Workshop: Woodblock Printing
Wann: Mo, 22.04.2024, 09:00 Uhr bis Di, 23.04.2024, 15:30 Uhr
Wo: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg
Woodblock printing (relief printing) belongs to manuscript culture. The earliest extant specimens have been found in China and are dated to the late seventh century, the technique soon spread to other regions in East and Central Asia and was used for ephemeral as well as literary texts such as Buddhist sutras or the Confucian canon. In the tenth century, woodblock printing was attested in Egypt for producing amulets. In the Latin West, it apparently emerged in the early fifteenth century for woodcuts on paper and then was used for printing entire books (block-books) including writing and images. At the same time, woodblock imprints were integrated in various ways into manuscripts and moveable-type books and have been in use until the end of the twentieth century. How this evidence from different times and places is related, is still a subject for speculation. In addition, it is rather unlikely that all these different types of artefacts were produced using the same materials and techniques as developed in China.
Whether considered as an ‘extension of manuscript culture’ or a ‘technique to print manuscripts’, woodblock printing has always played a negligible role in the history of the book, which is still mainly concerned with the Western book printed with moveable type. From Thomas Francis Carter to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, influential authors have only devoted a paragraph or two to this technique and usually dismissed it as caused by the ‘high number of Chinese characters.’ Quite often it is associated with imprinting textiles or using stamps to reproduce patterns on various media. Thus, the specifics of this technique, its place among other technologies for the multiplication of handwritten signs and images, and the reasons why it persisted in some parts of the world, but was abandoned in others, are still largely unknown. The workshop will address these questions as well as problems of terminology.