What were Martin Luther views about printing
Answers
Colin Woodard’s new book, “American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good,” will be published in March.
In the conventional survey course, Martin Luther leaps onto the historical stage out of nowhere: an unknown monk in an obscure German provincial town who, by performing the rather routine academic exercise of nailing a thesis to the doors of the local church, triggers the Protestant Reformation. The selling of indulgences was so hated, one gathers, that Luther was able to ride a wave of popular sentiment to reshape the course of Western civilization.
No surprise that it’s more complicated than that, but a new book by British historian Andrew Pettegree reveals a central and heretofore little-appreciated aspect: Luther’s master role in the imagination and execution of what had to have been the world’s first mass-media-driven revolution. Luther didn’t just reimagine the Christian faith, he figured out how to share his vision through the innovative use and manipulation of a nascent communications technology: the printing press.
“Printing was essential to the creation of Martin Luther, but Luther was also a determining, shaping force in the German printing industry,” Pettegree writes. “After Luther, print and public communication would never be the same again.”
When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door in the Saxon backwater town of Wittenberg, moveable type was something like the computer in the 1960s, a useful and expensive tool used by academics and elite institutions. “Most customers were churchmen, scholars, or students, with a smattering of rich collectors from the nobility,” Pettegree explains. “Consequently the first printers aligned their production to the established best sellers in these customers’ favored fields,” typically works that were “long, expensive, and in Latin” and written by long-dead authors. Wittenberg’s only print shop produced ugly, sloppy copies of the theses of local university students, another mainstay of the 70-year-old industry.
“Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--and Started the Protestant Reformation" by Andrew Pettegree (Penguin)
As “Brand Luther” makes clear, Luther realized the untapped potential of print as a mass medium and used it to broadcast his message to lay readers across the German states, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers via this new social media. He responded to the first scholarly criticism of his theses not in Latin, the language of scholarship, but in German, with a clear, straightforward 1,500-word essay that could be read aloud in 10 minutes. It fit perfectly into an eight-page pamphlet that could be quickly and cheaply printed and reprinted, each copy using but a single sheet of paper, folded in quarto. “It was an instant publishing sensation.”
The indulgence controversy was suddenly a public matter, and Luther churned out one argument after another over the next two years, with printers in other cities — seeing the public demand for the inexpensive texts from this eloquent new voice — making their own editions, which spread across Germany at unprecedented speed. “Printers got an immediate return for minimum investment,” Pettegree notes. “Luther, it very quickly became clear, was a safe bet for the printing industry.”
By 1519, this unknown monk had become Europe’s most published author, his 45 original compositions republished in nearly 300 editions. Realizing the limits of his local print shop, Luther personally lured a top printer from Leipzig, pairing him with the talented illustrator Lucas Cranach, whose elegant woodcuts adorned the soon-to-be sought-after “Wittenberg” editions. Cranach even created a modular woodcut for use in title pages, the center of which could be swapped out for each new book, allowing even modest pamphlets to be beautifully adorned.
Three years later, Luther had produced some 160 writings, the majority addressed to the Christian people of Germany in their own language, even though many of them had never before owned a printed work. “They responded with an interest and enthusiasm unprecedented in recent history,” driving the production of 828 editions, the printing, sale and distribution of which capitalized and transformed the German print industry.
BRAND LUTHER
Martin Luther views about printing remain positive because it helped in spreading the bible among people in different languages.
Explanation:
- Printing press plays a fundamental function in putting Protestant reformation in success. It helped people in getting open to the Bible, thesis, and theoretical articles, help them who were interested in understanding the depth of the religion.
- Martin Luther encourages the printing press in Europe because it became easier to produce literary work.
Learn More:
Who is Martin luther
https://brainly.in/question/14101364