was the first dated book printed in England, the Epilogue being dated 1477 and in one copy November 18. Though this was the first _dated_ book, it was not certainly the first issue of the press, Caxton's translation of Jason and a few other publications of slight extent having probably preceded it.
Within twenty years from the start, on the threshold of the discovery of the New World, printing from movable type is thus in full swing throughout Europe. The speedy and consequent intellectual ferment is an oft-told tale, scarcely worth further comment, if it were not too customary to dwell on the alleged impact on natural knowledge, as on biblical criticism and political theory, of Greek scholarship imported into Europe by Byzantine immigrants in flight from the victorious Turks. The fact is that the positive outcome of Alexandrian mathematics, astronomy, medicine and mechanics had long ago penetrated north-western Europe through visits of students to the Moorish universities in Spain, where positive knowledge had attained a higher level than ever before through the marriage of Alexandrian science to Hindu number-lore. Equally indisputable is the fact that the universities of Toledo, Cordova and Seville were midwives of the cartography which Jewish pilots put at the service of Henry the Navigator. That the new technique of printing made available for the great explorations of the fifteenth century a new scientific amenity for which there was a pre-existing and insistent demand is evident from the mounting number of nautical almanacks published between Gutenberg's first productions and the project of Columbus. Soon there were to follow manuals of military science propounding problems of ballistics created by the introduction of gunpowder into warfare--like paper, from Chinese sources by way of the Moslem world.
Why monks, such as Adelard of Bath, should disguise themselves as Moslems to study in the Moorish universities during the twelfth century is easy to understand. The Church had assumed the responsibilities of the ancient priesthoods as custodians of the calendar, and hence of astronomical lore, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. As founders of hospitals in conformity with the beatitude of the sick visitor, they were prohibited from active participation in the advancement of medicine as a science by Papal bulls against dissection of the human body, but on that account the more well-disposed to Jewish missionaries of the Moorish culture, when the latter set up schools of medicine on the campuses of the mediaeval universities....