ABSTRACT
‘Print and Protestantism’. This coupling seems so inevitable, so indelible, as to be utterly unshakable. Certainly, the speed with which the evangelical movement adopted the printing press was truly remarkable, not least in the manner in which Martin Luther, a conservative university professor, reinvented himself as an agile controversialist and polemical writer. Yet the association we make between the new technology and the new religion was only partly the consequence of observed events. It was also a matter of conscious insistence. Print and Protestantism went together partly because the evangelicals said that this was so. Print, as Luther memorably put it, was God’s highest act of Grace. And many other reformers, notably John Foxe, echoed this insistence that printing had been sent to promote true religion.
