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On New Millennium's Eve 2000, the History Channel aired a special "countdown" of the one hundred people who had made the most significant contributions to the preceding millennium. Johannes Gutenberg was declared number one for his invention of the moveable-type printing press in 1455. Suddenly, written communication was widely available and relatively inexpensive to produce, compared to hand-copied manuscripts. This invention came into being at the very dawn of what Robert Bireley calls "the long sixteenth century," that he avers began in 1450 and lasted until 1700.1 It is very likely, in fact, that it was the innovation of the printing press itself that birthed that long century.
Call it the influence of Holy Mother Church, or call it the insecurities of life, but with all levels of society being accosted by plagues, wars, economic breakdown and peasant unrest, the atmosphere at the nexus of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was charged with religiosity. If one wrote a treatise-(even a scientific one, as Galileo learned, to his dismay)-or created a work of art, or composed a ballad, religious themes predominated.2
The entrepreneurs of the burgeoning new printing industry were poised to exploit this atmosphere of religiosity. Printers were in business to make money.3 That meant, in the simplest terms, exploiting whatever market there was for their product. The guilds understood that religion, and its reform, was the milieu to be exploited. This is not to say that they lacked religious integrity. There had been movements advocating reform within the church for centuries. These movements were reaching a crescendo with the dissatisfaction and insecurity of life in their world. As part of the newly-emerging middle class of artisans, the printers were ready to join the impetus to reform, sensing the need for changing societal structures that supported the economically-stifling status quo. Primary among these structures was the Catholic Church with its vested interests in preserving not only the faith, but also its own system of ecclesiastical control and monetary support.4
In aiding this movement for reform, the printers' guilds not only rode the wave, but created the crest that carried it forward to a successful denouement across the entire long century. Just as in the after-effects of a tidal wave, the religious landscape of western Europe...