Cognitive Ecologies and Group Identity: Print and Song

Abstract

In accounts of memory and cognition in the English reformation, the effect of print, particularly of the Bible, in shaping religious identity is often given pride of place. John Foxe’s famous praise of printing in his Actes and Monuments credited the art of printing with overthrowing Papal power: through the power of the press, ‘tongues are knowne, knowledge groweth, iudgemet increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is seene, the Doctours be read, stories be opened, times compared, truth decerned, falshod detected, and with finger poynted, and all (as I sayd) thorough the benefite of printing’ (Foxe 1583: 707). Following this lead, A. G. Dickens argued that Protestantism was ‘from the first the child of the printed book’ (1966: 51). Such claims have been challenged by, among others, the research of Robert Scribner (1994), Patrick Collinson (1988), Andrew Pettegree (2005), and Tessa Watt (1991) into the variety of media used by Protestant Reformers; as Walsham has pointed out, ‘at least initially, Protestantism and print formed a somewhat uneasy coalition’ (2000: 77).