Nouvelle publication

Frédéric Barbier,
Gutenberg’s Europe. The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity,
trad. Jean Birrell,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 2016,
312 p., ill., index.
ISBN : 978 0 7456 7258 8.

Édition originale en fr.: L’Europe de Gutenberg. Le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale, Paris, Librairie Belin, 2006.

"Combining meticulous scholarship with persuasive comparisons between the print and the digital revolutions, Frédéric Barbier has made the most important contribution to the field since Elizabeth Eisenstein s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change."
Peter Burke (Cambridge University)

"The great strength of this book is that it roots Gutenberg s invention so firmly in the mediaeval craft society from which it emerged. Gutenberg was able to draw on a range of pre-existing techniques and developing markets; without these transformations, so meticulously explored here, the print revolution might have been still-born."
Andrew Pettegree (St. Andrews University)