"While many believe that the outpouring of revolutionary thought in the Enlightenment era in England and Europe gained momentum through the use of the printed word, it was also a catalyst for Royal and Ecclesiastical censorship, which resulted in the impediment of the printing industry."
I tried to focus on how the printing press was critical to the Enlightenment, but unfortunately, the printing of seditious materials caused a lot of distress on the part of the State and Church. I then gave a little insight into the reasons for the Enlightenment and how the printing press was used. Then I focused on the effects of printing on the reactions of the public, State, and Church. I then talked about several laws and statutes made to quiet seditious writers and even seek to destroy printing presses. I then talked about how this type of censorship impedes the advancement of knowledge and knowledge-producing technology.
The reason that previous paragraph is all in past-tense is because I worked with Andrew Whittle, who also wrote about censorship, to produce a better, more persuasive paper. This is the new opening paragraph:
Censorship: Knowledge
Controlled
The
emergence of the printing industry in England and Europe gained great popularity
in the Fifteenth-Century. Beginning
primarily with Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable print block machine, the
mass production of books, papers, essays and other popular pieces became faster
than ever before. Protestant and
revolutionary thinkers took advantage of the new printing technologies to
publish their seditious ideas. The ability to spread knowledge through the
form of text and print suddenly was available to the public. This new process
of communicating knowledge so seamlessly posed new and much more complex issues
to authorities in the control of knowledge, which, in this era, was contrary to
their established belief systems. The
mass production of such protestant propaganda caused in many European countries
the uniting of the general public in joint contest to the ruling state and
church authorities. The concept of
censorship in its true essence is control. Censorship is created as a direct
result of an authority that has a set system of beliefs or morals, and weighs
all knowledge by that standard moral system. While many believe
censorship to be a necessity in some contexts, as evidenced in the censorship
of Enlightenment thinkers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Centuries after the invention
of the printing press, censorship is intrinsically at fault in its attempt to
control; and thus halt the advancement of knowledge.
Now, our thesis is that the censorship of the printing press during the Enlightenment era is convincing evidence that censorship is intrinsically wrong because it halts the advancement of knowledge. To be honest, when I first wrote this paper, I thought: "Who really cares whether there was censorship of printed materials before 1700?" However, after researching and talking with Andrew about what he also researched, I realized that censorship is a very dangerous tool. It can be used for good and also for bad. Censorship is a tool in the hands of those in power over knowledge.
My question is: Who holds the power to censor? What do we consider "seditious" in our day?
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