The Role of the Printing Press in the Protestant Reformation - Essay Example

The Role of the Printing Press in the Protestant Reformation The Protestant Reformation was a profoundsocial and religious movement that had lasting repercussions not only in the church, but also in many of the conceptions and interpretations of the modern world. Generally attributed to Martin Luther, who is said to have pinned his 95 thesis on the door of the Wittenberg Castle in the early sixteenth century, the reformation actually had several roots. Some of these stretching back hundreds of years to when the absolute dictates of the church, and the general population’s devout belief in its goodness, began to be questioned. While some causes for doubt were due to natural processes quite beyond the scope or prevention of the church of the times, such as in the case of the Black Death and subsequent plagues that periodically decimated the European population, others were undoubtedly the result of greed and bids for power, such as could be seen in the Western Schism. Finally, social changes ranged far out of the control of the church through a variety of factors. A growth in the population leading up to the reformation, coupled with significant changes in economic structures as agrarian workers moved to towns and villages began to produce a more literary public. This was encouraged by the invention of the printing press that made the production of books faster and more economical and thus making them more accessible to a wider audience. This, in turn, promoted the spread of Humanitarian ideas throughout the general public following a period of church failures. Thus, while it can be argued that Martin Luther was the biggest catalyst for change, he was heavily assisted by a variety of factors that came together at just the right time and place for his words to have maximum impact. As the population began reasserting itself following the plagues of the 1300s, the semi-subsistent agrarian lifestyle of the past was no longer sufficient to sustain the growing population. Land became more expensive, peasants were required to pay larger rents and other duties and many began moving into the towns and villages to pursue crafts or trades that would cater to the growing consumer market. According to Immanuel Wallerstein (1980), those individuals who determined to stay on the land and pay higher rents could only do so by switching their farming techniques from one of subsistence to one of specialized farming that would produce higher profit crops for less effort. This contributed to the growth of towns as a means of trading among various growers just as much as the development of handcraft industries and the beginnings of a middle class. To keep up with these changing lifestyles and ways of doing business, more and more children were being educated in at least the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. Thus, while the population began to expand, the demographics started shifting to a more social, more innovative culture that had a stronger tendency to share ideas, discuss issues and examine beliefs. This was occurring across a broad range of the population that was also seeing an increase in prosperity and individual concern. The seeds of capitalism were planted needing only the justification for full-fledged pursuit of personal wealth at the same time that the greed and the folly of the Roman Church and the wealthy elite was becoming more evident. With the greater intermingling of society as the towns grew and business began operating more with a dependence upon written communication as a matter of course, more and more people were beginning to read and to appreciate various forms of literature, such as the production of plays as a means of entertainment and moral reinforcement. The predominant guiding principle for the creation of new literature was to re-create or mirror what was observed in human behavior and this concept extended naturally to commentary upon the church and state. The demand for books was high, but the cost of producing them was equally high until the middle of the 15th century and the production of the printing press. By creating metal blocks that contained a single letter each, Johannes Gutenberg was able to create movable type and print multiple copies of complete pages of text in a fraction of the time it used to take to hand-copy or block print with less waste and expense. The emerging Humanist ideals of the day rejected the words of the Catholic church in all its ineptitude and relied instead on the Bible itself as the only true authority. “Renaissance Humanists placed great emphasis upon the dignity of man and upon the expanded possibility of human life in this world” (“General Characteristics”, 2000). The values of this movement held that men should be involved in the world they lived in. “Individual achievement, breadth of knowledge and personal aspirations (as personified by Dr. Faustus) were valued” (“General Characteristics”, 2000). Proponents of the freedom of thought this approach suggested included those primarily credited with driving the Reformation to this day. These include Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther and John Calvin among others. As a result of this movement in thought, one of the earliest projects for the printing press was a large-scale printing of the Gutenberg Bible, which was made available for sale to any who could afford it, “the equivalent of three years’ pay for the average clerk” (Kreis, 2004). It was perhaps Desiderius Erasmus who can be credited with actually starting the Reformation movement as he was the first person to carefully translate the books of the New Testament. “It was the first attempt on the part of a competent and liberal-minded scholar to ascertain what the writers of the New Testament had actually said” (“Erasmus”, 2003). It was from this book that Martin Luther transcribed the Bible into German to make it available to the laypersons of the country just as it was this book that was used by William Tyndale for translation into English for the first time in 1526. Presuming that this book had a profound impact upon the start of the Reformation is also based upon the fact that the outbreak of the Lutheran movement took place less than a year after the publication of this book. “It made the issue between European society and the Roman Church system so clear that no man could quite escape the summons to range himself on one side or the other of the great debate” (“Erasmus”, 2003). As the Reformation moved forward, translations of the Bible into the various vernacular languages of the European continent and Great Britain and their distribution among the populace was only possible through this earth-shaking invention. In conjunction with the sudden availability of the Bible on a widespread basis, the public was progressively becoming better informed as a result of printed pamphlets that highlighted connections being made between the issues of the public and the responses of the elite. Throughout the 1400s and 1500s, there had been a series of revolts between the German peasants of the countryside and the landowners and business owners of the towns and cities. A great many of these revolts can be seen to have been incited by severe economic and political concerns, but the religious upheaval of the Reformation provided an impetus for stronger efforts in the early 1500s. As they became more and more aware of the criticisms of the church brought forward by Martin Luther and others in the form of pamphlets and treatises which were themselves made available by the printing press, the peasants became convinced that their concerns regarding these other issues had true merit and would be divinely upheld. While most of their concerns lay outside the church, the idea that religious matters played at least some part is evident in the demands they brought forward. “A program called the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry listed among the demands liberty to choose their own pastors, relief from the lesser tithes, abolition of serfdom, the right to fish and hunt, restoration of inclosed common lands, abolition of death duties, impartiality of the courts, and restriction of the demands of landlords to their just feudal dues” (“Peasant’s War”, 2003). Unfortunately, the peasants were cruelly defeated, estimates hold that as many as 100,000 peasants were killed during the revolt of 1525-1526, without winning many concessions to their demands and severely discouraging any further attempts at improvement. However, the ideas that had been planted regarding religious matters could not so easily be crushed out and more and more individuals began to seriously consider the words of the Humanists. Without the invention of the printing press, much of what Martin Luther and others were saying regarding the corruption within the Catholic Church would have been easily silenced before reaching the uneducated masses. With the printing press already in existence, having contributed to the development of a much greater reading public and the opportunity for widespread distribution of printed materials, Martin Luther managed to be in the right place at the right time with just the right words to touch off rising resentments, concerns and public observations. During this period in history, the church was seen to have turned its back on the common people in favor of money and power even as the common people were struggling to meet rising costs of living, changing world economies and different means of subsistence. The ability to expose these failings of the church and at the same time offer an alternative, including a first-hand experience of God’s Holy Word rather than the garbled interpretations that had been offered by the Catholic priests, fueled the growing energy of the Reformation period. Works Cited “Erasmus.” English Bible History. (2003). May 6, 2010 “General Characteristics of the Renaissance.” Renaissance. Brooklyn College. (August 17, 2000). May 6, 2010 Kreis, Steven. “The Printing Press.” The History Guide. (May 13, 2004). May 6, 2010 < http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html> Kreis, Steven. “The Protestant Reformation.” The History Guide. (October 11, 2006). May 6, 2010 “Peasant’s War.” Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th Ed. Columbia University Press, 2003. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1980. Read More