Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan Read Free Book Online Page A

pamphleteer who exploited it to the full.
    The first documents printed with movable type were, ironically enough, indulgences published by Johann Gutenberg at Mainz in 1445. Fittingly, his next venture was the Vulgate Bible. Using a metal typeface designed by the professional scribe Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg printed a run of three hundred copies on six presses. The technical quality was excellent from the outset. Experiments with colour printing began with the first dated book, a fine Psalter produced in 1457. Mainz was sacked in 1462, and fleeing print workers took the new technology with them. The wandering Germans were in Rome by 1464. By the end of the decade, they had set up at the Sorbonne in Paris, and, at Venice, had added lower case type and italic to the original Roman capital letters.
    A measure of the fall in prices is given by printed volumes with hand illustrations. They cost eight times as much as those with plain printed text. By 1500, a Venetian artisan could buy four printed volumes for one week’s salary. Bankers and merchantsinvested heavily in print shops and paper mills. Graduates from the new universities – two dozen were founded in Europe in the fifteenth century – provided readers as well as typesetters, proofreaders, editors, authors and translators. Controversial titles soon proved to be bestsellers. Erasmus’s Praise of Folly , wounding to the papacy, ran to forty-three editions in his lifetime. Humble readers were snapping up copies of religious tracts and sermons. The major constraint, in an age of rapidly growing literacy, was the high price of paper, which made up two thirds of production costs. The humblest reader could afford religious tracts. A fraud investigation in Seville – indulgence printers were in the habit of running off extra copies and selling them on their own behalf – uncovered a single printer who held stocks of more than eighty thousand sheets of prayers, rhymes and devotional woodcuts.
    Scores of thousands of pamphlets written by Luther came off the German presses, and they were soon flooding into England. By 1521, the English Church was so alarmed at the scale of smuggling that Wolsey presided over a grand burning of Lutheran books at St Paul’s Cross in London. A few weeks later, another bonfire was lit at Cambridge.
    Henry VIII himself was tempted into attacking Luther – Wolsey ‘furnished the court with chaplains of his own sworn disciples,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘to be always present, and to dispute the vanities, and to water whatsoever the cardinal had planted’ – and put his name to a treatise defending Catholic orthodoxy against Lutheranism. The English printer Richard Pynson published the king’s Assertio Septem Sacramentorum in 1521. The actual author of this work, which won Henry the title of Defender of the Faith from the pope (the Latin abbreviation of Fid. Def . appears on English coins to this day), was Thomas More.
    The battle lines of the coming conflict were being drawn up. More, humanist and author, but also rising lawyer and government officer – he was knighted in 1521 – appointed himself as thegreat lay champion of orthodoxy. Tyndale was coming to the end of his time at Cambridge. We do not know how or with whom he spent his time there. Foxe says merely that he was ‘further ripened in God’s word’. More wrote later that Tyndale at this time was known ‘for a man of right good living, studious and well learned in scripture, and in divers places in England was very well liked, and did great good in preaching’. It was the only kind thing that More ever said of him. We do not know who was his informant.
    We know that other reformers were Cambridge men, and that they were said to meet at The White Horse Inn: Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Bilney and others whom we know that Tyndale met later – Robert Barnes, Miles Coverdale and John Frith. Perhaps Tyndale joined in their talks at The White Horse; perhaps not.
    What is certain