SEVENTEEN - NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

IT ALL STARTED WITH THE WATERSHED MOMENT WITH THE INVENTION OF THE GUTENBERG PRESS

 

A Watershed Moment Defines An Age!

  

Invention is a kind of muse, which, being possessed of the other advantages common to her sisters, and being warmed by the fire of Apollo, is raised higher than the rest.

John Dryden (1631 – 1700), English poet and playwright  

 

THE SERENDIPITY OF ENTERPRISE

As late as the 14^th century, institutions for the manufacturing of knowledge were limited to isolated groups of churchmen, among them the clerical skeptics, who were essentially amateurs

when it came to natural philosophy doing mysterious investigationS as a sideline to their ecclesiastical responsibilities.  This isolation and somewhat surreptitious practice would end with explosive finality one hundred years later when a German goldsmith got the date wrong.  The consequences of that mistake would shake the Roman church to its foundation, and create an entirely new technological age.  This fortuitous event marks the continuing story of human serendipitous breakthroughs.  And it involved printing.

Printing would radically change not only the process of printing but the very way knowledge would be recorded and disseminated.  It would change the nature of knowledge, itself, and how that knowledge would be generated, used, and made more accessible to people.  

In 1439, in the German town of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg found that he had been misinformed as to the date of a Pilgrim’s Fair in nearby Aachen.  Gutenberg had agreed to sell small mirrors to these pilgrims.  When he found out that the fair was to be held a year later, he revealed to his co-inventors an alternative opportunity: make individual letters of metal to combine and recombine them to print words on paper.  The new typeface would radically change the world of documentation in the West, replacing as it did manuscripts.

 

The reason for Gutenberg’s misadventure in making polished mirrors believed to capture holy light from religious relics of Emperor Charlemagne’s collection was Aachen having suffered a severe flood postponing the exhibition one year.  In debt to his investors, and unable to repay them, Gutenberg promised to share a “secret.”  It was the idea of movable type. 

 

A limited amount of printing with engraved wooden blocks was already available, but they could only be used to print one image and quickly wore out.  The secret advantage to Gutenberg’s metal typefaces was that they lasted, and single reproduced letters were interchangeable.

So, this German went from a blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher to introducing a new technology in printing to Europe.  His introduction of mechanical movable type printing to Europe started the Printing Revolution and is regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium, the seminal event which ushered in the modern era of human history.  

It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and in an ancillary fashion provided the impetus to the American and French Revolutions.  It did so because it laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses, thus providing the foundation for progressive compulsory education for all children whatever their means.

Gutenberg in 1439 was the first European to use the printing press and movable type in Europe.  What followed was the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type, and the use of oil-based ink for printing books, adjustable molds, mechanical movable type, and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw press of the period.

 

Truly incredible was that his invention represented the combination of these elements into a practical system that allowed mass production of printed books, which was economically and viable to printers and readers alike. 

 

The invention of mechanical movable type printing would permanently alter the structure of European society in the Era of the Renaissance with an unrestricted circulation of information, including revolutionary ideas, transcending borders, and capturing the imagination of the masses.  

A quarter-century later, it was the perfect fodder for the Reformation as the German people were primed for challenging political and religious authority.  The sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly on the literate elite and bolstered the emerging Middle Class.  Martin Luther’s translation of the Holy Bible into German had a two-prong effect: it solidified the Reformation and promoted the idea of German nationalism.  It also accelerated the collapse of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.  

Meanwhile, across Europe because of accessible and speedy printing, European vernacular languages flourished to the detriment of the once-dominant French of the aristocracy and Latin of the Church.  

Like all crucial inventions, by the 19^th century, Gutenberg’s hand-operated style press was replaced by the steam-powered rotary press allowing printing on an industrial scale, which across the world became the sole medium for modern bulk printing. 

EARLY WOODEN PRINTING PRESS, 1568

Living in Strasbourg in 1444, it is believed here he perfected and unveiled the secret printing based on his research.  After this, there is a four-year gap finding him back in Mainz in 1448 where he worked on copper engravings.  Gutenberg’s major work was the Gutenberg Bible (known as the 42-line Bible), which was acclaimed for its aesthetic appeal and technical quality.  The future Pope Pius II was moved to write in 1455:

“All that has been written to me of this marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true.  I have not seen complete Bibles but only a number of queries of various books of the Bible.  The script was very neat and legible, not at all difficult to follow – your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses.”

It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but the work was commenced in 1452.  At the same time, the press was also printing other more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars).  There is also speculation that there were two designated presses: one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. 

Ironically, one of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was printing thousands of indulgences for the church in 1454 – 1455.  The Roman Catholic Church was Gutenberg’s first “house account,” which took full advantage of this new disseminating leverage.  However, with this single invention, the map of Europe would change, and the power of the Catholic Church would diminish as the nature of knowledge upon which political and religious control rest would never again be the same.  

Printing across the European continent was spreading at extraordinary speed.  In 1455, there was no printed text in Europe.  By 1500, there were 20 million books in 35,000 editions or one book for every five European residents.  Also, in 1455, the only printing press in Europe had been Gutenberg’s.  By 1500, there were presses in 245 cities from Stockholm, Sweden to Palermo, Sicily.  No innovation in history had spread so far and so fast.

As mentioned, the first to take advantage of this new technology was the Church failing to recognize its possible threat to its power.  Instead, Rome believed printing could strengthen its social authority through the production and dissemination of identical devotional books.  This would possibly establish liturgical conformity and obedience on an unprecedented scale. 

Then in 1466, Rome made a move to entrench its power even further among the growing literate non-Latin speaking peoples in the rising artisan class of German readers by publishing the Bible in the German vernacular.  The idea caught on, and again, the church didn’t recognize the threat to its authority.

In 1471, an Italian bible was on sale in Venice.  In 1477, the Delphi Press had printed a Dutch bible.  By 1500, there were 30 editions of the Bible in six languages.  With this development, the Catholic authority of Rome commenced unraveling. 

 

GUTENBERG BIBLE, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, DC

 Gutenberg missed this gathering storm as he died in 1468 and was buried in the Franciscan church at Mainz.  This church and cemetery were later destroyed, his grave was lost to posterity.  Before he died, in January 1465, he was honored for his achievements with the title of Hofmann (gentleman of the court).  His contribution lives and is reflected well into the 21^st century.  

 

Power of the printed word

 

American humorist and author Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) put it simply:

 

“What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg.  Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage, for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored.”

 

THE SERENDIPITY OF ECCLESIASTICAL OUTRAGE

To start with, the Bible was to have unexpected political consequences.  It gave native permanence to the native tongue in which the Bible was printed.  In doing so, it strengthened the unity and power of the ruler in that language community.  Despite the fact Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Wales, Ireland, Catalonia, and Finland were in economic dependence on more powerful countries, their national identity was strengthened by being able to read the Bible in their respective languages.

Conversely, over time, languages in which the Bible was not printed either disappeared or became provincial dialects subordinate to the political and economic dominant language of the region.  The political result of print languages imposed by kings who were in control of the presses would lead to a new kind of society, a nation.

Thanks to printing a Christian now saw himself as a member of a nation that before printing had not existed.  With a national language, monarchs began to enforce their local tongues with laws, taxes, armies, and bureaucracies that went with them.

No European used the press more effectively to promote and manipulate its new print-generated national identity than the Augustinian priest philosopher and German Protestant reformer than Martin Luther (1483 – 1546).  

 

  MARTIN LUTHER’S 95 THESES SPARKED THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION IN PRINT FROM 1522

 

Within only two years, Luther’s tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies throughout Germany and Europe.  Luther, the son of a miner, entered the University of Erfurt in 1501, taking his degree in 1505.  Before this, he had been studying Scriptures, spending three years in the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt.  In 1507, he was ordained a priest and lectured on philosophy at the University of Wittenberg where he discovered a talent as an influential preacher.

On a mission to Rome in 1510 – 1511, he was appalled by the conditions he found there.  After his return to Wittenberg, his career as a reformer began.   Money was greatly needed in Rome for its massive building projects.  The church sent emissaries out everywhere to seek funds using the ruse of the sale of indulgences.  Indulgences were purported to ease a person’s arrival in heavenly paradise by reducing or bypassing a stay in Limbo.

Luther’s indignation at this shameful practice was carried on by the Dominican friar Johannes Tetzel (1465 – 1519) who performed the role with great ostentation and gusto, which provoked Luther.  As a professor of Biblical Exegesis at Wittenberg (1512 – 1546), he began to preach the doctrine of salvation through faith alone and not through works.  On October 31, 1517, he drew up a list of 95 theses on indulgences denying the pope the right to forgive sins and nailed this document to the church door at Wittenberg.  

 

JOHANNES TETZEL, MARTIN LUTHER’S NEMESIS LEADING UP TO THE REFORMATION

 

Were this to have happened at an earlier time, a time before the invention of Gutenberg’s movable printing press, only conjecture can manage the impact of his message.  But in 1517, with printing established as a viable technology, there was no doubt.  The printing press took Luther’s fight with Pope Leo X (1475 – 1521) to the streets of Europe with astonishing speed.  A printed version of his protest of the Roman Church appeared everywhere in Germany within two weeks of its publication, and all over Europe within a month.   

 

MOVABLE METAL TYPE, AND A COMPOSING STICK, DESCENDED FROM GUTENBERG’S PRESS 

 

CULTURAL SHIFTS THAT FOLLOWED GUTENBERG

The structure of society was in transition and so the function of society followed.  Efforts were employed to standardize vernacular grammar and vocabulary while punctuation was introduced.  Printing of languages became another vehicle of conformity and codification paving the way for linguistic purity.

This was especially true in Elizabethan England.  Printed books in the English language were rapidly standardized across the realm.  To register a sense of this, the King James Bible created since the time of King Henry VIII introduced the vernacular language in English Protestant churches in 1611 and remained essentially the same until 1970.

The new print languages created unprecedented ease in domestic communications among speakers of widely different accents that existed in French, English, and Spanish.  By reading their formal common tongue on the page, citizens became aware of their commonality and began to take pride in this new nationalistic perception of themselves.  Thus followed an English, French, and Spanish way of thinking.

In England, the crown had been quick to realize the potential of print to induce ideological conformity in the form of the Book of Common Prayer (1549).  Its justification was the economy of production and the uniformity of worship.  Henry VIII (1491 – 1547) of England also ordered the standardization of grammar, spelling, and punctuation into a uniform system of learning.  Education and religion were cast into the same conformist vernacular mode.  Rules for social behavior were now set down everywhere in black and white.  A century and one half after Gutenberg, the press had rationalized laws and produced draconian regulations.

Printing had come to define and diffuse power outward from the old papacy-centered watertight authority of the church to disseminate it among the new nation-states on the periphery.  This came to isolate people within these new state boundaries with a new sense of national identity and separation.  Commercial activity became easier to regulate and manage with the aid of printed passports, safe conducts, mandates, invitations, legal notices, and national paperwork of all kinds.  The economics of the new nations began to grow and to develop their own devices as well as distinct characteristics.  

Books became popular among merchants who typically knew little or no Latin.  Political and religious propaganda could also be used to mobilize the growing literate middle class.  The circulation of engravings carrying pictures of kinds and princes heightened the visibility of royalty.  Portraits of rulers were framed and hung in both great houses and peasant hovels throughout Europe.  This raised the mass media creation of the public image, which had previously been used effectively only by Roman Emperors.  

Writers of various nations began delving into the past and writing patriotic histories which were meant to claim one nation superior to another.  In Protestant-controlled countries, this practice aided the monarchs moving them away from papal control.  Oddly enough, the Roman papacy accelerated this process by sponsoring the printing of the Bible in the vernacular of a people, away from the Latin, diminishing Catholic Christendom and leading to the unexpected consequences of becoming increasingly irrelevant.   

THE GUTENBERG LEGACY

To this day, Gutenberg’s contribution to modernity remains relevant.  There are many statues of him in Germany including the famous one by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1837) in Mainz home of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz along with a Gutenberg Museum on the history of early printing.  

  

A Gutenberg press replica at the Featherbed Print Shop Museum in Bermuda

With the five hundred anniversary of the establishment of Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the moveable-type printing press, the United States offered a commemorative stamp in 1952.

In 1961, the Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan entitled his pioneering study of the printing culture and the amoral advancing tidal wave of media ecology, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.

Gutenberg remains one of the towering figures in popular history.  In 1999, the A&E television network ranked him the number one influential person in the second millennium, while Time-Life Magazine picked his invention as the most important of that of the second millennium.  He even has an asteroid named for him, 777 Gutemberga as well as the subject of two operas.    

  United States Postal Service stamp commemorates Johannes Gutenberg from 1452-1952

 

THE HUMAN DANCE OF BIBLIA POLYGLOTTA

The remarkable new printing press conferred on secular authority a new “cut & control” tool that could attack the core of religious beliefs.  Its origin was the Council of Trent in 1545 when Rome convened an Ecumenical Council to discuss matters to combat Martin Luther.  It approved the printing of standardized liturgical versions of Catholic scripture and worship.

Christopher Plantin (1514 – 1589), a French printer in Antwerp (now Belgium), ran the biggest publishing house in Europe.  His Biblia Polygotta (1568 – 1573) included Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, French and Dutch Bibles.  

Plantin was suspected of Calvinist sympathies, although Antwerp at that time was firmly Roman Catholic.  He developed a plan to prove his loyalty to the Catholic King Philip II of Spain (1527 – 1595) by producing a polyglot version of the Bible, in five languages. The king promised to finance the effort, but in completing the project Plantin was nearly bankrupt.  The king sent the Spanish theologian Benito Arias Montano to Antwerp to watch over the production of this eight-volume of printing, which was printed in 1,212 copies in 1572.

The first four volumes contain the Old Testament.  The left page has two columns with the Hebrew original and the Latin translation, the right page has the same text in Greek with its Latin translation. Underneath these columns, there is an Aramaic (language of Jesus) version on the left-hand page and a Latin translation of this on the right-hand side. For printing, the Hebrew text Plantin used among others Daniel Bomberg’s Hebrew type.   

Volume five contains the New Testament in Greek and Syrian, each with a Latin translation, and a translation of the Syrian into Hebrew. Volume six has the complete Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek, as well as an interlinear version that has the Latin translation printed between the lines. The last two volumes contain dictionaries (Hebrew-Latin, Greek-Latin, SyrianAramaic, grammar rules, list of names, etc.) that were of value to scholars.

A complete copy of this Bible is on display at the Plantin Moretus Museum (the site of the original printing press) in Antwerp, Belgium, including the typefaces which were designed for this project.

Plantin’s print house would change history because it would enable printing to generate the greatest force for change radically modifying the nature of knowledge itself.  This suddenly widened the gulf between those with specialist knowledge and those without.  

It all started when Plantin created an entirely new kind of Bible for King Philip II of Spain in 1566.  More importantly, it added luster to the king’s eminence which was not missed by other monarchs.   

The Biblia Polygotta contained appendices that held vast amounts of data from biblical genealogies to maps of the Holy Land notes on Hebrew idioms and the origin of the language plans on the Temple in Jerusalem, Jewish antiques, history of the tribes of Israel, and essays on biblical coins as well as weights and measures.  There were Syrian, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek dictionaries in grammar, variant readings of the text, indices, and no fewer than eighteen treatises on archeological and philosophical matters.  The Biblia Polygotta caught on immediately with other appendices of the Bible beginning to appear in all other Europe.   

One of Six Volumes of Biblia Sacra Polygotta

In this human dance, something stunning was set in motion, something that would change the Western world forever.  When these biblical scholars finished their work, they didn’t stop as researchers.  They turned to research of other things.  This seeded an extraordinary explosion in knowledge.  It was the aftereffect of this diligence that would influence all aspects of 16^th-century European life, and in the process, help to shape the modern world.

The new knowledge specialists, not yet commonly referred to as “scholars,” set up intellectual book networks across Europe, exchanging information on anything from maps to data on instruments to flower balls to plant seeds to rare stones.  

The only other book of comparable size to the Biblia Polygotta were almanacs.  These collections of encyclopedia knowledge attracted the skills of these new researchers.  Almanacs had existed in the limited form before printing, but now they appeared everywhere in massive numbers and radically increased the amount of data in circulation.  Almanacs in the 16^th century were selling at the rate of 400,000 copies a year.

Data contained in these almanacs encouraged specialists in other disciplines to create their specialized almanacs.  So, subsequently, there was the Seamen’s Calendar, Weaver’s Almanac, Farmer’s Almanac, and so on.  Each publication rigorously pruned its special data for accuracy and standardization.  Readers came to trust and use the information with confidence.  Still, again in this instance, the “cut & control” nature and manner of accumulating knowledge were to increase the fragmentation of society and to differentiate people into esoteric conclaves.  Paradoxically, not unlike the Information Age of the 21^st century, it was bringing people closer and separating them at the same time.  

A new industry involved in which earlier editions of these almanacs were reviewed, revised, and updated for current relevance.  Anatomists, for example, opened bodies and discovered discrepancies in anatomical drawings for the position of organs, blood circulation, and the nervous system circuitry.  The tool of print provided a new way of thinking about the world as education took on new significance and roles.  Knowledge not only had to be created and disseminated but managed for its expected impact.

Today, we take for granted the structure and function of our primary, secondary, and university educational systems.  It was Martin Luther, however, with his obsession with the need to create an ordered hierarchical society of literate and docile believers that provided the impetus.  Luther structured education into a classified and graded process that submitted learners to standardized examinations.  Tests identified the level of ability and monitored deviance and ignorance.

 

THE CHURCH GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE: SOCIETY OF JESUS

To combat the surge of the Protestant Reformation which had taken full advantage of this printing miracle which the Roman Church had fumbled, the Catholic establishment turned to create several Ignatius Loyola colleges throughout Europe, the first opening in Portugal in 1542.   

Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491 – 1556), was a Spanish knight from Basque, a member of a noble family, a hermit, theologian, and a priest since 1537.  , and theologian.  He founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and, on 19 April 1541, became its first Superior General.  Ignatius emerged as a religious leader during the Counter-Reformation with to the Roman Catholic Church along with absolute obedience to the Pope.  

After being seriously wounded in the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, he underwent a spiritual conversion while in recovery.  The De Vita Christi (Life of Christ) written by Ludolph of Saxony in 1374 inspired him to abandon his previous military life and devote himself to labor for God, following the example of his spiritual leader

Francis of Assisi.  After experiencing a vision of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus at the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat in March 1522, he went on to Manresa where he prayed for seven hours a day in a nearby cave, formulating his Spiritual Exercises.  In September 1523, he reached the Holy Land to settle there but was called back to Europe by his Franciscan order.

Between 1524 and 1537, Ignatius studied theology and Latin at the University of Alcala in Paris.  In 1534, he arrived in the latter city during a period of antiProtestant turmoil which forced John Calvin to flee France. Ignatius and a few followers bound themselves by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as they found the Society of Jesus in 1539, approved in 1540 by Pope Paul III, as well as Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises which was approved in 1548. Loyola also composed the Constitutions of the Society. He died in July 1556, was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1609, and canonized a saint by Pope Gregory XV in 1622, and declared patron of all spiritual retreats by Pope Pius XI in 1922.  Ignatius' feast day is celebrated on July 31. Ignatius is the Patron Saint of Soldier, the Society of Jesus, and the Basque Country. 

  

IGNATIUS IN ARMOR

[If interested in the training of Jesuits to this day, I recommend reading “Mean Astutely Trained” by Peter McDonough, 1992).  It seems no accident that the present pope, Francis I, is also the first Jesuit priest ever to be pope, and in a time of challenge not unlike that of the high Middle Ages.]  

Jesuits as “Soldiers of Christ” defend the faith, not with guns but with intellectual prowess.  Jesuit universities to this day stress a uniform curriculum of high standards and achievements.  Course material is formalized and taught under strict theological supervision while students are monitored at all times by priests, prefixes, and rectors to be certain to conform to the discipline.  

 

By the 17^th century, another key figure would emerge in education.  John Amos Comenius (1592 – 1670), a Czech educational reformer.  He aimed to teach all things to all men.  Settling in Lissa, Poland in 1628, he worked out his new theory of education and was chosen Bishop of the Moravian Brethren in 1632.  

Merchants in England, France, and Germany were eager to follow his vocational lead as they wanted the young prepared for the new emerging capitalistic economy free of direct church control.  

The new Comenius commercial schools taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, the essential elements for success in the expanding economy.  In 1640, envisioning a new way to engage young minds, he created his Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures), the first picture book for children.  It was also the first book ever published to use visual aids to learning.

Earlier, King Henry VIII of England saw the wisdom in bringing knowledge makers under the control of the realm.  His first initiative was to found the Royal College of Medicine in London.  In 1540, English surgeons established a society to regulate the new profession of surgery.  In the same year, the Royal College of Physicians was established, and in 1617, the Society of Apothecary.

As professional societies had established themselves in print, members of such societies increasingly used books to communicate with each other.  The language of each profession became increasingly incomprehensible to those outside the profession.  This staid and select community of reading and writing specialists would be shaken to its foundation, however, when the world as it was conceived and recorded in print was shattered by yet another paradigm shift: the discovery of America.     

NEXT – EIGHTEEN – NWL – THE SHATTERING OF CONVENTIONAL WISDOM