In 1521 Martin Luther spent a tense and frustrating year in the Wartburg Castle. Five years previously he had been virtually unknown outside the narrow circle of his colleagues in the German Congregation of the Augustinian Hermits order. Now he was one of the most notorious men in Germany, a condemned heretic and a German cause célèbre. His incarceration in the Wartburg came immediately after his appearance at the German Imperial Diet, an interview forced on a reluctant emperor by the German princes. Now he was a fugitive, an outlaw, living under the protection of his own ruler, the elector of Saxony, who had his own reasons not to surrender Luther for punishment for his heresies.

Jean Calvin and Martin Luther never met, a circumstance neither of them had much cause to regret. While Martin Luther fought his existential struggle with the papacy in the 1520s, Calvin was still in receipt of a clerical prebend; the German church was well established before Calvin was forced, with some hesitation, to throw in his lot with the reformers. What both men shared was a clear understanding of the power of print. For Luther, this was an instinctive grasp of pamphleteering, how a direct appeal to a lay audience could neutralise the traditional sources of church power. Calvin’s journey was more studied. His first quest for authorial fame was a painful humiliation, a callow and premature attempt to walk in the footsteps of Erasmus. From the failure of this project the young scholar learned an important lesson, that if the print industry had ever hastened to follow the humanist agenda, those days were long gone. This was now a pragmatic alliance. Printers loved Luther because he made them money; his Catholic opponents struggled with the medium because they did not. Calvin, too, in his studied, thoughtful way, would conquer print, and in the process make of Geneva a second powerhouse of Reformation publishing. But like so much else in his life, this was a pragmatic triumph, an application of his extraordinary intelligence to a necessary task.

When Johann Gutenberg successfully concluded his experiments with the new technique of multiple copying, news of the new invention spread with extraordinary rapidity. To posterity it has seemed quite natural that the text with which Gutenberg announced his new invention should be his famous 42-line Bible. Yet this choice was more daring than is sometimes recognised. The first half of the fifteenth century had seen a large increase in book production in many parts of Europe. But this growth in the production of manuscript books had not embraced texts of the Bible. The high point of manuscript production of bibles had been reached and passed in the thirteenth century. The large numbers created in this fertile period seem to have sufficed to meet demand in the succeeding two centuries. If gentry or noble households had acquired any religious texts in the first half of the fifteenth century then these were far more likely to have been books of hours, a class of book reproduced in massive numbers in this period.

Yet Gutenberg chose a Bible, perhaps not fully aware of how challenging a technical task he had undertaken. The task would consume him for over two years, and ruin him financially. Although the Bible was a technical triumph, it effectively ended Gutenberg's active career as a printer. In the years and decades that followed the Bible would continue to be among the most challenging projects that a printer could undertake; and yet many would do so, bringing to the market many hundreds of editions, in literally millions of copies, and in every variety of size, language and textual arrangement.

In consequence the Bible would come, in the 150 years after the invention of print, to occupy a special place both in the transformation of the European book world and in the cultural history of its peoples. It became a prime motivator in change in the geography of the book industry, yet for workers in the industry it also encapsulated the pitfalls that lay in wait for those who ventured too far, in a business where fortunes were as easily lost as won.

It is possible that Gutenberg's experiments with printing may have begun some years before his arrival in Mainz in 1444. During the previous five years in Strasbourg he had entered into a number of business associations.

On the basis of the foregoing discussion we can now be reasonably satisfied that the production of books in the sixteenth century was deeply shaped by the organization of the market – both the structure of the printing industry, in a series of discrete and quite distinct national markets, and a sophisticated transnational system of distribution and marketing. These industry issues conditioned the book world at all levels: the market in scholarly books, as much as the production and sale of pamphlets. Our purpose now must be to try and locate the book in the culture of persuasion.

There can be little doubt that books had a vast and important role to play in shaping the new religious cultures of the sixteenth century. Books were bought in vast quantities, and religious books dominated the market at all levels: at both ends of the spectrum and almost all points in between. From the learned Latin biblical commentaries of Calvin, Brenz and Oecolampadius, to the ‘godly ballad’, with a whole host of Bibles, catechisms, works of devotion and Flugschriften in the middle ranges, the market in religious books dominated the sixteenth-century book world. None doubted their impact in forming opinion – certainly not Luther and his colleagues, who wrote so indefatigably and lavished praise upon the ‘new’ invention; certainly not the Catholic authorities who tried to limit their circulation by censorship and proscription. But in some senses the book has suffered precisely because its influence seems so obvious.

We began this book by emphasizing that the decision to adhere to the new evangelical teaching was often painful, and pregnant with consequences. It meant breaking or reordering a whole web of associations and loyalties, to family, friends, workmates and even the local state power. It could mean separating oneself from comfortable regimes and familiar practices; it called into question the validity of customs practised with relish for a whole lifetime, even for generations. Sometimes the Reformation demanded an impossible choice between conflicting loyalties. Kristen Neuschel has offered an evocative picture of the dilemma posed to the French nobility who owed fealty to the leader of the Huguenot party, Louis de Condé, at the beginning of the Religious Wars. Many were devoutly committed to their Catholic faith; but all other accustomed social tradition urged the precedence of a duty of loyalty to their sworn lord. Inevitably different families, or different members of the same family, resolved these difficulties in contrasting ways. When Condé emerged as leader of the insurgent Huguenot party, some sent their excuses or boldly proclaimed a higher duty to crown and religion. Others dutifully gathered behind Condé's standard at Orleans. Similar unpalatable choices faced thousands of men and women wherever the evangelical message was heard and became embedded in the local culture; many, even among those who headed the call to adhere to the new confessions, did so with grave misgivings and very mixed emotions.

By 1580 Europe's confessional boundaries were essentially fixed. The British kingdoms of England and Scotland were secure under the control of Protestant monarchs; in France a Calvinist minority was entrenched, but it was clear the nation would never be converted. In the Netherlands the Protestant north would never be recovered by Spain; the southern provinces would gradually assume a distinct Catholic identity. In Germany the oldest Lutheran states were now entering their third generation since the adoption of a Protestant church order. The Scandinavian kingdoms had also settled to life with a Lutheran state church. Only in eastern Europe would the tides shift in a significant manner, as the Habsburg victories of the 1620s allowed the suppression of the previously dominant Protestant estates of Hungary and Bohemia. That was for the future. For the moment the reality of a confessionally divided Europe was a generally accepted fact of European life and politics.

It would be wrong, however, to believe that this relative stability, so clear in retrospect, had calmed the passions raised by the first Reformation conflicts. On the contrary, relations between the faiths remained fractious and unstable, coloured above all by fear. On the Protestant side, this was understandable enough. In 1580 memories of the terrible massacres of Paris (1572) and Antwerp (1576) were still fresh, a reminder of Catholic perfidy, and the imminent danger that hard-won freedoms could still be dashed away.

This book was conceived in 1991, when I made my first visit to Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, as it was then called. Standing in front of one of the display cases in the Lutherhalle Museum, I came face to face with a cascade of Flugschriften. The visual impact of this great heap of Reformation writings, piled up seemingly at random, was very strong, and set me musing on the contemporary impact of such literature: the extraordinarily innovative manner in which the Reformation made its appeal for public support, and the manner, perhaps very different, in which this appeal was received. I have been ruminating on these questions ever since, even as other writing projects have directed my immediate attention to more specific tasks. This book is an attempt to give these thoughts some sort of systematic expression. With the passage of years since 1991 I have obviously read and learned a very great deal, working primarily on the experience of Reformation in four main areas: Germany, the Netherlands, France and the two kingdoms of Britain, England and Scotland. Much of this has been learned through the guidance of friends and professional colleagues, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge here the help and inspiration of scholars on both sides of the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. Many people have guided my exploration of the various literary disciplines and media explored in this volume.

Luther and his colleagues would make much play with the concept of the new evangelical sermon. We should certainly not underestimate the element of novelty, and the surprise of the new. The priest who commandeered the pulpit – often his own pulpit – to launch a bold attack on time-honoured practices and the doctrine of the community he served was bound to cause a sensation. The impact on his congregation, moved, excited, troubled or appalled, was clearly profound. But it was so precisely because the sermon was so fundamental a part of church life. It also played an important role in the wider information culture of pre-modern society. In a world where most information continued to be conveyed by word of mouth, few could doubt that preaching represented one of the primary means of communication with a wider public.

This was a world the reformers instinctively understood. Few doubted that, if they were to reach their audience, it would be through the medium of the word: and that meant in the first instance the word preached, as much as their published works. Many of those who would make up the first generation of the leaders of the Reformation had made their reputation first as preachers; they owed both their local reputation and the opportunity to contribute to the new evangelical movement to their skill in the pulpit. All, without exception, regarded preaching as fundamental to their duty as pastors, and to their evangelical mission.