For The Sake Of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation

"This is a book from the early 1980s, when that older, more ecclesiastical view of Reformation history was starting to change. It’s about the early Reformation in Germany, and although Luther appears in it, it’s not really about the grand narrative of Luther’s revolt. It’s about how the Reformation was received, how the Reformation was understood, how a Lutheran movement was created, particularly in a society that was overwhelmingly illiterate. Particularly in the countryside, literacy rates were very low. If the Reformation was entirely about the printed word of the Bible and the ability of people to read it, it wasn’t going to get very far. It’s a book about pictures, about the visual propaganda for the Reformation. This approach was truly innovative for the time, to take images away from the special discipline of art history and into mainstream history, and also to be interested in images that were not great art. Scribner’s pictures are woodcut illustrations advancing Protestant arguments and usually denigrating or attacking Catholic ones. The pictures are often extraordinarily scatological—a group of devils sitting on top of the gallows shitting out monks and friars and popes into a big pile lying beneath it. There is lots of excrement and farting. The idea that Scribner is presenting us with a rude rather than a decorous Reformation is rather appealing, but there’s also an important point to this. I think it goes back to something I was saying earlier about how it’s important to understand that the Reformation doesn’t come out of nowhere. Scribner, I think, would have described himself as a social or a cultural historian of religion, rather than a historian of theology. He’s principally interested in how religious ritual works within society. And the key question here is how these new, apparently very radical evangelical Protestant ideas from Luther and his followers clicked with people. “The idea that the Reformation developed in ways its leaders didn’t necessarily want or expect is one of the most important things we need to understand about it” Part of the explanation was that they found ways of rooting themselves within accepted cultural norms. A number of Scribner’s pictures, pictures of Luther at the very moment when he is raising the standard of rebellion against Rome, portray him as a Catholic friar, indeed almost as a Catholic saint. Luther’s followers are not just rejecting but drawing on the expectations of mediaeval Catholicism to advance the message. The way in which the image of the cross or the image of the crucified Christ appears to be almost ubiquitous in these Lutheran prints is very important. That’s clearly a symbol that is at the centre of mediaeval Catholic Christianity, but is kind of adopted or adapted or brought on board in this changed Lutheran version of it. It’s also drawing on ideas that are rooted in popular culture about the human and the animal. So, for example, there are portrayals of popes and cardinals as wolves, or lions threatening the sheep of Christ. There are ideas about carnival, the inversion of social norms in order to make points about truth and falsehood. These are deeply rooted in popular culture, in Germany particularly, where during carnival or Fasching celebrations the world is turned upside down for a day or two. That’s a very important theme in these pictures. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The book takes us a long way from the high-minded doctrinal debates into—almost literally—the blood and filth of the Reformation, but it’s very important in helping us to understand how something apparently so radical, so new, could make sense to people within that society. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily even a conscious strategy or a committee of people sitting down and thinking how to do this. There’s a whole range of authors behind these ephemeral and popular texts that are being produced. In some ways, you could say Luther’s message is perhaps rather misunderstood, and Luther himself wouldn’t always have approved—particularly of the idea that he himself was a saint. But the idea that the Reformation developed in ways its leaders didn’t necessarily want or expect is one of the most important things we need to understand about it."