The Birth of Printing

Gutenberg is responsible for the most significant invention of the medieval period: movable type printing. But do you know the full story? Who really was Gutenberg? This docudrama shows the struggle of an inventor who challenged the societé of his time. With the help of book history experts and using contemporary documents – such as judiciary archives, notarized acts, and first printings – the docudrama retrace the most significant moments of Gutenberg’s life.

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic.

The medieval era was a watershed in Western history. This was a time of extraordinary advances in numerous fields of knowledge ranging from philosophy and theology to science, medicine, literature, and economics—as well as of revolutionary developments in education and the birth of the university. In its effects, this fascinating epoch was not only a time of great innovation, it was the era in which the seeds of the modern West were sown.