Question #70045
1 Answer
printed books, trade.
Explanation:
There are books written just on that subject :) I will try to give an example. Before humanism, God ruled, in the sense that human happiness, achievements on earth, did not matter compared with successfully reaching heaven. I'm being very schematic here. Humanism dared to say that happiness was achievable on earth, that we were all capable of improving, of understanding the world.
Books, printed books, did much to give people access to ancient knowledge from the Greeks and Romans, which had been lost, or discarded. With the discovery of the printing press by Gutenberg, many copies of classic books, until now unavailable to the west and coming from the Eastern part of the Roman empire, helped philosophers to think more in terms of man having power over his life and less in terms of divinity.
