Q1. [4] medium exam-ready
Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow:
'To what corner of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books? It may be that one here and there contributes something worth knowing, but the very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut, and even in good things satiety is most harmful … [printers] fill the world with books, not just trifling things (such as I write, perhaps), but stupid, ignorant, slanderous, scandalous, raving, irreligious and seditious books, and the number of them is such that even the valuable publications lose their value.'
— Erasmus, Adages (1508)
(i) Who was Erasmus and what was his general position on the Catholic Church and the Reformation? (1 mark)
(ii) What specific fear about the printed book does Erasmus express in this passage? (1 mark)
(iii) Identify one group of people in sixteenth-century Europe who shared Erasmus's anxiety about the printed word, and explain why they were worried. (2 marks)
Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · 2026-06-26 15:00 · grounding rag
Model Answer
(i) Erasmus was a Latin scholar and Catholic reformer. He criticised the excesses of Catholicism but kept his distance from Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
(ii) Erasmus feared that the sheer multitude of printed books created a glut — flooding the world with stupid, slanderous, irreligious and seditious material — so that even valuable publications lost their worth.
(iii) The Roman Catholic Church shared this anxiety. Print enabled common people to read and independently interpret religious texts. For example, Menocchio, an Italian miller, reinterpreted the Bible and formulated ideas that enraged the Church. Fearing such heretical thinking would spread and undermine its authority, the Church imposed controls on publishers and maintained an Index of Prohibited Books from 1558.
Source: Chapter 5, Sections 3.2 and 3.3
---
Explanation
- (i) "Latin scholar," "Catholic reformer," and "kept his distance from Luther" are the exact phrases from the Source A box — use them directly.
- (ii) The passage gives two clear fears: the glut/satiety argument and the spread of bad/seditious books drowning out valuable ones. Mention both briefly.
- (iii) For 2 marks you need to name the group + explain their reason with evidence. The Roman Catholic Church + the Menocchio example + Index of Prohibited Books covers all marking points neatly. Monarchs are also acceptable as a named group, but the Church is better supported by the passage.