Читать книгу Neomedievalism. Reflections on the Post-Enlightenment Era онлайн
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The oral culture of the Middle Ages begins to change in that moment we call Humanism and that is more commonly taught as the Renaissance. The demand for written texts is accelerated long before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450. In fact, Gutenberg did not invent the printing press, but a technique for movable type that accelerated even more this process of reproduction of texts and massification of readers. The invention was a technical response to a historical need. This is the century of the emigration of Turkish and Greek scholars to Italy, of the travel by Europeans to the Middle East without the blindness of a new crusade. Perhaps, it is also the moment in which Western and Christian culture turns toward the humanism that survives today, while Islamic culture, which had been characterized by this same humanism and by plurality of non-religious knowledge, makes an inverse, reactionary turn.
The following century, the 16th, would be the century of the Protestant Reform. Although centuries later it would become a conservative force, it birth—like the birth of all religion—arises from a rebellion against authority. In this case, against the authority of the Vatican. Luther, however, is not the first to exercise this rebellion; the humanist Catholics themselves were disillusioned and in disagreement with the arbitrariness of the Church’s political power. This disagreement was justified by the corruption of the Vatican, but it is likely that the difference was rooted in a new way of perceiving an old theocratic order.