JamesWhitehead said:
Well you used to get burned just for more or less anything. Because they had a book and it said so.
The key thing about Protestantism is that it asked, "What are the rules, then, and can we see them?"
Up till then, The Book was chained up and in a dead language anyway.
Mm, not quite; you're forgetting Wycliffe and the Lollards. The Bible was available, if you were rich and educated enough to have one. In Wycliffe's time (14thc.) there had yet to be a *complete* translation of the Bible into English; if you had a Bible, it was likely to be in Latin or French (or, less commonly I think, Greek).
The birth of Protestantism also coincided, very roughly, with the introduction of the printing press, which made mass distribution of Bibles and other literature feasible for the first time. Wycliffe believed the vernacular Bible was the true path to salvation and should be accessible to all. These remained in manuscript, however. Print, Protestantism and propaganda seemd like a natural combination from the 1530s onward. The literate read aloud the Bible, along with other texts, for the benefit of their less educated relatives and neighbours. Thomas Cromwell issued an injunction in 1538 requiring a Bible for public reading placed in every church. Not entirely pleased with this result, i his last speech to Parliament, on December 24, 1545, Henry VIII deplored that "the most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern."
Both Luther and Calvin used the press to first attack Rome and her policies, and then to spread their doctrines. The new religion created by these reformers had at its core the notion that a vernacular edition of the Bible should be within reach of all for study and contemplation. In his study of Luther, A.G. Dickens argued that "Lutheranism was from the first the child of the printed book, and through this vehicle Luther was able to make exact, standardized and ineradicable impressions on the mind of Europe. For the first time in human history a great reading public judged the validity of revolutionary ideas through a mass-medium which used the vernacular language together with the arts of the journalist and scientist."
Now, class, you can see a paradigm shift developing here, can't you?
Elizabeth Eisenstein (
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge 1983) said "A reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one." Yet at the same time, new links were made to more distant collective units--new communities in other words. (This board is the heir to that) The beginning of the print era also meant that the collection and dissemination of news were no longer confined to the pulpit; these functions were now taken over by lay people. Increased political awareness and growing sophistication regarding political and religious issues among the middle to lower ranks of society developed as a direct result of rising literacy. With the various flavours of Protestantism stressing individual study and prayer over the primacy of the sacraments...well, surely you can see the connection.
edited for typos