By the early 1500’s, Europe had been prepared for the Protestant Reformation in ways that Johann Gutenberg could never have expected. Circa 1452, this Mainz patrician developed printer’s ink and an alloy for making individual letters to be used in a typeset, which could then be put into a printing press, and used over and over without wearing out. This allowed for the rapid creation of multiple copies of a document.
A providential note is the presence of alphabetic based written languages in Europe. Logographic forms, such as Japanese or Chinese, would have required thousands of different characters in the typeset, and a system of keeping these thousands organized. The alphabetic systems were much easier to produce and organize, and had the added benefit of the ubiquity of the Roman alphabet which allowed more than one language to be produced using the same typeset.
One of the first documents printed was the famous Gutenberg Bible of which approximately 200 were believed to have been made (somewhere around fifty survive today, the left flanking picture is from one of these). This was a Latin text, primarily the work of Jerome.
Much like new technology today, the first products of this printing press were expensive, but soon costs began to fall as the technology spread. It spread very quickly with probably more than 2500 cities having operating presses by 1500. By the early 1500’s printing had become fairly economical.
While the publishing of the Bible in many languages was very important, this was still a large book requiring a lot of labor and materials. As such, a Bible was still costly beyond the means of the majority of the people. As the Reformation grew, a more readily available resource was the variety of tracts, pamphlets, and sermons, or Flugschriften, produced by numerous reformers (Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli included). These allowed for the rapid dissemination of Reformation literature easily and inexpensively. (Ironically, some scholars believe that one of Gutenberg’s early jobs may have been printing Roman Catholic indulgences.)
These products of the first Information Age, beginning in a town in Germany, had an incredible impact on the course of human history, affecting the entire world, and breaking the stranglehold of the corrupt Roman Catholic Church. I hope and pray that as we continue into this second Information Age, God will send us a reformation exceeding even that of the 16th century.
