This was a survival from the age of the scribe in which abbreviations, especially of Latin, were heavily used to save time and, more importantly, to ensure the neat justification of the right-hand margin. Given that justified margins could now be achieved by adding metal spacers of the required width between characters and words, and that contractions, which required extra characters in every font, made the job of setting type and replacing it after use so much more cumbersome, it was surprising that the practice only gradually died out during the century.
Naturally, errors were made during the process of typesetting, which required the compositor to assemble a mirror image of the required text. Mistakes could also be made when laying out the forms in the exact manner required for each format of book, so that pages might appear in the wrong order. Proofreading could catch the worst slips, and lists of corrigenda could be added to the final page, or a loose leaf might be pasted in; but cheap pamphlets generally did not warrant the extra expense involved.
Early 16th-century pamphlets are therefore crude affairs, far from the triumphs of art and craft we normally associate with early printed books.
In later centuries, they were traded for their value as scrap paper rather than as reading matter. Circulated and read unbound, many must have fallen to pieces long before they could meet such a fate. The important thing about them, then as now, was not their appearance but their contents.
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Sixteenth-century pamphlets covered a wide variety of subjects, from cookery and books of trades to astrology and works of traditional theology and devotion. But in the s, the vast bulk of pamphlets was religious in character and related to the growing demand for reform of the Church. Typically, they portrayed the Church as a corrupt institution that oppressed the consciences of the laity even as it emptied their pockets. Monks and friars were excoriated for their hypocrisy in professing poverty while amassing great wealth. Similarly, they portrayed the Pope, while arrogating to himself the title of Vicar of Christ, as preferring the pomp and circumstance of his court to the hard life of the first disciples and of their Master.
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They claimed that the straightforward message of the Gospel had been displaced by human inventions—canon law, scholastic theology, the cult of the saints, masses for the dead—and that the Italian-led Church had for too long exploited the proverbial slow-wittedness of the Teutons. But at last, they proclaimed, even the Germans were waking up to their misfortune.
There is indeed much in the pamphlet literature of the Reformation, both in content and in tone, to remind us of the Internet age and its predilection for conspiracy theories. Balancing the negative messages, however, were positive elements, proclaiming enlightenment through the notion of the open Bible, liberation through the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the restoration of right order by providing support and education for the poor. These arguments, both positive and negative, might be presented in a number of ways. Some Flugschriften were reasoned expositions, corresponding to pamphlets in the modern sense.
Far more numerous were those that adopted a sermonic style, and indeed were often straightforward transcriptions of sermons actually preached. The letter was a form much favored by humanists, in imitation of classical models. But when Luther addressed open letters to persecuted communities, his inspiration was more likely the epistles of the New Testament and the early fathers. Another very popular genre was the prose dialogue between two or more antagonists.
In addition to classifying pamphlets in terms of genre, it is also possible to classify them in terms of subject matter. Ozment has identified seven major areas covered by Reformation pamphlets: Such classifications by style and subject matter are artificial and, as one might expect, a high proportion of pamphlets straddle two or more genres a treatise in the form of a letter, for example , or deal with more than one subject.
The pamphleteers were, after all, addressing a general public, not a specific audience with a single interest.
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Their variety of approach is nowhere more evident than in individual topics treated in the pamphlets. The message of the pamphlets was not conveyed by words alone. Many pamphlets and most broadsheets were enlivened by woodcut illustrations. But sometimes, as with the broadsheets, woodcuts could be related to the text in a more appropriate way.
The precise relationship between text and image, and the effectiveness of this relationship in the context of a largely illiterate society, is still the subject of debate. During the 15th century, woodcuts of the saints, usually associated with pilgrimage sites, circulated widely both before and after the advent of the printing press. Finally, woodcuts were used to illustrate apocalyptic broadsheets frequently critical of ecclesiastical institutions.
On the eve of the Reformation, therefore, there existed a repertoire of printed images with a wide range of religious associations, from the devotional and edifying to the critical, which could be drawn on by Protestant illustrators both to condemn the Church of their day and to present an alternative ideology in positive terms.
But how successful were they in this dual aim? It is reasonable to suppose that negative images that ridiculed or vilified the authorities would, like present-day political cartoons, have a far greater effect than more constructive images. This depicts and describes a misshapen calf born in , known as the Monk-Calf of Freiburg, and a strange creature found dead on the banks of the Tiber in , known as the Pope-Ass.
The explanation of portents was a stock-in-trade of the late medieval broadsheets, and the Wittenberg reformers were able to harness anti-Roman feeling, a universal interest in strange phenomena, and fascination with the grotesque to good effect: Johann Cochlaeus and Pope Leo X had names that invited their immediate transformation into a snail and a lion respectively. Negative images were undoubtedly striking and had an important place in the arsenal of Reformation publicists.
But even his raw data are a useful corrective to the common assumption that such illustrations were predominantly negative. It should also be noted that many apparently negative illustrations in reality had a dual nature, conveying a positive message alongside the negative. Several of the most famous Reformation woodcuts possess this quality, especially those that were deliberately constructed as a diptych, or that otherwise expressed a contrast between truth and falsehood. Examples of this genre include the late c. It is therefore difficult to make a hard and fast distinction between positive and negative illustrations in these pamphlets, and still more difficult to conclude with Scribner that the negative had a greater popular appeal.
A similar degree of agnosticism seems called for when considering the public at which these illustrations were aimed. The traditional understanding of images as the books of the unlearned certainly underlies much Reformation publishing, in which illustrations are explicitly described as being for the sake of the simpler sort. But it has been pointed out that such illustrations often make little or no sense without some knowledge of the accompanying text.
Two other angels, representing Reason and Justice, are portrayed as ineffective in comparison. Like the double-entendres of British pantomime, which can win both innocent laughter from those of tender years and salacious guffaws from adults, such images were clearly designed to work at different levels simultaneously.
The generous use of illustrations in printed religious matter was characteristic of the Lutheran Reformation but not of Calvinism, which in the 16th century demonstrated what has been called a fear of graphic representation. Scribner has shown how pictures of the reformer, often in saintly guise complete with halo or other sign of divine favor, came to be treated with as much devotion and superstition as any religious image of the Middle Ages.
The peculiarly Lutheran predilection for images had another result, in the illustration of Lutheran bibles. John, most famously the depictions of the beast in the temple Rev. The tiaras proved controversial and were quickly withdrawn; but their original inclusion exemplifies the remarkable freedom Luther felt able to exercise in relation to the form of the sacred text, provided that its essence was retained. This was not so much a case of a Bible specifically prepared for the laity, as if layfolk were second-class Christians who did not need exposure to the real thing, but a means of preparing the laity to access the Bible.
A large proportion—perhaps around half—of Reformation pamphlets omit any indication of author or printer or provenance or date, partly to avoid the risk of prosecution, partly perhaps to indicate a mighty but anonymous swell of popular support for reform. But often these anonymous pamphlets keep their secrets. Nonetheless, a great number of pamphlets do carry reliable information, and allow us to make fairly firm generalizations.
It is a relatively straightforward task to name the most widely published of the evangelical pamphleteers. Perhaps more surprising is that the names of four laymen appear on the list: Melanchthon, Sachs, Hutten, and Cronberg. Interestingly, this list would seem to be fairly representative of pamphleteers as a whole. Thirty-two percent had backgrounds in religion, while 42 percent were secular clergy. The category of lay writers can be broken down still further.
Miriam Chrisman has studied the writings of all ninety-four German lay propaganda pamphleteers Protestant and Catholic active in the period to , and has determined their social status as follows: Hutten and Cronberg came from the second most populated group, the nobility. Chrisman further identifies six 6. Three of the lay pamphleteers are identified as Catholic. A lay category omitted by Chrisman was that of peasant writers. Some thirty pamphlets were published under the names of self-styled peasants in this period, but Chrisman assumes that these were in reality the work of educated clerical reformers masquerading as peasants.
The same tendency to social and cultural mobility is evident in the case of the printers who produced pamphlets. Printers were typically drawn from the ranks of highly skilled manual workers—silversmiths, goldsmiths, engravers, and painters—who could use many of their skills in the art and technology of printing. Others came up from the ranks, as it were, journeymen who composed the type or pulled the sheets and who had amassed enough capital to set up in business for themselves. Yet others were highly educated men: On the one hand was Heinrich Seybold of Strasbourg, whose printing business was ancillary to his main profession as a physician.
As with all the regulated trades, it was common for businesses to pass to others through marriage or re-marriage as well as through direct male inheritance; but it was unusual for women to run presses themselves for any length of time, or to carry out business in their own name. The printers can justifiably be called unsung heroes of the Reformation, because of the dangers they ran in handling religious pamphlets.
In addition to the usual commercial risks, publishers of such material in the Empire, between and , were acting in contravention of the Edict of Worms. But others clearly worked in accordance with their own religious convictions, such as the Catholics Peter Quentel at Cologne, Alexander Weissenhorn at Ingolstadt, who printed for Eck, and Nicholas Wolrab at Leipzig, who printed for Cochlaeus. The greatest risks were run by those who printed Anabaptist works, who could not rely on a friendly council but could depend on the hostility of Protestants and Catholics alike. One such was the Nuremberg printer Hans Hergot, who was executed in for printing the pamphlet The New Transformation of a Christian Life , which describes a communalist utopia.
The tragic example of Hergot and his vision of a society free from the tyranny of property reminds us how socially conservative the 16th century was. But in spite of its conservatism and deep concern with matters of status and rank not even Hergot proposed the outright abolition of the nobility , it was also a period of great social mobility and the breaking down of time-honored distinctions. The role of the clergy was partly confirmed, partly further undermined, by such lay movements as the devotio moderna and the popularity of lay-controlled confraternities.
The Reformation, when it came, was led by clergy and monks, who preached the open Bible and the priesthood of all believers, and in doing so undermined their own position in society. We can see from the background and education of both pamphleteers and printers that they, no less than the pamphlets they produced, inhabited the social and cultural meeting-point of worlds hitherto kept apart.
Pamphlets were ephemeral productions designed to be read as soon as they came off the press. The efforts described above of pamphleteers and printers to design, produce, and market these little books would have been wasted without the prospect of an immediate, paying readership. Unfortunately, this is the aspect of the process we can say least about with any degree of certainty. Much invaluable work has been done on the inventories of books sometimes attached to 16th-century wills. It seems that our understanding of pamphlet-consumption is destined to lag behind our understanding of pamphlet production.
Despite over a century and a half of intensive research, the phenomenon of printing, propaganda, and public opinion in the time of Martin Luther remains enigmatic. The amount of printed material that has survived is considerable, and through such developments as the Universal Short-Title Catalogue and the progressive digitization of library holdings, it is now more accessible than ever before. Academics who conducted their doctoral research before the late s can only envy the facilities available to their present-day successors.
However, there is much we still do not know about this mass of material. We do not know how representative were the views they contain, or how effective these publications were at persuading others of those views. Precisely because it has been, and remains, so enigmatic, the field of Reformation printing has been perhaps more than usually vulnerable to the vagaries of scholarly fashion. Before suggesting how this field is likely to develop in future, it might be instructive briefly to review the manner in which it has been treated in the past. The terms reinforced the idea that Reformation pamphlets were cheap, crude, and aesthetically unprepossessing artefacts of far less interest to the bibliographer than literary works of more lasting value, and it is fair to say that, because of this, pamphlets received little scholarly attention until the second half of the 19th century.
The case for studying pamphlets as a worthwhile subject of historical and theological inquiry in their own right was first put seriously by Gottfried Blochwitz in a article. He concluded that these pamphlets were evidence that Luther had disseminated his message successfully to every level of society, even the lowest. But given the personal and practical difficulties Gravier must have faced in writing about a German national hero in German-occupied France, his work deserves to be considered a landmark study.
Perhaps because of the enthusiasm with which pamphlet studies were prosecuted in the Nazi era, the immediate post-war years saw a decline of interest. The development of ready-made statistical programs for mainframe computers in the s and s enabled historians who were not programming specialists to access computers for the manipulation of large bodies of data. The analysis of catalogue entries of 16th-century book collections, broken down by author, date, provenance, publisher, language, format, and so on, was pioneered by R. Cole in his study of the Gustav Freytag pamphlet collection. First, it meant that large bibliographies could be hosted online and laid the foundation for the holy grail of researchers, a union catalogue of all 16th-century holdings extant in libraries.
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Secondly, and perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this entry, digital copies of holdings of regional German libraries are being made accessible online free of charge. This service lacks the sophistication of an equivalent paid-for service such as Early English Books Online which alongside digital images provides the machine-readable text of the books , but is nonetheless likely to revolutionize the study of German Reformation pamphlets once again. Pioneered by French scholars such as Lucien Febvre, it attempts to locate printing in its social and cultural context and is therefore an arm of cultural history.
Something of its vitality can be gauged from the Library of the Written Word series, published by Brill under the direction of Andrew Pettegree. The third factor, which has particularly characterized German-language studies, is the post-war growth of methods for assessing the effectiveness of mass communications. The result has been an unlikely alliance of capitalist and Marxist methodologies brought to bear on the Reformation pamphlet.
The public sphere approach has had the effect of demonstrating the importance of context when discussing German Reformation propaganda. First, it is now usual to speak of a communication process in which the public were not mere recipients of a propaganda message but active participants within the Reformation public sphere. It is also acknowledged that, for various reasons, the Reformation public sphere that obtained in Germany was not replicated elsewhere, and therefore that the German experience cannot be taken as indicative of the European experience as a whole.
Opportunities for getting to grips with German Reformation pamphlets are understandably limited for those who lack a reading knowledge of 16th-century German and in some cases Latin. Scarizzi, A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images. It is unfortunate that more anthologies of Reformation pamphlets do not exist in English translation, though there are examples of German equivalents, which are less forbidding to the learner than a digitized or even a real pamphlet.
More recent anthologies include a series that originated in the German Democratic Republic and reflects Marxist principles of selection: Many examples of printed broadsheets can be found in Max Geisberg and W. For the more advanced student, the digitized holdings of German regional libraries are proving to be a wonderful, free, resource.
The process is not yet complete, but it has already transformed the field, especially for scholars based outside Germany. The best finding aid for German pamphlets since has been the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16 , abbreviated as VD As of April , about 30 percent of the entries in VD16 had been digitized.
Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, — The German Nation and Martin Luther. Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Cambridge University Press, The Reformation and the Book. The Rhetoric of the Reformation. The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation. Yale University Press, Pettegree, Andrew, and Matthew Hall. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation.
Oxford University Press, Fortress Press, ; see Table 1 on 18f. Klett-Cotta, , Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Cited in Elizabeth L. Cambridge University Press, , Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland , ed. Klett-Cotta, , 25—39 , at Other anti-book-proliferation sentiments can be found at 6: Editions du Cerf, , 61f.
Contrast the approach taken by Steven Ozment in Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution New York: A Guide to Research St. Center for Reformation Research, ; W. Center for Reformation Research, ; David Whitford, ed. Truman State University Press, Johann Cochlaeus, Auff Luthers Trostbrieff an ettliche zu Leiptzigk, Antwort und grundtliche unterricht, was mit denselbigen gehandelt Dresden: Cochlaeus makes this point in an interesting foreword, in which he compares the huge sums wasted each year on heretical books in Germany with the fabulous wealth accruing to those more loyal Catholic realms, Spain and Portugal, from their newfound lands.
Martin Arnold, Handwerker als theologische Schriftstelle: Peter Matheson, Argula von Grumbach: Otto Clemen —; repr.
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Andrew Pettegree questions whether this would have been a widespread practice, given the strict social distance between the literate and the illiterate. Cambridge University Press, , — Klett-Cotta, , 77— Irish Academic Press, , 83— Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation , second edition Oxford: Oxford University Press, , xv. The concept of hybridization is borrowed from McLuhan. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda , 39 and Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion , ff. Geringe Polarisierung, unklare Mehrheiten und starke Personalisierung: Zwischen Langeweile und Extremen: Wahlkampfkommunikation im intertemporalen Vergleich.
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