Page 224 - Culture Society and the Media
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214 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
it fostered an individualistic, private approach to religion that gave precedence to
the study of the Bible and private prayer at the expense of the corporate
organization of religion, based on collective rituals administered by a
professional priesthood. Print thus helped to displace the mediating and
intercessionary role of the clergy, and even of the Church itself, by providing a
new channel of communication linking Christians to their God.
The development of a lay scribal and print culture also undermined the
ideological ascendancy of the Church. The growth of commercial scriptoria and
subsequently commercial printing enterprises made it more difficult for the
ecclesiastical authorities, who had previously directly controlled the means of
book production, to exercise effective censorship. The failure of the Church to
maintain its domination over centres of learning in the later middle ages also
weakened its grip on the content of élite culture. Through the medium of the
written and printed word (as well as in a sense through changing styles of
representation in Renaissance art), an anthropomorphic view of the world that
stressed man’s innate capacity to regulate his environment was expressed that
directly confronted the more traditional theocentric view of a divinely ordained
and ordered universe that underpinned papal imperialism. Developments in
political thought—most notably the modern distinction between Church and
State and a belief in the legitimacy of state power as being derived from people
rather than from God—was also mediated through books to a larger élite
audience, undermining the premises that sustained papal ascendancy (Wilks,
1963; Ullmann, 1977).
The rise of the book, pamphlet and flysheet also to some extent undermined
the authority of the Church leadership by expanding the boundaries of time and
space: publications increased knowledge of early Church history in which Rome
had played an inconspicuous part, and spread information about the greed and
corruption of the Renaissance papacy which, though probably no worse than that
of the papacy in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, became more widely
known. In a more general sense, the rise of the manuscript and subsequently of
the printed book also fostered the development of an alternative culture.
Although the bulk of scribal and early print output was in Latin and religious in
content, the production and dissemination of vernacular texts helped to foster a
parallel secular culture based on national languages and dialects, drawing upon
indigenous cultural traditions. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in late medieval
Europe sought to contain the threat of this ‘new learning’ through proscriptions
and censorship, direct patronage and the creation of what Southern (1970) calls
‘a separate university system’ through the Franciscan and Dominican orders. It
was unable, however, to neutralize the dislocating influence of new techniques
of communication that by-passed the established information order of the
Catholic Church.
Indeed, the rise of the book not only subverted the authority of the Church, but
also acted as a directly centrifugal force within it. It polarized the Catholic
congregation between literate and pre-literate definitions of religious experience