I’ve had an epiphany. This one is about Korean printing technology. The basic question is: Why, if the Gutenberg press spawned the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment and the end of feudalism in Europe, did not the same thing happen in Korea 200 years ahead of Gutenberg when Korea developed its own metal movable type?

Korea likes to display its pride over developing metal movable type printing and book distribution, but where were the consequential developments like those in Europe? The answer is — and this is my epiphany — the printing revolution and its attending developments were already happening in Korea ahead of metal movable type. The revolution is Korea had started with wood block printing. Metal movable type was one step in an ongoing renaissance.

It was wood block printing that created the renaissance in Korea, not 200 years ahead of Gutenberg, but 400 or 500 years ahead. It was on the heels of wood block printing, whereby large numbers of books could be printed and shared with schools all across the country. Korea was mass-producing books while Europe was still copying books by hand.

European schools and monasteries slowly spread religious scholarship, the only kind of scholarship there was, through reading of hand-copied manuscripts — manos = hand, script = writing.

Korea had some wood block printing as early as the mid-eighth........

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