Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities

In “Imagined Communities,” Benedict Anderson speculated that the transition from printing work in Latin to printing in a wide variety of vernacular created space for the idea of nationalism to form and initiate an alternative option to religion. Before 1500, roughly 77% of the books printed were in Latin, as estimated by French historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, which resulted in an ever widening gap between the literate and illiterate. Once Latin was usurped by the vernacular around the year 1640, the spread of new ideas to a wider range of people allowed for more independent thinking, and for the gap between the Monarchy and the illiterate to diminish since people no longer relied on their religion for information or communication.