A show on PBS right now (started 10:00pm Tuesday 10-Feb-2009) is about the translation of the early Christian bible to native tongues. The Catholic Church and many countries made it heresy to translate the bible into the vulgar, but people after reading various “heretical” translations started creating many vulgar translations.
While I knew a lot of the stories and history around this, it gave more of an insight to the lives and deaths of those men who translated the bible. This of course opened the way for people to have a bible at home and allow people to study religion on their own.
Of course not only did this lead to the protestant reformation, but also led to other more radical ideas. Not exactly what the original reformers had in mind, but it did happen.
For more information on the PBS show, see here.
Again a very interesting show.
I believe the Catholic Church for the most part wanted to retain power over their members by denying them the ability to read scripture for themselves. There is validity though in fears that people would misinterpret scripture or translators would (purposely or not) mistranslate them.