Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (34 page)

This certainly has the ring of truth. The Latin exchanges of the years after 1517 were intended largely to engage a clerical audience; on the conservative side it was crucial to address this group and stem the hemorrhaging of support among the clergy to Luther’s side. This is all the more obvious when, as we have seen, we consider the vital role that such early clerical converts would play in building the Reformation in the cities across Germany. But there was also a genuine belief, as the Franciscan Thomas Murner put it, that “matters of faith should not be disputed before the ignorant common folk.” This was true irrespective of the truth or otherwise of Luther’s teachings; merely the appearance of discord among the clergy “caused great scandal and disobedience among ignorant Christians.” “As we unfortunately now can clearly see, not many Christians have been moved to reverence by doctor Martin’s teaching but only to rebellion.”
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The irony is that these trenchant reflections included in Murner’s
Concerning Doctor Martin Luther’s Teaching and Preaching
were written and published in German, one of five such vernacular writings published by Murner in a barrage against Luther in Strasbourg in the years 1520 and 1521. In this Murner was not alone. Johann Tetzel, as we have seen, recognized the need to confute Luther’s German writings very early, and the indefatigable Jerome Emser would publish more in German than in Latin.

The problem was not that Catholic authors could not, or would not, write in German, but that these works were not particularly successful. Few of those works that were published had much resonance, and hardly
any went through more than one or two editions; many could not be published at all. For this failure to find publishers for their works Catholic authors were often inclined to blame the malign partisanship of the printing industry. Already in 1521 Aleander at Worms was remarking on the difficulty of finding printers for Catholic works, and two years later Cochlaeus would attribute the delay in publishing Schatzgeyer’s reply to Johann Briesmann’s attack on his work on monastic vows to the influence of Lutheran sympathizers in southern Germany.
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This mattered, particularly if in the rapid fire of controversy Catholics could not get their replies into print, and it appeared as if they were ceding the field to their evangelical opponents. But it was easy, and not likely true, to imply these difficulties occurred because printers were committed to the evangelical cause. As we have seen, most printers would cheerfully publish for both sides, or move from one to the other, if it was worth their while. The real answer was that printers could see which way the wind was blowing. Reading the market was an essential skill in the publishing industry, which depended on assessing risk and seizing opportunity. And here the evidence flowed all one way. The enthusiasm for the writings of Luther and his followers was palpable and obvious. Printers could see this in the speed with which editions sold out and the demand for reprints and new titles. The real disincentive to publishing Catholic works was the irrefutable evidence that those of Luther’s supporters sold much better.

It was also the case that printers who took on the works of Luther and his colleagues faced little danger of retribution for doing so. This was not the case everywhere. In France, England, and the Low Countries, printers faced serious consequences if they published evangelical works. They were arrested and occasionally executed when their responsibility for heretical publications could be proved. With few exceptions this was not the case in Germany, especially in these early years. In Germany most authorities instituted a form of censorship, but this did little to inhibit the flow of books since jurisdictions were so very local: here the fact that Germany was a patchwork of hundreds of small city and
princely states militated against effective control.
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Production was also very decentralized. In England, books for sale in St. Paul’s Churchyard, if they were in English, would have been printed in one of a limited number of shops all less than a mile away. This was an industry that was very easily controlled. In Frankfurt, Augsburg, or a host of other places, the pamphlets on a bookseller’s stall might have come from two dozen different places. Most were printed without the printer’s name on the title page, and so even if the authorities were inclined to investigate it was difficult to know where to start. Anything that might put a local printer at risk could be sent to another print shop a day’s ride away, and the pamphlet or broadsheet could be back for local sale within a couple of days.
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So even in a loyally Catholic jurisdiction the risk of such sales fell on the bookseller rather than the printer.

All of these factors conspired to ensure that in Germany, and uniquely in Germany, the printing industry felt a strong if pragmatic affinity with the evangelical cause. Even the most distinguished defenders of the Roman obedience might experience cool responses when they took their manuscripts to a print shop, an experience that left them bruised and resentful. In 1520 Johannes Cochlaeus finished a rebuttal of Luther’s
To the Christian Nobility;
this was clearly an exceptionally important work, but he could not raise the funds to have it printed. His
Assertio pro Emsero,
written in 1521 to support Jerome Emser, was not published until 1545. The dogged determination of Cochlaeus to see his works into print was a continuous drain on his resources throughout his career, and it was only in 1535, when Cochlaeus became a canon of Meissen, that he found an effective solution by underwriting the establishment of a new press in Leipzig. Cochlaeus provided one thousand gulden of start-up capital to pay for three presses and meet the costs of the first publications. The press was run by his nephew Nikolaus Wolrab.
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Emser and Murner also found themselves having to bear their own production costs.
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This was not unusual in the Renaissance book world: authors were often forced to make a significant contribution to underwriting the cost
of seeing their works into print. It was taken as a given that Catholics writing against Luther would have to contribute in this way. In a scathing review of the Catholic propaganda effort, the bishop of Vienna, Johann Fabri, thought the Catholic cause had suffered because they had paid so little attention to the needs of their scholars. “The capable and steadfast are for the most part dead. Only a very few remain who are able and dare to resist; and those who are able to contradict [the Lutherans] or rather to prevail over them scarcely have the means to feed themselves not to mention the means to pay the printers.”
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But this was certainly not a problem faced by Luther or his fellow evangelicals, since publishers could be confident that their books would sell, and provide them with a lucrative harvest of reprints. Here, in the reach of their writings and the sheer quantities of copies in the public domain, was where reformers enjoyed an absolutely critical advantage. For Catholic authors, even if they were prepared to subsidize their own writings, there was seldom any benefit in terms of reprints or further editions published elsewhere. And even if they could cajole a printer into taking their works, the indignities faced by conservative authors were not necessarily at an end. Conservative publications were not infrequently subjected to boisterous acts of ritual humiliation, their books standing as surrogates for their invisible authors. We have seen how Emser’s works were publicly mocked in Magdeburg; in other instances Catholic works were forcibly removed from booksellers’ stalls.

This sort of direct action was extremely effective, as printers were highly sensitive to these sorts of cues. The Erfurt printer Johann Knappe was well connected in humanist circles and happy to publish Luther when the opportunity arose. He was less happy when Johann Eck asked him to publish a local edition of the papal bull condemning Luther. The commission was hard to refuse, so Knappe tried to hedge his bets. He printed
Exsurge Domine,
but in a quasi-facsimile of the Rome original, with “Rome” and the name of the original printer given in place of his own imprint.
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We have seen how Augsburg printers used “Wittenberg” on their title pages to increase their sales; in Knappe’s case the deception
was a purely defensive strategy. Even so, it did not work: most of the edition was lost when students from the university stormed his shop and hurled the copies into the river.

Those who wrote against Luther plowed a lonely furrow, with little help from the printing industry. Printers would often only take on their works if paid, or if obliged to do so, and with good reason, for these works simply could not match the sales of evangelical authors. The evangelical
Flugschriften
were the lifeblood of the industry in these years, the motor of rapid growth and huge potential profits. Any printers cut out of this market faced hard times. If any of Germany’s publishers doubted this they had only to consider the cautionary tale of Leipzig.

LEIPZIG

Where Germany’s local authorities did make determined efforts to forbid the publication of evangelical works this could usually be done. We have seen that this was the case in Nuremberg, which in consequence played a much more modest part in the publication of Luther’s books than might have been expected. This did not necessarily inhibit access to Lutheran texts, which in Nuremberg were fairly freely available, since the council turned a blind eye to their sale so long as the local printers were not responsible. In this case, too, the absence of Luther’s works from the local presses encouraged the growth of alternative markets, such as dramas and the poems of Hans Sachs, a hugely successful author and a firm supporter of the Wittenberg reformer.
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It required real commitment on the part of the local power to prevent the publication and sale of Lutheran books altogether. This could be achieved, but the effect on the local book industry could be devastating.

In 1515 Leipzig was Germany’s principal printing center, nudging ahead of other major centers of production such as Basel, Augsburg, and Strasbourg. This was a remarkable achievement, since Leipzig was some way distant from the major nodes of commerce and
communications in the Rhineland and Danube basin, which gave access to Europe’s most important markets. But Leipzig had its own markets to the north and east, and profited from its dominant role in the supply of books to these regions and the universities and cultural capitals of central Europe.

Not surprisingly, Leipzig’s printers took very eagerly to publishing Luther, with an early pirate edition of the ninety-five theses followed by forty-three editions of his works in 1518 spread among four different printers: Landsberg, Lotter, Stöckel, and Schumann.
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The summer of 1519 was golden, as the city briefly became the center of the drama with the Leipzig Disputation. Printers cheerfully turned out editions of the disputation proceedings and multiple copies of the furious polemical exchanges that followed, along with numerous of Luther’s other works. But the Leipzig Disputation, which he attended in person, also turned Duke George decisively against the Reformation. When the Emperor Charles pronounced Luther’s final condemnation at the Diet of Worms, Duke George moved firmly to enact the edict’s full terms, including the prohibition of printing, buying, and selling Lutheran books. So meticulous was he in the performance of these obligations that when the Luther New Testament was published in 1522, Duke George ordered that all purchasers should surrender their copies (they would be refunded the purchase price).
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This prohibition on the publication of evangelical books, so strictly enforced, was an absolute disaster for Leipzig’s previously buoyant book trade. Printers protested, but in vain. Production plummeted. In 1519 and 1520 the Leipzig presses had turned out respectively 190 and 188 editions, a higher level of production than they would reach at any subsequent time in the sixteenth century. But production halved in 1521 and 1522, and in 1523 and 1524 collapsed altogether. In 1524 Leipzig’s mighty printing houses turned out only 25 editions between them.

In desperation the printers approached the town council to petition Duke George on their behalf. This remarkable document sums up with admirable economy the difficulties faced by those committed, by force
of necessity, to uphold traditional religion in these years. The printers were in danger of losing “house, home and all their livelihood,” because they were not allowed

To print or sell anything new that is made in Wittenberg or elsewhere. For that which one would gladly sell and for which there is demand they are not allowed to have or sell. But what they have in over abundance [Catholic treatises] are desired by no one and cannot even be given away.
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Duke George was, of course, unmoved. In fact, he had added to the difficulties of his Leipzig printers by setting up a press in his capital, Dresden. This was to provide an outlet, under the close supervision of his court, for the works of his secretary and loyal propagandist, Jerome Emser.
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This press was not particularly active, but sucked further life out of the Leipzig industry at an especially difficult time. The real beneficiary of Leipzig’s decline was its local rival Erfurt. Until these years the production of the Erfurt press had been negligible, averaging fewer than 20 editions a year before 1520. But Leipzig’s misfortune was Erfurt’s opportunity. In 1523 Erfurt printers published an astonishing 179 editions, almost all of them works of Luther and other evangelical authors.
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