Sword & Trowel 2017: Issue 1
printing industry. The invention of printing by
movable type was the information revolution of the late Middle Ages. It was their equivalent of the inter- net. Johann Gutenberg of Mainz in Germany was the great pioneer in the 1450s. By 1500, over 200 print- ing presses were churning out books throughout Europe. Gone were the days when scribes (usually monks) had to copy out literary works labori- ously by hand. For the fi rst time, a publisher could make thousands of copies of a book easily and quickly, and put them into mass circulation. This meant that ideas could spread so much more rapidly. It also meant that the ability to read became more highly valued. Literacy was a by- product of the printing revolution, and without literacy it is diffi cult to see how Reformation ideas could have been so widely communicated. As a result of the new printing industry, the ideals of Renaissance humanism were able to fl ow out across Europe relatively easily, and in their wake, the even more radically
reforming ideals of Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli (and others). We might say that printing enabled the Reformation to ‘go viral’ in a way that frankly would not have been possible in a previous age. The new information technology turned out to be God’s gift to his people. We can discern the alignment be-
tween the printing revolution and the spread of the Reformation in a single fact: it was cities and universities that fi rst embraced the Reformation. In England, for example, London fast became the nation’s hotbed of Protes- tantism. Here were the great printing presses; here too was a thriving port, where merchant ships could bring in Protestant literature from Continental Europe. Long before Henry VIII’s death, his capital city had already been infected at every level with the good infection of the Reformation, and it owed little or nothing to Hen- ry’s political breach with Rome. A similar phenomenon greets us if we look at 16th
-century Switzerland.
The Swiss Confederacy was made up of thirteen member states, called ‘cantons’. Four of these were ‘city cantons’: Zurich, Basel, Berne, and Schaffhausen. The other nine were agricultural cantons, based around farm and village, dominated by fi ve central ‘forest cantons’. Is it a mere accident of history that the Reformation
A Gutenberg press replica (Photo: Seán Pòl Ó Creachmhaoil)
page 28 Seeds of the Reformation
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
