A monk who defended copying by hand in a printed book, and a reflection on AI
Press enter or click to view image in full size
In 1492, in the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim in western Germany, a young abbot wrote a book in praise of copying books by hand. It was called De laude scriptorum, In Praise of Scribes. Two years later it was printed in Mainz, on a press, by a professional printer named Peter Friedberg.
It is easy to laugh at this. An abbot who praises the pen and hires the press looks like a man caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I think the joke is the least interesting part. His position was more careful than the laugh allows, and the argument he joined is one we are still having.
The press next door
The abbot was Johannes Trithemius, and he lived in the same corner of Germany as the most disruptive workshop in Europe. In Mainz, in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg had put out a Latin Bible printed with movable type. Within a few decades printed books were flooding Europe, and everyone with a pen for a living had to decide what to think about it.
The new trade got attention fast. The earliest known picture of a printing shop, the one at the top of this story, comes from Lyon in 1499, in a book about the dance of death, and it is not flattering. Skeletons…