Printing, Prints and Propaganda

Abstract

Abstract This book is a study of visual propaganda, and of its role in the dissemination of the evangelical movement during the first half-century of the Reformation in Germany. A good deal has been written about the importance of printed propaganda for the spread of the Reformation, and the contribution of visual propaganda to this process has often been recognised, but it has been the subject of no thorough or systematic investigation. This study attempts to plug that gap, but it also seeks to go further, and to examine how the Reformation may have impinged on the broadest masses of the people in sixteenth-century Germany. This is the sense in which the term ‘popular’ is used in the title, rather than the other meaning ‘most acclaimed’ or ‘most sought after’. Its argument is that through a study of visual propaganda we may gain a wider understanding of how the Reformation appealed to common folk than by concentrating attention more narrowly on printed propaganda alone.