著者

田中 佳佑

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美学 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.62, no.2, pp.49-60, 2011

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It is a familiar fact that the printed books wiped out the manuscripts in the late 15th century European intellectual world. However, the significance of it in the historical context is too complex to interpret as a mere technical invention. In the present paper I shall try to explain, though only in philological way, what sort of directions were given in the Renaissance humanism by printing and the printed books as the problem of the history of ideas. I shall not discuss the mode or artistic format of any incunabula and early printed books, mine is rather abstract task of trying to understand, through some documents of Italian humanists, the historical impact of printing on the Renaissance era. My aim will accordingly indicate the essential correlation of printing with the Modern form of knowledge. In my idea, printing has three aspects: (i) the institutional package which produced the public value of books by means of mass circulation, (ii) the product of a certain technologism which changed knowing as personal study into knowing as impersonal manipulation, (iii) the breaker of the traditional close relationship between the authors and the readers. One may find these aspects support our form of knowledge.