AP European History

Peterson's

The Renaissance

Humanism and the Printed Word

The texts mat were being produced by humanists were being spread across Italy and Europe at an unprecedented rate. With the invention of me movable type printing press around 1450, the German Johann Gutenberg revolutionized the way in which ideas were shared and distributed. While pre-printing press documents were produced either by hand or by block printing at tediously slow speeds, documents printed using the movable type press were produced relatively quickly and they far outnumbered their predecessors in a matter of a few short years. Many of the new documents were Bibles and other religious texts, although a large number of the new documents were reprints of classical works, previously available only as expensive manuscripts.