Page 51 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

26 Guy Poitevin

before the Reformation, Bibles started circulating in French. No legisla-
tion, no inquisition, no censorship, no police force could prevent city
people from reading them and freeing themselves from the control of
clerics. In 1570 a Catholic French Bible was officially allowed—a revised
version of the Geneva Bible—and cheap New Testaments circulated
in small format with some success among Catholics. To maintain an
orthodox reading of the ‘naked and simple letter’, the text was wrapped
with images and religious symbols so that the eye was guided by the
commentary and the illustration: the new modes of control had to
adjust to the print technologies.
A similar though milder polemic took place in the domain of medical
knowledge. A number of books appeared in vulgar language in which
doctors of medicine tried to dispel the ignorance that reigned not only
among laymen, but also among surgeons–companions (those belonging
to a corporation of surgeons). To justify these publications, one of them
in 1565 argued that Galien and Avicenna wrote their works in their
mother-tongues, evidence similar to the one put forward by Catholic
humanists and Protestants who recalled that St Jerome had translated
the Bible in a vernacular language. An English author justified medical
vulgarization in terms similar to those of Antoine de Marcourt, one of
the first Protestants out to stigmatize the ‘merchants’ who appropri-
ated the Faculty of Theology:
Why do they frown upon Medicine being published in English? Is
it their wish that nobody but themselves alone know about it? But
what are they achieving with it? Are they traders of our life and
death and are we to buy our health from them only at rates that
they alone have fixed?
French Protestant Laurent Joubert explicitly compared doctors in
medicine who disapproved of teaching people in their own language
how to remain in good health with doctors in theology who deprived
people from spiritual food. A surgical operation may succeed in any
language and misunderstanding can bear as much on a text in Latin
as one in French: should we burn an inexperienced young cleric who
misinterprets a Scripture?
The attempts and perspectives of Laurent Joubert who spent twenty-
five years of his life to eliminate all misconceptions in medicine are
particularly emblematic of the transformations that printing technol-
ogy effectuated in modes of social relations and cultural traditions.