My understanding is that prior to the printing press, books in Europe were hand copied by scribes/monks associated with the church which was basically the center of knowledge and education within Europe at the time. I also read that the printing press was at least partly responsible for the Reformation and the rise of modern science, presumably by increasing the amount of communication between large numbers of people and removing any control the church might have had on content.
Is that an accurate summary? Were there any interesting impacts of the introduction of the printing press that aren't widely known?
Your summary is correct. Put succinctly, the printing press didn’t cause the Reformation but it certainly accelerated it. Printing aided both Protestants and Catholics; each could make their case through pamphlets and short treatises. Steven Ozment estimates that upwards of 10,000 pamphlets appeared in the first half of the sixteenth century. Martin Luther wrote around 30 tracts between 1517 and 1530, published in about 30,000 copies. Most importantly, the bible was printed in over 100 editions in several languages between 1457 and 1500, before the Reformation even began. But it’s worth remembering that the books that rivaled the bible in print runs—the “best sellers of the era”—were boilerplate Catholic works like the 13th-century collection of saints’ lives called [The Golden Legend] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Legend) that was published more frequently than the bible in the early years of printing, or sermon anecdotes called the [Gesta Romanorum] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesta_Romanorum#Editions_and_translations) or Thomas Kempis’ early 15th-century devotional work, [The Imitation of Christ] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_of_Christ). It’s also worth remembering that rates of literacy were still low in this period, especially in the countryside, so printing was limited in what it could accomplish.
Printing did undermine the authority of the church, to which end it tried to censor what it deemed dangerous books through the [Index of Prohibited Books] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum) first issued in 1559. This did stifle intellectual progress to some degree—it certainly threw cold water on some of the best loved classics of the Renaissance—but it did not necessarily stifle scientific progress.
Interesting fact: Johann Gutenberg, traditional “inventor of the printing press,” might never have gotten his invention off the ground but for some bad fortune. He and his partners originally had a joint venture to sell souvenir metal mirrors to pilgrims visiting relics to be displayed at Aachen Cathedral in 1439; they made around 30,000 of them. But a plague struck the city and the pilgrimage had to be postponed, causing him to lose his investment. He turned his attention back to tinkering with printing to recover financially.
The pioneering and most influential book on this subject, though much adjusted by later scholarship, is Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979) abridged as The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983).