Print –

What was protestant reformation ?

2015 /2/3/m
Protestant reformation was a A sixteenth-century
movement to reform the Catholic Church
dominated by Rome.
In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther
wrote Ninety Five Theses criticising many of the
practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic
Church.
A printed copy of this was posted on a church
door in Wittenberg. It challenged the Church to
debate his ideas. Luther’s writings were
immediately reproduced in vast numbers and
read widely.
This lead to a division within the Church and to
the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
Luther’s translation of the New Testament sold
5,000 copies within a few weeks and a second
edition appeared within three months.
Deeply grateful to print, Luther said, ‘Printing is
the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one. ’
Martin Luther was one of the main Protestant
reformers
. Several traditions of anti-Catholic Christianity
developed out of the movement
2. Why did Woodblock print only came to
Europe after 1295. [CBSE 2013]
For centuries, silk and spices from China flowed
into Europe through the silk route. In the
eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europe
via the same route.
in 1295, Marco Polo, an explorer, returned to Italy
after many years of exploration in China. Marco
Polo brought his knowledge of wood block
printing back with him.
Now Italians began producing books with
woodblocks, and soon the technology spread to
other parts of Europe.
* Luxury editions were still handwritten on very
expensive vellum, meant for aristocratic circles
and rich monastic libraries which scoffed at
printed books as cheap vulgarities. Merchants
and students in the university towns bought the
cheaper printed copies.
3. The Roman Catholic Church began
keeping an Index of Prohibited Books from
the mid-sixteenth century due to the
following reasons :
Print and popular religious literature stimulated
many distinctive individual interpretations of faith
even among little-educated working people.
 In the sixteenth century, Menocchio, a miller in
Italy, began to read books that were available in
his locality.
He reinterpreted the message of the Bible and
formulated a view of God and Creation that
enraged the Roman Catholic Church.
When the Roman Church began its inquisition to
repress heretical ideas, Menocchio was hauled up
twice and ultimately executed.
The Roman Church, troubled by such effects of
popular readings and questionings of faith,
imposed severe controls over publishers and
booksellers and began to maintain an Index of
Prohibited Books from 1558.
4. Gandhi said the fight for Swaraj is a fight
for the liberty of speech,
After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the
press changed. Enraged Englishmen demanded a
clamp down on the ‘native’ press.
As vernacular newspapers became assertively
nationalist, the colonial government began debating
measures of stringent control.
In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled
on the Irish Press Laws. It provided the government
with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in
the vernacular press.
*From now on the government kept regular track of the
vernacular newspapers published in different provinces
 When a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper
was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press
was liable to be seized and the printing machinery
confiscated.
When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907,
Balgangadhar Tilak wrote with great sympathy about
them in his Kesari. This led to his imprisonment in
1908, provoking in turn widespread protests all over
India.
During the First World War, under the Defence of India
Rules, 22 newspapers had to furnish securities. Of
these, 18 shut down rather than comply with
government orders.
*The Sedition Committee Report under Rowlatt in 1919
further strengthened controls that led to imposition of
penalties on various newspapers.
*At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Defence
of India Act was passed, allowing censoring of reports
of war-related topics. In August 1942, about 90
newspapers were suppressed.

Gandhi said in 1922: that ‘The Government of India is

now seeking to crush the three powerful vehicles
( ‘Liberty of speech,liberty of the press,freedom of
association’)of expressing and cultivating public
opinion. The fight for Swaraj, for Khilafat means a fight
for this threatened freedom before all else
5. The Erasmus’s idea of the printed
book.
Erasmus, a Latin scholar and a Catholic reformer,
who criticised the excesses of Catholicism but
kept his distance from Luther, expressed a deep
anxiety about printing
. He wrote in Adages (1508) as follows :
To what corner of the world do they not fly, these
swarms of new books?
It may be that one here and there contributes
something worth knowing,
but the very multitude of them is hurtful to
scholarship,
because it creates a glut, and even in good
things satiety is most harmful ... [printers] fill the
world with books, not just trifling things
but stupid, ignorant, slanderous, scandalous,
raving, irreligious and seditious books,
and the number of them is such that even the
valuable publications lose their value.’
6. The Vernacular Press Act. [CBSE Sept.
2011, 2012]
After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the
press changed.Enraged Englishmen demanded a clamp
down on the ‘native’ press.
As vernacular newspapers became assertively
nationalist, the colonial government began debating
measures of stringent control.
In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled
on the Irish Press Laws.
It provided the government with extensive rights to
censor reports and editorials in the vernacular press.
From now on the government kept regular track of the
vernacular newspapers published in different provinces.
When a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper
was warned, and if the warning was ignored, the press
was liable to be seized and the printing machinery
confiscated.
7. What did the spread of print culture in the
nineteenth century India mean to women
//Explain, how had the print culture changed the
way of life of women in late nineteenth century
in India. [CBSE 2010 (D)] 5/3
Women became important as readers as well as writers
In Europe Penny magazines were especially meant for women,
as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping.
When novels began to be written in the nineteenth century,
women were seen as important readers.
Some of the best known novelists were women: Jane Austen,
the Bronte sisters, George Eliot in Europe & Rashsundari Debi
Kailashbashini Debi , Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai in
india . Their writings became important in defining a new type
of woman: a person with:
* will, strength of personality, determination and the power to
think
the early twentieth century, journals, written for and sometimes
edited by women, became extremely popular. They discussed
issues like women’s education, widowhood, widow remarriage
and the national movement. Some of them offered household
and fashion lessons to women and brought entertainment
through short stories and serialised novels.
Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly
vivid and intense ways. Women’s reading, therefore, increased
enormously in middle-class homes.
Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk
at home, and sent them to schools when women’s schools were
set up in the cities and towns after the mid-nineteenth century.
Many journals began carrying writings by women, and
explained why women should be educated. They also carried a
syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be
used for home-based schooling
But not all families were liberal. Conservative Hindus believed
that a literate girl would be widowed and Muslims feared that
educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu
romances. rebel women defied such prohibition.
8 . How did the women writers use the print to express
their opinions regarding the status of women in India ?
Explain./“Printing technology gave women a chance to
share their feelings with the world outside.” Support
the statement with any five suitable examples. [CBSE
2013]
- in East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari
Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household,
learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen. Later, she wrote
her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876.
-
- it was the first full-length autobiography published in the
Bengali language.
-
- From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini
Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women –
about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in
ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated
unjustly by the very people they served
-
- In the 1880s Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita
Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable
lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.
-
- A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to
women who were so greatly confined by social regulations:
‘For various reasons, my world is small.
More than half my life’s happiness has come from books” .
-
- In Punjab folk literature was widely printed from the early
twentieth century. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling
Istri Dharm Vichar to teach women how to be obedient
wives.
-
- The Khalsa Tract Society published cheap booklets with a
similar message. Many of these were in the form of
dialogues about the qualities of a good woman
9. Why did some people in the eighteenth
century Europe think that print culture would
bring enlightenment and end despotism? [CBSE
Sept. 2010, 2011]Assess the impact of print
revolution on the European society. [CBSE 2013]
- By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a common
conviction that books were a means of spreading progress
and enlightenment.

- Many believed that books could change the world, liberate

society from despotism and tyranny, and herald a time
when reason and intellect would rule.

- Louise-Sebastien Mercier, a novelist in eighteenth-century

France, declared that “The printing press is the most
powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force
that will sweep despotism away.”

- In many of Mercier’s novels, the heroes are transformed by

acts of reading. They devour books, are lost in the world
books create, and become enlightened in the process.

- Convinced of the power of print in bringing enlightenment

and destroying the basis of despotism, Mercier proclaimed:
‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the
virtual writer!