HSTEU 290 B: Topics in European History

Print, Its Impacts and Futures: Lessons from a Modern Communications Revolution

From medieval manuscripts to commercially printed books to today's rapidly recycled digital content, we'll explore how changing forms have shaped the ways texts have been read and understood, how the development and spread of printing technology in Europe impacted the modern world, how the book became dominant, and how a new media revolution (the mass digitization of texts) is again reshaping access to and understanding of the past.

• We'll study the development and spread of print technology in 15^th‑century Europe and the impacts of this communications revolution on life, culture, religion, society and politics: What role did the circulation of printed news play in the fall of monarchies and rise of modern democracies? How did copyright and intellectual property, along with new notions of authorship and originality, emerge from the need to regulate the burgeoning market in printed books? How did “mass-produced” Bibles and devotional books transform religious experience?

• We'll visit UW Libraries Special Collections, where students will study, hands‑on, early printed books form the 16th-18th centuries.

• We'll reflect critically on our present moment, also defined by a revolution in communications technologies, and consider the implications for print of mass digitization and the dominance of the internet. How is the internet transforming reading habits and literacy patterns, which were shaped over centuries by the printed book? What is the future of print?
  

• Offering a broad history of the modern world through the lens of transformations in media technologies in the past and today, this course will interest students in numerous majors, including in the Humanities, History, Communication, among others. The course will count towards VLPA and I&S distribution requirements.

The course counts as an elective in a new minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, just approved this winter.