> Written culture was a huge deal long before the printing press.

The limitation for the first 5,500 years of writing was not so much the technology of writing, as the scale of publishing.

Only priests and nobles could read. The general population of Europe before the printing press couldn't read. Partly because there was no point - they couldn't afford the books even if they could read them.

And partly as control. Remember the Church vehemently opposed the translation of the Bible from Latin, because if the general population could read it they'd start making their own minds up about what it said.

Right. Then Gutenberg’s presses enabled the bible to be published in German, French, English, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and English. Bibles were distributed to individual parishes where priests could conduct their own sermons without reference to a central authority.