The modern world was not created by the civilization of Renaissance
Italy, the advent of the printing press, or the marriage restrictions
imposed by the medieval church. Rather, it was widespread reading that
brought about most of the cognitive, psychological, and social changes
that we recognize as peculiarly modern. David Williams combines book and
communications history with readings of major works by Petrarch, Bruni,
Valla, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Foxe, and Milton to argue that expanding
literacy in the Renaissance was the impetus for modern civilization,
turning a culture of arid logic and religious ceremonialism into a world
of individual readers who discovered a new form of communion in the act
of reading. It was not the theologians Luther and Calvin who first
taught readers to become what they read, but the biblical philologist
Erasmus, who encountered the divine presence on every page of the
gospels. From this sacramental form of reading came other modes of
humanist reading, particularly in law, history, and classics, leading to
the birth of the nation-state. As literacy rates rose, readers of all
backgrounds gained and embodied the distinctly modern values of liberty,
free speech, toleration, individualism, self-determination, and
democratic institutions. Communion and community were linked, performed
in novel ways through revolutionary forms of reading. In this conclusion
to a quartet of books on media change, Williams makes a compelling case
for readers and acts of reading as the true drivers of social,
political, and cultural modernity - and for digital media as its looming
nemesis.
