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
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