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

789 Words2 Pages

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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

Open Document