The explosion of book-making that followed has long been mythologised as a driving force of progress. By widening book ownership, it facilitated the Protestant Reformation

While Christ looks down approvingly from Heaven, King Henry VIII distributes the Word of God to his people, like Moses bringing the stone tablets down from Mount Sinai. He hands the Bible first to Reformation leaders Lord Cromwell and Lord Cranmer, and then to kneeling clergy and laymen. They in turn preach to an amassed crowd of lower orders, all of whom appear to be men, who gratefully chant “God save the kynge”. Henry reigns over the social order and, thanks to his beneficence, his spiritually hungry subjects have been provided with the Word of God.

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