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Gutenberg's printing press made books accessible to a ton of ordinary people, not just the wealthy and the church, so ideas started circulating much faster and within everyone's reach.

Before that, you had to copy everything by hand, which was a nightmare and cost a fortune, whereas with movable type you could print hundreds of copies of the same text in a reasonable amount of time.

This meant that knowledge was no longer a privilege of the few, people could read, learn new things, develop critical thinking and challenge authority, which was fundamental for the Enlightenment and the cultural changes that came after.

In my opinion it's not so much the printing press itself, but the timing - it arrived when people were already hungry to learn new things and could afford to buy books, so it amplified what was already in motion rather than creating it from scratch, like the person who answered before you said.

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