Reformation und Buch: Akteure und Strategien frühreformatorischer Druck - erzeugnisse / The Reformation and the Book: Protagonists and Strategies of Early Reformation Printing. Ed. by Thomas Kaufmann and Elmar Mittler

Abstract

The quincentenary of the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 predictably occasioned many publications of various kinds and, given the extensive use made by the Reformers, Luther in particular, of the still relatively new art of printing, reflections on the theme ‘The Reformation and the Book’ were not going to be in short supply. Another wave of such studies may confidently be expected in 2022 when the five-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Luther's New Testament translation is marked. The present volume comprises fourteen contributions (eleven in German, three in English), not all of which can be discussed individually here. In some respects, several of the contributions cover similar ground to that dealt with by Jean-François Gilmont and others in La Réforme et le livre: l’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v. 1570) (Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1990), reissued in English as The Reformation and the Book (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), and in various other studies from the pens of Francis Higman, Andrew Pettegree, and others. Thus the essays by Gerald Chaix, ‘Book, Reformation and Counter-Reformation in France’ (pp. 145–58), Marieke van Delft, ‘Researching Printing in the Low Countries (1500–1550)’ (pp. 159–71), Wolfgang Undorf, ‘Reformation without Luther?—The Transnational Printing Culture in Denmark and Sweden during the Reformation Era’ (pp. 263–80), and Otfried Czaika, ‘Printing and the Reformation in Sweden and Finland’ (pp. 281–301) deal with fairly extensive geographical areas and offer relatively little beyond what the aforementioned studies already presented, though we do find shifted emphases here and there and also updated statistics, thanks to ongoing work on the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts (VD16) and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (USTC). Marieke van Delft, for example, notes that USTC contains almost one thousand more titles than Nijhoff and Kronenberg's Nederlandsche bibliographie van 1500 tot 1540 (The Hague, 1923–71).