2012 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Historian / New York City, USA

The historian Elizabeth Ann Lewisohn Eisenstein, born in New York in 1923 and deceased in Washington in 2016, became known for researching the history of early book printing, the media change from the era of manuscript culture to print culture and the role of book printing to address the broad cultural change in Western civilization. Her major work "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" (1980) is considered a milestone in modern book research. In it, she analyzes the effect of Gutenberg's invention on the population of Europe and discusses the influence of book printing e. g. on the Reformation and the humanism, but also on the Enlightenment. In 2011, her in-depth work "Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of Ending" was published.
Eisenstein received her doctorate from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She taught, among others, at the American University in Washington D.C. and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she held the Chair of "Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History". In 1993, the Elizabeth Essay Prize was created, which is awarded to members of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars for their work. She was also a member of numerous foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation or the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2012, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society for her outstanding life's work and significant teaching.