What Was The Impact Of The Printing Press In The Fifteenth Century

Until the end of the Middle Ages, the need to copy manuscripts by hand limited the spread of information. As a result, the Catholic church, which possessed a virtual monopoly on education for much of the era, enjoyed virtually unchallenged authority, while scientific knowledge of the world did not advance beyond the discoveries made by the ancient Greeks and Romans. This all changed when Johannes Gutenberg invented the first printing press with movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century. The printing press fundamentally changed the lives of Europeans and ushered in the modern age by enabling the publication of works that challenged the authority of the Catholic church and promoted new empirical views of nature that formed the foundation

of the Scientific Revolution.

The printing press greatly increased the volume and availability of writings that challenged the authority of the Catholic church. As Document 2 shows, such writings were always viewed as a threat, even prior to the invention of the press.

The authors of the Council of Constance’s sentence against Jan Hus also took care to command that his books be burned, in order to ensure that his heretical teachings would not spread. However, eliminating all such writings was no longer possible for the Catholic church once the printing press began to produce an ever-greater number of works that encouraged critical scrutiny of its teachings and structure. The most famous example of this may be Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, which the printing press spread throughout Europe in a matter of months, causing his criticisms of indulgences to become widely known and making it impossible for the church to eliminate Luther as it had eliminated Huss. As the Protestant Reformation gained traction, the printing press continued to play a key role in spreading their ideas. Writings

like Document 3, for example, challenged the Pope’s leadership of the church by arguing from Scripture that Peter, to whom the Pope traced his authority, had no more power than Jesus’ other apostles. Published in England in 1530, it reflects the fact that the printing press had helped to spread similar arguments for over two generations, as well as vernacular translations of the Bible itself. By the time the Council of Trent attempted to reform the Catholic church, the church itself recognized that the number of books in print was too great for it to control. Document 5 shows that the Council was forced to limit the censorship of writings by those it considered heretics to books that dealt directly with religion, most likely because it could not keep up with the volume of work now available.
The printing press also enabled the spread of new knowledge, based on empirical observation rather than ancient authority, and thus contributed significantly to the Scientific Revolution.

Document 4 provides an example of this in the form of Andreas’ Vesalius’ detailed drawings, based on his firsthand dissection of human bodies, which sometimes contradicted classical teachings. The printing press allowed Vesalius’ discoveries to circulate widely, and resulted in the discrediting of Galen, the Roman physician who up until the sixteenth century had represented the gold standard of anatomical knowledge. As Document 6 shows, the printing press also facilitated the spread of the new scientific method itself. By encouraging readers to approach existing knowledge with skepticism, natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon promoted additional observation and experimentation that led to further scientific progress. Document 7, in which William Harvey announces his discovery of human circulation, is an example of one such breakthrough, which would not have been possible without the communication of earlier discoveries and the spread of empirical ways of looking at nature via the printing press. The fact that Harvey’s work was dedicated to the King of England also shows the enhanced prestige of such empirical knowledge, and acceptance of its superiority to ancient teachings, by the seventeenth

century.

There were, of course, many other factors that allowed people to successfully challenge the Catholic Church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the debate over indulgences, discontent over corruption in the church, and the ambitions of secular rulers who sought to gain more control. Similarly, the printing press could not have changed the way scientific inquiry was conducted without other important developments. The discovery of a New World completely unknown to ancient philosophers, as well as the increased pursuit of profitable knowledge that accompanied the new expansion of commerce, were just as important in stimulating new empirical ways of viewing the universe. However, without the printing press to accelerate the spread of ideas, both the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution would have taken far longer to reach their tipping points, and Europe’s mindset might have remained essentially medieval for decades or even centuries more.