Everybody knows that printing was, par excellence, the invention that changed the world, an idea reinforced by endless contemporary assertions about the comparable impact of the Internet. The fullest statement of the case came in Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). For Eisenstein, printing was the catalyst of modernity, midwife to both the Reformation and Scientific Revolution, and the death knell for scribal culture. This excellent collection of essays (with an elegant epilogue by Margaret Aston) adds to a growing body of work dissatisfied with the sharply drawn outlines of Eisenstein's approach. There is no agreed agenda (beyond a common focus on England), but certain themes predominate: the vitality and viability of scribal transmission long after the introduction of printing; the deeply ambivalent attitudes toward print persisting in elite circles throughout the period; and an insistence that both printed and handwritten texts can only properly be understood in relation to oral, and aural, communication. The printing revolution (like most other revolutions once revisionists get at them) turns out to have been not so much a rapid transformative process as an extended period of dynamic interchange.

One of the merits of this collection is its bringing together of medievalists and early modernists to explore the modalities of premodern communication. Anthony Musson demonstrates how over the course of the later Middle Ages the status of the law, and its practical administration, was underpinned by a growing concern with textual authority, despite a continuing reliance on oral proclamation as the most effective way of publicizing the royal will. These interactions are further addressed in Andrew Butcher's (rather jargonish) reconstruction of a “speech-text community” from the urban records of late medieval Hythe. (Jonathan Barry, with the benefit of a larger source base, surveys the interpenetration of text with other forms of communication in the civic culture of late seventeenth-century Bristol.) Several contributors explore the nexus of script, print, and orality to be found in late medieval religion. Felicity Riddy examines the early circulation of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love and provides a salutary reminder that “publication” predates print. She invokes the familiar notion of the public sphere (inns, guildhalls, and marketplaces substituting for Habermasian salons and coffeehouses) and aphoristically observes (43) that “‘publication’ is short for public conversation.” Whether this “medieval public sphere” was quite as ungendered as Riddy contends is debatable. James Clark takes on the relationship between the Benedictines and printing in England, effectively overturning the stereotype that the religious orders showed no interest in the new technology. David d’Avray, by contrast, suggests that the orders were doing fine without it. With forensic skill, he argues historians have massively overestimated the survival rate of medieval sermon manuscripts by failing to take account of the huge scribal effort of the mendicants, whose products were much less likely to survive. In a pleasingly provocative image, he likens the advent of printing, not to the Internet, but to the introduction of the mechanical typewriter, an only moderately more efficient technology. More provocatively still, he suggests that the volume of late medieval scribal production undermines the idea that printing was the sine qua non of the Reformation. Rather, the absence of political repression was the crucial determinant. This poses an important question in a fresh way, though one's mind boggles somewhat at the army of scribes required to replicate the quantity of Luther's texts flooding Germany in the early 1520s.

D’Avray is not alone in seeking to unsettle the shibboleth (erected in the sixteenth century itself) about Protestantism's dependence on print. In a characteristically incisive and thought-provoking piece, Alexandra Walsham argues that recourse to print was the option of last resort for dissenting groups, whether Protestants under Mary, Catholics under Elizabeth, or Anglicans under the Commonwealth. The relationship between Protestantism and print was “less a match made in heaven than a marriage of convenience” (232). Once in power, religious leaders’ love affair with the presses noticeably cooled, an observation that invites a different perspective on the Marian regime's much-trumpeted failure to understand the importance of printing. One evident failure of the Marian regime, as Thomas Freeman demonstrates, was its inability to staunch the flow of manuscript writings from Protestants in its prisons. Despite the considerable importance of these works for sustaining Protestant cohesion and morale, very few of them were ever printed. Long-standing Protestant ambivalence about the potential of print is further explored in Scott Mandelbroote's examination of anxieties around scriptural translation, and in Ann Hughes's treatment of Thomas Edward's Gangraena (1646), a work deploring the spreading of heresies through print and itself heavily structured around oral and manuscript material. That early modern intellectuals might attach especial authority to the unprinted word is demonstrated by Julia Crick's examination of seventeenth-century transcription of Anglo-Saxon charters. While several of the essays consider oral residues within the written, Christopher Marsh addresses the connections between the textual and the soundscape of music and song. In a brilliantly persuasive and engaging essay, he contends that the range of meanings contemporaries ascribed to printed ballads can only be reconstructed by a knowledge of the tunes to which they were assigned—a melody with well-known bawdy associations, for example, transforming by association the meaning of ostensibly inoffensive words. The argument is illustrated by staves of musical notation, obliging this reviewer to hum out loud in order to get the point. When a volume on modes of communication itself requires new habits of reading, it is clearly a valuable addition to the field.