Lee Palmer Wandel

In the sixteenth century, as Western Christendom fragmented, pastors took up the recent technology of print to teach, as Martin Luther wrote, “what every Christian should know.”  Catechesis was much older than the Reformation, and late medieval clergy had turned to printed codices to teach the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer, but no council, no Pope, had decreed that knowledge necessary to be a "Christian."  In 1529, in calling for Christians to make their bodies the medium of the printed text, Luther named a new relationship among codex, knowledge, Christianity, and person.