22 | Mass Media and Historical Change
with the number rising to 252 within the following twenty years. In the
early stages, a third of all printing locations were situated in the Heiliges
Römische Reich (the Holy Roman Empire), as the reign of the emperor is
officially called; later, the same encompassed a fifth of all printing locations.
The first conspicuous details are the strong regional differences respecting
the transfer of new media technology. The wealthy northern Italian cities
now constituted the most important core areas. As private book ownership
had already established itself, the demand for print-work was particularly
high (Fremmer 2001: 288). Generally speaking, northern Italian cities made
for very appealing printing locations – thanks to their political structure,
their economic wealth, and, as a result of their well-established universi-
ties, their high level of education (Richardson 1994). Even though Paris and
Lyon attracted printers for similar reasons, printing technology expanded
considerably more slowly into other areas of France, not least due to the
effects of the Hundred Years’ War (Chartier and Martin 1989). In England,
though, there were no printing houses until 1476, the year in which the
cloth merchant William Caxton established the very first one on his return
from Cologne, where he had been on business and had learned the art of
book printing (Kuskin 2006). The number of books printed in England
remained smaller than in Italy, France and the Reich up until 1560, and
the book market remained ‘provincial’ until sometime in the seventeenth
century, the reasons for which may be found in the economic and political
situation during and after the Wars of the Roses (Burke 2000: 193). In addi-
tion, the number of manuscripts produced in England had been comparably
low even before this, so the printing trade could not build on a previously
established book market in the late fifteenth century. This, of course, also
confirms that printing was strongly dependent on previously established cul-
tural constellations.
When turning to Eastern Europe and the Orient, this culturally condi-
tioned regional discrepancy becomes distinctly visible. In the orthodox East,
printing was hardly able to gain ground, whether due to the limited extent
of alphabetisation or concerns about worldly and ecclesiastical direction. The
reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century marked the first
turning point in facilitating the dissemination of printing in Russia. The first
printing house in St Petersburg was constructed in about 1711, after the one
in Moscow was unable to handle the workload. In spite of this, the trade with
handwritten texts continued to dominate the Russian streets. When the patri-
archal printing house began to issue prayer books and primers galore in the
seventeenth century, it was once again the Church that gave impetus to the
printing trade (Plambeck 1982: 53). A noteworthy expansion of the printing
business, however, took place only towards the end of the eighteenth century,
in the reign of Catherine the Great.