The Renaissance

During the Renaissance, literacy spread more quickly than ever, reshaping European culture and laying the groundwork for widespread literacy for centuries to come. At the heart of this transformation was Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1450s, which made it possible to produce books far more cheaply and quickly than the hand-copied manuscripts of the Middle Ages (but we're still grateful for the time and effort all the scribes put in to those manuscripts, because they are very pretty and our primary recorded knowledge of the Middle Ages). This innovation coincided with the growing use of paper, a much more affordable material than vellum (all the baby calves learned how to sing Hallelujah once paper came into the picture). Together, these advances drastically lowered the cost of books, putting reading material within reach of far more people than before.

The new accessibility of books had ripple effects across society. For the first time, people across different regions could encounter the same texts, standardizing knowledge and practices of reading. Vernacular texts (books printed in more languages than just Latin) further accelerated literacy, allowing ordinary people to read devotional works, poems, and even scientific treatises. Cheap pamphlets and ballads were like an early form of social media, spreading ideas quickly and stirring public debate. Popular works, such as Erasmus’s satirical In Praise of Folly (1511), revealed how printed books could both entertain and challenge authority (boy did that get popular).

Religion played a powerful role in driving literacy in the Renaissance. Martin Luther’s insistence that every Christian should read the Bible for themselves spurred the printing of vernacular Bibles, with his German translation (1522) becoming a bestseller. In Protestant regions, teaching children to read became a religious duty, while Catholic Europe responded with catechisms, devotional works, and the regulation of reading material through the Index of Forbidden Books. For both, schools often remained tied to the church, and literacy was justified by the need to engage with scripture and prayer.

This combination of technological innovation, social demand, and religious pressure transformed literacy from just the few elites into a cultural expectation. The Renaissance did not make every European literate overnight, but it created the foundation and the habit of reading that would eventually sustain widespread literacy across the continent. People liked the books!