Panizzi Lecture 1: Woodblock Publishing in China’s First Age of Print
Channel: British Library
Date: 2022-02-08

In this first of three Panizzi lectures, Professor Cynthia Brokaw explores why woodblock printing or xylography, remained, throughout China’s pre-modern history, the major print technology.

The lecture will consider what advantages xylography enjoyed over movable type as a technology for reproduction of Chinese texts. It will also discuss what woodblock-printed texts looked like, and survey the development of printing from its origins in the seventh to eighth centuries through the 14th century, China’s first age of print.

Cynthia Brokaw is Professor of History and East Asian Studies and Chen Family Professor of Chinese Studies at Brown University, where she teaches early modern Chinese history. Her research focuses on the social history of publishing and book culture in China, with particular attention to the relationship between the growth of commercial publishing and the development of a large commoner reading public in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.