Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast. I'm your host, Heather Chesco. A special shout out to my husband, Jonathan, who's learning a lot about home recording for his music and is recording me using his fancy equipment right now, holding a mic up as we speak. I hope you can notice a difference in quality. So I still want to do that episode on

tutor colleges, but I haven't had a chance to do the reading for it that I want to. I blame it on the

teething eight-month-old with whom I live and the lack of sleep associated with that. So anyway,

today I'm going to talk about William Caxson and the printing press. One of my favorite radio

for shows is called In Our

Time, which you can download as a podcast on iTunes, and they did an episode on William Caxton about

two years ago. I'll stick a link up to it on the blog. It got me interested in the history of the

printing press, and later readings on Elizabeth Woodville, who was an early supporter of printing books in

England, also got me interested. So William Caxston was a 15th century technological pioneer

who introduced the printing press to England in 1476. He was also the first English retailer

of printed books. Printing was a game changer in the mid-15th century, the way the internet has been for us.

Before printing, if you wanted copies of a book, you had to get them written out by hand,

by educated people, usually monks. Not only was this time-consuming, but it also meant that

there was room for error and revisions. Printing presses meant that you could have multiple copies of the same

text quickly. Pamphlets, which all read the same, could be disseminated quickly and easily. Suddenly,

there was a push for people to learn to read, since there were materials available that they could

read. If you mix together a push for a population to become literate with easily available reading materials and a religious reformation, you have the ingredients you need to cause a seismic shift in society.

So let's talk about Liam Kaxton, who helped to contribute to these huge societal changes.

Kaxston was born around 1420 in Kent, about 30 years before printing was invented by Johann Gutenberg

in the 1450s. Like many new inventions, early on, the technology spread slowly from Mainz,

where Gutenberg was based and printed his famous Bible around 1454. In the mid-1460s, it spread more

rapidly and reached Cologne around 1465.

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