It is believed that these manuscripts played an important role in
triggering the Renaissance.

Historian Elmer D. Johnson says.
" The role of the monastery library in the preservation of Western culture cannot be denied.
For more or less a thousand years, it was the intellectual heart of Europe,
and without it western civilization would have been a far different world."

The work of copying the Bible helped to keep..
" the intellectual heart of Europe " beating during this period.
And as the Reformation swept through Europe,
the desire to read the Bible motivated ordinary men to cast off
the shackels of illiteracy.

The book the story of Libraries says :
" We find in the Protestant Reformation the beginnings of the idea that every member of society must have
at least enough education to read the Bible.

As theological controversy increased,
the abillty to read a broader range of religious writings became important.
This required not ony the knowledge of how to read ,
but physical access to the books as well."

The Bible thus played a key role in the spread both of libraries and of literacy throughout the Western world.
Then with the invention of the printing press,
huge private and national libraries containing books on a vast array of subjects emerged throught Europe and,
eventually , the rest of the world.