What does it look like?

This is the first book printed in Western Europe using a printing press. Johann Gutenberg is credited with ‘inventing’ the printing press and so the bible bears his name. Central to his innovation was the press, although it was an adaptation of existing technology.

Oil and wine presses had existed for centuries, so his innovation here was how the press was used. Equally critical was the invention of separately cast metal letters, also called moveable type. This is arguably the most significant innovation of the fifteenth century. The production of thousands of separate pieces of type allowed printers to build up words, then sentences, then pages of text, then to print many copies from them.

Crucially, the same type could then be washed, broken up and reused to make up other words, sentences and pages. With the exception of a couple of initial sections in red, the Bible was printed in black only, then hand decorated, to look like the sort of medieval manuscript  which would have been familiar to the audience to which Gutenberg hoped to sell his bible.

Who, what and where?

It was produced by Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust, in Mainz, Germany. The motivation behind printing the bible was purely commercial. Prior to printing the bible, Gutenberg had been experimenting with the printing press. In the early 1450s he printed a series of indulgences, a medieval poem called the Sibyllenbuch and a Latin grammar, but the bible was his first major printing project. 

It appears to have sold well; on 12th March, 1455, a man called Enea Silvio Piccolomini wrote in a letter that he had seen samples of the bible in Frankfurt, that the type was so clear it could be read without glasses, and that all copies had been sold. However, the partnership between Gutenberg and Fust soon ran into difficulties. By November 1455, the two partners were in court arguing over money. Gutenberg lost and the partnership was dissolved. Over the ensuing decade, however, printing spread rapidly across Europe, transmitted by the workmen in Gutenberg’s print house.

Why is it significant to the study of religion?

In the first instance, printers sought to copy the existing manuscript tradition – printed books were produced, which looked like manuscripts and the texts which were printed were the same as those which circulated in manuscript form – the Latin Bible was therefore a sound choice. Within 50 years though, the printed book had developed a distinct character of its own. Printed books started to look different from manuscripts – title pages, page numbers, contents pages and indexes were introduced. At the same time, the sorts of texts being printed changed.

For the first time, controversial texts circulated in large numbers, fuelling religious debate and leading people to question religious assumptions. In 1519, Martin Luther produced the 95 theses, a criticism of the sale of indulgences by the Catholic Church, one of the key texts that triggered the Protestant Reformation. Within two weeks of their appearance, the 95 theses had circulated throughout German-speaking lands, and within two months they had reached every corner of Europe. The printing press made this possible.

It made the circulation of controversial texts, traditional religious texts, and new interpretations of religious texts possible.