The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.

    It opens with a chapter establishing this small Essex parish in the national context of econmic and social change in the years between 1525 and 1700. Thereafter the chapters examine the economy of Terling; its demographic history; its social structure; the relationships of the villagers with the courts of the church and state; the growth of popular literacy; the impact of the reformation, and the rise in puritanism. The overall process of change is then characterized in a powerful interpretive chapter on the changing pattern of social relationships in the parish.This revised edition has a new chapter, 'Terling Revisited' which addresses the debate occasioned by the book, notably over kinship relations in early modern England, and the impact of puritanism on local society. In both cases a new interpretive synthesis is attempted and the argument of the first edition is defended, elaborated, and advanced in the light of subsequent research.