Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
would have been impossible without printing. Textbooks became a
ordable
and necessary instruments of school learning, helping to standardize the cur-
riculum among schools and, in some cases, entire cities. Scienti
ff
c papers—
adaptations of the letter—could be read at meetings even without the
author's presence. In literature, printing enhanced the ability of texts to con-
quer space but diminished the importance of time to their signi
fi
cance: as
Boorstin (1983:422) observes, “In our time the printed best seller speedily
reaches across space but only seldom reaches out into the generations. In the
age of the manuscript the power of a single classic author was deathless.”
Among several repercussions of the printing revolution were the ways
in which it became entangled in religious con
fi
icts of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The early Church actually encouraged printing as a
means of disseminating the Bible before coming to oppose it due to the
unintended consequences it unleashed: Deibert (1997:29) notes that “the same
bishops and monks who actively encouraged the establishment of local print-
ing houses never anticipated the way heresies, like the Protestant Reformation,
would thrive with the widespread availability of this new technology. The full
e
fl
ects of printing went unforeseen by the very actors who encouraged and
shaped its early development.” For example, heretical movements could
spread their messages more e
ff
ectively through cheap pamphlets. Under-
standably, therefore, printing was denounced by some of the clergy and poli-
ticians as a means to spread subversion and heresy. Through printing, one
person could reach a mass audience in a short period, as witnessed by Luther's
95 theses criticizing the Church. The power of printing to reproduce copies
quickly and cheaply led many theologians to wonder whether the ancient
hermeneutic debate over the one true meaning of the Bible could be settled at
last. Instead, printing accentuated the rift within the Church. The Protestant
Reformation called into question received religious authority and accelerated
the historical shift from ecclesiastical to civil authority. Hence, places domin-
ated by Protestantism, which encouraged a Bible in every house and direct,
individual communication with god, saw literacy rates climb faster than did
Catholic regions. Protestantism, with its greater emphasis on literacy, also
initiated a break with the Catholic veneration of images. In Protestant lands,
printing enhanced the textual authority of the Bible over the theological doc-
trines of the Pope. While the Catholic hierarchy held the Bible to be an allegor-
ical document, Protestants such as Luther and Calvin argued it should be
taken literally. This shift in consciousness was also important to the incipient
nationalism then in the making: not surprisingly, Protestant regions, which
encouraged reading, developed national identities more quickly than did
Catholic ones, which often did not (Mann 1986). Printing in vernacular lan-
guages began to undermine the hegemony of Latin, establishing local tongues
as the basis of emergent national identities and imagined communities and
dooming the dream of a Christendom united under a single Latin tongue.
Literacy soon spread from an idiosyncrasy of monks of an agrarian cul-
ture to a necessity in an urban, mercantile one, amplifying the economic and
ff
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