THE Portuguese astronomer and cosmographer Pedro Nunes looked back in 1537 on what his countrymen had achieved in their voyages and trumpeted deep patriotic pride and optimism: ‘The Portuguese… discovered new islands, new lands, new peoples; and, what is more new stars and a new heaven. They freed us from many false impressions and showed us that there are antipodes, about which even the saints had doubts; that there is no region that is uninhabitable because of heat or cold.’²³ Nunes’ delight in the new discoveries, his revelling in the enlarged state of the world, is actually quite surprising. For centuries, the general instinct in most branches of learning was that the world and humanity were in decay: present-day people knew less than people in the past, and that true wisdom lay in what had been known a long time. Authority was to be respected, and it usually gave all the answers which were necessary; this was particularly the case with the greatest authoritative text of all, the Christian Bible. Yet far from being intellectually disoriented by the discovery of new continents and new peoples unmentioned in the Bible, with an antipodes or southern hemisphere which confounded all the opinions of the authorities (‘even the saints had doubts’), fifteenth-century Europe seemed to welcome the novelty of being ‘freed from false impressions’ – even those in positions of traditional authority. We have witnessed a Pope taking his pen to the newly enlarged globe to divide it for the Iberians, and his successor Pope holding a jamboree in 1507 to celebrate what the Portuguese had achieved. Clearly this was not a society frightened of novelty; moreover, it could recognize parallels to the voyages across the oceans in other spheres of experience.

TWO recent technical innovations were recognized even during the fifteenth century as a radical improvement on the past; together they revolutionized the speed of communicating information and ideas. The first was a writing material in increasingly widespread use in Europe since the thirteenth century: paper manufactured from rags. Europe had not invented this process; it had been known in China for centuries. Paper was much more easily and cheaply manufactured than reed-based papyrus or animal-skin bases for text (vellum or parchment), and by the end of the fourteenth century, Christian Europe far outstripped the Muslim world in production. In the early fifteenth century came the second technological revolution, printing with movable type: again, this was a much older invention of the Chinese, but once it was introduced Europeans rapidly took it up with enthusiasm. It was immediately clear that printing like this was much more flexible and useful as a technology of reproducing information than the existing use of carved woodblocks, which usually rather crudely reproduced mass copies of a design, but only at the size of a single page. The superiority of printing to handwritten texts (manuscripts) was less obvious, for manuscripts could present more directly the work of their author in a format which the author wanted, and they continued to be an important medium of circulating information when only a few people needed to see it, particularly in elite scholarly circles. Niccolò Machiavelli preferred manuscript to print in publicizing his controversial ideas on government to an audience of powerful people. The German Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius, an eccentric but influential scholar, said sniffily in 1492 that writing on parchment would last a thousand years, while printing on paper would probably only survive for a couple of centuries: though he had borrowed this remark from the early Christian scholar Jerome dismissing papyrus a millennium earlier, he had a point.²⁴

ALTHOUGH an individual text on parchment might indeed last for a thousand years, once destroyed, it was gone for ever, and it might represent the only copy of the text that it contained. Multiplication was a sure way to preserve information. For texts which required very many copies, printing was soon indispensable. Movable-type text on paper (de luxe copies might still use parchment) was radically cheaper than a manuscript to produce and once the rather laborious process of setting up the pages was completed, it was exhilaratingly easy to reproduce large print-runs, on the same scale as many present-day editions. The commercial ordinances of Geneva in the 1540s assumed that in a day a skilled craftsman could produce 1,300 copies of a single sheet (for the average-sized book, eight pages of the finished product): so editions tended to be in multiples of 700 copies, half a day’s work. Larger books, which would be labour-intensive to re-create once their typeface had been broken up and reused, produced the largest runs, and they could appear in an edition of three or four thousand copies.²⁵ The resulting product was not necessarily cheap to buy, but for that reason, printing could be extremely profitable and was an attractive trade to enter. In England in 1537, a big Bible for churches to buy (as they were soon forced to do by royal command) cost its printer 6s 8d, a third of a pound sterling, in a run of 1,500 copies; in 1539, a similar Bible retailed to the customer at between 10s and 13s 4d (a half to two-thirds of a pound). So Protestantism, when it established itself, would prove to be good business for printers.²⁶

CONVERSELY, printing also turned out to be good for Protestantism, for a religion of the book needs books. An English reforming sympathizer celebrated this early in the brief mid-sixteenth-century reign of King Edward VI, when evangelicals in England were at last free openly to print their propaganda: he contrasted his own age with that of the Early Church and the Emperor Constantine. ‘[B]ut thanks be to the Lord, our King’s Majesty may go further with hundred pound in printing, than Constantine might have done with three thousand pound in writing. For the lack of books caused the Bishops of Rome and his [sic] aiders to prevail in all Councils [i.e. General Councils of the Church] since the first.’²⁷ One of the reasons that the Lollards (chapter 1, p. 35) had failed to consolidate widespread support while a century and a half later their evangelical successors did, was the fact that they could not produce enough copies of their literature to distribute.

EVEN if the events of the 1520s had never happened and there had been no evangelical challenge to the Church, the coming of printing would have changed the shape of religion. It is true that early printers hastened to supply the safe market which would make an assured profit, and naturally that meant supplying what conventional religion wanted. The earliest surviving dated piece of English printing, from 1476, illustrates this, because it is an indulgence, printed ready for the purchaser’s name to be filled in in ink: the Church’s exploitation of indulgences was precisely the issue which sparked Luther’s fury in 1517 (see chapter 3, pp. 121–3).²⁸ Yet within conventional religion, with no sense that the impulse was unorthodox, there was a great popular hunger to encounter the book on which the faith and worship of the Church was based – the Bible. The earliest surviving datable printed book of all, published at Mainz in 1457, is a Latin edition of the Book of Psalms (the Psalter).

BERNARD Cottret, Calvin’s biographer, has observed that the increase in Bibles created the Reformation rather than being created by it, and it is notable how many of these Bibles were translations from Latin into local languages. Not all churchmen approved of this development. Even the great Jean Gerson, who as we have seen wanted to clip the Pope’s wings and to encourage laypeople to receive communion more often (see chapter 1, pp. 22, 40), proposed a ban on Bible translations to the Council of Konstanz – but it was not implemented, unlike the drastic and exceptional action taken in England in the previous decade. Gerson’s fear was not merely clerical selfishness but reflected the newly flourishing state of preaching in the fifteenth century: the worry was that the laity would spend too much time reading and not listen to sermons. Regardless of such fears, the printers followed the market. Between 1466 and 1522 there were twenty-two editions of the Bible in High or Low German; it reached Italian in 1471, Dutch in 1477, Spanish in 1478, Czech around the same time and Catalan in 1492. In 1473–4 French publishers opened up a market in abridged bibles, concentrating on the exciting stories and leaving out the more knotty doctrinal passages, and this remained a profitable enterprise until the mid-sixteenth century.²⁹

THE effect of printing was more profound than simply making more books available more quickly. It affected western Europe’s assumptions about knowledge and originality of thought. Before the invention of printing, a major part of a scholar’s life was spent copying existing texts by hand, simply in order to have access to them. Now that printed copies of texts were increasingly available, there was less copying to do, and so there was more time to devote to thinking for oneself: that had implications for scholarly respect for what previous generations had said. Copying had been such a significant activity that in previous centuries of Christian culture, it had been given a privileged place against original thought. The thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar and devotional writer Bonaventure discussed various categories which might be described as writing: of his four variants, none included pure authorship of a new book as we would understand it today. He spoke of the writer as scribe (that is, a copyist), as compiler of anthologies, as commentator on older texts, and finally as ‘auctor’ – but even then, that meant someone who produced ‘his own work in principal place adding others for purposes of confirmation’. Such a hierarchy of functions would seem bizarrely out of proportion after the fifteenth century.³⁰

THERE were further consequences to basic assumptions about authority, none of which were good news for a Church hierarchy which claimed to have proprietorial rights over what to believe. Printing which produced multiple identical copies of a text encouraged a familiarity with uniformity, very different from the individuality of a manuscript. That in turn was liable to produce a sense of how significant it was when difference appeared: uniformity paradoxically put a premium on individuality. A culture based on manuscripts is conscious of the fragility of knowledge, and the need to preserve it: a priority must be to keep it secure, simply to avoid the physical destruction of a single precious source, and that fosters an attitude which guards rather than spreads knowledge. Print culture multiplies copies, and the printer has a vested interest in as much multiplication as possible, to sell his wares. Similarly, a manuscript culture is going to believe very readily in decay, in knowledge as in everything else, because copying knowledge from one manuscript to another is a very literal source of corruption. This is much less obvious in the print medium: optimism may be the mood rather than pessimism.³¹

 EVEN the larger number of books in circulation had its own effect. Because printing generated so much more to read, reading became a skill much more worth acquiring. It is worth noting that although in our society reading and writing are generally taught in the same educational timescale, there is no particular reason for this, and of the two skills, reading is probably the easier to acquire. In medieval and early modern Europe, many more people could read than could write. This spread of reading skills had consequences which began to be felt in Europe even before printing appeared, but which it then powerfully encouraged. Reading is a passive experience physically but an active one mentally; it is also a solo activity. There are ways of bringing physical activity to it, like mouthing the words to oneself or reading the text aloud as a performance to a group of listeners, but these are peripheral to the central experience of sitting quietly with the text, forming one’s own relationship with the writer, and deciding for oneself what he or she is trying to say. Other people are only a distraction, unless they are in turn a passive audience for the reading of the text. Only when the text has been read can it begin to be discussed.

AS reading became a more prominent part of religion for the laity (as it had long been for the clergy), the shift in priorities encouraged the more inward-looking, personalized devotion which we have already begun noting in a number of spheres in the fifteenth century: lay enthusiasm for the writings of the mystics, meditation on aspects of the life of Jesus, the ethos of the Devotio Moderna. For someone who really delighted in reading, religion might retreat out of the sphere of public ritual into the world of the mind and the imagination. Reading privileges sight among the other human senses, and it further privileges reading text among other uses of the eye; it relies not at all on gesture, which is so important a part of communicating in liturgy or in preaching. So without any hint of doctrinal deviation, a new style of piety arose in that increasingly large section of society which valued book-learning for both profit and pleasure. Even if such people were in the crowd at the parish Mass, they were likely be absorbed in their printed layfolk’s companion to the Mass, or a Book of Hours – books commonly known as primers. The wealthier folk among them might build themselves an enclosed private pew in their church to cut themselves off from the distractions provided by their fellow worshippers.³²

THIS new emphasis in devotion tended to be urban in its perspectives, for there were more books (and soon very many more printing-presses and schools) in towns than in the country. It was likely to associate the more demonstrative, physical side of religion with rusticity and lack of education, and treat such religion with condescension or even distaste, seeing rituals and relics as less important than what texts can tell the believer seeking salvation. Historians of the twelfth century are familiar with an earlier expression of this sort of view, because that period had likewise seen a sudden upsurge in excitement about classical literature and a hunt for ancient manuscripts – but readers were then so much smaller a proportion of the population, and virtually all of them were clergy.³³ In the fifteenth century, the attitude spread to a much larger group of prosperous and well-educated laypeople: merchants, gentry, lawyers, people who would form a ready audience for the Protestant message, with its contempt for so much of the old ritual of worship and devotion. Yet although this mood certainly found forthright expression in the Protestant Reformations, it was already flourishing in the thought of the major new departure in late medieval Europe’s intellectual life, the movement known as humanism.

23. G. Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: his life, his times (4 vols, Rome, 1973–82), pp. ii. 1.

24. J. Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, ch. vii, quoted in T. J. Brown, JEH 27 (1976), 82. I am grateful to Elizabeth Eisenstein for pointing out the echo of Jerome.

25. A. Pettegree, ‘Printing and the Reformation: the English exception’, in Marshall and Ryrie (eds), Beginnings of English Protestantism, pp. 157–79, at pp. 158–9.

26. J. E. Cox (ed.), Works of Archbishop Cranmer (2 vols, PS, 1844,1846), ii. p. 395; J. Strype (ed.), P. E. Barnes, Memorials… of… Thomas Cranmer… (2 vols, London, 1853), vol. ii p. 286, quoted London British Library Cottonian MS Cleopatra E V 325.

27. ’R. V.’, The olde faythe of Greate Brittayne and the newe learnynge of Inglande, wherunto is added a symple instruction, concernynge the Kinges Maiesties procedinges in the comunyon (London, 1548), sig. C iiiv. RSTC 24566 wrongly guesses the date of publication to be 1549; it is clearly a year earlier. This predates the well-known remarks of John Foxe in the Book of Martyrs on the same subject: see G. Townshend and S. R. Cattley (eds), The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe (8 vols, 1837–41) vol. iii, pp. 718–22.

28. London, Public Record Office, E.135/6/56 (1476); RSTC 14077C.106.

29. Cottret, Calvin, pp. 93–4.

30. Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, p. 84.

31. Ibid., pp. 54–7, 80, 141.

32. A fine discussion of the primer is E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London, 1992), chs. 6–7. See also V. Reinburg, ‘Liturgy and the laity in late medieval and Reformation France’, SCJ 23 (1992), 526–64; C. Richmond, ‘Religion and the fifteenth-century English gentle man’, in R. B. Dobson (ed.), The Church, Politics and Patronage (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 193–208,: a comment of 1559 from England echoes Richmond’s argument, PRO, STAC 5 U3/34, Answer of William Siday.

33. B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Princeton, 1983), pp. 246–50.

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