by Ian Mortimer
It was not just the movable type of the printing press that allowed science to take several great strides forward. Just as significant was the ability to produce images. In 1542, Leonhart Fuchs published his magnificent and beautifully illustrated De Historia Stirpium Comentarii Insignes (Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants). A team of professional artists had engraved the blocks and painted them by hand in colour to the author’s specifications. Herbals had existed for centuries but never before had they received such a scientific treatment or been so well illustrated, and certainly no scientific work had been mass-produced to such a high standard. The importance of the printed image was even greater in the case of Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which was published the following year. In 1300, Pope Boniface VIII had forbidden the dismemberment of corpses; as a result, Anatomia Mundini by Mondino de Luzzi, composed in Bologna around 1315 and based heavily on Galen and Arabic works, remained the basic anatomical work throughout the later Middle Ages. A printed version appeared in 1478 and went through 40 editions, perpetuating Galen’s anatomical ideas.3 These ideas, of course, were far from perfect, as the dissection of human bodies had been frowned upon in the ancient world too: Galen’s conclusions were mostly based on animal dissections. Thus, serious errors of anatomical understanding lasted for centuries. Most medical schools received only a handful of hanged criminals’ corpses to cut up each year and the dissections were more ritual than experimental. On the rare occasions when a medical dissection took place a physician would read the relevant sections of Mondino’s Galenic text while the surgeon made the necessary cuts. Medical students observing such dissections were told that there were three ventricles to the heart and that the liver had five lobes; in the dissecting theatres of the time they could not get close enough to the organs to question what they were told. Thus the dissection in front of them only served to reinforce the authority of the teachers who were, in effect, misleading them. Vesalius’s book swept all this away and introduced the scientific study of anatomy. Many carefully drawn and engraved plates showed the dissected body in various poses to reveal its skeletal and muscular form. Such images changed attitudes to anatomy itself, leading surgeons to engage in pioneering anatomical research despite the prohibitions of the Church.
Architecture, geography and astronomy similarly benefited enormously from the printed image. Even though Andreas Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570) was only published in Italian, it had a huge impact across the whole of Europe by depicting the architectural principles of Vitruvius and other classical architects. Also in 1570, advances in image reproduction allowed Abraham Ortelius to produce the first modern atlas using Mercator’s projection. Tycho Brahe’s De Nova Stella (About the New Star), published in 1573, included charts showing where in the sky the supernova had been seen the previous year. The same author’s Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica (Instruments for the Restoration of Astronomy), published in 1598, depicted the technology in his observatory in great detail, revealing how he had achieved such a high level of accuracy in measuring the sky, and how others might further his work. Thus printing did not just impart knowledge, but also acted as a catalyst to scientific advancement.
The foregoing points about the printing revolution are perhaps obvious. Less obvious are its social consequences. As the spread of the printed word increased the number of literate people, it placed a greater emphasis on the importance of the written word. This in turn changed the relationships between kings and their subjects. Governments now sought to collect information on all those who dwelt within their borders. Almost every country in Europe began to keep records of baptisms, marriages and burials. England started doing so in 1538. France kept records of all baptisms from 1539 and of all marriages and burials from 1579. In Germany, where a few individual parishes kept registers from as early as the 1520s, most states did so systematically from the 1540s. In Portugal, one in twelve parishes was already keeping registers in the 1520s. The Council of Trent in 1563 recommended that baptisms, marriages and burials be recorded in every parish, and most Catholic countries that were not already doing so complied within 30 years. In Italy, for example, parish registers were ubiquitous by 1595.
Registration was just the tip of the iceberg. In England, a colossal amount of written material came to be required by the state. Every county court had to keep records of its quarter sessions. Church courts had to maintain records of their grants of probate and to keep copies of the millions of wills, inventories and accounts on which they based their decisions. The Church examined and licensed school teachers, surgeons, physicians and midwives. Magistrates licensed innkeepers and victuallers from 1552. In each parish, surveyors of highways were required to keep accounts of money collected and spent on the maintenance of roads. Churchwardens had to keep accounts of parish funds, and overseers of the poor similarly had to produce accounts of their disbursements. Local militia organisers kept records of the men trained to defend the shores and the rates levied on communities to pay for these part-time troops and their supplies.
The government discontinued its sequences of medieval rolls and formed separate departments to deal with distinct aspects of the administration of the realm. By the end of the century these departments had started to gather statistics, assessing such things as the number of victims of each plague outbreak and the number of inns and taverns operating in each county, as well as centrally collecting records of the taxes paid by individuals. The government was also suppressing the publication of certain books. Printing outside London was permitted only at the two university presses, and all publications had to be registered at Stationers’ Hall in the capital, allowing royal officials to cast an eye over everything put in print, censoring anything that was contrary to its interests. The state’s involvement in both controlling the new literate culture and making use of that culture to monitor the population was unprecedented. Today we might take such intervention for granted but the leap from a realm of unrecorded subjects in 1500 to one of detailed state supervision by 1600 was enormous.
Another less obvious social consequence of printing in the vernacular was the changing position of women in society. In the medieval period, very few girls had been taught to read. If a woman could write, she knew that the vast majority of her readers would be men, and if they did not like what they read, they could easily silence her by destroying her manuscripts. Printing put an end to that: if enough copies of a book were printed, it was almost impossible for her enemies to eradicate an author’s work entirely. Also, texts did not discriminate between their readers: while many teachers would not even have considered teaching girls, a book didn’t care whether the person reading it was male or female. Intelligent women quickly realised that they could learn from books just as well as their male counterparts. Moreover, women had a particular reason to want to learn to read. For centuries they had been told that they were legally, biologically, spiritually and socially inferior to men, and that the reason for this was that Eve had offered Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden. Now that they could teach themselves to read, they could interpret the Biblical story for themselves, and express their own views on the inequality of the sexes. Moreover, they could do so in print, and with the confidence that their words would reach the eyes and minds of other literate women. It is hardly surprising that in England, where male literacy more than doubled over the course of the century, from about 10 to 25 per cent, female literacy increased proportionally even more, from less than 1 to about 10 per cent.4
Not content with merely understanding the basis of the prejudice, a number of women attempted to redress the imbalance between the sexes. In Italy, Tullia d’Aragona wrote A Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (1547), arguing that there was nothing morally wrong in sexual desire, and that the association of women and the sexual act with sin was itself immoral and misogynistic. Gaspara Stampa (d.1554) wrote a series of passionate and moving lyrical poems following her abandonment by a lover, w
hich demonstrated a degree of literary skill and argumentative wit that few men could match. The relationship between the sexes became a hot topic in Italy in the last decade of the century, and the arguments of unsympathetic male writers were answered by several bright women. Lucrezia Marinella argued forcefully against misogynistic writers of the past in The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men (1600). In Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women, wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Superiority to Men (1600), seven Venetian women discuss why men and marriage seem destined to bring women unhappiness, and how much better off they would be if they remained single.
In England, similar debates were taking place. Isabella Whitney became the first published female poet in English, expressing a heartfelt bitterness, albeit in somewhat simplistic lines, in The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Meter, by a Gentlewoman to Her Unconstant Lover (1567). Jane Anger published her brilliantly splenetic Protection for Women in 1589, in which she asked: ‘Was there ever [anyone] so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, or so wickedly handled undeservedly as are we women?’ The remarkable Emilia Lanier spoke for many when she reasoned in her poem ‘Eve’s apology for the defence of women’ (1611) that in the Garden of Eden, the fault for the whole apple business lay with Adam. God had made him stronger to take responsibility for Eve, so if he failed in that duty, why was she solely to blame? In both England and Italy, educated women began to produce translations of classical texts. In 1613, the first original play in English written by a woman, The Tragedy of Mariam, was published by Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland.
All these were just the crest of a great wave of women’s writing, published and unpublished: letters, religious tracts, diaries, memoirs and recipes. By the end of the century, affordable self-help books written by women for women were being printed and reprinted by the thousand – at a cost of no more than a skilled worker’s daily wage. They helped shape women’s identities and reinforced their growing sense of individuality. Printing was thus the catalyst for a whole new relationship between women and knowledge – and, by implication, between women and men.
The Reformation
It should not surprise us that the Reformation started in a German-speaking state, Saxony. By 1517 the Bible had been available in German for more than fifty years, and its various editions had provoked many people to read and discuss the word of God privately. They grew increasingly concerned. They saw that there was a huge gulf between the early Church as it was presented in the Bible and the Roman Catholic Church of their own time. For example, in the early sixteenth century you could pay an indulgence seller for a piece of paper that supposedly absolved you of some or all of your sins. The more money you paid to the Church, the greater the range of sins for which you were forgiven. But there was no basis for such a thing in the Bible. Would their sins really be forgiven by buying a piece of paper? Some began to suspect that unscrupulous priests simply selected passages from the Bible to suit themselves – and suppressed those that did not fit their purposes. And what about those aspects of the Church that were not in the Bible at all? Biblical texts said nothing about payments to the parish clergy beyond some vague references to tithes. There was no mention of monasteries or ecclesiastical landlords. The whole hierarchical structure of the Church had no foundation in the teachings of Christ. As for rosary beads, wedding rings, hymns and sacred vestments: where did all this religious paraphernalia come from? To the great consternation of many, it seemed that these things were superfluous to the real purpose of religion, which was to guide them to live according to the word of God on Earth.
Into this context of spiritual concern stepped Martin Luther, a monk and a doctor of divinity at the University of Wittenberg. Outraged by the demands of a papal indulgence seller who demanded large sums from unwitting citizens for a piece of paper whose ultimate purpose was to pay for building works at St Peter’s in Rome, Luther set about debating the validity of the pope’s actions. On 31 October 1517, so the story goes, he nailed a list of 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. These 95 points essentially argued that the sale of indulgences was nothing more than a ploy by the pope to raise money. Luther insisted that the pope had no power to remit any penalties other than those he had imposed himself: it was down to God to forgive sins and to determine what happened to the souls of the dead in Purgatory. He asked some searing questions about the pope’s authority. If the pope truly had the power to redeem souls from Purgatory, why did he not simply release all the souls of sinners therein rather than leaving them there to suffer? Why should people pay for Masses for their late relatives as well? Most of all, as the pope was so wealthy, why did he not simply build the new church he wanted out of his own funds?
There had been many challenges to the authority of the Catholic Church before 1517 – the Cathars in the thirteenth century, the Lollards in the late fourteenth and Jan Hus in the early fifteenth – but Luther’s onslaught was effective because he expressed exactly what many people across Europe were thinking. Moreover, unlike the medieval heretics, his views were widely circulated with the help of the printing press. By the time he was declared a heretic in 1520, he was a respected and popular figure, and people had begun to adapt their faith and worship in accordance with his teaching. What had begun as an attempt to reform the Catholic Church from within very quickly fractured the whole ecclesiastical structure and the unity of Christendom. Reformers of many different persuasions sought to redesign the Church to suit their own spiritual and not-so-spiritual ends. Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, Philip Melanchthon and Thomas Müntzer all attracted followers to their various teachings, differing, among other things, on whether infant baptism was acceptable or whether the host during Mass actually contained the presence of Christ or was merely a memorial of it. Philip of Hesse, the first political leader to adopt Lutheranism as a state religion, in 1524, even sought to enlist Luther’s support for reintroducing polygamy – at least in respect of his own desire to take a second wife. By 1530 the Reformation had spread beyond the German-speaking borders to the British Isles, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Further renunciations of papal authority followed. In England, Henry VIII finalised his split from Rome in the Act of Supremacy of 1534, and the Danes formally renounced the Catholic Church in favour of Lutheranism in 1536. Even in countries where the ruler did not turn against the Catholic Church, the numbers of Protestant reformers grew quickly.
Why was this so important? The answer depended to a large degree on who you were and where you lived. The Protestants themselves felt a great sense of liberation from the repression of the Catholic Church. Restrictive practices and old laws and rules were done away with. Citizens in Protestant countries were delighted not to have to pay large amounts of money to Rome for an indulgence or similar papal tax. No longer having to pretend that the bread at Mass became the actual body of Christ would have lifted a burden from the conscience of some; not having to fear ending up in Purgatory must have been a similar relief for many more. But there were down sides too. Although many Church payments did not go to Rome any more, they were not abolished; they were simply paid to secular lords and property owners. That raised new moral questions: was it right to pay ecclesiastical tithes to the lord of the manor or a university college? Many people lost their livelihood on account of the abolition of age-old rites, such as innkeepers who accommodated pilgrims travelling to the established shrines, or undertakers who furnished the great funeral services of the wealthy that had preceded the Reformation. At a deeper level, too, there was a measure of disorientation and confusion. Religion was entwined with natural philosophy, or, to use the modern term, science; thus to doubt religiously was to be plunged into scientific doubt. Consider the problem in terms of your own faith. Whatever you believe, you believe in something, whether it’s the presence of God or some other creative force, or the random accident of chemical combinations, or something else entirely. You have an idea about how the world and everything associ
ated with it came into being. It is not something you choose to believe – what you publicly say you believe could easily be quite a different thing – it is what you think is most likely to be true on the basis of such factors as your cultural background, the evidence you have seen with your own eyes and your understanding of the statements and ideas of others. Now imagine that what you believe is flatly denied by half of the known world, which will take up arms to stop you espousing your views. The result is likely either to make you question your understanding of the world or to make you defend more vigorously the truth of what you believe.
There is no doubting the divisiveness of the Reformation. But it is important to realise that it was not just a matter of setting Protestants against Catholics. Indeed, it was difficult to know exactly what the term ‘Protestant’ implied. However, people were sure that what they professed on Earth would affect the fate of their eternal soul. While some revelled in the iconoclastic fury that gripped Zurich in 1524, Copenhagen in 1530, England in 1540 and 1559, and the Netherlands in 1566 – when radical Protestants gleefully smashed the statues of saints, burnt the crosses that stood above the altars, and whitewashed over the paintings of Doom and the Last Judgement that decorated their churches – others were disturbed by it. Even if you resented the payment of money to the pope for spurious indulgences, it did not follow that you wanted to see the shrines of saints smashed and the relics within scattered to the winds. The question of Purgatory was particularly troublesome. In the past, people had dutifully prayed for their ancestors’ souls; now they were told that those souls had either gone straight to Heaven or Hell and there was nothing they could do about it. In Protestant countries, all the friaries, chantry chapels and monasteries founded for the souls of the donors were closed and sold off by the government. Many people were deeply troubled when their family burial places were confiscated by the king and sold to rich merchants for demolition, or conversion into comfortable country houses. That was not why their ancestors had freely donated their lands and wealth to the Church rather than bequeathing them to the next generation (and ultimately to them).
