The Audience

"The Reformation was an urban event." Such is the judgment of the historian A. G. Dickens, summing up a wealth of recent scholarship.^[25] But to the extent the Reformation was an urban event, it was a minority event as well. About 10 percent of the population of the Holy Roman Empire lived in cities that ranged in size from about fifty thousand inhabitants for a city such as Nuremberg to around two thousand inhabitants, a more typical size for the great majority of towns and cities. These were obviously not the great metropolises we are familiar with today. As is often the case even in major shifts in Western history, the great bulk of the population did not—at least at first—participate actively in the change. It was activists, first of all in the city but also, as recent scholarship has shown,^[26] in the countryside, who propagated or opposed the Reformation.

More than an urban event, the Reformation was an oral event. Even within the cities, where the literacy rate of perhaps 30 percent greatly exceeded the overall literacy rate of perhaps 5 percent, most urban inhabitants learned of the Evangelical message from sermons and conversation rather than from books, pamphlets, or even pictorial propaganda. So what does it mean with literacy rates so low to speak of the "first Western mass media campaign"? To get a handle on this question we need to explore the issue of literacy itself in sixteenth-century Germany as well as the "two-stage communication process," discussed by the Köhler,^[27] by which pamphlets influenced "opinion

leaders" such as preachers, teachers, and government officials who in turn passed the message^[28] orally to much larger numbers of people.

Obviously only the literate could read these pamphlets for themselves.^[29] It has been estimated that overall literacy in Germany in the early sixteenth century was around 5 percent. Although literacy rates were higher in the cities, perhaps in the area of 30 percent for men, cities themselves enclosed no more than 10 percent of the empire's population. In other words, those learned in Latin were a minority among the literate; the literate were a minority within the cities; and the cities enclosed a minority among the empire.^[30] The Reformation, then, was a "minority phenomenon," and the audience for the views of the learned may have been small indeed.

These simple statistics have gone a long way to debunking the romantic or confessional myth that Reformation theology galvanized a whole nation. Much to the good, they have also induced some historians to seek other forms by which the ideas of the learned might have been transmitted, such as sermons and other means of oral transmission, and pictures, rituals, and other forms of nonverbal communication.^[31] But these statistics may conceal a more complicated situation in which the printed views of the learned reached a larger audience than the literacy statistics suggest.

While we must recognize that the theological concerns of the learned reached the general population through intermediaries and that the message could be transformed in the process of transmission and reception; nevertheless, we should not make the mistake of thinking that a printed message could reach only those who were able to read. It may be a conceit or at least a naïveté of our modern, literate culture to fail to recognize how well the illiterate could get access to the printed page. One reader could share the fruits of his or her reading with hundreds and even thousands of other people. Miriam Chrisman has shown in the case of Strasbourg that during the crucial period 1520 to 1526, the learned wrote large numbers of vernacular treatises aimed at a more popular audience. These and other pamphlets of the early Reformation are replete with suggestions that the reader share his reading with the illiterate. For example, in the dialogue Karsthans , examined in some detail in chapter 4, the characters of Murner and Luther both urge Karsthans to have their books read to him, and the character of Karsthans himself speaks of having his son read the books to him.^[32] And when the reader was a preacher, the "multiplier effect" could be large indeed. In his Christian Apology of 1523, in which he

expounded at length on Luther's teachings, the Strasbourg preacher Mattheus Zell stated that he was now putting in writing what he had already taught orally and at length to more than three thousand people.^[33] A treatise such as Luther's 1520 On the Freedom of a Christian might see twelve reprintings within a year or two of its publication, representing, say, thirteen thousand copies. But one preacher, such as Mattheus Zell, who read this treatise and incorporated its message into his sermons, could multiply its influence many times over.

Even with this, too much may have been conceded to the skeptics. If we assume conservatively that each printing of a work by Luther numbered one thousand copies, we are talking about an output for Luther alone of 3.1 million copies during the period 1516 to 1546. And this total does not include the numerous whole and partial editions of Luther's Bible translation, which, as we shall see in a later chapter, conveyed Luther's central convictions with particular force. Moreover, Luther was only one Evangelical author, albeit by far the most prolific, producing fully 20 percent of the pamphlet literature of the first three decades of the century.^[34] If, for the sake of argument, we assume that for every five treatises that Luther published other Evangelicals published an additional four treatises, which is roughly the ratio found in the city of Strasbourg, then we have another 2.5 million copies. Although Catholics were badly outpublished by the Evangelicals in the vernacular—printers produced about five vernacular treatises by Luther to every one Catholic treatise—Catholic authors still contributed at least another 600,000 copies. This all adds up to a bit over six million copies or one exemplar for every two people in the empire, literate and illiterate, or twenty copies for each literate member of the empire.^[35] Publication statistics such as these show that we may need to rethink the whole issue of literacy in the sixteenth century.

I have noted before the importance of vernacular publications for reaching a mass audience. Even though only a tiny fraction of the German-speaking people in the early sixteenth century could read, the fraction that could read Latin was much smaller. The mix of Latin and German publications in the overall publishing effort of both Evangelicals and Catholics should tell us something, therefore, about the audience sought by each group of publicists.

In the crucial early years of the Reformation movement, from 1518 through 1524, only two out of every five Catholic controversial works

—that is, works written against Evangelicals and in defense of the Catholic faith—were in German (see table 6). This rose to nearly half from 1525 to 1529, only to fall again in the subsequent decades. For the full period 1518 to 1555, three out of every five Catholic controversial works were in Latin.

This Catholic effort differed markedly from the Evangelical pattern. Consider Martin Luther's production over a comparable period, 1518 to 1544 (see table 2). While Catholics published three Latin controversial works for every two German ones, the ratio for Luther's works was strikingly different, four German works for every one Latin one. In the crucial period 1518 to 1529, when the battle for the minds of the urban laity was at its hottest, more than 80 percent of the overall printings of Luther's works, and nearly as many of those containing anti-Catholic polemics, were in the vernacular. This and the other statistics for the printing of Luther's works exclude the numerous printings of his German translation of the Bible. For the same crucial period, slightly less than half of the Catholic printings were in German.

This comparison suggests some conclusions about the goals, and perhaps the popularity, of the two groups of publicists. The Evangelicals appear to have targeted their argument to a broad audience, including all literate laity. Catholics, in contrast, may have been addressing a smaller audience of what we might term "opinion leaders" such as clerics, councilors, and rulers. This difference may also reflect the more scholastic background of the Catholic publicists. To be sure, Evangelical vernacular publications may have simply sold better, thus encouraging reprints. Recall the petition of the Leipzig council on behalf of its printers with which this chapter opened.

If we can assume that printers in choosing what they published followed not only their personal religious convictions but also the wishes of the market—they were, after all, in the business to make a profit or they did not stay in the business long—this lopsided dominance by Evangelicals of the vernacular market for controversial literature strongly suggests that the literate laity supported Protestantism in far greater numbers than they supported Catholicism. This says nothing about why they supported Protestantism and preferred Evangelical writings to Catholic, but it makes the preference abundantly clear.^[36]