Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast. I'm your host, Heather Tesco. 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 Tudor 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 Caxton and the printing press.

One of my favorite radio four shows is called In Our Time, which you can download as a podcast on iTunes,

and they did an episode on William Caxston 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 Caxton 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. Caxton 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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