A Brief History of the Printing Press

Long before Gutenberg, East Asia was already printing. China used woodblock printing by the Tang era; Bi Sheng experimented with movable type in the 11th century; Korea cast metal type by the 1200s (the “Jikji,” 1377, is the oldest extant book printed with metal movable type). In Europe, however, the watershed came in the 1450s when Johannes Gutenberg combined movable metal type, oil-based inks, and a press adapted from wine-making. Suddenly, books could be produced in days rather than months, and identical copies could circulate across borders. Literacy rose; scholarship accelerated; power shifted.

Not everyone cheered.

Scribes and manuscript guilds were among the first to grumble—less out of theology than economics. Hand-copying was a profession; print threatened it overnight. Complaints from the period lament “crude” type and “careless” compositors who introduced errors no diligent scribe would tolerate.

Religious authorities moved quickly to police the new speed of ideas. The Fifth Lateran Council (1515) under Pope Leo X issued the decree Inter sollicitudines, requiring that “no one may print or sell books without the approval of the ordinary [bishop]” and that approved copies carry a censor’s signature—an early, formal system of prepublication review aimed at stopping heresy before it spread.

Universities also dissented. The Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) condemned Martin Luther’s printed tracts in 1521 as “pestiferous and heretical,” urging authorities to seize and burn them. The fear wasn’t abstract: print gave reformers a megaphone, and pamphlets could outrun edicts.

Secular rulers echoed the alarm. In England, royal proclamations under Henry VIII (1530s) railed against “erroneous” books and translations, and by 1557 the crown chartered the Stationers’ Company to license presses and police unapproved works. The Star Chamber Decree of 1586 tightened the vice, targeting “seditious, schismatical and heretical books,” limiting the number of presses, and binding printers to official oversight.

Farther afield, the Ottoman Empire strictly limited printing in Arabic script by Muslims from the late 15th century; printing remained largely in the hands of minority communities (Hebrew, Armenian, Greek) until the 18th century, when Ibrahim Müteferrika secured permission (1727) to print non-religious works. The anxiety was familiar: printing could multiply disputation as easily as dictionaries.

Even humanists who benefited from print sometimes winced at its excesses. Erasmus praised good printers but complained about shoddy editions and the “swarms” of trivial books crowding out serious study—a quality control critique as much as a moral one.

And the skepticism endured into the age of newspapers. In 1671, Virginia’s governor Sir William Berkeley famously declared, “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years,” linking presses with “disobedience” and “heresies.” For him, the press meant unrest.

Yet the tide ran the other way. The Index of Prohibited Books (first issued 1559 under Pope Paul IV) tried to cordon off dangerous reading; licensing boards tried to throttle presses; city councils tried to cap output. But the economics were relentless: cheap paper, hungry readers, and the copy-and-paste logic of movable type favoured diffusion. In the end, dissenters helped define the press’s power by fearing it. Their warnings—about error, heresy, sedition, and speed—are the mirror image of what made printing revolutionary: it made words travel faster than those who would stop them.