‘Preachers, players and printers… be set up of God, as a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the pope, to bring him down.’ John Foxe was quite sure that the invention of printing was a providential gift by which God hastened the advance of the true church. The link between printing and Protestantism has long been established in the historical imagination. Indeed, the arrival of printing has been seen as the first step in an even greater cultural transformation that incorporated Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. Despite the subtleties of most historical writing on the subject, there is still a tendency towards easy contrasts: medieval against early modern, manuscript against print, Catholic obscurantism against Protestant communication. This has dovetailed with the still-lingering popular narrative which portrays the pre-Reformation church as superstitious, corrupt and unpopular and contrasts it with a Protestant movement which was reformed, biblical, popular and progressive. The still pervasive conclusion is that the printing press was the foundation of Protestantism, because Protestantism was the religion of the book.

This network of assumptions is deeply misleading. There were of course points at which the nexus between print and Protestantism was particularly influential, such as in the German states in the 1520s, or with Foxe's own magisterial work, the Acts and Monuments, in Elizabethan England. The overall picture, however, is very different.