Jean-François Gilmont (1998), 'Printing at the Dawn of the Sixteenth Century', in Jean-François Gilmont (ed.), The Reformation and the Book, trans. Karin Maag, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 10-20.

What was the situation of printed books when the Reformation began? Printing technology and the religious movement centred on Luther met at the precise moment when after decades of fine tuning, the new

invention gained its independence from manuscripts. Thus the first paragraphs of this chapter describe the early stages of printing. But the history of the book is also tied to that of reading, and therefore the development of reading practices at the dawn of the Reformation constitutes another major theme of this analysis. The final sections of this chapter examine the actual technical constraints imposed on the book, on publishing and on printing.