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\n\u201cFrom the outset [of the invention of printing], a few scholars experimented with making the new craft into a tool for learning.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/span>
– Adrian Johns1<\/span><\/em><\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/span><\/p>\n
Despite scholars\u2019 early interest in the printing press, scholarly journals appear to be a product of seventeenth-century, not fifteenth-century, Europe. Changes in the printing industry, language use, and intellectual culture in Europe converged in that century to make journals a commercially viable product and a desirable way for scholars to share knowledge. Printing became a more streamlined business by the mid-sixteenth century, as European printers found ways to better manage the expenses of running a print shop. Paper, the major expense, made up two-thirds <\/em>of a book\u2019s production costs. In response, by the 1560s the prominent printer Henri Estienne of Paris, for instance, shrewdly bought one \u201cmill\u2019s entire paper stock for eight years at a rate of 1000 reams a year.\u201d2 Estienne\u2019s purchase of an entire mill\u2019s future output is an early instance of industrial-capitalist business strategy. Estienne gained control over part of the supply chain, ensuring uninterrupted production and profit. Furthermore, by the late sixteenth century, the largest print shops (like Estienne\u2019s) enjoyed the patronage of Europe\u2019s wealthiest families, such as the Fugger mining family of Augsburg and the Medici banking family of Florence (often representing the Pope).3 In securing a steady supply chain of materials and the financial backing of wealthy patrons, printers in late sixteenth-century Europe made printing an economically viable activity on a large scale, capable of uninterrupted mass production of printed material.<\/span><\/p>\n
Developments in language use and intellectual culture in Europe also mattered for the emergence of scholarly journals. In England, France, and Germany in the seventeenth century, a group identity coalesced around \u201cspecific learned professions\u201d such as university professors, court historians, and librarians.4 The legacy of Renaissance humanism and the rising prestige of empirical science united scholars in a mission both to preserve old and create new knowledge. Professionals such as the court scholar Francis Bacon in England, the librarian Gabriel Naud\u00e9 in France, and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany\u2014the last variously a diplomat, librarian, and court historian\u2014began, in the seventeenth century, to see themselves as part of an international community of \u201cinformation brokers\u201d and \u201cknowledge managers.\u201d Their goal was to build a collectively pursued and cumulative body of scholarship that would add up to a \u201cuniversal knowledge\u201d encompassing all possible areas of human learning. In their own time, this group of men (almost all were men) were known as \u201cmen of letters.\u201d They belonged to a so-called Republic of Letters, an imagined fellowship of scholars pursuing universal knowledge. In addition, the shift from classical Latin to vernacular French as the preferred \u201clanguage of the inhabitants of the literary Republic\u2026 [in] the seventeenth century\u201d opened up both the reading and writing of the Republic\u2019s scholarship to a wider set of people.5 After adopting a cohesive sense of identity and a vernacular language, men of letters in seventeenth-century Europe next needed a means by which to share their scholarly work with one another: the scholarly journal.<\/span><\/p>\n
\u00a0The \u201clearned journal\u201d came into its own \u201cin the 1660s with the Journal des Savants <\/em>in Paris and the Philosophical Transactions <\/em>of the Royal Society of London.\u201d6 Learned societies, crucially, could share printing costs among its own members\u2014rather than rely on one wealthy patron or a small group of aristocrats\u2014which gave journal editors greater control over content and frequency of issue. Yet for the Royal Society, although King Charles II was a major patron, the Philosophical Transactions <\/em>apparently remained underfunded. Henry Oldenburg, the journal\u2019s founding editor, paid out-of-pocket for the first few years of printing costs. As a teacher, translator, and writer, he was far from wealthy and probably paid because he believed in the journal\u2019s purpose.7 After four years the Society began to reimburse him, and in 1750 an official decision shifted the burden of costs from the editor to \u201cthe Society, as a body.\u201d Thus the older tradition of aristocratic or royal patronage as well as individual member payment and collective cost-sharing were all ways that men of letters, as an intellectual community, financially supported scholarly journals and the circulation of scholarly information.<\/span><\/p>\n
A final comment from cultural historian Peter Burke captures the growth and impact of the scholarly journal in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe: \u201cThe press, especially the periodical press\u2026 made an increasingly important contribution to intellectual life in the eighteenth century, contributing to the spread, the cohesion and the power of the imagined community of the Republic of Letters. No fewer than 1,267 journals in French are known to have been founded between 1600 and 1789, 176 of them between 1600 and 1699 and the rest thereafter.\u201d8 Today, scholarly journals still join together communities of scholars within and across disciplines.<\/span><\/p>\n
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1 Adrian Johns, \u201cThe Coming of Print to Europe,\u201d in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book<\/em>, ed. Leslie Howsam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 120.
2 Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance <\/em>(New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 163.
3 Jardine, 96-98, 152, 174.
4 Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot <\/em>(2000; reprint, Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), 25-27.
5 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe <\/em>(1983; reprint, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 98-99.
6\u00a0 Burke, 169.
7 R.K. Bluhm, \u201cHenry Oldenburg, F. R. S. (c.1615-1677),\u201d Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science <\/em>15, no. 1 (1960), 187, 192.
8 Burke, 48.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Where Did Scholarly Journals Come From?: Printing and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Europe Robert Manzo, Western Carolina University \u201cFrom the outset [of the invention of printing], a few scholars experimented with making the new craft into a tool for learning.\u201d- Adrian Johns1\u00a0 Despite scholars\u2019 early interest in the printing press, scholarly journals appear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":537,"featured_media":0,"parent":9801,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9824","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/537"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9824"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9827,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9824\/revisions\/9827"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}