![]() Disagreements between the two parties on biblical interpretation played a role in sparking social upheaval and eventually the Protestant Reformation. Since reading spurs the formation of intellectual opinions, a large part if the population now began to read their own personal bibles and form their own opinions, which didn’t always align with that of the religious authority figures. At the same time, the lower and middle classes begun to develop an interest in reading since they could afford personal religious texts. This overall decrease in price led to an increase in literacy in Europe during the fifteenth century. The decrease in cost of book materials due to technological production changes (namely paper and ink), as well as mechanization of the printing process allowed for mass production of less expensive books. This is about 180 times the amount of books which could be produced by a scribe within the same time. Nearly eight million books, most of which were religious, were printed using the printing press by 1500. Similarly, by the end of the fifteenth century, the majority of Western Europe cities had a printing press. Thus, it wasn’t surprising that numerous monasteries hailed the printing press as a gift from God. The Catholic Church utilized the press for printing ordinances, indulgences and anti-Islamic Crusade propaganda during the late 1400s and early 1500s. Interestingly, the Catholic Church was one of the biggest early customers of printing press. This shift in power from the religious authority to the people was a common effect of more accessible and inexpensive print, particularly in the religious sector of European culture during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They could form their own intellectual opinions concerning the bible and their faith through reading. As long as they were literate, many citizens no longer needed to rely on religious authorities for knowledge, interpretation, and analysis of religious literature. Fast production and fewer materials decreased the price and increased availability of the bible, thus providing more opportunities for anyone of any economic status to own and read a private family bible. 30 – Disrupting Society from Tablet to Tablet three years to produce a single product, Gutenberg produced a total of 180 copies 150 bibles on paper and 30 on vellum. ![]() While scribes took Movable type sorted in a letter case and loaded in a composing stick on top. The movable type also allowed for fast production of the bibles. By fitting more lines per page, the Gutenberg Bible limited the amount of paper and parchment needed to produce a bible. Scribes, on the other hand, only wrote thirty-six lines per page in earlier bibles. Gutenberg started off printing forty lines per page but began printing forty-two lines per page instead. The first book printed with movable type was Gutenberg’s Bible. Print and the Power of Religious Knowledge ![]() ![]() The movable type printing press, however, didn’t affect all areas equally. ![]() From here, the opportunity to share ideas and knowledge brought on a new era of change and enlightenment never seen before. As a result, more pages could be efficiently printed in a shorter amount of time with much less effort. Movable type kept the metal stamp letters separate, which allowed printers to reuse the letters quickly on succeeding pages. Before Gutenberg, all texts had been printed with woodblocks or fixed text stamps, both of which were complex and time-consuming processes. Using a large manually operated machine, the stamps would be arranged to read a page of text so that when covered with ink, it would print out a page of text. Movable type printing used metal stamps of single letters that could be arranged into different words, sentences and pages of text. While printing had already existed for several centuries, Johannes Gutenberg turned the printing world upside down and brought on a new era of print with his revolutionary innovation of movable type in 1445. Movable type sorted in a letter case and loaded in a composing stick on top ![]()
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