The King and the Swarm - First Things

The King and the Swarm - First Things

The printing press did not just change how people shared information. It changed the normative patterns of consciousness itself. After those changes came a period of chaotic upheaval, out of which emerged the worldview and political settlement characteristic of modernity. In England, that upheaval reached a crisis in the seventeenth century, in a series of convulsions that birthed not just a new political settlement, but also a reality-picture t…