Oct. 15, 2010

Today we journeyed to the city of Mainz. The main attraction (that we knew of at least) was the Guttenburg Museum. It was very interesting to go throughout this museum and think that  back in that time era these where printers. The long process of putting all of the letters together to for a line then to keep going until you had a page, that would take so much patience! And that would only have been one page. The process of putting a book together would take weeks, I’m sure. However weeks is much faster than how long it would take the fastest scribe  write the Bible. One of the many advantages to the printing press of that time was that you could print multiple things. When you put a page together you would print that mage multiple time therefore you would end up with multiple books in the end. To that century this was explosive for authors, students, and anyone wanting to make money, learn to read and so on. The printing press made everything so much more accessible. People that weren’t motivated to learn before, were motivated now, because learning was now accessible. I made sure that I got to see some of the original Guttenburg Bibles. They were absolutely beautiful! I thought it was amazing how embellished they were. I also thought it was amazing the amount of security there was involved. Each Bible was in a glass case lined with security wires, hence if the glass were to be broken into an alarm would sound. The room that the Bibles were in was actually a vault. Is that secure enough for you?

We drove on from Mainz and the Guttenburg Museum all the way for a short stop in Worms see the Church there and where Luther’s famous “Diet of Worms” was. I noticed that inside this church the back of the church did not have an organ. It was located on the wall to the right. I wonder why it was this way. Another thing that was vastly different with this church was it stained glass. There weren’t many stories of Saints, or of Christ and the Scriptures. They consisted of larger chunks of colored glass not in any shape at all really. We walked to a Reformation monument and on the way over to it I noticed that all throughout Worms there are statues of dragons. Some of them more vibrantly painted than others, and all posing differently. Very curious. 

Our last stop the day was at a Jewish Cemetery (also in Worms). It was interesting to see such a large cemetery all for Jewish people. We learned about the significance in stacked rocks on a grave stone. It meant that the person was very significant and loved. It is a tradition for the Jewish people to do this rather than put flowers on a grave. I wonder why. All in all, there was a lot of traveling today and I am glad we made stops in these two cities.