Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is Episode 135, a House of Cards.

In this episode, we're going to turn our attention to printing.

We've spent many episodes discussing the important role of scribes and the nature of handwritten

manuscripts, but in the 1400s, those scribes suddenly faced a new source of competition,

the printing press.

In this episode, we're going to examine the history of the printing press, but we're

going to take a broader look and explore the larger history of printing.

And that story requires us to look at another innovation which also appeared in Europe

around this same time period, and that's the popular pastime of playing cards.

The appearance of playing cards and the printing press around the same time wasn't really

a coincidence, because in many ways the two innovations are directly tied to each other.

So this time we'll explore those developments, and we'll see how both of those innovations

shaped the English language.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is History of

EnglishPodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes

and transcripts at patreon.com slash History of English.

Now let's turn our attention to some important developments that were taking place in the

early 1400s, and let's begin by picking up where we left off last time.

In the last episode, we explored the rise of the House of Lancaster.

As we saw, the Lancaster and Dynasty began when Henry IV essentially overthrew the

...