Chapter XII - The Printed Bible

Summary

The invention of printing was as important for the Bible as it was for all literature; but its significance has often been misinterpreted, largely because modern conceptions and preoccupations have been imported into the context of early printing. The earliest observers went to the heart of the matter, as they saw it. ‘He prints as much in a day as was formerly written in a year’ said Campano, bishop of Teramo, of the fifteenth-century printer Ulrich Han. Printing was a means of speedy, and soon of cheap production. Speaking of the Bible, a French translator added that there was now no excuse for the literate believer if he was not familiar with the Word of God.

Writers nearer our own time, but before modern bibliographers had made their systematic investigations, found a deeper significance, which is still advanced. The concept of the edition, a scholar's concept which has taken five hundred years to elaborate, is projected backwards into the first years of printing as if it were the perfect outcome of a sudden transformation. Where once the scribe had produced his single copy— perhaps inaccurately transcribed, interpolated or tendentiously altered, and taken from another single copy subject to the same vicissitudes, and so on back through innumerable stages—there was now supposed to be the modern succession of accurately printed editions, each an improvement on the last if not faithful to it. Within each edition all copies were supposed to be identical.