that the mature phase of print culture which proceeds by 
segmenting and homogenizing situations will not favor the 
interplay between fields and disciplines such as characterized 
the first age of print. When print was new it stood as a 
challenge to the old world of manuscript culture. When the 
manuscript had faded and print was supreme, there was no 
more interplay or dialogue but there were many “points of 
view.” There is, however, one massive aspect of the “transfer of 
training” that occurred with the Gutenberg technology that is 
stressed throughout the work of Febvre and Martin 
(L’Apparition du livre ). It is that during the first two centuries 
of print, until the end of the seventeenth century, the great 
body of printed matter was of medieval origin. The sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries saw more of the Middle Ages than 
had ever been available to anybody in the Middle Ages. Then it 
had been scattered and inaccessible and slow to read. Now it