Some Methodological Considerations

This book takes advantage of several characteristics of early sixteenth-century printing. Printers in the sixteenth century were in the business to make money. They might also publish out of conviction and altruism, but they still had to make a profit over time or they would be forced out of business. At the very least, then, we should be able to assume that the printer expected that there would be a market for his product. If he were correct in his expectation, then the printing of a work is a valid although indirect measure of public interest. If he was wrong, of course, he took a loss. But if the printer reprinted the work several times, and this is often the case with Luther's works, we may safely assume that he did so to meet the demands of his customers. The printing of a work, and especially the reprinting of a work, then, may be taken by historians as an indirect measure of public interest. This assumption is employed in subsequent chapters to identify those works that likely had the most influence in the Evangelical publishing barrage.

The business side of publishing has other significant implications for the study of printing and propaganda in the early Reformation. In an age well before copyright and with shipping over land expensive and printing relatively cheap, a work generally spread through reprinting. If, for example, there was interest in Strasbourg for a work first published in Wittenberg, it was more common for a printer in Strasbourg to reprint the work than it was for the printer in Wittenberg to ship a large number of copies to Strasbourg. This business fact can also be turned to the use of the historian. Since works were printed with the expectation of sale, the printing or reprinting of a particular work in a particular place may also be an indirect measure of local or regional demand, and not merely demand in general.

To be sure, a moment's reflection will suggest problems with this approach. Some types of printed material would have circulated more widely than others. For example, there was more centralized production and wider distribution of particularly expensive items such as

Bibles. Yet by concentrating our attention on popular, relatively inexpensive pamphlets, we shall not go too far astray in seeing these works as a rough indication of local interest and demand.

In several chapters, the implication of local production is used to make an otherwise overwhelming task manageable. The media campaign of the years 1518 to 1525 is simply too large for any one scholar to encompass in a reasonable length of time. Even Hans-Joachim Köhler, who directed the Tübingen Flugschriften Project that aimed at collecting and analyzing every surviving pamphlet edition from the years 1500 to 1530, had to settle for a sample when it came to content analysis.^[13] Of an estimated 10,000 pamphlet editions produced between 1500 and 1530, and the approximately 3,000 pamphlets actually collected by the project, Köhler used a carefully created sample of 356 pamphlets for the basis of his content analysis. His results will be referred to at several points. I myself have chosen to solve the dilemma in a different way and have in four of the chapters limited my consideration to works published in the city of Strasbourg.

Admittedly, some treatises reached Strasbourg from outside printing centers, influenced the impressions Strasbourgeois had of Luther and his message, and yet were not reprinted in Strasbourg. By omitting these treatises, I add some imprecision to my reconstruction. Having conceded this, I would point out that any treatise that had aroused widespread interest within Strasbourg would likely have been reprinted. The Strasbourg printers were not about to pass up a sure chance for profit. By limiting ourselves to Strasbourg publications, we are in fact unlikely to overlook many treatises that strongly shaped public opinion in Strasbourg. And as it happened, since the vast majority of Luther's early vernacular works were published in Strasbourg, the "outside" publications that might have significantly modified readers' first impressions of Luther would have likely been in Latin. I doubt that this restriction to Strasbourg publications skews the analysis overmuch.

In fact, this focus on vernacular works published in Strasbourg is arguably less artificial than the standard biographical approach that pays little or no attention to evidence that some treatises had much wider readership and impact than others. It may be well and good in a biography to analyze indiscriminately Latin and German works without concern for the different (although overlapping) audiences each addressed. But we need to remember that vernacular publications reached a much wider audience. Furthermore, if we are interested in

issues of reception, we risk seriously misunderstanding the historical record if we give to works printed only once the same weight we give to works that were reprinted numerous times and published over a wide geographical area. Some works were simply more significant than others in forming opinion among a significant segment of the population.

Strasbourg, an imperial free city with a population of about twenty thousand, was the third greatest printing center in German-speaking lands, exceeded only by Cologne and Nuremberg. As we shall see in chapter 1, it was a major center during the Reformation for the printing and reprinting of Luther's works, outproduced only by Wittenberg, Augsburg, and Nuremberg.^[14] Since I am interested in the media campaign, Wittenberg is obviously not the right place for examining the impression Luther made on his reading public since Luther was available to them in the flesh. Among the remaining major centers, I chose Strasbourg over Augsburg and Nuremberg because of the fine bibliographies by Miriam Chrisman and Josef Benzing that make the study of the Strasbourg press easier than for any other major city of the Holy Roman Empire.^[15]

It should be stressed, however, that it is the pamphlets that are the "heroes" of this account, not Strasbourg or her printers, not even the various authors of the pamphlets. I am using Strasbourg as a filter, not a focus. For those interested in the history of Strasbourg's printing industry, Miriam Usher Chrisman's fine Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480–1599^{[ 16]} is the book to read. Similarly with the authors of the various pamphlets, who are identified in the text but rarely described. Most readers would have known little or nothing about the biographies of the various authors. They would have known only what the authors chose to reveal in the pamphlets themselves, itself an important part of the argument I develop in subsequent chapters. In being faithful to the crucial point of limited information, I do not dwell on the authors or their background.