Historians of science have noticed connections between the printing press and early modern science. Mentions of the printing press as a driving force in the transformation of mathematics, natural philosophy, and medicine have appeared since the early twentieth-century histories of the Scientific Revolution. Recent scholarship on the history of the book and the history of science have provided additional elements to revisit the relationship between the production of knowledge and the material, social, and intellectual dimensions associated with the technology of the printing press.
In Loath to Print, Howard explores a previously unattended aspect of this fruitful relationship: authors’ reluctance to print. While several studies emphasize how early modern authors enthusiastically submitted their manuscripts to printers for the benefit of reaching wider audiences, Howard opens the door to a different aspect of the rise of early modern science: the hesitation that scientific authors expressed over publishing. By focusing on aversion rather than sympathy, Howard masterfully shows that the uses of this new technology presented significant challenges to early modern authors. Documenting and analyzing in detail cases that have been previously treated as mere anecdotes—Newton's repugnance to appear in print after the controversy on light and colors, Descartes's maneuvers after Galileo's process, or Huygens's careful distribution of his works—Howard shows how the challenges of the production and circulation of books were not a vehicle to but an integral component of early modern scientific knowledge.
The book provides analytical treatment and detailed historical scrutiny of the transformation of values embedded within the strategies that early modern authors, editors, and printers mobilized in a world where the circulation of manuscripts and letters was still dominant. Howard starts with the attitudes early modern authors held toward print and emphasizes how sentiments of mistrust and fear informed their decisions. Authors were concerned with censorship, with the distortion of their ideas through printers’ mistakes or the material limitations of printing technologies, and with the possibility of provoking harmful controversies in the hands of undesired readers. While some authors refused to print, others went (or were taken!) to the press with reluctance but attempted to control their works’ production, circulation, and representation.
The insertion of prefaces helped authors to control readership by seeking to discourage some readers and encourage others. The preface is a zone of transactions between the author's intentions and the reader's expectations. Some of Kepler's and Newton's prefaces discouraged unqualified readers, while Descartes's Principia provided detailed instructions for reading his work. But prefatory material was not the only control over the books. Decisions over distribution were part of complex negotiations of the new ideas’ privacy, secrecy, and value. The distribution of printed works was connected to attempts to cultivate patronage, secure priority, or ensure a fair reading.
Moving in another direction, Howard also explores how the interests and values of scientific disciplines impacted the development of printing technologies. Early modern scientists developed their own technologies to ensure further control over the production and distribution of their work, such as the creation of their printing presses, emancipating themselves in this way from larger systems. Others developed their engraving or etching technologies to illustrate their works or to produce small-scale reproductions, attending to their criteria of representation. Howard introduces and conceptualizes the editor in early modern science. While the early modern publisher could be compared to the editor, Howard has in mind another figure: the individual who “shepherded works from the author's study to the compositor's stick to the booksellers’ stalls” (141). Editors such as Halley, Ent, and Van Schooten appear as midwives, making possible the works of Newton, Harvey, and the geometers, and disappearing after their job was done.
Written in a clear and engaging style, the book discusses previous and current scholarship, showing intellectual debts and the specific points where novelties are introduced. Howard manages to depict an image of science in the making, providing a rich and nuanced approach to printing technology as an enabler and a boundary for authors’ intentions and possibilities. Although the argument focuses on the big names of the Scientific Revolution, Howard's treatment is a stimulus for exploring other early modern connections between the production of knowledge and the introduction of the printing press.
