For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation.

The importance of Scribner's study strikes the reader on the very first page: "The role played by printing is undeniable, but over-concentration on the printed word may seriously distort our understanding of how Reformation ideas spread among the population at large" (1). Prior to this study, such over-concentration seemed logical, if one considered the theme of most early sixteenth-century German books. For instance, in 1523, 418 of the 498 titles printed focused on the religious controversy. And yet only a small segment - five percent - of the country's population was literate. How did the Reformation mass communicate with the illiterate?

According to Scribner, the Reformation disseminated its message primarily through visual propaganda. Indeed, before the populace became familiar with the sight of books, it was familiar with the sight of illustrated broadsheets. Dating from the end of the fourteenth century, these illustrations, derived from cheap, easily produced woodcuts, acted as a means of pre-book mass communication and continued in the first half of the fifteenth century to reach more people than did the printed word.

It is hardly surprising that the Reformation used illustrations as a way of reaching the illiterate majority. But in doing so, the Reformation had to overcome metonymic and mimetic problems. To communicate its message successfully, the Reformation had to use clear, easily recognizable images and patterns, even while trying to tear down the ideas and values these images and patterns often stood with or for. The early images of Luther, invariably as doctor, monk or man of the Bible demonstrated a reliance on traditional images of authority even as these images were appropriated in an attempt to radically alter popular culture and belief.

Luther's cause was depicted as a furtherance of Christianity and his opponents' position with its antithesis. While many of these ideas and images were scriptural and philosophical, the religious schism was often depicted as emotive and personal, sometimes even as a popularity contest: Luther versus the Pope; Christ versus the Pope.

Scribner also studies textual illustrative accompaniment, a form of communication quite different than plain illustration. As Scribner explains, the book illustrations demonstrate a McLuhanesque media-hybridization. The text and accompanying illustration do not always say the same thing but complement each other. Thus, although the main targets of these illustrations were the illiterate or semiliterate, the use of illustrations worked subtly upon the literate, who could more fully understand the interplay of image and word.

The weakness of Scribner's book is his structuralist assumption that Reformation culture is reducible to a dialectic of binary opposition. Scribner is frankly puzzled by the "surprisingly little counter-propaganda from the side of orthodoxy" (229). Further, he is clearly disappointed with the effectiveness of Reformation propaganda and its failure to create a new symbolic universe distinctly different from the old faith: "Its 'symbolic universe' was a combination of the three movements of past, present and future, in which the future orientated, creative impulses were limited by the other two." (248) Nevertheless, Scribner's book is important beyond the narrow confines of religious propaganda. The book will be of interest to literary and art historians, religious scholars and cultural materialists.

JEFFREY KAHAN Montreal