The Gutenberg Revolution
A bankrupt goldsmith copied a Buddhist idea and accidentally ended the Catholic Church's monopoly on truth
Open
Two things about the man whose name is on this.
He did not invent printing. Chinese printers had been working from carved blocks since the ninth century. A man called Bi Sheng was setting movable ceramic characters around ten forty. Korean foundries were casting movable type in bronze by the twelve thirties, and the oldest surviving book printed that way came off a press at a Buddhist temple in thirteen seventy seven, seventy eight years before anything was printed in Mainz.
And he did not keep it. Within months of finishing the Bible that carries his name, Johannes Gutenberg lost the press, the type and the unsold stock in a lawsuit, to the man who had lent him the money.
Scene 1The judgement
Mainz, November fourteen fifty five. Johann Fust, a wealthy financier, goes to court against the printer he has been funding for five years.
The first loan was eight hundred guilders, in fourteen fifty, secured against the printing equipment. Two years later, another eight hundred.
Fust wants two thousand and twenty six guilders back, principal and compounded interest. He wins.
He takes the workshop, the type and the inventory. He takes Gutenberg's foreman, Peter Schoffer, who is also his son in law.
Fust and Schoffer become the first commercial publishers in Europe. They put their names in the books.
Gutenberg is granted a small pension by the Archbishop about ten years later, and dies in fourteen sixty eight.
The invention worked. That is why he lost it.
A machine that turns three years of labour into a hundred and eighty identical books is collateral worth seizing, and the person who understood that first was the creditor.
Scene 2The system
What was actually invented in Mainz was not a machine. It was a set of four things that had to work together.
An alloy of lead, tin and antimony that was soft enough to cast, hard enough to survive thousands of impressions, and that did not shrink as it cooled.
A hand mould that let one worker cast hundreds of identical letters a day.
An oil based ink, taken from what Flemish painters were doing, because the water based inks used for woodblocks simply slid off metal.
And a press, adapted from the screw presses that the Rhine valley used for wine.
Every one of those existed already. The combination did not.
The forty two line Bible was the demonstration. Two columns, forty two lines a page, in a typeface cut to imitate the best handwriting of the day, using about two hundred and ninety different characters to reproduce the abbreviations and the ligatures a scribe would use.
It took roughly three years. It used the skins of about a hundred and seventy calves per copy on the vellum editions.
And early readers could not tell the pages from manuscript, which was the point.
Nineteen years later, a Carthusian monk called Werner Rolewinck put the invention into a world chronicle, which was itself printed.
· Fasciculus Temporum · 1474
“This art was discovered in Mainz, Germany. It is the art of arts, the science of sciences.”
Scene 3Fifty years
Now the numbers, because the speed is the whole story.
By fourteen seventy there are presses in Italy, France, the Netherlands and England. By fourteen eighty, in a hundred and ten towns. By fifteen hundred there are print shops in two hundred cities.
The output by fifteen hundred is about twenty seven thousand separate editions, somewhere near twenty million volumes.
In fourteen fifty, all the manuscripts in Europe together are estimated at perhaps thirty thousand books.
Within fifty years the price of a book falls by about eighty per cent. Over the next century and a half, literacy in western Europe goes from somewhere between five and ten in a hundred to thirty or forty.
Scene 4Wittenberg
The thirty first of October, fifteen seventeen. A theology professor in Wittenberg puts ninety five propositions about the sale of indulgences on a church door, in Latin, for other academics.
Within a fortnight printers in Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel have reprinted them. Within three months there are an estimated three hundred thousand copies in circulation, in German.
Martin Luther did not translate them. Printers did, because there was a market.
Between fifteen seventeen and fifteen twenty five, German presses turn out around six thousand pamphlet titles. Eight to sixteen pages, a few pfennigs, woodcut illustrations for people who could not read the text.
Luther published thirty works in fifteen twenty alone. He knew exactly what he was holding.
Luther, at his own table, years later.
· Table Talk · c. 1530
“Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.”
Five accounts
Five ways of telling this, and they disagree about what the invention even was.
victorGutenberg and the Printer's Revolution
The printers
The first account is the workshop's, and its claim is that the breakthrough was engineering, not ideas.
Nobody needed to be told that copying books by hand was slow. What nobody had was an alloy that cast clean and stayed hard, a mould that made every letter the same height, and an ink that would stick to metal.
The evidence for that reading is the speed of the spread. Once the system existed it was copied across a continent in thirty years, by workmen who took the trade with them out of Mainz.
And the trade behaved like a trade. Aldus Manutius in Venice worked out in the fourteen nineties that a book could be made small enough to carry, printed the Greek and Latin classics in that format, and invented publishing as a business.
Read the full account
Narrative
Gutenberg was a goldsmith by training, from a patrician family in Mainz. He had been experimenting with printing since at least the late 1430s, when he was living in Strasbourg. A 1439 court record mentions a contract dispute involving a "secret art" that scholars identify as early printing experiments. By the mid-1440s, he had returned to Mainz and was producing small printed items: a German poem (the "Sibyllenbuch"), a Latin grammar (the Donatus), and papal indulgences, single-sheet forms with blank spaces for the purchaser's name.
The 42-line Bible was the proof of concept. Each page contained 42 lines of text in two columns, set in a blackletter typeface (textura) designed to mimic the best manuscript calligraphy. The type was so precise that early readers could not distinguish printed Bibles from handwritten ones. Gutenberg used a font of approximately 290 distinct characters, including ligatures, abbreviations, and variant letterforms, to replicate the visual density of Gothic script. Rubrication (red headings and paragraph marks) and illuminated initials were added by hand after printing, a hybrid process that made the earliest printed books indistinguishable from the manuscripts they were replacing.
The technical system was the innovation, not any single component. The hand mold for casting type allowed a compositor to produce hundreds of identical letters per day. The oil-based ink, adapted from techniques used by Flemish painters, particularly the Van Eyck workshop, bonded to metal where water-based inks could not. The press itself was a modified wine press: the flat platen distributed even pressure across the forme, and the screw mechanism allowed precise control. A skilled press crew could produce roughly 250 sheets per day, or 3,600 pages of a Bible in a single day across multiple presses.
Gutenberg saw none of the profits. After Fust's lawsuit, he operated a smaller press in Mainz, probably producing the 36-line Bible and a few other works, but never regained commercial footing. He was granted a court pension by Archbishop Adolf of Nassau in 1465, a gentleman's stipend that included an annual allowance of grain, wine, and clothing. He died on February 3, 1468. His gravestone was lost when the church where he was buried was demolished. The inventor of the most transformative technology before the internet left no surviving portrait, no personal letters, and no diary.
Arguments
- Gutenberg's innovation was systemic, with alloy, ink, press, and workflow combined into a reproducible manufacturing process
- The 42-line Bible demonstrated that print could match manuscript quality at a fraction of the cost and time
- The technology spread because it was economically irresistible, not because Gutenberg promoted it
- Gutenberg himself was dispossessed of his invention and died in obscurity
Sources
- Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words
- The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention that Changed the World
- Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing
vanquishedCatholic Church
The Catholic Church
The second account belongs to the institution that was printing's first customer and then its first casualty.
The Church welcomed the press. Hand copying introduced errors, and every diocese had drifted; a printed missal was the same in Mainz and in Marseilles. The earliest print runs in Europe were indulgences, psalters and Bibles.
Then the arithmetic turned. Manuscript culture could be policed, because a heretical text could be found and burned before it travelled. A single press run could put five hundred copies into circulation in a week, and confiscating a book in one city meant nothing when it was being set in type in another.
The response came in stages. In fifteen oh one a papal bull required every printed work to have a bishop's approval. The Fifth Lateran Council reinforced it in fifteen fifteen. The Index of Forbidden Books was established in fifteen fifty nine.
A line attributed to a Dominican friar at the Council of Trent puts the problem in one sentence.
“Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their yokes from us, now the common people have the Bible, and the heretics will cite texts.”
Read the full account
Narrative
The Church was printing's first patron and its first victim. The earliest printed products were religious: indulgences, psalters, Bibles. The Church initially welcomed the press as a tool for standardizing liturgical texts. Manuscript copying introduced errors, and every diocese had slightly different readings. A printed missal was identical in Mainz and Marseilles. Pope Nicholas V, who died in 1455, reportedly praised the Gutenberg Bible.
The problem emerged within a generation. Manuscript culture had operated through controlled channels: monasteries produced books, bishops licensed scriptoria, and the cost of copying limited circulation to institutions and wealthy patrons. A heretical text could be identified, confiscated, and destroyed before it spread far. Print destroyed this model. A single press run could produce 500 copies in a week. Confiscating books in one city was futile when the same text was being printed in another jurisdiction. John Wycliffe's English Bible (1382) had been contained by manuscript-era suppression. Jan Hus's Czech writings (1400s) circulated in limited copies. Luther's German Bible (1534) sold 100,000 copies in its first decade, and that was only one of dozens of vernacular Bibles flooding Europe.
The institutional response came in stages. Pope Alexander VI's Inter multiplices (1501) required all printed works to receive episcopal imprimatur before publication. The Fifth Lateran Council (1515) reinforced pre-publication censorship. None of it worked. Luther's 95 Theses (1517) demonstrated the futility: posted in Latin on a church door in a small Saxon town, they were translated into German by local printers and circulated across the Holy Roman Empire within weeks. Between 1517 and 1520, Luther published 30 pamphlets; printers sold 300,000 copies. No papal bull could match that output.
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, established by Pope Paul IV in 1559, was the most comprehensive attempt at content control. It listed every book Catholics were forbidden to read, own, or sell. At various points it included works by Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Darwin. The Index survived for 407 years; it was not abolished until 1966, by Pope Paul VI. Its persistence testifies to the depth of the threat the Church perceived. But its existence also testifies to its failure: every book on the Index remained in circulation. Censorship in a world of decentralized printing was a rearguard action against a technology that had already won.
The Church adapted, eventually. The Jesuits became master printers. The Counter-Reformation used the press to produce standardized catechisms, devotional literature, and hagiographies. The Tridentine Missal (1570), made possible only by print, unified Catholic liturgy for 400 years. But the fundamental shift was irreversible: after Gutenberg, the Church could promote its message, but it could no longer monopolize the medium.
Arguments
- The Church initially welcomed print for standardizing liturgy but could not control its decentralized distribution
- Manuscript-era suppression of heresy (Wycliffe, Hus) was impossible in a print environment (Luther)
- The Index of Forbidden Books persisted for 407 years, evidence of both the threat's magnitude and censorship's futility
- The Counter-Reformation eventually adapted to print, but the monopoly on scriptural interpretation was permanently broken
Sources
- The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
- The Reformation: A History
- Censorship and the Sorbonne: A Bibliographical Study of Books in French Censured by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, 1520-1551
revisionistChinese and Korean Precedent
The Chinese and Korean precedent
The third account says the priority is simply not European, and it has the objects to prove it.
Bi Sheng's ceramic type is described in detail by Shen Kuo in ten eighty eight: characters set in an iron frame on resin and wax, heated to fix them, inked, pressed, then reheated to free the type for the next page.
It worked, and it did not take over, for a reason that is arithmetic rather than culture. A literate reader of Chinese needs three or four thousand characters, and a full font wants forty thousand or more. Sorting and composing that is slower than carving the page as a single block. Movable type only pays on long runs with a small character set, and an alphabet of twenty six letters is the ideal case.
The Korean court went further and cast type in bronze by about twelve thirty. The Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teaching printed at a temple in thirteen seventy seven, is the oldest surviving book made with metal movable type.
It is in the national library in Paris. Korea has asked for it back more than once.
Read the full account
Narrative
Bi Sheng made individual characters from baked clay around 1040 in Song Dynasty China. The process is described by Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays (1088): characters were set in an iron frame on a bed of resin and wax, heated to fix them in place, then inked and pressed to paper. After printing, the frame was reheated to release the type for reuse. The system worked. It was described in detail by a contemporary observer. And it was not widely adopted.
The reasons were practical, not cultural. Written Chinese uses thousands of characters: a literate reader needs approximately 3,000-4,000; a comprehensive font requires 40,000 or more. Sorting, storing, and compositing tens of thousands of individual type pieces was slower than carving a single woodblock for each page. For short-run printing (a few hundred copies of a text) woodblock remained more efficient. Movable type made economic sense only for large runs of texts using a limited character set. The Latin alphabet, with 26 letters, was ideal. Chinese logographic script was not.
Korean innovation went further. The Goryeo court cast the first metal movable type in bronze around 1230. The Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings, was printed with metal type at Heungdeok Temple in 1377, 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible. It is the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type. A copy resides in the Bibliotheque nationale de France; Korea has repeatedly requested its return. The Joseon Dynasty established a royal type foundry, the Jujaso, in 1403, producing copper type sets for government documents. King Sejong the Great, who promulgated the Hangul alphabet in 1443, combined a phonetic script with metal type, the most advanced printing system in the world before Gutenberg.
The question of why Europe "gets credit" for movable type is entangled with the question of impact. Gutenberg's system produced a revolution; Bi Sheng's and the Korean court systems did not, at least not on the same scale. The standard explanation is that the alphabetic advantage made European printing economically scalable in a way that logographic printing was not. But Thomas Christensen and others have challenged this framing: Chinese woodblock printing was already producing books at massive scale. The Tripitaka Koreana, 81,258 carved woodblocks of the entire Buddhist canon, was completed in 1251. China was not a pre-literate society waiting for Gutenberg. It had a different, fully functional print culture that European historians have consistently minimized because it did not fit the narrative of Western technological supremacy.
The omission is not accidental. Joseph Needham documented Chinese printing technology exhaustively in Science and Civilisation in China (1954-), yet the standard Western textbook narrative begins with Gutenberg. Bi Sheng invented movable type 400 years before Gutenberg. Korea cast metal type 200 years before Gutenberg. Paper itself traveled from China to the Islamic world to Europe via the Silk Road. The Gutenberg "revolution" was a revolution in Europe, built on Chinese and Korean foundations that the European narrative has systematically erased.
Arguments
- Bi Sheng invented movable type 400 years before Gutenberg; Korean metal type preceded the Gutenberg Bible by 78 years
- The alphabet gave European printing a scalability advantage, but Chinese woodblock printing was already producing books at massive scale
- Standard Western narratives erase Asian precedents to construct a story of European technological originality
- Paper, ink, and the concept of movable type all traveled from East to West; Gutenberg's "invention" was a synthesis of borrowed elements
Sources
- Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1: Paper and Printing
- The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
- Gutenberg's Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity
bystanderReformation and the Pamphlet Wars
The pamphlet war
The fourth account is about what the machine did to argument, and its central claim is uncomfortable: the difference between a heretic who is burned and a reformer who wins is not theology.
Jan Hus made much the same case a century before Luther. He was burned at the stake in fourteen fifteen and his movement stayed inside Bohemia. John Wycliffe put the Bible into English in thirteen eighty two and his followers were hunted down.
Luther said it in German, to printers who could sell it, in a format cheap enough to buy on a market day.
And the machine had no loyalty. It printed the replies too, and the censors' lists, and the manuals of the counter attack. What it ended was not the Church's authority but its monopoly on reproduction.
Read the full account
Narrative
Luther did not start the Reformation. The printing press started the Reformation, and Luther was its most talented user. This is an overstatement, but not by much. Jan Hus had made similar arguments a century earlier; he was burned at the stake in 1415, and his movement was contained within Bohemia. John Wycliffe had translated the Bible into English in 1382; his followers, the Lollards, were suppressed. The difference between Hus and Luther was not theology. It was technology.
On October 31, 1517, Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Within two weeks, printers in Nuremberg, Leipzig, and Basel had translated and reprinted them. Within three months, an estimated 300,000 copies were in circulation. Luther had written in Latin, for an academic audience of theologians. Printers translated him into German, for everyone. The Reformation was not Luther's plan. It was what happened when Luther's arguments met Gutenberg's machine.
The pamphlet, the Flugschrift, became the medium of the Reformation. Between 1517 and 1525, German printers produced roughly 6,000 pamphlet titles, the majority taking Luther's side. These were cheap (a few pfennigs), short (8 to 16 pages), illustrated with woodcuts for the illiterate, and written in colloquial German. Luther himself published 30 works in 1520 alone, including the three treatises that defined the Reformation: Address to the Christian Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian. Printers competed to publish him because he sold. Luther was the first bestselling author in the modern sense.
The Catholic response was slower. Partly this reflected institutional inertia, since the papal bureaucracy was not built for pamphleteering. Partly it reflected a genuine strategic disadvantage: Luther's message was populist and simple (scripture alone, faith alone, the priesthood of all believers), while Catholic theology was complex, hierarchical, and did not translate well into vernacular pamphlets. Johannes Eck, Luther's most capable Catholic opponent, published extensively but never matched Luther's sales. The Jesuits, founded in 1534, eventually became skilled polemicists and publishers, but by then the Reformation had fractured Western Christendom permanently.
The vernacular Bible was the ultimate weapon. Luther's German New Testament (1522) sold 5,000 copies in two weeks. His complete German Bible (1534) went through hundreds of editions over the following decades. William Tyndale's English New Testament (1526), printed in Cologne and Worms, was smuggled into England in bales of cloth. Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536, but his translation survived: roughly 84 percent of the King James Bible (1611) derives from Tyndale's text. The Church could kill the translator. It could not kill the copies.
Arguments
- Pre-print reformers (Wycliffe, Hus) were suppressed; Luther succeeded because the press made suppression impossible
- The pamphlet (cheap, short, vernacular, illustrated) was the first mass medium and the weapon of the Reformation
- Luther was the first bestselling author, but printers, not Luther, drove the translation and distribution
- The Catholic Church could execute translators (Tyndale) but could not destroy decentralized print runs
Sources
- Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe, and Started the Protestant Reformation
- Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion
- The Book in the Renaissance
academicInformation Revolution Theory
The information theorists
The fifth account is the one that tries to explain all of the others at once.
Elizabeth Eisenstein's argument, published in nineteen seventy nine, is that the decisive thing was not any book but the properties of print itself: reach, identical copies, and fixity.
Fixity is the one that does the work. In manuscript culture every copy introduced errors, so a scholar reading Ptolemy was reading a copy of a copy, and the foundation shifted underneath every generation. Print froze the text.
That is why the Scientific Revolution is in this story. Tycho Brahe's observations could be published in identical editions, checked by Kepler, and built on by Newton. Two botanists in different countries could hold the same page and argue about the same plant.
On this reading the press did not create new ideas. It made existing ideas impossible to suppress and possible to accumulate.
Read the full account
Narrative
Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) is the foundational academic treatment of Gutenberg's impact. Her argument is that print culture, not any individual printed text, was the precondition for the three transformations that created the modern world: the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the political revolutions of the 18th century. The mechanism was not distribution alone but three properties unique to print: dissemination (reaching more readers), standardization (identical copies), and fixity (texts preserved unchanged across time and space).
Fixity was the most consequential. In manuscript culture, every copy introduced errors. A medieval scholar working on Ptolemy's Geography was working with a copy of a copy of a copy, each generation introducing transcription mistakes. Scientific knowledge could not accumulate because the foundation kept shifting. Print froze the text. Tycho Brahe's astronomical observations, published in identical editions, could be verified and built upon by Kepler, who built upon by Newton. The Scientific Revolution was not simply a matter of new ideas. It was a matter of reliable transmission of existing data.
Standardization enabled comparison. When Luther and Erasmus debated theology, they could cite the same printed edition of the New Testament and argue about specific words on specific pages. When botanists in Padua and Leiden received identical copies of the same herbal, they could compare plants in their local gardens with the same illustrations. The atlas, the encyclopedia, the table of logarithms, forms that depend on exactness across copies, became possible only in print culture.
Critics have pushed back. Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book (1998), argued that Eisenstein overstated fixity, since early printed books were full of errors, piracies, and unauthorized variants. Robert Darnton emphasized the social and economic networks of printing rather than the technology itself. But the Eisenstein thesis, even in modified form, remains the dominant framework: the printing press did not cause the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, or the Enlightenment, but it made each of them possible by changing the conditions under which ideas were produced, distributed, and preserved.
The parallel to the digital revolution sharpens the analysis. Like the internet, the press decentralized information production. Like the internet, it was initially celebrated as a democratizing force and later recognized as a vehicle for propaganda, disinformation, and polarization. The German Peasants' War (1524-1525), fueled by pamphlets, killed an estimated 100,000 people. The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) were intensified by printed polemic. The technology is neutral. Its consequences depend on the society that uses it. Gutenberg made possible both Luther's Bible and the Index that banned it.
Arguments
- Print's three properties (dissemination, standardization, fixity) were preconditions for the Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment
- Fixity (unchanged text across copies) enabled cumulative science, which manuscript culture's errors made impossible
- The parallel to digital disruption is structural: decentralized production, democratization, then polarization and propaganda
- The technology was neutral; its consequences were determined by the societies it entered
Sources
- The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe
- The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
- The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800
The turn
And here is the shape of what each account is not saying.
Gutenberg and the Printer's Revolution
The printers' account leaves out that every component was borrowed, from the winemakers, the goldsmiths and the painters, and that the man who assembled them could not hold on to the result.
From the record
Chinese and Korean precedents in movable type centuries earlierGutenberg's business failures and Fust's role as the actual commercial publisherThe social disruption, from unemployment of scribes to monastic copying houses made obsoletePrint's role in enabling propaganda, censorship evasion, and misinformationThe Church's account leaves out that it paid for the first presses and profited from them, and that the indulgences the Reformation attacked were among the first things Gutenberg printed.
From the record
Church's own enthusiastic early adoption and patronage of printingLegitimate concerns about doctrinal accuracy and theological error in mass-produced textsPrint's role in spreading anti-Semitic and other harmful content alongside reform literatureThe intellectual quality of many banned works versus the crude propaganda that also circulatedThe Chinese and Korean account, which is right about priority, can let priority stand in for consequence. The Jikji proves who was first. It does not explain why the technology stayed local there and travelled here, which is the question the alphabet answers.
From the record
Gutenberg's genuine systemic innovation, the integrated press, ink, and alloy systemPractical limitations of logographic movable type that constrained Chinese adoptionThe demonstrable difference in societal impact between East Asian and European printingEurope's unique political fragmentation, which prevented centralized suppression and accelerated print's spreadReformation and the Pamphlet Wars
The pamphlet account leaves out that the same presses served whoever paid, and that the Index of Forbidden Books is as much a child of printing as the Reformation is.
From the record
Print's role in spreading Counter-Reformation materials and Catholic devotional literatureCommercial motivations of printers who published whatever sold, regardless of theologyPrint-enabled propaganda that fueled the German Peasants' War (1524-1525) and its 100,000 deadThe wars of religion (1524-1648) that print helped ignite and sustainAnd the theorists' account leaves out the people. It is a description of properties. There is no goldsmith in it, and no lawsuit.
From the record
Oral culture's persistence and resilience alongside print; most Europeans remained illiterate for centuriesNon-European print traditions and their independent impactsThe economic exploitation of print workers: compositors, press operators, booksellersWomen's near-total exclusion from the printing trade and authorship until the 18th century
Close
Fust and Schoffer's books are the first with a printer's name, a date and a place on the last page. Gutenberg's Bible has none of that on it. It is anonymous.
The Index of Forbidden Books was maintained for four hundred and seven years, and abolished in nineteen sixty six.
The pension that kept Gutenberg was paid in grain, wine and cloth.
And the oldest surviving book printed with metal type sits in a library in Paris, four and a half thousand miles from the temple that made it.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 50 yrs
- Killed
- N/A, cultural revolution, though…
- Displaced
- 20MTransformed literacy from elite privilege to mass…
- Place
- Holy Roman Empire (Mainz)
Key figures
- Johannes GutenbergInventor of the European movable-type printing systemc. 1400 to 1468
- Johann FustFinancier who sued Gutenberg, seized his press, and became Europe's first commercial publisherc. 1400 to 1466
- Peter SchöfferGutenberg's apprentice and Fust's son-in-law, continued printing after the lawsuitc. 1425 to 1503
- Bi ShengChinese inventor of movable ceramic type, c. 1040c. 990 to c. 1051
- Martin LutherReformer whose 95 Theses became the first viral printed document1483 to 1546
- Aldus ManutiusVenetian printer who invented the pocket-sized book (octavo format)1449 to 1515
Primary sources
· Table Talk · c. 1530
“Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.”
· Fasciculus Temporum (first printed world chronicle) · 1474
“This art was discovered in Mainz, Germany. It is the art of arts, the science of sciences.”
· Quoted in Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change · c. 1546
“Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their yokes from us — now the common people have the Bible, and the heretics will cite texts.”
Threads
- The Protestant ReformationGutenberg's press printed Bibles and indulgences for seventy years without threatening the Church. Then Luther aimed it at the Church itself, and one in three German books sold from 1518 to 1525 carried his name
- The French RevolutionA Parisian laborer spent 88% of his wages on bread. On July 14, the crowd took 30,000 muskets. The Bastille fell by dinner.
- The CrusadesThe Fourth Crusade never reached Jerusalem. It sacked Constantinople, the largest Christian city on earth, instead.