I appreciate the great detail you went into in this post to discuss some aspects of the history of the Catholic Church — especially as it relates to Luther and the impact of the printing press (specifically Gutenberg’s press) on literacy and the teaching of Church doctrine.

I mentioned this information briefly this week when I went off on a tangent in one of my posts — I moved into a short discussion of the Church’s reaction to the mass production of books (burning them) and the Church’s reaction to Luther’s actions (excommunicating him and denouncing his ideas) and then compared this book burning/information control to the current situation that we are experiencing with banning and blocking of social networks/blogs in our schools.

I believe that future generations will look back on this time in history in much the same way that we look back on the Rennaissance — a time of great expansion in knowledge-sharing and content development… perhaps even a time of (eventually) great shifts in power as a result of knowledge acquisition.

One thing that readers may not be aware of — and something that I didn’t mention in my post: Until the great shift in literacy as a result of the development of the printing press and mass book production — the Church relied on VISUAL images to teach their doctrine to the illiterate masses. Most of the artists that we are familiar with from the medieval and Rennaissance periods were financially backed by the Church and this is why so much artwork from that time period depicts religious subject matter. I don’t recall if Brown mentions that in Da Vinci Code.

And — I also think that Luther would be blogging if he were alive today

I look forward to the movie as I found the book to be a fun and thrill packed ride through a semi fictional history.