Page 223 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 213
and by the establishment of a fully organized international book trade, in the
later middle ages. The introduction of printing with moveable metal type for
commercial purposes in 1450 was thus the culmination, rather than the
beginning, of a major expansion of a book-based culture. Print resulted,
however, in an enormous gain in productivity, with output per capita engaged in
book production rising by well over a hundred-fold, to judge from estimates
provided by Eisenstein (1968). Print also led to a sharp reduction in costs, so that
the printed works of Luther, for instance, could be purchased in England for 4d or
6d a copy in 1520—the equivalent of about a day’s wage for a craftsman. This
increase in output and fall in costs, combined with rising rates of literacy,
resulted in a spectacular increase in book consumption. About twenty million
books were produced in Europe between 1450 and 1500, rising sharply thereafter
(Febvre and Martin, 1976).
This expansion of book production resulted in the mass dissemination of
religious texts, and in particular Bibles in vernacular languages. There were, for
example, nineteen editions of the Bible in High German before Luther, and
Luther’s own translation of the Bible was published in whole or in part in no less
than 430 editions between 1522 and 1546. This diffusion of the Bible
undermined the monopolistic position of the clergy as agents of religious
communication, and threatened their authority as mediators of religious
knowledge by providing direct access to an alternative, more authoritative source
of religious teaching—that of Christ as reported in the scriptures. As John
Hobbes wrote disapprovingly in the seventeenth century: ‘every man, nay, every
boy and wench that could read English thought they spoke with God Almighty,
and understood what He said’ (quoted in Hill, 1974, p. 154).
It was mainly in order to maintain priestly, hierarchical control over religious
knowledge that determined attempts were made to restrict public access to the
Bible. The Catholic Church proscribed Bibles printed in languages that people
could understand. The English Church under Henry VIII tried a more
discriminating approach. Bible-reading was banned in 1543 among the lower
orders, namely ‘women, apprentices and husbandmen’ (Bennett, 1952).
In a less immediately apparent but more important way, the rise of the book
undermined the authority of the clergy by diminishing their intermediary role.
The prestige and influence of the Catholic clergy (and of the Catholic Church as
an institution) derived from their special status as the mediators of divine power.
This found concrete and dramatic expression in a variety of rituals symbolizing
the role of the clergy in transmitting—and even coercing—supernatural power
through their intercession. The development of a book-based culture encouraged
a new orientation in which the word of God mediated through print was placed
at the centre of religion. This new approach tended to reject the elaborate
ritualism and expressive iconography of pre-literate forms of religious
communication in which the priest was the principal actor. It frequently
repudiated also the efficacy of the rites administered by the priest, thereby
diminishing his status as a dispenser of grace. Indeed, in its more extreme form,