ABSTRACT
In a seminal article, 'The Advent of Printing and the Protestant Revolt', Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that Protestantism had successfully harnessed the relatively new medium of printing, whereas Catholicism had not. This model was borne out by work on the Lutheran Reformation, the conclusions of which were applied to the Reformation as a whole. The emergence of what Olivier Christin has caiied 'an impartial state' based on the 'autonomisation of political reason', however, could only be achieved through the control of the printing press. At a time when the views of Church, Parlement and Crown converged, censorship was fairly straightforward. The internal debate within the Reformation, notably regarding the sacraments, played a divisive role and prevented Reformers from answering contemporary attacks effectively. On the whole, both Catholics and Protestants were concerned with the impact of polemic on the 'unlearned'. This idea reproduced contemporary rhetoric often found in Catholic polemic that the Protestants were catering to the unlearned and the femmelettes.
