Renaissance, Reformation and revolution in ideas
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
Printing changes the odds
Gutenberg's press, around 1450, made a book perhaps thirty times cheaper within a generation. Ideas that once travelled at the speed of a hand-copied manuscript could now cross Europe in weeks. Every argument in this unit — religious, scientific and political — moves faster because of it.
The Reformation
Luther's objections in 1517, especially to the sale of indulgences, spread by print and became a movement no one fully controlled. In England the break with Rome had a tangled mix of causes: Henry VIII's wish to annul his marriage, the wealth of the monasteries, genuine religious conviction among reformers, and politics. Reducing it to one cause is the commonest weak answer.
Knowledge and authority
Copernicus, Vesalius and later Galileo challenged accepted authority by observation. The pattern is what matters: when a claim can be checked, and printing lets many people check it, authority based on 'it has always been said' weakens. That pattern recurs in every later century, including this one.
Follow one argument, about indulgences, through the press. In 1517 Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses in Latin, as points for scholars to debate. That year printers in Basel, Leipzig and Nuremberg put them into print. Several hundred copies of the Latin text were printed that year. In spring 1518 Luther published a sermon on the same subject, this time in German. It was very popular. Wittenberg had only one printer, and he was not ready for the huge demand. Printers in other cities, such as Leipzig and Basel, printed the sermon too. Within three years, more than twenty editions had appeared. An argument that began in Latin for scholars was now in print in German in many places.
Change questions get answered as though everything changed. Most people in 1600 still lived rurally, worked the land and could not read — perhaps thirty per cent of English men were literate and far fewer women. The press mattered enormously and reached a minority directly, with the rest hearing print read aloud. Significance is measured against what stayed still, so an answer that names the continuity is making a stronger claim about the change, not a weaker one.