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Gutenberg and the Koreans       
Did East Asian Printing Traditions Influence the European Renaissance?
Thomas Christensen

Was Gutenberg influenced by East Asian printing?

Since the use of printing from movable type arose in East Asia well before it did in Europe, it is relevant to ask whether Gutenberg may have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Korean or Chinese discoveries of movable type printing, or their earlier discoveries of block printing.

In Joseph Needham"s Science and Civilization in China a chapter on Paper and Printing suggests that “European block printers must not only have seen Chinese samples, but perhaps had been taught by missionaries or others who had learned these un-European methods from Chinese printers during their residence in China.” [14] The oldest dated example of this block printing is the Diamond Sutra, dating to 868. Movable types made from clay were introduced in China by Bi Sheng, between 1041 to 1048. Cast metal movable type was introduced during the Goryeo dynasty of Korea and is associated with Chae Yun-eui (around 1230).[15] A set of ritual books, Sangjong Gogeum Yemun were printed with the movable metal type in 1234.[16] The oldest surviving book printed with movable type, the Jikji, is from Korea, dated 1377.[17]

By the 1300s the Mongol Empire stretched from Korea to Damascus and Kiev, and movable type printing radiated westward out of Korea. Among the people known to have used movable type are the Uighurs of Central Asia, whose written script was adopted for the Mongol script. There has been considerable conjecture whether some news of this technology, if not printed samples, had reached Europe, e.g. in this article[18] by Tom Christensen :

    What is certain, however, is that printing with movable wooden type is documented from the eleventh century; that printing with movable metal type had been an active enterprise in Korea since 1234; that other printing technologies had Asian origins and were subsequently transmitted to the West; that a single empire (the Mongol khanates) stretched from Korea to Europe through much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, facilitating cross-cultural exchange across a large region; that there was considerable East-West travel, contact, and exchange during this period; that the written record of such contacts records only a fraction of what actually occurred; and that there was awareness of Asian printing in Europe in the centuries before Gutenberg….[but] as Eva Hanebutt-Benz properly observes, “We do not know if Johannes Gutenberg had any kind of knowledge of the fact that long before his invention printing with moveable type was done in East-Asia.”

However, there were key differences between the European technologies and that in Korea. Gutenberg used a press, unlike in East Asia, and used matrices (type holding frames), oil-based inks, and other devices that were significantly different. Whatever the facts regarding Asian influences in this invention, there can be no doubt about Gutenberg"s genius in putting together the technologies that eventually went on to fuel the European renaissance.[4]

http://www.rightreading.com/printing/gutenberg.asia/gutenberg-asia-1-introduction.htm

Johannes Gutenberg’s development, in mid fifteenth-century Mainz, of printing with movable metal type was enormously consequential—it made texts available to an increasing percentage of the population and helped to spark the European Renaissance.1 So it is surprising how much remains unknown about Gutenberg and his invention, such as its year of creation, what the press looked like, what tools were used to prepare the type, or what financial structure supported the print operation.

Another question also remains unanswered: Was Gutenberg aware that he was far from the first to print with movable metal type, and that printing in this manner had been done in Asia since the early thirteenth century? “The question if there was a direct influence from the orient on the invention of printing with movable type in Germany around 1440,” says Eva Hanebutt-Benz of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, “cannot be solved so far in the context of the scholarly research.”2 What is certain, however, is that that printing with movable wooden type is documented from the eleventh century; that printing with movable metal type had been an active enterprise in Korea since 1234; that other printing technologies had Asian origins and were subsequently transmitted to the West; that a single empire (the Mongol khanates) stretched from Korea to Europe through much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, facilitating cross-cultural exchange across a large region; that there was considerable East-West travel, contact, and exchange during this period; that the written record of such contacts records only a fraction of what actually occurred; and that there was awareness of Asian printing in Europe in the centuries before Gutenberg.

For all these reasons it is likely that Europe’s print revolution did not occur independently but was influenced or inspired by similar printing in Asia.

Notes
1 Although Gutenberg is widely acknowledged as the first European to print with movable metal type, that honor is sometimes claimed for a handful of other printers. In addition, researchers Paul Needham and Blaise Aguera y Arcas have recently suggested that Gutenberg did not in fact use movable type as we understand it (Princeton Weekly Bulletin 90, no. 16). This dispute has little bearing on the present argument.

http://www.historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/index.php?id=344

Johannes Gutenberg, working with merchant and money-lender Johann Fust and printer Peter Schöffer, completes printing the 42-line Bible (B42) (Gutenberg Bible), the first book printed in Europe from moveable type.

To accomplish this monumental task Gutenberg, previously a goldsmith,  invented a special kind of printing ink, a method of casting type, and a special kind of press derived from the wine press. This complex set of integrated technologies has been called the first invention in Europe attributed to a single individual. Printing books was also the first process of mass production—the process that centuries later became the model for the Industrial Revolution.

Yet the process of printing from moveable type, for centuries attributed to Gutenberg, without supporting documents except for the surviving examples of his printing, seems to have evolved in stages from the early 1450s to the 1470s, and also seems to have involved other inventors besides Gutenberg. In 2002 physicist and software developer Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, working on original editions in the Scheide Library, used high resolution scans of individual characters printed by Gutenberg, and image processing algorithms to locate and compare variants of the same characters printed by Gutenberg. From this research it appears that the method of producing moveable type attributed to Gutenberg developed in phases rather than as a complete system, and that Gutenberg"s technique of type casting was a precursor to the definitive process developed in the 1470s.

“We may now surmise that the method of manufacture of type with steel punches and matrices, which became the standard for more than four centuries of typography, was introduced a few years later by Nicolas Jenson, who from early days on was praised as a co-inventor. Jenson"s contribution was apparently based on the early part of his career at the Mint in Paris, where striking medals with elaborate lettering would have given him specialized expertise. Jenson became one of the most influential type designers of all ages—as well as an excellent printer—when he worked in the 1470s in Venice, but this may have been preceded by an interlude in Mainz, where he probably made a type, first used in 1459, which unlike Gutenberg"s types, was able to withstand many years of intensive use” (Lotte Hellinga, “The Gutenberg Revolutions” in Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 208).

“The irregularities in Gutenberg"s type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, made it clear that the variations could not have come from either ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. While some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, made for only one conclusion: that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also revealed substructures in the type that could not arise from punchcutting techniques. They [Agüera y Arcas and Needham] hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in “cuneiform” style in a mould like sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the alphabet would need to be recreated to make additional type. This would explain the non-identical type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed type. Thus, they feel that “the decisive factor for the birth of typography”, the use of reusable moulds for casting type, might have been a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggest that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s” (Wikipedia article on Johannes Gutenberg, accessed 02-08-2009).

References:

Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, “Computational analytical bibliography,” Proceedings Bibliopolis Conference The future history of the book”, The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (November 2002).

Agüera y Arcas, “Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg"s DK type”, in: Jensen (ed) Incunabula and Their Readers. Printing , Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (2003) 1-12.

Computational analytical bibliography에 대한 자세한 것은 다음 링크를 참고 하세요.

Agüera y Arcas, Blaise; Paul Needham (November 2002). “Computational analytical bibliography”. Proceedings Bibliopolis Conference The future history of the book.
http://bibliopoliscongres2002.kb.nl/aguera.html