As The Norton Anthology of English Literature says, "By far the larger proportion of surviving literature in Middle as in Old English is religious" (7). This shouldn't be surprising since we know education had a religious affiliation; men were educated, went to "universities" to become clerics. "The church offered a path for gifted commoners to make a career" (7), but left the majority of commoners illiterate. The fact that Latin was the language of education and books were time consuming to produce and expensive only compounded the problem. The situation was alleviated somewhat with William Caxton's introduction to type-setting in 1474, when he printed the first book in English. This