ambyr

An exhaustive (and exhausting) economic history of print. If you need to know about the production, circulation, and use of books in the European Renaissance, this is absolutely the title for you. If you are looking for a little light history reading to entertain and enlighten you . . . you probably want to look elsewhere. Pettegree is an excellent researcher but very, very dry.

This worked for me because I was listening to it on audio while doing things in the kitchen, where it was helpful to have a book that straddled the boundary between "interesting" and "not so engrossing that I'm not perfectly willing to hit pause at any point." If I'd been keeping a print copy by my bedside table, I'm pretty sure it would still be there gathering dust. And that's a shame, because there is a lot of neat information here, particularly for those (like me) that somehow missed European history entirely in school and previously had no background on minor events like the Reformation. This provided a useful contextual framework for a history of Europe's religious schisms, though I don't really think that was Pettegree's main intent.