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This book presents a contemporary, eyewitness account of the life of Martin Luther translated into English. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479–1552) was present in the great hall at the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521 when Luther made his famous declaration before Emperor Charles V: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen’. Afterward, Cochlaeus sought Luther out, met him at his inn, and privately debated with him. Luther wrote of Cochlaeus, ‘may God long preserve this most pious man, born to guard and teach the Gospel of His church, together with His word, Amen’. However, the confrontation left Cochlaeus convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Over the next twnety-five years, Cochlaeus barely escaped the Peasant's War with his life. He debated with Melanchthon and the reformers of Augsburg. It was Cochlaeus who conducted the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne, where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament (1525). For an eyewitness account of the Reformation—and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation—no other historical document matches the first-hand experience of Cochlaeus. After Luther's death, it was rumoured that demons seized the reformer on his death-bed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. Cochlaeus consequently completed and published his monumental life of Luther in 1549.
– such as double-entry bookkeeping or the printing press – are invisible to most of us precisely because they form part of the rules that we play by now ( Eisenstein, 2005 ; Soll, 2014 ). The paradigm shifted before our time, and we recognise it only with hindsight. Such paradigm innovation is however part of the 4Ps model developed by John Bessant and Joe Tidd ( Tidd et al. , 2005 ) and adopted by Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund to categorise different types of innovation
bodies, but also by the din of conflicting words, claims and narratives. But the forms that this disinformation has taken have constantly changed as technology has changed, from printing presses to wireless and TV and now to social media. The rapid growth in internet penetration and social media usage worldwide has made it easier and quicker to access and share vast quantities of news, information and entertainment – and this has proved fertile ground for all kinds of
start and end points, but human development is not so easily compartmentalized or simplified. The Middle Ages did not stop suddenly, giving way to the modern world with entirely new and quite distinct characteristics. Besides, in Britain the most convenient date of 1485 (the battle of Bosworth) and the advent of the Tudors would be challenged by European historians who prefer 1494 and the French invasion of Italy as their ‘turning point’. For our purposes here, the advent of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century (though it had appeared in China
. As soon as the floodgates of censorship had been opened, the sentiments of all sections of the people burst through. The printing press enabled people to involve themselves in politics to an unprecedented degree. As one man commented in 1641, ‘the art of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression’. When, therefore, the opponents of Charles I (r. 1625-49) launched a massive propaganda assault against the king, whom they believed was trying to destroy their
Chapter 3 . The coming of print, 1550–1650 I n 1551 the first book printed in Ireland using movable type was produced on a printing press in Dublin. By European standards this was a late development. Most countries on the fringes of Europe had adopted printing as a technique half a century earlier. On the eastern edges of Europe, Bohemia had a press since the 1460s and on the northern edge of the continent Stockholm had a press by the end of the fifteenth century. In Scotland, Edinburgh had its first press by 1500.1 Ireland in European terms has only two
printing press Towards the end of the fourteenth century, signs of a media revolution appear whose artistic and societal consequences in no way lag behind those of the invention of the daguerreotype. Imago and writing as medial sign systems of divine revelation start to weaken. During major upheavals, cultural and technical developments enter into a
Chapter 11 The Reformation and the War of Religious Ideas Printing, wrote Francis Bacon, together with gunpowder and the compass, ‘changed the appearance and state of the whole world’. The printing press certainly provided the artillery that enabled the lines to be drawn up in an unprecedented religious war of ideas. ‘The Reformation’, writes one historian, ‘was the first religious movement which had the aid of the printing press.’ When Martin Luther pinned his 95 Theses to the door of the church of the castle at Witenburg in 1517 calling for the reform of the
– in its various forms – had maintained a five-hundred year dominance in the industry, resulting in deeply entrenched practices, values and identities that at first proved hard to shift.12 Hence we can see that letterpress had undergone significant technological shifts in previous centuries, but, crucially, a letterpress-machinist’s labour process remained somewhat ‘hands-on’ throughout this period. This was chiefly because the process of setting up the press remained highly labour-intensive, and because printing presses endured as autonomous units, usually under the
Chapter 12 Tudor Propaganda In England, where indeed the Catholic Church had been rooted out by the Henrician reformation of the 1530s, Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell is said to have launched ‘the first campaign ever mounted by any government in any state of Europe’ to exploit the propaganda potential of the printing press. Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, had always been acutely aware of the importance of propaganda as a means of consolidating his power. Henry was determined to legitimize his dynasty in the eyes of God, the Pope, and Europe