ABSTRACT
In the history of the West, the Protestant Reformation is said to be one of the greatest positive forces toward the spread of literacy and schooling. The Reformation involved factors far beyond the religious and theological. Its roots lay in the Middle Ages; economic, political, cultural, and social issues inextricably intertwined to give rise to a deep and bitterly divisive mass movement. Humanism benefited from such new factors as the role of printing, the urban and articulate commercial classes, and the increasingly literate laity; it offered an optimistic, progressive reform program. At the beginning of the century, traditional moral and religious books were popular, but newly developing literary forms were also being published before the Reformation, including collections of sermons and the works of the church fathers. The roles of literacy and print, in a popular rather than an intellectual or theological sense, must be placed in sixteenth-century sociocultural settings.
