Religion and the Rise of Printing Reconsidered

A talk on the short paper published in 2001 and the absence of any other account of the religious roots of printing in China.

Date: Monday, March 10, 2008
TIME: 5:00 PM

Timothy Barrett, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

This talk will pick up from a short paper published in 2001 and not widely circulated which has been cited surprisingly frequently in the absence of any other account of the religious roots of printing in China. The remarks in that paper are now to be restated and extended in The Woman Who Discovered Printing, which tries to set out a provisional narrative of the factors affecting printing up till the end of the Tang dynasty. But after completing this account, consideration of what happened next, in the early decades of the tenth century, has suggested to me that we need to look carefully at the political and social factors prevailing at that point to understand the widespread acceptance of printing thereafter. And once again, we need to look very carefully at religious materials to get some picture of what was going on, even if paradoxically they have nothing to do with printing at all.