DURING the second half of the fifteenth century, the reproduction of written texts of all kinds began to move from the copyist's desk to the printer's workshop. That the impact of Gutenberg's invention upon all fields of knowledge, learning, and information was profound is generally agreed, though the change was neither as immediate nor as wholesale as is sometimes claimed ; throughout the sixteenth century and into the next, some categories of text continued to circulate in manuscript rather than in print. Older studies of the phenomenon tend to concentrate on the technical rather than the cultural aspects of early printing ; the historiography of the early book is filled with studies of different aspects of printing processes and workshop practices, including considerations of type (and its migration), paper manufacture, imposition and presswork, elements of illustration and decoration, and patterns of production and selling. These subjects, sometimes approached on their own as a contribution to the history of the printed book seen as an aspect of the applied arts, have been combined in other cases with biographies and descriptive catalogues to form studies of individual printers and their output. More recently, and largely under the influence of French scholarship, the picture has gradually begun to change, and what one writer has called “the unacknowledged revolution” has begun to be studied as part of cultural history and to be concerned with the relationship of print culture to questions of literacy, the transmission and dissemination of texts, patterns of reading and book ownership, the propagandistic uses of print, and its relationship to orality and popular culture, in a richly textured approach generally known as “l’histoire du livre.”

The traditional models evolved by specialists in the history of printing and related topics in the hand-press period have in turn largely determined the style and content of the study of early music printing. Here too the field has also been largely preoccupied with typography, bibliography, the study of press variants, and the operations of individual printers and publishers. The general picture is clear.