Alternate history what-if explored with plausible cascading consequences

For "what if the printing press was never invented," the immediate effects layer discusses slower spread of the Reformation given handwritten pamphlets' limited reach, grounded in how manuscript culture actually functioned. The medium-term layer traces likely slower literacy growth and continued Church control over information, flagged as reasonably well-supported by comparison to regions with delayed printing adoption. The long-term layer speculates, clearly marked as more uncertain, about a delayed scientific revolution given how print sped up the circulation of experimental results. It closes with the counterintuitive point that oral and scribal knowledge networks were more resilient than commonly assumed, so the actual slowdown might be smaller than the intuitive guess.