In 1492, a German monk named Johannes Trithemius sat down to write a passionate defense of an ancient practice he believed was dying. His subject was the hand-copying of manuscripts. For Benedictine monks, it was a painstaking, meditative labor by which they had preserved and transmitted human knowledge for a thousand years. A new technology had arrived that could reproduce a text in hours rather than months, that put books within reach of ordinary people, that threatened to make the monk’s most sacred work unnecessary. Trithemius believed this would be a catastrophe, and he took to the page to say so.

He called his treatise In Praise of Scribes. He had it printed on a printing press.

Trithemius needed the printing press to distribute an argument against printing. That is part of why he is worth remembering, but it is not the main reason. He overestimated several dangers and missed many of printing’s benefits. He was still trying to describe a real change in what happened to a person while copying a text by hand, even though he did not yet have the language to separate that loss from the technology he distrusted.

Trithemius’s material predictions were uneven. Paper could be less durable than parchment, and rapid reproduction could spread errors as efficiently as it spread knowledge. Printing also widened access to texts, accelerated scholarship, and helped destabilize institutions that had controlled interpretation. The consequences were enormous, but they were not a simple vindication of his fears.

But the thing he was actually mourning, without quite being able to name it, was another phenomenon entirely. The practice of hand-copying a sacred text was not merely a means of reproduction. It was a technology of internalization. The monk who spent six months transcribing the Psalms knew those Psalms in a way no reader of a printed edition ever would.

The knowledge wasn’t just in the book. It was in the body, in the hand, in the thousands of hours of slow meditative repetition that had made the text inseparable from the person who had written it out. This was a form of understanding that the printing press didn’t just replace but rendered unnecessary. And when it became unnecessary, it quietly ceased to exist.