Reformation und Buch: Akteure und Strategien frühreformatorischer Druckerzeugnisse / The Reformation and the Book: Protagonists and Strategies of Early Reformation Printing eds. Thomas Kaufmann and Elmar Mittlerby (review)

The quincentenary of the beginning of the reformation in 1517 predictably occasioned many publications of various kinds and, given the extensive use made by the Reformers, Luther in particular, of the still relatively new art of printing, reflections on the theme 'The Reformation and the Book' were not going to be in short supply. Another wave of such studies may confidently be expected in 2022 when the five-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Luther's New Testament translation is marked. The present volume comprises fourteen contributions (eleven in German, three in English), not all of which can be discussed individually here. In some respects, several of the contributions cover similar ground to that dealt with by Jean-François Gilmont and others in La Réforme et le livre: l'Europe de l'imprimé (1517–v. 1570) (Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1990), reissued in English as The Reformation and the Book (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), and in various other studies from the pens of Francis Higman, Andrew Pettegree, and others. Thus the essays by Gerald Chaix, 'Book, Reformation and Counter-Reformation in France' (pp. 145–58), Marieke van Delft, 'Researching Printing in the Low Countries (1500–1550)' (pp. 159–71), Wolfgang Undorf, 'Reformation without Luther?—The Transnational Printing Culture in Denmark and Sweden during the Reformation Era' (pp. 263–80), and Otfried Czaika, 'Printing and the Reformation in Sweden and Finland' (pp. 281–301) deal with fairly extensive geographical areas and offer relatively little beyond what the aforementioned studies already presented, though we do find shifted emphases here and there and also updated statistics, thanks to ongoing work on the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts (VD16) and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (USTC). Marieke van Delft, for example, notes that USTC contains almost one thousand more titles than Nijhoff and Kronenberg's Nederlandsche bibliographie van 1500 tot 1540 (The Hague, 1923–71).

The most useful contributions are those dealing with particular towns. Wolfgang Schmitz (pp. 85–104) deals with Cologne where the church exerted very considerable influence, but nevertheless there is a certain amount of evidence of pro-Reformation sympathies amongst the citizens there and even amongst the city's printers, especially Arnd von Aich and the Lupuspresse. En passant, we may note Schmitz's call (p. 98) for a reassessment of the widespread belief that the printer involved with Tyndale's first attempt to have his English New Testament printed at Cologne was the Catholic Peter Quentell. Thomas Fuchs (pp. 105–27) examines the impact of Duke George of Saxony's anti-Reformation policy on printing, the book trade and book ownership in Leipzig, analysing in some detail books owned by the Leipzig Dominicans, the theologian Arnold Wöstefeld who taught at the university from 1498 to 1537 and who was initially attracted by but later rejected the Reformation, and Caspar Borner, Professor of Astronomy and later director of St Thomas's school. Table 6 (p. 122) in this contribution contains an error: in the left-hand column Lyon appears twice, presumably once instead of Löwen (i.e. Leuven/Louvain). Andrew Pettegree (pp. 129–44) contrasts the publishing scene in Wittenberg, marked by the creation of 'brand Luther' by men such as Melchior Lotter and Lucas Cranach, with that in London where the Reformation made 'little progress until the king decided he could no longer stand his wife' (p. 140); much of this material is well known to English historians of the book, but the details regarding the development of the London book trade during the reigns of successive monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I will be generally less familiar to continental readers...