Die Mitte der Reformation. Eine Studie zu Buchdruck und Publizistik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, zu ihren Akteuren und deren Strategien, Inszenierungsund Ausdrucksformen by Thomas Kaufmann, and: Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation by Amy Nelson Burnett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die Mitte der Reformation. Eine Studie zu Buchdruck und Publizistik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, zu ihren Akteuren und deren Strategien, Inszenierungsund Ausdrucksformen by Thomas Kaufmann, and: Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation by Amy Nelson Burnett John A. Maxfield Die Mitte der Reformation. Eine Studie zu Buchdruck und Publizistik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, zu ihren Akteuren und deren Strategien, Inszenierungsund Ausdrucksformen. By Thomas Kaufmann. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. xx + 846 pp. Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation. By Amy Nelson Burnett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xx + 524 pp. Both of these extensive and significant works display the fruits of decades of research by well-established scholars of the German Reformation at the height of productive careers. Each explores the dynamics of book production and its central role in shaping and spreading the religious ideas of (mostly) Protestant reformers in the early sixteenth century. Both books focus on the 1520s as the critical decade wherein the Reformation was shaped through controversy and polemic into a cultural movement that effected sweeping change not only in the church and Christianity but also in European society. Kaufmann is a German church historian (Professor of Church History at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) while Burnett is an intellectual and cultural historian at an American state university (Professor of History at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln). These are very different vocational contexts, but both scholars show how rich are the rewards of integrating intellectual, religious, and theological history with interests in the broader cultural impacts of the Reformation. Each study shows that the essentially religious and social movements called the Reformation were shaped by the new technology and industry of moveable-type printing, and that the book culture was itself shaped by Protestant reformers and the religious and social changes they sought to instill in European culture. Kaufmann's book is the broader of the two in its subject matter, exploring the "middle of the Reformation" (with allusion in the preface to previous works published by Mohr Siebeck: Das Ende der [End Page 448] Reformation [2003] and Der Anfang der Reformation [2012]) through the printing industry and its actors, strategies, forms of staging and expression. The book is structured, after a brief introduction, in three very long chapters (the first nearly 200 pages, the others more than 200 pages). The first focuses on the reformers as "book people" (Büchermenschen) and explores such topics as how books were collected and possessed, written about in correspondence among a European intelligentsia under the spell of the Humanist movement, controlled, repressed, burnt and censored. Kaufmann uses the reformer Johannes Oecolampadius as an exemplary "book actor" whose activities are well-documented and who displays the variety of activities Humanist scholars carried out in this era of the universal Renaissance man of the book: author, contributor, editor, lecturer, buyer and reader. Several of Martin Luther's autographs are then used to investigate the process through which a handwritten text becomes a printed book, the author deeply involved often at every step of the process, frequently to his own frustration with "poor" printers or the personal, economic, and sometimes political dynamics of the publishing business. Kaufmann frequently presents and analyzes reproductions of title pages (with their borders and central images), handwritten manuscripts with annotations and marginalia, and book illustrations. The second chapter explores how the printers went through a kind of reformation. While by 1500 some three hundred firms were active in some sixty-five cities, within a few decades several cities (and one small university town) became overwhelmingly dominant in the printing business: Augsburg, Basel, Erfurt, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Strassburg, and Wittenberg. "Printer families" dominated the industry, developing firms that were passed down (and multiplied or expanded) from father to son or sometimes son-in-law: especially noteworthy are the Petri firm in Basel and Nuremberg; the Schott family in Strassburg; the Schöffers in Mainz, Worms, and Strassburg; and the Lotters in Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Magdeburg. In the third chapter Kaufmann investigates the literary and publicity strategies, genres or kinds of texts, and forms of expression that scholars, reformers, and their publishers developed. Academic forms included theses for...