The Lutheran Reformation, arriving in the towns of Estonia in 1523-4, shook the country to its foundations. Apart from political upheavals and cases of iconoclastic pillage, it encouraged the spread of the new art of printing which, in turn, led to the publication of the first books in Estonian. The earliest notion of printed Estonian text, reference to a Lutheran compendium published in Lübeck, dates from 1525.
Fragment of the Wanradt-Koell catechism (1535), the earliest book printed in Estonian still extant	The austere interior of many an Estonian parish church derives from the time of sermon-friendly and effigy-hostile Reformation

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