
The power of Luther’s printing press - allthebest
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-power-of-luthers-printing-press/2015/12/18/a74da424-743c-11e5-8d93-0af317ed58c9_story.html
======
danso
I don't think this book is it, but I've been trying to find a book that covers
the spread of literacy as it relates to the invention of the press, i.e. the
"Learn to Code" movement of the 16th-century, in that it must not have been
immediately evident that learning to read and write for oneself would have a
lot of practical value (e.g. "Why do you need to do that when we have priests
who talk directly to God? And what if you misread the Scriptures and f*ck
everything up?").

I gather that the advent of mass literacy, as we know it, is likely influenced
by many other factors, such as changes in agriculture and, well, the
Industrial Revolution, and other such things that changed how we work and
live. But I'm interested in the century or two after Gutenberg, what the
valuation of literacy was now that there was something that made its fruits
much more pragmatically accessible?

~~~
benbreen
Elizabeth Eisenstein's _The Printing Press as An Agent of Change_ (1979) is
the classic work on this. It's the kind of book that book historians of the
present often poke holes in, but the fact that people still argue with it is a
testament to how good it is. It tackles the technological and social elements
of printing in a way that it seems to me would appeal, based on your question.
Michael McKeon's _The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740_ is also very
interesting, in many ways much wider in scope than what the title suggests
because it's really about the advent of mass literacy and cheap print.

------
benjohnson
As a Lutheran, my advice would be to never trust a historical account that
claims Luther nailed his 95 thesis to a church door - there's no historical
record of him doing that.

As such, I would be very cautious in trusting the research of any author that
made a claim they may be prone to not using first sources.

As an aside, Luther did something much more dangerous than nailing paper to a
church door: He sent the thesis to his Archbishop.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Didn't Luther make claims based on secondary/tertiary/n-ary sources?

~~~
benjohnson
It really depends on what body of Luther's output you're referencing - Luther
as a rather acerbic German man swore and cussed a lot and used all sort of
sources for political arguments.

Luther in his output that he would have felt as proclaiming the Gospel,
primarily used scripture and early church fathers as the norm. In the
Christian tradition, scripture is God-breathed and is a primary source (along
with tradition that has been handed down.)

