Typography tended to alter language from a means of 
perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

*     As for the mere stress on use and practicality, it is not 
only Ramus but the entire humanist corps that insists upon 
that. From the Sophists to Cicero training in language and 
oratory had been accepted as the road to power and top 
executive action. The Ciceronian program of encyclopedic 
knowledge in the arts and sciences came back with printing. 
The essentially dialogue character of scholasticism gave way to 
a more extensive program in languages and literature for the 
training of the Courtier and the Governor and the Prince. What 
we have come to consider as an impossibly genteel curriculum 
of authors, languages, and history was in the Renaissance held 
necessary for the statesman, on one hand, and the study of 
Scripture, on the other. Shakespeare presents (I, i) his Henry