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On the Movable Type Printing Press and the Protestant Reformation

The reinvention of the printing press by Guttenberg and his contemporaries in 1456 has had many effects upon Western society.  Possibly most profound and long lasting of these was its impact upon the Protestant Reformation occurring at the time in many European nations.  Arguably, the massive increase in book circulation and the consequential increase in literacy and formation of unidentifiable publics of readers which resulted from the invention of the movable type printing press contributed as much, if not more, to the success and longevity of the movement than the current social climate and Protestant leaders of the time.

Prior to the introduction of this device into common use in 1456, all books were written by hand.  The task of transcribing these volumes, especially the larger and more elaborate of them, could prove to be a tedious and time consuming task.  The very nature of this practice limited the availability of literature on any subject.  The movable type printing press, which allowed for the relatively quick arrangement of letters to form words, sentences and paragraphs and then the mass production of these pages, by its own nature, permitted these volumes to be created en masse.  Among these many books were various vernacular translations of the Bible, canon works, and the works of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, such as Luther, Calvin, and Cramner.  Whereas before the mass production of books the supply of copies of any of these works were terribly limited due to the scarcity of those who could read the works and then transcribe what they had read and therefore radically expensive for even those who could read them, the new supply of copies that flooded market places drastically decreased the price of the works.  This permitted the thoughts of people in distant places to reach the minds of others in faraway places.  This new level of intercommunication allowed many more people to decide that the ideas of the aforementioned Protestant leaders and others were credible than would have previously been possible.  It is doubtful that such a broad opposition against the current power of the Roman-Catholic Church could have been unified in any other way.

This unification, however, would still have been nearly impossible were it not for a secondary impact of the then-modern printing press upon the Protestant Reformation and society in general; that is, a wide spread increase in literacy of European peoples.  This massive change though, could scarcely have occurred within the generation in which the printing press was reintroduced.  Indeed, this increase in literacy took place slowly over a number of generations, as narrow degrees of understanding of the characters on pages of books were gained by each succeeding age group, as they now had books to analyze.  However, this trend of the laity learning to read can be attributed to more than simply their chance to do so.  To be sure, it became a financial opportunity, and possibly even economic necessity to be able to have some basic understanding of one’s own written language.  As more documents began to be published, it greatly served masters of trades and other employers to have those with the ability to at least read in their employ.  With the slowly increasing supply of this form of worker, if one were to sustain oneself in ways other than one’s own physical labor in fields, manors, etcetera, then this skill would have been essential in competing in the developing job market.  As more laypeople began to be able to read and understand writings, the Protestant movement which used clever language and basic interpretations of scripture as its sharpest sword and sturdiest shield gained more power.  Whereas previous to this time all interpretations of scripture were fed to the hungry laity solely by Catholic clergy and theologians, it was now possible to have one’s own private interpretations of scripture, as well as gain new understandings of scripture by taking from the thoughts of those whose works they read, including the many new emerging authors of the era, namely the leaders of the Protestant movement.

The laity with little doubt took advantage of this opportunity, occasionally unbeknownst to their civic and religious authorities.  These masses of people who would hoard books in the privacy of their homes and with their newly derived ability to comprehend what they had read and learned formed large, often invisible, publics of people with similar, potent, and often revolutionary and reform-minded ideas to appear.  It was not all impossible for a locale to have strong resistance to a certain idea, which their leaders may have been proponents of, rise up in the people and swarm in their minds and hearts before the rulers of that area ever knew such a notion even existed among their subjects.  This reality possibly contributed as much to the potency of the Protestant Reformation as much as anything else yet discussed, for even when people gain new and revolutionary ideas, history teaches that wide and powerful entities, as surely the Roman Catholic Church was even this late in its time of ultimate prestige and power, can crush these ideas and their holders easily, assuming that they know that there is resistance.  This key clause if the most vital to the thought, as resistance in this form of “invisible publics” could remain just so until those publics felt that it was appropriate to act upon their convictions, often with devastating consequences for the status quo.

Ultimately, it was this status quo itself that the Protestant Reformation sought to destroy.  How successful it was echoes throughout history and is up to the students of the same to judge.  Unarguable, though, is that any degree of success that this movement, which arguably caused a change in Western religious and philosophical thought as potent as the rise of Christianity itself, had in its purpose would have been greatly diminished had it not been for the providential timing of the introduction of Guttenberg’s printing press into Western society.  This single invention surely takes its rightful place as one of the greatest of the factors in the shaping of Western society and thought and has stood as such until now from its introduction in 1456.