Discuss and explain how printing affected the authority held by the Essay

Discuss and explain how printing affected the authority held by the church and the aristocracy in the Europe and how this led to profound social and political changes - Essay Example The practical value of literacy would at all times be essential. The ultimate practical use was apparently in the purposes of the Church, since merely a knowledgeable clergy may be the authorities of religious life. In other words, literacy was the Church’s protection, which had supreme control over education. The invention of printing, entailing more efficient and more economical means of book production, transformed the dilemma of illiteracy. Francis Bacon, living in the period directly after the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, illustrated as one of the remarkable inventions of the century which had revolutionized the form and condition of the entire world (Hill 2001). The objective of this paper is to explore the impact of the printing press on the authority of the Church and aristocracy in Europe as well as its contribution in the profound social and political changes that the continent experienced in the iron century. The absolute goal of making the population literate was to persuade them of the rightness of their own points of view. The period of the Counter Reformation can hence be viewed as an extended practice in the development of methods of persuasion. It was the printed ideas, circulated through manuscripts, newspapers and pamphlets that eventually surfaced as the most persuasive technique of propaganda. In the Middle Ages, the pulpit had been the primary arbiter of public judgment, and this important role persisted all over the seventeenth century. Unparalleled victory was attained by the clerics of the Counter Reformation, who, through this method originated the remarkable progresses initiated by Lutherans through the effective exploitation of the pulpit. Sermons realized a twofold victory, further. They were transmitted by word of mouth; then, they were printed and circulated in order to get to an even wider audience (Kamen 1971). So