"The Evangelical demand for literal reading of Scripture was dangerous enough in itself. . . . [But] These dangers were magnified thousands of times . . . by the new medium of print, which Tyndale, like Luther, greatly prized and deftly used. Debates on small points, instead of being settled by conversation, turned into mortal combat simply because scholars conducted them in print. The new medium, cold, distant and precise, enabled writers to excerpt, anatomize and mutilate their opponents' words, paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, using all the textual violence they could devise."
Anthony Grafton, "Violence in words: the damage caused by both destroying texts and by imprisoning ideas in chains of paper," Times literary supplement no. 5495 (July 25, 2008): 4-5. I'm not sure I follow this. No writers before the age of print "excerpt[ed], anatomize[d] and mutilate[d] their opponents' words, paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, using all the textual violence they could devise"?
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