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 论文编号：
lw200707250738407077 |
| 论文属性：
Notes |
| 论文语言：English |
| 论文国家：U.K. |
| 登出日期： 2007-07-25 |
| 字数： 5000 |
| 源程序：
无 |
| 价格：
免费论文 |
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| 论文大纲，目录 |
| 关键词搜索：Government Public Policy Political Communication Communication |
e and political dissent developed in parallel tracks. Elites, disputing among themselves,
appealed to the increasingly powerful merchant and educated middle classes for support,
thereby inviting a dialogue across classes that had hitherto not been possible. Such debates
were theological and political by turn, and the invention of the printing press gave this dialogue
unprecedented reach and power.
One of the press’s particular contributions to the development of modernity was the way it
broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church over public debate. The Church, the major source
of the ideological consensus that had given European civilization its coherence since the
demise of the western Roman Empire in 476 CE, found itself challenged by Martin Luther and
other reformers who resented its wealth and corruption. The Church, in a manner similar today
to politicians who find themselves the subject of negative advertising, was in a bind. Respond
to the allegations, and risk giving further life to the charges. Ignore them, and in the official
silence imply that the charges are legitimate.
Print alone did not lead to Protestantism. Literacy was still a rare skill, and satirical songs and
graphics decrying the Vatican’s excesses were popular on the streets of Wittenberg, Leiden,
and London. Newspapers as we know them today were unknown; the first European
newspaper didn’t publish until 1609. While books were printed in large numbers, beginning
w英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】ith the “incunabula” (i.e., those books published in the first fifty years after Gutenberg’s
invention, 1450-1500) and in the tremendous torrent that followed, the average person’s
reading on current affairs and contemporary debates took the form of pamphlets. Pamphlets—
cheap and quick to produce—provided the basis for the democratic conversation that defined
the early modern public sphere. They were often crudely written, propagandistic, and by today’s standards, slanderous. But for all their primitive features, the pamphlets produced in
England and certain other of the more politically mature European societies were
indispensable to these societies’ development.
Thomason Tracts, the largest collection of early modern pamphlets in English:
http://www.bl.uk/collections/early/thomason.html
It’s always hazardous when discussing communications history to make any causal links
between phenomena. Did the pamphlet wars waged by defenders of the Catholic Church and
the Protestant reformers in the Netherlands and England, or alternately, the monarchists and
the democrats in many European countries, actually prepare the way for the creation of liberal
democracy in Europe? At the very least it might be said that the pamphlets wars were an
occasion not just for debates about religious doctrine, but also gave rise to a certain public
consciousness of the political that was necessary to the making of modernity. The public
sphere did no
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