Gutenberg: How One Man Remade The World With Words

“A world without books is a world without curiosity, creativity, or information. A world in which very few people would have the ability to share reliable information or individualized ideas. From this simple statement, one could infer that a world without books is a world without intelligence.”-Hannah Frizzell. While there are many big consequences of the printing press, the most important one would have to be the desire for knowledge which grew as a result of people being able to read books and learn things in mass which could help to make some of them question the world around them with a newfound curiosity of which they were once denied. Notifiable, religion, science, humanism, and exploration, were all being affected or changed during

But by 1560, there is an explosion of change. In document three, you see a portion of the 95 Theses that Martin Luther wrote about and supposedly posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. In a small section below, you see credit being passed to a helper of Martin Luther. A passage from “Gutenberg; How One Man Remade the World with Words”, by John Man, clearly notes this in the very first sentence presented to the analyzers of the document. This (edited) passage follows as saying, “...Luther fired off more salvos with the help of the press. His sermons, tracts and polemics...streamed from presses by the hundreds of thousands...According to one estimate, a third of all books printed in Germany between 1518 and 1525 were by him...Printing was in its infancy, but Germany at the time was turning out about a million books a year. Of which a third - 300,000 - were by Luther...it would be the equivalent of one author selling almost 300 million books in Britain (which prints some 800 million a year), or 700 million in the US, every year. For seven years running.” These figures would simply not be possible without the printing press. Not only did he spread his ideas, but it would seem that they became very popular, very quickly. The statement that the press had no effect on the massive change throughout Europe, is, in my opinion, ridiculously irrational. It took Luther 60 years at best to entirely change the religious diversity of Europe. And yet Luther was spreading knowledge. He was simply telling everyone what was really going on in the Roman Catholic Church. He did this so well, that he persuaded quite a few people to drop the Pope, the “leader” they were to follow into heaven, and create and follow a church of their own. In document five, we see two maps which make this argument even more difficult to defeat. In 1500, Europe is mostly engulfed in the Roman