Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648: “Printed Poison & Evil Talk” by Allyson F. Creasman (review)

Too few historians have concerned themselves with the efforts of Reformation-era authorities to govern printing, and those who have, have tended to measure the success or failure of censorship against the normative yardstick of imperial, territorial, or urban law. They predictably conclude that censorship was ineffectual. Such treatments, contends Allyson Creasman, fail to address what was truly at stake with censorship, or to analyze it in its proper context, i.e., in relation to evolving structures of communication. Drawing on judicial records from the imperial cities of Augsburg, Frankfurt, Nuremburg, and Ulm, as well as the Duchy of Bavaria, Creasman argues that censorship is best understood not simply as a top-down operation of the state against a passive, subject population, but as a communicative “process of accommodation to communal expectations” (19). In Creasman’s analysis, censorship was the product of constant interaction between authorities and their constituent populations, in which censorship both defined popular attitudes toward civic order and was constrained by beliefs held among the population at large.

This approach recognizes the proper object of censorship laws: not printed words and images per se, but all forms of expression, including rumor, gossip, graffiti, and song. Some of Creasman’s best detective work reconstructs the links between these genres of expression. Her first chapter reminds us that censorship was predicated on a universally held assumption that the regulation of expression was vital to the preservation of political order and unity of belief. As such, censorship antedated both printing and the Reformation and tended naturally toward the regulation of religious beliefs. Both forces stimulated new efforts to censor more effectively at all levels, from the imperial (through the 1521 Edict of Worms and controls on the Frankfurt book trade) to the territorial and municipal (through visitations of books shops, printing presses, and private libraries). On a superficial level, Creasman’s findings on the implementation of these laws seem to confirm their ineffectuality: Bavaria could not stem the interregional book trade, for example, and religious strife wrecked efforts to police the book market in Frankfurt. Examined as a communicative process, however, they reveal a subtler interaction in which the strength of enforcement varied according to the willingness of citizens and subjects to participate as informants and self-censors.

The contours of this reciprocity emerge more clearly in Creasman’s second and third chapters, which delve into the complexities of censorship in Nuremberg and Augsburg during the 1520s and 1530s. Both cities built censorship policies around a “middle path” that sought to accommodate popular demand for reform while, at the same time, suppressing texts that might have provoked political confrontations with the Emperor. Together, these tactics drove a wedge between the older aims of censorship. Henceforward, enforcing orthodoxy would yield to the aim of preserving civic order and concord, even in Nuremberg, where religious controversy eventually produced a monoconfessional, Lutheran regime. They also placed greater emphasis on honor, manifested in the suppression of libelous or defamatory texts. These effects emerge most clearly in Creasman’s third chapter, which treats the exigencies of peacekeeping in Augsburg after the Religious Peace of 1555. In addition to establishing a biconfessional regime in Augsburg, the Peace drove censorship even more strongly toward the preservation of civic concord. Any defamation of either lawful religion might have now potentially become the target of censorship; prosecution functioned increasingly as a “didactic tool” in the folkways of biconfessional coexistence. Thus censorship did not so much halt the circulation of texts as reposition them culturally.

Creasman rightly stresses the fragility of the Religious Peace, but her chapter on the controversy in Augsburg surrounding the Gregorian calendar reform of 1583 could just as easily be read to indicate their success as didactic tools. At one level, the controversy registered its collapse: rioting broke out in June 1584, and Lutheran clergy who preached against the reform were...