Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson Page B

little Officer … did keep the Keys of the Library’. 23 But those days were gone for ever. As Henry VIII’s minister Thomas More was quick to grasp, even those who opposed the Reformation had no option but to join battle in print. The only way of limiting the spread throughout Scotland and England of the Calvinists’ Geneva Bible (1560) was for King James VI and I to commission an alternative ‘authorized’ version, the third and most successful attempt to produce an official English translation. * Also unlocked and spread by the printing press were the works of ancient philosophers, notably Aristotle, whose
De anima
was published in modern translation in 1509, as well as pre-Reformation humanists like Nicolaus Marschalk and George Sibutus. Already by 1500 more than a thousand scientific and mathematical works had appeared in print, among them Lucretius’
De natura rerum
, which had been rediscovered in 1417, Celsus’
De re medica
, a Roman compilation of Greek medicalscience, and Latin versions of the works of Archimedes. 24 Italian printers played an especially important role in disseminating commercially useful arithmetical and accounting techniques in works like
Treviso Arithmetic
(1478) and Luca Pacioli’s
Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita
(1494).
    Perhaps most remarkably, at a time when anti-Turkish pamphlets were almost as popular as anti-Popish tracts in Germany, 25 the Koran was translated into Latin and published in Basel by the printer Johannes Oporinus. When, in 1542, the Basel city council banned the translation and seized the available copies, Luther himself wrote in Oporinus’ defence:
It has struck me that one is able to do nothing more grievous to Muhammad or the Turks, nor more to bring them to harm (more than with all weaponry) than to bring their Koran to Christians in the light of day, that they may see therein, how entirely cursed, abominable, and desperate a book it is, full of lies, fables and abominations that the Turks conceal and gloss over … to honour Christ, to do good for Christians, to harm the Turks, to vex the devil, set this book free and don’t withhold it … One must open sores and wounds in order to heal them. 26
     
    Three editions were duly published in 1543, followed by a further edition seven years later. Nothing could better illustrate the opening of the European mind that followed the Reformation.
    Of course, not everything that is published adds to the sum of human knowledge. Much of what came off the printing presses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was distinctly destructive, like the twenty-nine editions of
Malleus maleficarum
that appeared between 1487 and 1669, legitimizing the persecution of witches, a pan-European mania that killed between 12,000 and 45,000 people, mostly women. 27 To the audiences who watched Christopher Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
, first performed in 1592, the idea that a German scholar might sell his soul to Satan in return for twenty-four years of boundless power and pleasure was entirely credible:
    By him I’ll be great emperor of the world,
    And make a bridge through the moving air,
    To pass the ocean with a band of men;
    I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore,
    And make that country continent to Spain,
    And both contributory to my crown:
    The Emperor shall not live but by my leave …
     
    Yet, just seventy years later, Thomas Hooke could publish his
Micrographia
(1665), a triumphant celebration of scientific empiricism:
By the means of
Telescopes
, there is nothing so
far distant
but may be represented to our view; and by the help of
Microscopes
, there is nothing so
small
, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the Earth it self, which lyes