Supporting Question 2

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Source A: Constitutional Rights Foundation, description of how the printing press changed Europe, “Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution in Europe” (excerpts), Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2009

During the Middle Ages in Europe, most people lived in small, isolated villages. If people traveled at all, they typically ventured only a few miles from where they were born. For most people, the only source of both religious and worldly information was the village Catholic priest in the pulpit. News passed from one person to another, often in the form of rumor.

Written documents were rare and often doubted by the common people as forgeries. What counted in important matters was oral testimony based on oaths taken in the name of God to tell the truth.

Almost no one could read or write the language they spoke. Those few who were literate usually went on to master Latin, the universal language of scholarship, the law, and the Roman Catholic Church. Books, all hand-copied, were rare, expensive, and almost always in Latin. They were so valuable that universities chained them to reading tables. Most people passed their lifetime without ever gazing at a book, a calendar, a map, or written work of any sort.

Memory and memorization ruled daily life and learning. Poets, actors, and storytellers relied on rhyming lines to remember vast amounts of material. Craftsmen memorized the secrets of their trades to pass on orally to apprentices. Merchants kept their accounts in their heads.

Even scholars literate in Latin used memory devices to remember what they had learned. One device involved visualizing a building with various rooms and architectural features, each representing a different store of knowledge. A university scholar imagined walking through this virtual building along a certain pathway to recall the contents of entire books for his lectures.

Scribes, often monks living in monasteries, each labored for up to a year to copy a single book, usually in Latin. The scribes copied books on processed calfskin called vellum and later on paper.

Specialists or the scribes themselves “illuminated” (painted) large capital letters and the margins of many books with colorful designs and even miniature scenes. These books were beautiful works of art. But they took a long time to make and were very costly.…

By 1448, Gutenberg was back in Mainz. He borrowed money again to set up a printing workshop. In 1450, he printed his first book, a brief Latin grammar for students. He may have printed a few other things such as church “indulgences.” These standard forms often called for Christians to donate money to the Catholic Church. In exchange, the church forgave their sins, assuring admission into Heaven.

Gutenberg, however, had a much bigger project in mind. He knew that the Catholic Church wanted uniform Latin Bibles to standardize worship in Europe. Gutenberg could supply many identical copies of these Bibles by printing them. But he needed more money to set up a second print shop.…

Less than 50 years after Gutenberg printed the Bible, over 1,000 print shops had sprung up in more than 200 European cities and towns. They turned out more than 10 million copies of books in Latin and other European languages. Books became cheaper in price and available to anyone who could read them. Books were no longer chained in libraries.

The spread of knowledge, both factual and not, exploded throughout Europe. Books began to appear for the first time with the author’s name on a title page. This made writers responsible for the content of their books, thus improving their accuracy. It also gave rise to the first copyright laws, protecting authors from having others publish their works without permission.

By the 1400s, the Renaissance had already begun in Italy, and this cultural revival was spreading to other parts of Europe. Scholars wanted more copies of the recently rediscovered writings of Aristotle, St. Augustine, Cicero, and other ancient authors. The scribes, however, could not work fast enough to meet the demand.

Printing presses were soon producing great numbers of books translated into Latin from Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other classic languages. These books dealt with many subjects such as literature, the law, philosophy, architecture, and geography. By 1500, Renaissance Venice was Europe’s printing capital with 150 presses at work.

From the “Communication of Ideas” issue, Bill of Rights in Action 24, no. 4 (Winter 2009). © Constitutional Rights Foundation. http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-3-b-gutenberg-and-the-printing-revolution-in-europe.

Supporting Question 2

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Source C: James Fieser, description of humanism, “Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy,” The History of Philosophy: A Short Survey (excerpt), 2008

One of the most distinctive intellectual movements within the Renaissance was humanism—which was originally called “humanities”, that is, the study of humanity. The main emphasis of humanism was secular education using Greek and Latin classics, rather than medieval sources. There were five traditional subjects in humanities education, namely, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. The most significant impact humanism had on philosophy was the revived study of ancient Greek philosophical schools thanks to the publication of new editions and translations of classical texts. The invention of the printing press during this time made these books much more readily available to readers, and the influence of classical philosophy spread like wildfire. Humanistic philosophers latched onto the earlier schools of Greek philosophy, almost as though they were pretending that the middle ages never existed. They variously associated themselves with Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or Skepticism, interpreting the classical texts and expanding on them.

Available at the University of Tennessee–Martin website. https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/110/6-renaissance.htm.