Standard narratives credit the printing press with igniting the Reformation, as if cheap pamphlets alone converted a continent. A more cautious scholarship resists this technological determinism. Presses, it observes, existed for decades before the upheaval without provoking one, and many regions saturated with print remained untouched by reform. What the press supplied, on this account, was not a cause but an amplifier: it spread arguments faster and farther once other conditions, resentment of church wealth, sympathetic princes, a vernacular readership, were already in place. The revised claim is easy to caricature as denying the press any role, but its proponents intend something narrower. They ask only that a powerful tool not be mistaken for the grievances and alliances that decided where, and whether, the tool would be picked up.