The Media

The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire in about 1450, seventy years before the outbreak of the Reformation. By 1500 printing presses existed in over two hundred cities throughout Europe. In the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss confederacy there were some sixty-two presses by 1520 and Cologne, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Basel, Wittenberg, and Augsburg were the leading publishing centers. With the exception of Cologne, which remained Catholic, the presses of these towns became the nerve centers of the Evangelical media campaign, flooding the cities of the empire with aggressive little pamphlets advocating radical reform.

The Reformation perfected the use of the small booklet or pamphlet as a tool of propaganda and agitation.^[4] Frequently in quarto format—that is, made up of sheets folded twice to make four leaves or eight pages—and without a hard cover, these pamphlets were handy, relatively cheap, readily concealed and transported, and accordingly well suited for delivering their message to a large popular audience. They could be easily transported by itinerant peddlers, hawked on street corners and in taverns, advertised with jingles and intriguing title pages, and swiftly hidden in a pack or under clothing when the authorities made an appearance. They were ideal for circulating a subversive message right under the noses of the opponents of reform.

Contemporaries simply called such a pamphlet a libellus or Büchlein , a booklet or little book. Their nature is better captured, however, in the German term Flugschriften , which means literally "flying writings." This designation was first attested in the late eighteenth century (1788) and was borrowed from the French feuille volante or "flying (loose) leaves." Although the content and use of these booklets could and did vary widely, the connotations of a Flugschrift or "flying writing"—a piece of printed material that is short, spontaneous, often unpretentious, and transitory—fit most of these writings quite well.

The great majority of these pamphlets were brief. Over half of those identified and microfilmed by the Tübingen Flugschriften project under the direction of Hans-Joachim Köhler were less than eight leaves in length—two quarto sheets making sixteen pages. The average was about sixteen leaves—four sheets folded in quarto format to make thirty-two pages. A scant quarter of the pamphlets were longer than this, although a few could extend to book length.^[5]

In addition to being short, these pamphlets were generally unpretentious and relatively cheap. Although a few of the pamphlets contained multiple woodcuts, most were unadorned except for the title page, which might display a woodcut border or a single woodcut illustration with, perhaps, some relevance to the content of the pamphlet. The handy quarto size, perfect for cheap but still legible type, the small number of sheets, and the modest decoration (if any) meant that these works could be turned out quickly and cheaply by printers. They did not demand the same heavy investment in paper and multiple sets of type that conventional books did. They also took less time to produce and could therefore be sandwiched between larger print jobs and whipped out quickly to respond to changing events. The small size and ease of production also allowed for relatively inexpensive prices. Although the evidence is sketchy at best, Köhler believes that a good estimate of cost would be one or two pennies (Pfennig) per sheet, which would make for a cost of, say, eight pennies for average pamphlets of four sheets yielding up to thirty-two printed pages. This is about a third of a day's wage for a journeyman artisan, equal to the price of a hen, or a kilogram of beef, or a pound of wax, or the cost of a wooden pitchfork—not insignificant, but certainly within reach of the "common man," the pamphlets' intended target.^[6]

The propaganda pamphlet was not new, of course, nor was its use by publicists who wished to sway a large popular audience. From the beginnings of printing there was occasion for short publications of this size and format.^[7] In the years leading up to the Reformation pamphlets had been used, for example, in an attempt to mobilize the broader German public in support of Emperor Maximilian's policies. The press was also exploited for its propagandistic potential in the so-called Reuchlin affair, which saw many of Germany's humanists locked in a propaganda struggle with those churchmen, mainly Dominicans, who wished to seize and destroy Jewish writings. Both before and during the Reformation, the printing press was used quite

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Figure 1.
Editions of Luther's Works by Language

effectively for a propaganda campaign against the Turkish menace in the East.^[8] What was new in the Reformation, however, is the sheer scale of the propaganda effort.

Köhler estimates that approximately 10,000 pamphlet editions (first editions and reprints) issued from the presses of the German-speaking lands between 1500 and 1530.^[9] Of these almost three-quarters appeared between 1520 and 1526, and most were due to the Reformation movement. Martin Luther alone was responsible for approximately 20 percent of the overall total.

Here are the statistics drawn from the Tübingen project and my own tabulation of the editions of works by Luther (see figure 1 and tables 1 to 4). From 1517 through 1518, the first year of the Reformation movement, there was a 530 percent increase in the production of pamphlets. Production continued to expand rapidly through 1524, increasing nearly eight-fold over this six-year period. Printings of Luther's works also grew rapidly from 87 printings in 1518 to a high of 390 printings in 1523 followed by a gradual decline into the 200 range. The peak year for the overall production of pamphlets came in 1524, which saw the publication of more than 16 percent of the pamphlets produced through the whole thirty-year period from 1501 to

1530. The crucial early years of the Reformation, 1520 to 1526, saw almost three-quarters (73.9 percent) of the total produced in the thirty-year period. Over six thousand editions appeared in this seven-year period, representing conservatively over 6.6 million copies. "The average level of annual production during these seven years was almost four times as high as during the years 1518/19 and 55 times higher compared to the period pre-dating 1518," Köhler observes,^[10] adding, significantly, that the production of pamphlets fell off after 1525–1526 but nevertheless remained at a level "almost twice as high as in 1518/19 and more than 20 times higher than before 1518."^[11] In other words, the supply of pamphlets continued to be more than adequate to reach a large audience with its message of advocacy.

This outpouring of pamphlets possesses one other characteristic that is decisive for its designation as a media campaign: the drastic turn to the vernacular. Only a small fraction of the population in sixteenth-century Germany could read, and an even smaller fraction could read Latin. So Latin publications were addressed to a relatively tiny learned audience, made up primarily of clerics and members of the learned professions. Vernacular publications could still be read by clerics and learned professionals, but they were also accessible to laity literate in the vernacular. Accordingly, when learned authors wrote controversial treatises in the vernacular, they had a relatively popular audience as their target. We shall have reason to return to this point when we consider the Evangelical and Catholic publicists and their respective audiences. Suffice it to note here that the early years of the Reformation movement saw a massive publication effort in the vernacular. As Köhler shows, the number of pamphlets written in German rose seven-fold from 1519 to 1521, and the proportion of German to Latin pamphlets completely reversed itself, going from about three Latin pamphlets published for every German one to three German pamphlets for every Latin one.^[12] In the following year the presses of the empire put out nine German pamphlets for every one Latin pamphlet. Equally telling are the figures for the printing of Luther's publications.^[13] In 1518 not quite half of the printings were in German. In 1519 this figure rose to over six in ten, then in 1520 and 1521 around eight in ten, and for the rest of the decade around nine in ten.

It is the magnitude of the effort, and its overwhelming use of the vernacular, that justifies designating this the West's first large-scale media campaign.