For The Sake Of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Clarendon Paperbacks) - Softcover

Scribner, R. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198203268 ISBN 13: 9780198203261

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 1994

Synopsis

R.W. Scribner's pioneering work analyzes the forms of popular propaganda aimed at the illiterate and semi-literate during the German Reformation and reproduces many of the prints which still survive in Germany. A new Introduction and an additional chapter in this edition advance original interpretations of these illustrations, revealing how visual propaganda both exploited and participated in popular belief and the coarser aspects of popular culture.

About this title

Review

`a major achievement ... important and pioneering study'Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Synopsis

In this book R. W. Scribner provides the first detailed analysis of the forms of propaganda - such as illustrated broadsheets, picture books, title pages, and book illustrations - which were aimed at the illiterate and semi-literate during the Reformation, and reproduces many of the vast corpus of prints which still survive in scattered locations in Germany. Dr Scribner advances new and original interpretations of these illustrations, revealing how visual propaganda exploited popular belief and the coarser aspects of popular culture, while at the same time being a product of them. This, he suggests, explains why the Reformation appealed to the broad masses of sixteenth-century people, even though the propaganda was unable to educate them in the more complex theological aspects of the Reformation message. As well as raising important questions about the Reformation as a religious phenomenon, the book is a contribution to the understanding of early modern popular culture, and the nature of propaganda in a pre-industrial society; it is also a detailed historical study of the sixteenth-century woodcut.

In develolping an interdisciplinary analysis combining the methods of iconography, semiology, sociology, and folklore, Dr Scribner presents a fruitful new approach to the study of popular mentalities. Hailed as a pioneering study of great importance on its original publication in 1981, For the Sake of Simple Folk is now available in paperback for the first time, with a new Introduction and additional chapter. 'The reproduction of such a formidable body of "documentation" in the text is a major achievement ...important and pioneering study', Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198203268
• ISBN 13: 9780198203261
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368