Europe's first universities grew out of motivation to apply the teachings of Jesus and the Bible's cultural mandate to all of life. The first university began in the Italian city of Bologna in 1119. The University of Paris also began before 1200, though a specific year is not available, and Oxford University also has no clear date of origin, but claims it grew rapidly beginning in 1167, when King Henry II banned English students from going to the University of Paris.

Two other Italian universities date from the same period: Siena began in 1203, and Vincenza, 1204. Cambridge dates its beginning from 1209. The universities (the word is Latin for “corporation”) were seen as providing higher educational opportunities to sons of the expanding merchant class. Though still related to the churches and providing a Christian worldview, the universities provided the first higher education for secular vocations, the only educational institutions in most of Europe before then being monasteries. Though monasteries fostered and extended literacy, their main charter was not imparting specialized knowledge.

Secular university studies required something else that was not readily available in the world at that time: nonreligious books. Texts were handwritten by experts, who left them in stationers' stores, where the student, or someone he hired, could go and copy them by hand.

Enhancing the Christian life and worldview was also the main impetus for the beginning of a revolution in publishing. Though some books (especially Bibles) were circulated in Europe prior to the invention of the printing press by using a single block of hand-carved characters for each page, movable type and the printing press for using it were invented by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450s. His first book created after introducing the printing press was the Bible.