Printing revolution, and revolution in print

Résumé du document

The study of Milton's role in the Revolution and some features of print culture are useful for the analysis of Areopagitica. Early Modern Europe was marked by the appearance of printing. It enabled ideas, knowledge, or news to be spread more widely than ever before, and it changed man's conception of writing. During the English Revolution, the press witnessed and registered the fabulous intellectual emulation in England, and was turned into an ideological weapon by combatant writers. Milton was one of them. His attitude as a pamphleteer, as well as some particular events of the Revolution, help to understand why he rejected the Licensing Order of 1643. The development of the printing trade made possible the spread of ideas through the mass publication and distribution of key writings which were going to have an enormous impact on Western societies. The spiritual and secular authorities of Europe and England well perceived the dangers of this innovation, they feared that the wide circulation of dissenting ideas was going to undermine the stability of their establishment, and very soon assumed a jealous control over the printing press. In England, these controls were not sufficient to prevent the publication of seditious opinions, and printing became religious and the political dissidents favourite means of expression.

Extraits

[...] 15- Ibid. p Cf. MRR, p Ibid. pp. 38-39. Wittemberg was the home town of Luther, and Geneva that of Calvin, the two fathers of Reformation theology. A. E. McGrath, Reformation Thought : an Introduction ed., Blackwell, Oxford p.13. [...]

[...] Printing revolution, and revolution in print The studies of Milton's role in the Revolution and of some features of print culture are useful to the analysis of Areopagitica. Early Modern Europe was marked by the appearance of printing. It enabled ideas, knowledge, or news to be spread more widely than ever before, and it changed man's conception of writing. During the English Revolution, the press witnessed and registered the fabulous intellectual emulation in England, and was turned into an ideological weapon by combatant writers. [...]

[...] Through the Courts of the Star Chamber and High Commission, Charles enforced docility. He adopted violent and malicious repression methods to conceal growing intellectual diversity and silence dissenting voices: ancient rights of individuals dwindled to vanish point. One, Peacham, was condemned to die for no other offence than that of having written a sermon which, when discovered, gave displeasure to the authorities . The courts of Star Chamber and High Commission were tyrannical and cruel, and an infamous Archbishop Laud, cunning and authoritarian, enforced silence on the Puritans. [...]

[...] Protest in Print in England: the Marprelate Tradition, and the Protestant Ideology of Print The printing press appeared on the eve of the Reformation, and it largely contributed to the spread of Protestant ideas: The reformers' ideal of universal Biblical readership became reality thanks to the mass publication of Bibles, and all the founding Protestant works were made available by printing. These factors led many reformers to imagine the press as the special agent of the Reformation. Many Protestants considered printing to be a present from God, a divine reforming tool. [...]

[...] The printing press was a revolutionary tool, which came to serve a revolutionary cause. Meeting with the theological ground swell tide of the Reformation, it echoed and amplified the rumblings of religious discontent, widened the intellectual horizons of thousands of people, and changed writing into a viable occupation. In England, it was very soon adopted as a way to propagate militant religious ideas, be it to the contempt of Crown policies and licensing legislation. Puritan writers as Marprelate contributed to the constitution of a tradition and ideology of the press as being a weapon for the individual activist, and this would become a central notion during the Revolution. [...]