The Reformation Centenary Broadsheet

Religious historian Karen Armstrong on the broadsheet: "Well it's very noticeable in this picture, the emphasis on the written word. Up until this point, religion had been precisely about listening for what lay beyond language. People had thought not in terms of words so much, or concepts, or arguments, but in terms of images, icons, in terms of music, in terms of action. Now, because of the invention of printing which helped Luther disseminate his ideas, everything is going to become much more wordy. And that has been rather the plague of western religion ever since, because we are endlessly now stuck in words. The printing enabled people for the first time to own their own Bibles, and this meant that they read them in an entirely different way."