🚀 go-pugleaf

bartholomew burns (bburns@unlinfo.unl.edu) wrote:

: The following is the preliminary abstract for my thesis:

: In the first one hundred fifty years of printing, the Roman Catholic 
: Church actively censored printed materials with Eastern Orthodox 
: audiences.  When Prague printer Shivipolt Fiol printed his seminal 
: Cyrillic works in 1491, the Inquisition arrested him for heresy, 
: releasing him only following a detailed confession and repentance.  
: Fiol stopped his work altogether, finding Orthodox printing too risky,
: especially for his profit-centered enterprise.  In 1517, Francisak 
: Skaryna attempted further Cyrillic printing in Prague, producing an 
: edition of a Belorussian/Church Slavonic Bible.  He relocated in 
: Lithuania in 1520, but lost some property to official seizure in 
: Wroclaw.  Skaryna continued to print Belorussian materials in after 
: the Wilno until his activities stopped in 1525, probably because of 
: Wilno's Fire of 1526. 
:      Catholic censorship of Orthodox material was an extension of a 
: mutual enmity dating to before the definitive schism of 1054.  The two
: churches differed along political and cultural as well as theological 
: lines, and relations between the two varied from strained to outright 
: hostile.  The two churches competed for territory, resources, and 
: converts.  The Roman church recognized the printing press' power as an
: agent of mass communication and unity.  In order to maintain its 
: monopoly over this valuable tool, the Catholic Church actively worked 
: against the printing of Orthodox materials, effectively forestalling 
: Eastern European printing's growth.
:      Catholic Europe continued to have a virtual monopoly on print 
: technology through the sixteenth century.  There were Orthodox 
: printing houses in Bosnia (1521), Moscow (1564) and Zabludiv (1569);  
: these presses suffered various setbacks and printed very few books.  
: Fewer than one-tenth of one percent of the books printed before 1600 
: were of an Eastern Orthodox nature.  Real Orthodox print culture would
: not develop until the seventeenth century and the prolific presses at 
: Moscow and Kiev.


: If anyone has any questions, comments, corrections, or flames (!), 
: please drop me a line.  I'm interested in exploring this topic in as 
: much depth as possible.

: Yours,

: Stu Fliger-Burns
: bburns@unlinfo.unl.edu

Let's see how this works!

Stu