Earlier movable type printing in Europe

Is there anyway at all to get Chinese-derived movable type across the Silk Road and end up in Europe well before Gutenberg's independent invention of it? If so, during what era would movable type be best received by Europeans, and what would be the effects on the contemporary intellectual/religious movements and literacy due to improved dissemination of printed material?
 
It will have to diffuse out of China, probably through the Middle East. Europeans could theoretically become aware of it by the Crusades or during the Mongol conquests.

Movable type printing is a highly "undemocratic" technology since it is far more useful for alphabet based languages than say Chinese or Arabic. In China it never replaced block printing due to the large number of Chinese characters, and the Arabs AFAIK didn't embrace printing until Lithography was invented in the late 18th century.

I like to say that all revolutions are information revolutions. Without information new inventions have limited impact. Movable type printing in Europe will usher in earlier social, economic, and technological advancements with profound impact on the world.
 
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Ok, so we're going for the 1000s to 1300s range? So what sort of intellectual movements would the spread of movable type accelerate?

Did the Benedictine monks and other orders who spent much of their time employed as copyists/illuminators just lose that art form? I imagine that the Greek and Roman works they preserved would be spread further and faster with an earlier printing press.

On the other hand, if the printing press arrived in the 1300s during the time of Dante, Machiavelli, and those other Florentines during that particular period (I know there's a specific name for it in Italian, which is escaping me at the moment) could we see an earlier Renaissance with many of the same characteristics as the OTL one in the 1400s?
 
Movable type printing is a highly "undemocratic" technology since it is far more useful for alphabet based languages than say Chinese or Arabic. In China it never replaced block printing due to the large number of Chinese characters, and the Arabs AFAIK didn't embrace printing until Lithography was invented in the late 18th century.

In particular, the problem for Arabic was in the printing of the Quran, which required a lot of special diacritics. The Venetians tried to make a printed Quran, but it it ended up, well...not working. It printed fine and all -- just not in a way that would be seen as not-blasphemous by Muslims.
 
I wish a more "democratic" printing technology had been developed earlier that would be equally useful for all languages. This way it would be more quickly adopted throughout the world. Europe probably missed out on movable type because would be interlopers like the Arabs found the technology of limited use to them.

The great equalizer was lithography, which was technologically doable since ancient times. There's no reason, say the Romans, couldn't invent it. Even cheaper and simpler is silkscreen printing, which despite being invented by the Chinese during the Song dynasty, some how failed to take a simple step forward to print words. Today of course screen printing is used for printing on every surface imaginable since it's so versatile. You don't even need paper - cloth, parchment, ceramic, metal, screen printing works for everything.

Not only would lithography and screen printing print words, they could also duplicate graphics. With movable type press you still need wood block or etching to handle illustrations. Litho and screen could do both with the same tools. Pictures as they say are worth a thousand words.
 
I just saw a documentary which claims Marco Polo never went to China since he failed to notice several things, among which was printing.
 
The problem for Arabic was ligatures. Lots of ligatures. Arabian writing is more ligatures than anything else, because it's all connected and depends on position and stuff like that. It's like trying to print in cursive: next to impossible with early movable type.
Chinese is actually a little bit better for that: they only need casts for every character. Arabic, with the tech level we're talking about, literally needs casts for every single word (and likely some phrases as well). :eek:
An alphabet - or syllabary - that doesn't have all its characters connected would be perfect for movable type. It doesn't even have to be Latin - it can be just about anything up to (and hopefully including) Linear B... but Arabic is out, and so are most Brahmi-derived syllabaries, unfortunately (blame their weird need to have that darn upper bar on every single letter).
 

wormyguy

Banned
Yeah, you'd have to have a Middle Eastern/Persian cultural intermediary that sees value in movable type. So either get rid of the Arab conquests or somehow make their lingua franca Greek or something else that works.
 
Which is why I say use screen printing earlier. The Arabs would pick up on it early because it would suit their script perfectly. By the time the Mongols sack Baghdad and destroy all those books, many copies would've been made and in wide circulation.
 
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