The Introduction of the Printing Press - Essay Example

The introduction of the printing press had a significant impact on education, organized religion, and written languages. Discuss the impact on each social area. A paradigm shift was what scholars have come to define the impact of the printing press in culture and the modern society as a whole. Some even believed that its invention is comparable to the breakthrough experienced by man in his discovery of writing and his development of the alphabet. Indeed, the printing press has revolutionized most aspect of the modern society and this is what this paper seeks to state. Specifically, we will explore the impact of the introduction of the printing press in the area of education, religion and the written languages. History In the old days, books and literature were handwritten manuscripts under the watch of copyists and scribes. Later on, it would be taken over by block printing with a painstaking process involving an army of craftsmen carving and printing letters of a composition via individual blocks of wood. Back then it was painfully difficult to produce and distribute, say, a piece of literature not to mention its consumption of time. Shane Hipps (2005) has an interesting illustration on this part after the Greeks invented the alphabet: Like a slow gas leak lasting 1,000 years, the alphabet gradually infiltrated Western culture. However this leak was all but turned off during the fourth century when papyrus supplies dried up, literacy rates plummeted and Europe returned to a dominantly oral culture. (p. 51) Hence, scholars agree that Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable printing press was an unacknowledged revolution in the history of mankind. We quote Elizabeth Eisenstein in the book called, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: In the late fifteenth century, the reproduction of written materials began to move from the copyist’s desk to the printer’s workshop. This shift, which revolutionized all forms of learning, was particularly important for historical scholarship. Ever since then, historians have been indebted to Gutenberg’s invention; print enters their work from start to finish, from consulting card-files to reading page-proofs. (p. 3) The impact of the invention of the printing press was particularly important in the system of transmitting our traditions according to Eisenstein. Shane Hipps (p. 51) attempted to scale its overwhelming power and found it almost infinite with the alphabet, perfectly uniformed, now endlessly repeatable. This brings us to the first social area in our discussion, which is education. Education As copies of the Gutenberg printing press prototype spread across Europe like wildfire, European thought has also begun its change departing from its medieval nature. The mass-production of all kinds of literature placed literacy into the hands of everyone. (Hipps, p. 51) When in the past, manuscripts were prized possessions for the quality of its paper, and the focus on images and visuals, the printing press has offered printed books in turn for a fraction of the cost of its predecessor. As a result, there was a diffusion of knowledge creating an environment that is most conducive to the development of education and the intellectual life. Let us imagine if materials and documents necessary for instruction were still to be made by hands. They will take forever to produce and they would have been outrageously expensive. Also, we should like to highlight that manual copying is subject to human errors with each generation compounding their own. As Haven Kendall (2005) put it, the printing press has fundamentally changed the way we transmit knowledge. Mass literacy became the trend as well as the advent of the scientific revolution which “depended on scientists being able to record and share their findings… and read what others have discovered.” (Haven, p. 48) On a more technical front, the restructuring on how books are produced had also changed the reading process of people. Long ago, people are fond of oral readings, then there was a shift to silent and private reading. (O’Brien 1921, p. 28) Also, if we open a book today, for example, we would see an organized format where same information are located on the same category. This is helped by page numbering; the existence of the table of contents as well the index pages. The upshot on the entire printing press movement on education was that literacy shot up to new dizzying heights. Religion The utility of printing press to religion is as important as its impact in education through its usefulness as a rhetorical device. Also, as Eisenstein stated, religion and education were cast in the same uniform vernacular mold. It is a widely accepted belief that the printing press created upheavals in religion such as the incidence of the Reformation. First, we should not forget the foundation of religious faiths resides on the written manuscript, which was the Bible. Perhaps the most profound impact that the printing press had on religion was what Eisenstein called the “division of Christendom” (p. 33) by the new means editing and spreading the Gospel. Bible literacy naturally paved the way for a number of scholars to question established dogma of the church. The printing press was used to duplicate the Bible and henceforth as a tool for the Catholic and emergent Protestant scholars in attacking and defending their faiths. Again, we take an excerpt from Eisenstein book to drive home our point: It was printing, to be sure, that made it possible fully to implement long-lived evangelical aims. Nevertheless, Protestant doctrines which stressed Bible-reading as necessary for salvation did generate unusual pressures toward literacy; while the Catholic refusal after Trent to authorize alternatives to Latin Vulgate worked in opposite direction. (Eisenstein, p. 333) We also take note of the power of the printing press in the education of the priests and clerics. Protestants claimed an educated following as opposed to the uninformed laity of the Catholic Church due to a “deliberate cultivation of mystery, an insistence on withholding pearls of wisdom which characterized the arguments made at Trent.“ (Eisenstein, p. 344) Impact on Written Languages Through history, we have learned that the power of the Roman Catholic Church imposed the use of the Latin language in communication especially those of written documents. This was possible because the Church had the influence over its faithful, and the resources and financial capacity to produce literatures. We thank the monks, for instance, for they were invaluable assets then in copying precious documents written in the past and preserving those which, in one way or another, were doomed to be destroyed. This, however, marginalized Europe’s written languages. Let us talk in religious terms to elaborate. “Even where vernacular translation was allowed, Catholic Bibles were marked by Latinate expressions and elaborate glosses.” (Eisenstein, p. 344) Thus, Latin dominated Europe for hundreds of years because the Gospel as presented in various forms of documents was the only source of literacy among the people. Upon the introduction of the printing press, books suddenly became easily available in European vernaculars. This marked the decline of the Latin language as a means of scholarly communications and the rise of European languages. Most importantly, printers had a more practical reason for attempting to achieve some sort of uniformity in the written language. “As the printing press made it possible for written works to be reproduced in relatively large quantities, printers needed to reach out to as many potential buyers as possible. The market of Latin readers, while spread throughout Europe, was also confined to a relatively thin strata at the top of European societies, and in order to reach beyond this narrow market it was in writers’ and printers’ interest to begin producing works in local vernacular for which larger market existed.” (Snow, p. 25) Indeed, there came a time when districts such as Utrecht, Leiden and Haarlem exhibited a language with its own distinctive flavor. (Barbour and Carmichael 2001, p. 138) There were those who argued that the development of the European languages through the printing press shaped European individual identities and finally nationalism to rise as independent nations. There is no wonder; the printing press was touted as the single breakthrough in invention in the past 2000 years as it has shaken the very fundamental structure of human society, thought and activity. (Kendall, p. 48) References Barbour, Stephen and Carmichael, Cathie. (2001). Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford University Press Eisenstein, Elizabeth.(1980). The Printing Press as and Agent of Change. Cambridge University of Press Haven, Kendall. (2005). 100 Greatest Science Inventions of All Time. Libraries Unlimited Hipps, Shane. (2005). The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. Zondervan. p. 51 O’Brien, John. OBrien, John. (1921). Silent Reading, with special reference to Methods for Developing Speed. The Macmillan company Snow, Donald. (2004). Cantonese as Written Language. Hong Kong University Press (HKUP) Read More