I don&#x27;t think this book is it, but I&#x27;ve been trying to find a book that covers the spread of literacy as it relates to the invention of the press, i.e. the &quot;Learn to Code&quot; movement of the 16th-century, in that it must not have been immediately evident that learning to read and write for oneself would have a lot of practical value (e.g. &quot;Why do you need to do that when we have priests who talk directly to God? And what if you misread the Scriptures and f*ck everything up?&quot;).<p>I gather that the advent of mass literacy, as we know it, is likely influenced by many other factors, such as changes in agriculture and, well, the Industrial Revolution, and other such things that changed how we work and live. But I&#x27;m interested in the century or two after Gutenberg, what the valuation of literacy was now that there was something that made its fruits much more pragmatically accessible?