Print and the intense study of letters
That printing from movable types was an event nearly related to the earlier technology of the phonetic alphabet is a fact that has been a main reason for studying all these centuries that preceded Gutenberg. (McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy 152)
It's true that print brought attention back to the forms of letters and sentences--after all, in order to form them on a printing press, they had to be studied and arranged with mechanical precision and efficiency in a way that would produce legible texts.