What significance does having one’s writings appear in print as opposed to being handwritten have for an early modern author? The creation and dissemination of printed texts, starting with the books created at the Gutenberg press in Mainz, Germany, in the mid-fifteenth century and continuing over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been hailed by many scholars as “one of the most effective means of mastery over the whole world,” and “inaugurating a new cultural era in the history of Western man.”1 Echoing Francis Bacon’s observation in Novum Organum (1620) that printing, along with gunpowder and the compass, has “changed the appearance and state of the whole world,” classic studies such as Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change highlighted what she argued was a cultural transformation coinciding with the “shift from script to print” as the dominant media for written communication.2