A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In most of Europe, when printing technology arrived in the early fifteenth century, the supply of vernacular Bibles hugely increased: the printers sensed a ready market and hastened to supply it in languages which would command large sales. Between 1466 and 1522 there were twenty-two editions of the Bible in High or Low German; the Bible reached Italian in 1471, Dutch in 1477, Spanish in 1478, Czech around the same time and Catalan in 1492. In 1473–4 French publishers opened up a market in abridged Bibles, concentrating on the exciting stories and leaving out the more knotty doctrinal passages, and this remained a profitable enterprise until the mid-sixteenth century. Bernard Cottret, Calvin’s biographer, has suggested that this huge increase in Bibles created the Reformation rather than being created by it.