Trust in the Text
The introduction of movable type print in late fifteenth-century Europe began with the noble aspiration of making the Word of God available for all, most famously exemplified by the Gutenberg Bible. How could early printers have foreseen that their work would prepare the ground for the violence and social turmoil that would follow in the Reformation. Texts, broadly defined, were experiencing a powerful transformation. The trust that people placed in texts came under severe strain even as they were more readily available than ever before. Texts of all kinds—the sermon of the local clergyman, a pamphlet expressing a political view, poetry, plays, even the Word of God itself—required new methods and systems for declaring their trustworthiness.