Content area
Full text
My title points both to the view of history and history-writing in William Cobbetts History of the Protestant "Reformation" ana to the publishing history of the work; at the close of the essay I will suggest that the details of the publishing history replay the wider history with which the work deals. Let me begin with a concise restatement, by Steven Ozment, of the traditional wisdom concerning the Reformation:
Luther, a theologian, was fond of describing the Reformation as the work of God's Word. However true that may have been, it was certainly the deed of the printed word. As Luther also recognized, the printing press made it possible for a little mouse like Wittenberg to roar like a lion across the length and breadth of Europe.... Protestants eagerly multiplied vernacular Bibles and urged that all boys and girls be educated to vernacular literacy so that they could read the Bible directly and model their lives on it. Protestant reformers envisioned a laity knowledgeable in Scripture as the backbone of free Christian commonwealths. Nowhere was this truer than in England.... By 1538, English parsons were required to make English Bibles available in their parishes "for every man that will look and read thereon." The ideal of universal vernacular literacy persisted among Protestants.... Was the medium more important than the message? It has been argued that the printing press was less the instrument of Protestant success than the Reformation the creation of the printing press.1
The "affinity between literacy, printing, and Protestantism in the early years of the Reformation" was viewed entirely differently by Lucien Febvre and HenriJean Martin in their monumental The Coming of the Book:
We must, of course, be careful not to ascribe to the book or even the preacher too important a role in the birth and development of the Reformation. It would be wrong to regard propaganda and propagandists as the main cause of such developments. It is not part of our intention to revive the ridiculous thesis that the Reformation was the child of the printing press.2
After this bracing beginning it is somewhat anticlimactic to find Febvre and Martin conceding a few sentences onward that after all "books played a critical part in the development of Protestantism in the...