In March of 1518, Desiderius Erasmus sent his good friend Sir Thomas More a curious document that had recently come his way. It was the program for an academic event that was to have been staged four months earlier in a backwater university in an out-of-the-way north German town under the rule of the Ernestine branch of the Wettin Saxon Dukes. Originally printed in a broadsheet edition at the university print shop—the sixteenth-century equivalent of Kinko’s—at the behest of an obscure professor of theology, the program had already been reprinted in the imperial free city of Nuremberg as well as in Leipzig and Basel. In Basel, a cosmopolitan town of great culture, the broadsheet had been transformed into an elegant pamphlet complete with Roman numerals and careful spacing of the text to enhance readability, an unusual treatment for what might otherwise be viewed as academic ephemera. It was this edition of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses against papal indulgences that Erasmus, then resident in the Low Countries, sent to More, a testimony to the burgeoning print culture of the sixteenth century and its role in the rapid dissemination of the ideas that drove the movement that eventually became known as the Reformation. The improbability of such events is best summed up by the shocked reaction of George, the Catholic Duke of Albertine Saxony, “That a single monk, out of such a hole, could undertake a Reformation, is not to be tolerated.”

By the time Martin Luther died