Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation

Abstract

The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper attempts to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis which instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were 52.1 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1530. This economically and statistically significant effect lasted through 1600, though it weakened throughout the century.

The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands

“…He was not the first one to protest against these practices; however, he could count on a series of fortunate circumstances which would warrant success to his endeavor. Among these circumstances were the power struggles between the Emperor, the Pope, and the territorial lords; the contemporary intellectual networks; technological breakthroughs such as Gutenberg's printing press (Rubin ); and the ongoing fight against the Turks in Austria (Iyigun ). At first, many, including the Pope, dismissed his action as a minor protest without consequences.…”

Does medieval trade still matter? Historical trade centers, agglomeration and contemporary economic development

“…(2012), Dittmar (2011), andRubin (2011) we also include dummies for regions containing at least one imperial city or at least one city that was member of the Hanseatic League. Finally, we also control for the possible long-lasting effect of a Roman Empire legacy and low transport costs for trade and agglomeration by including a dummy for cities located along or near to an important imperial road (Postan 1952).…”

State Capacity and Public Goods: Institutional Change, Human Capital, and Growth in Early Modern Germany

“…Historians (Eisenstein, 1980;Brady, 2009) and economists (Rubin, 2014) argue that the printing press technology shifted the supply of Reformist ideas. Recent research argues that the diffusion of Protestantism in the media was driven by competition in the use of printing technology rather than technology per se (Dittmar and Seabold, 2015).…”

“…Our research is very different, in being able to examine the diffusion of the Reformation across all cities in Germany, because the plague shocks we study here are orthogonal to the firm-level shocks previously studied in Dittmar and Seabold (2015), and because not one of those firm-level shocks was caused by the city-level plagues we study. Rubin (2014) documents that cities with printing in 1500 were more likely to adopt Protestantism, studying a measure of Protestantism that includes non-institutionalized diffusion, similar to Cantoni, Dittmar, and Yuchtman (2015). alleviate suffering figure prominently and interlock with other public goods provisions (Rittgers, 2012;Lindemann, 2010;Roeck, 1999;Grell, 2002;Cameron, 1991).…”