Knowing Better, who I last saw 'cutting through the bullshit around gun control' by appealing to his experience in the military and immediately misidentifying the borrowed M240 he was posing with as a Vietnam era M60, has important question. Were books written before 1800?
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Ok, I know this is fairly old and usually I don't mind Knowing Better, but seriously?
There might be some quibbles about the definition of a 'Book', but if we are using the Iliad and the like as a starting off point then you have, just off the top of my head:
-The Song of Roland (11th century)
-Tristan and Iseult (12th century)
-The Canterbury Tales (14th century)
-The Divine Comedy (14th century)
-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th century)
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Le Morte d'Arthur (15th century)
-Utopia (16th century)
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Amadís de Gaula (16th century)
-The Prince (16th century)
-The Faerie Queene (16th century)
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Don Quixote (17th century)
-Leviathan (17th century)
-Paradise Lost (17th century)
-Discourse on the Method (17th century)
-The Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (17th century)
-Principia (17th century)
That's just a bare list mostly of English literature when there were tons of other things written in other languages, and at that only of European works so discarding Chinese or Japanese works like Romance of the three kingdoms, Journey to the West and the Tale of Genji. Moving into the 18th century with the full flourishing of the enlightenment with the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau and so many others the amount of important works just explodes to the point that its meaningless to try and cover them all, and I'm being nice and not adding the large amount of popular plays from people like Shakespeare.
Literature mattered a lot to people back then, they didn't just read the bible endlessly, the Arthurian canon was popularized in the high middle ages and adventure novels like
Amadís de Gaula were so popular that they helped motivate the conquistadores in Spain, California is even named after a fictional location in one of these books, its like if today they found a new continent and named it 'Wakanda'.