How could Gutenberg and Caxton have known that the invention of
the printing press would be a massive force for the
democratisation of knowledge and central to the transformation
of a feudal society into the beginnings of a recognisably modern
world via the Renaissance and the Reformation? The ability of
printing presses to produce a massive volume of information,
especially on religion and science, helped to break the elitist
monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church. Prior to this, knowledge
was largely the preserve of a small, secular and religious
elite. The production of a manuscript was a slow process,
centrally controlled—as we might describe it in today’s terms,
it was a closed source, proprietary system which would have got
the imprimatur from the Cathedral of St. Redmonds (the blessings
of the holy St.Vista be upon them). Once the printing presses
got up to full speed a vernacular explosion of information went
exponential and one could reasonably describe it as the
equivalent of the first non-electronic