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Old 03-15-2022, 09:21 AM
Status: "A solution in search of a problem" (set 13 days ago)
 
Location: New York Area
34,448 posts, read 16,543,954 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
In regards to jbgusa's comments - in Europe the Church and the State weren't one in the same in those days. Those days were the Christian Reformation and the beginning of the Enlightenment. Protestantism took the Bible out of the hands of the priests, translated it from Latin to the local languages, and put it into the hands of the congregations.
The Gutenberg Press was invented in the early to mid-1400's (link). Earlier presses were invented in China in the 800's (link). The Protestant Reformation started in the 1500s (link). Though I wasn't there at the time I suspect strongly that the development of the press had something to do with taking "the Bible out of the hands of the priests." As H.R. "Bob" Haldemann said in another context "Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.” (link). I would presume that had something to do with greasing the skids.
Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
This spurred literacy in Protestant Europe - the need to read God's Word directly, instead of having a clergyman simply tell you what he thought you needed to hear. Once people got used to the idea of reading the Bible to form their own opinions on religion, it spread to reading Roman and Greek literature, and then on to modern works produced by Enlightenment philosophers.
Here we agree. But "Protestant Europe" didn't exist at the time of the invention of the Gutenberg Press.
Quote:
Originally Posted by djmilf View Post
Asia didn't have an equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church. It had Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Shintoism, or something else. It didn't have one specific book purporting to be God's Word.

The Arabic world is unique in that it did had one religion (yes, I'm ignoring the Shia/Sunni split, as well as the Ibadis for sake of this post) and it did have one religious text given by Allah to his last holy prophet. But unlike the Torah and the Bible, the contents of the Koran weren't up for debate by the common people.
The Jews' ability to debate the Bible had to be annoying to the Catholic Church, and "annoying" would have to be an understatement.
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Old 03-15-2022, 11:31 AM
 
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I thought the Arabs brought over some chinese folk to teach them how to print, and that knowledge was passed to Euros.

Gutenberg did not change the world, he just changed Europe, and at some point Europe changed the world.
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Old 03-15-2022, 11:32 AM
 
17,877 posts, read 15,739,155 times
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Also, before a "printing press", why couldnt people just copy writing down by hand, and do it huge volume? Its not like there was something else better to do back then.
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Old 03-15-2022, 12:50 PM
Status: "A solution in search of a problem" (set 13 days ago)
 
Location: New York Area
34,448 posts, read 16,543,954 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133 View Post
I thought the Arabs brought over some chinese folk to teach them how to print, and that knowledge was passed to Euros.

Gutenberg did not change the world, he just changed Europe, and at some point Europe changed the world.
I don't think the Chinese press ever made it westward.

Quote:
Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133 View Post
Also, before a "printing press", why couldnt people just copy writing down by hand, and do it huge volume? Its not like there was something else better to do back then.
Some of those items were a bit big to reproduce en masse, such as the Bible, etc.
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Old 03-15-2022, 01:05 PM
 
Location: North America
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133 View Post
Also, before a "printing press", why couldnt people just copy writing down by hand, and do it huge volume? Its not like there was something else better to do back then.
When you need 500 copies of something, do you write them out by hand? Yeah, me neither.

If you take a book out from the library and decide that you want a permanent copy for reference, do you just copy it by hand? Yeah, me neither.

Do you see hand-copied books for sale in bookstores? Yeah, me neither.
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Old 03-17-2022, 10:45 AM
 
Location: Jacksonville, FL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133 View Post
Also, before a "printing press", why couldnt people just copy writing down by hand, and do it huge volume? Its not like there was something else better to do back then.
The life of the average person in Europe circa 1400-1500 was one of subsistence. The work day started when the sun came up and ended when the sun went down. Unless you were a member of the nobility, free time was non existent.

The Gutenberg press was instrumental in providing leisure time to Europeans. It enabled the dissemination of knowledge to the masses, allowing improvements to farming and other industries which normally would have required direct instruction from another individual - instruction that wasn’t possible in many cases due to the distances involved. Remember, we’re talking about a time period when visiting the city made you an adventurer. Many people never traveled to the neighboring town, much less a city or another country. The dissemination of knowledge improved farming techniques, enabling more food to be grown with less effort. It could be argued that the Gutenberg press was just as instrumental in providing a better life for the masses as the steel plow would later be.

ETA: Also remember that the majority were illiterate prior to the invention of the Gutenberg press and the resulting availability of printed materials. Even the scribes and monks who copied text by hand weren’t capable of reading in many cases. They were simply artists who drew exactly what they saw on the page.
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Old 03-17-2022, 12:41 PM
Status: "A solution in search of a problem" (set 13 days ago)
 
Location: New York Area
34,448 posts, read 16,543,954 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JimRom View Post
The life of the average person in Europe circa 1400-1500 was one of subsistence. The work day started when the sun came up and ended when the sun went down. Unless you were a member of the nobility, free time was non existent.

The Gutenberg press was instrumental in providing leisure time to Europeans. It enabled the dissemination of knowledge to the masses, allowing improvements to farming and other industries which normally would have required direct instruction from another individual - instruction that wasn’t possible in many cases due to the distances involved. Remember, we’re talking about a time period when visiting the city made you an adventurer. Many people never traveled to the neighboring town, much less a city or another country. The dissemination of knowledge improved farming techniques, enabling more food to be grown with less effort. It could be argued that the Gutenberg press was just as instrumental in providing a better life for the masses as the steel plow would later be.

ETA: Also remember that the majority were illiterate prior to the invention of the Gutenberg press and the resulting availability of printed materials. Even the scribes and monks who copied text by hand weren’t capable of reading in many cases. They were simply artists who drew exactly what they saw on the page.
The ruling class was not happy with this for obvious reasons. They preferred a largely illiterate population that could be inflamed at will for such ridiculous adventures as the Crusades and pogroms.
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Old 03-17-2022, 07:39 PM
 
Location: Jacksonville, FL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa View Post
The ruling class was not happy with this for obvious reasons. They preferred a largely illiterate population that could be inflamed at will for such ridiculous adventures as the Crusades and pogroms.
In fairness, the Church probably was far less happy with widespread literacy than the ruling class was, at least at first. I won’t discuss modern versions of the church or my opinions of religion in general, but circa 1400 the Church (capital C because as an institution it was more powerful than some countries) was filled with some serious megalomaniacs. We’re discussing an era when even many nobles were functionally illiterate, and power had been concentrated in the halls of religion for several generations. It’s much easier to control a population with fear of eternal damnation when said population is unable to read the rules on their own.

Historically, the church was not the friend of the common man. Not that the nobles were much better, but as an institution the medieval Church was a brutal bunch of right bastards. We could probably have a whole thread about the crimes committed in the name of the medieval Church and the oddly incestuous relationship it had with the noble class. It was fairly common for the younger (and sometimes just the unwanted) sons of nobility to join the clergy, and those relationships were taken advantage of by people on both sides of the monastery gates. Paraphrasing, but there was a saying way back when along the lines of “One for the family, one for the army, one for the clergy.”
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Old 03-17-2022, 08:00 PM
Status: "A solution in search of a problem" (set 13 days ago)
 
Location: New York Area
34,448 posts, read 16,543,954 times
Reputation: 29622
^^^^^
I pretty much agree with this. In many cases the nobility and clergy were heavily interlocked.
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