How Paper Caused the Renaissance: The English Experience ^☆

Abstract A technological revolution that began in Europe during the second half of the thirteenth century caused an intellectual revolution that continues to this day. The manufacture of good quality paper beginning in Italy c.1250 created a virtual explosion of intellectual activity wherever such writing paper became readily available. Paper gave rise to an ever‐expanding amateur scribal culture. Its participants were soon turning out original works on a spectrum of topics far wider and in far greater volume than was possible during the preceding ‘age of parchment’ when writing was largely monopolized by professional, clerical scribes. I use England as a test case to demonstrate first, the intellectual and practical constraints on a culture dependent on the restricted medieval writing technology, and second, the liberating and democratising effects of the paper‐based writing technology that succeeded it (but did not by any means bring it to an end).