Baldwin, William - Terence N. Bowers (essay date winter 1991)
Terence N. Bowers (essay date winter 1991)
SOURCE: Bowers, Terence N. “The Production and Communication of Knowledge in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat: Toward a Typographic Culture.” Criticism 33, no. 1 (winter 1991): 1-29.
[In the following essay, Bowers maintains that Beware the Cat is a “cultural object” that reflects the transition from Catholic oral culture to Protestant print culture, claiming further that the work is a kind of treatise on reading and its social function as well as an argument for widespread literacy.]
For as the first decay and ruin of the church before began of rude ignorance, and lack of knowledge in teachers; so, to restore the church … it pleased God to open to man the art of printing … Printing, being opened, incontinently ministered unto the church the instruments and tools of learning and knowledge; which were good books and authors, which before lay hid and unknown....
[The entire page is 13538 words long]
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