There's a series of films in German on Youtube called Die Deutschen and there's a channel called Chronicle, and sometimes it's useful to see more than one viewpoint even if both are somewhat unfactual.
The Chronicle film on the Thirty Year's war starts off with a premise that takes a good deal of undereducation to put out, let alone support. Basically, it says even if Luther did nail his theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral, who could have read them? Then it goes on to pretend that the Peasants' Revolt was a consequence of the theses.
Well.
Here we are in 1517, and the Renaissance has been going on for more than 60 years. In 1453 when the Muslims conquered Constantinople, Christians fled to Europe and the scholars and clergy among them took along Greek language manuscripts. This is important because, to that point, Europe's editions of Aristotle, that pillar of the church, were in Latin. And if you know anything about me, you know that I know that translations sometimes aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
The Greek-speaking Byzantines taught European clergy and scholars to read Greek and then died. From then on Aristotle was grammatically described using Latin labels, and if you are reading my 21st Century Classical Greek thread, you know what a disaster that was in my opinion. On the other hand, it became popular for royalty and the rulers of non-royal territory of the Renaissance to read both Latin and Greek. Henry VIII was a Greek geek; so were his children. So were the Borgias. And so on. So for Luther to nail his theses to the cathedral door was not a useless stunt; it was an open invitation for the wealthy and powerful to wrest their lives out of the hands of a corrupt church and become truly independent of it, a direction history had been taking for the whole 500 years since the Crusades.
But what was truly a stunt was translating the Bible into German. Most people everywhere in the world at that time were illiterate, and thereby hangs the tale. Luther's Bible was another stunt to attract the wealthy and powerful; it did nothing for the peasantry who couldn't read anyhow. The most the peasantry could get out of it was if the Bible was read TO them in German instead of Latin.
The Chronicle video shows Thomas Munzer, leader of the Peasants' Revolt, and Luther having a shouting match over going to war. Luther did not want the peasants jeopardizing his power base, which was pretty fragile (Henry VIII is only 8 years old when Luther hangs up his theses), but the peasants wanted to end their near-servitude. German peasants, particularly in the east, were basically serfs as the powerful tried to hold onto feudalism. Being illiterate, the peasants did not get the message that Luther put into his translation. This is a standard fact of the split between the literate and the illiterate or those who can read but don't, in every country and at all times, including the 21st century. The US MAGA movement is one example.
Literacy in Germany was a product of Luther's translation, and it did not get far down into the peasantry for 200 years. The printing press helped, but the price of books was still well out of the reach of most people on the land or apprenticed to guildsmen. Die Deutschen shows that Frederick II of Prussia, in the heart of the Enlightenment, promoted literacy among his peasantry so they could be good soldiers, read their manual of arms and his proclamations. Likewise Enlightenment preachers in England promoted Sunday schools so that farmers' workers and landlords' tenants could read their Bibles and learn to be satisfied with their place in the class system.
There's a lot of bushwa out there about literacy and the effect of printed books on the public. Just because something is written or printed doesn't mean it has any effect on people who read, still less on people who don't. It's been that way since writing was invented over 6000 years ago. It's only a surprise to people today if they don't accurately understand how literacy works -- or not.
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