Lichtgedanken 02

S C HW E R P U N K T 15 02 | LICHT GEDANKEN Flying paper BY UTE SCHÖNFELDER The collection of one-page prints among the copperplate en- gravings of the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha is one of the most comprehensive of its kind. But the roughly 700 flyers illustrated with woodcuts from the 15th and 16th cen- tury slumbered unnoticed for decades. The unique collection that had grown over time had only been partially scientifi- cally recorded and published, and scarcely anyone had a complete overview of the collection which mostly dates back to the Saxon Ernestinian electors. But that is in the past: The »Project Group for the History of the Reformation«, formed in 2012 under the aegis of the Uni- versity of Jena, has now conducted a comprehensive review of the entire collection which is to be found in a recently pu- blished catalogue (ISBN 978-3-89790-413-2). The joint project work in which the university and research library of Erfurt/Gotha also participated besides the Univer- They were the means of mass communication at the time of the Reformation. In the same way as photos, opinions and news are disseminated today via tweets and posts, people in the 16th century used the recently invented techniques of printing to distribute information in illustrated leaflets. The reformers also exploited this development to spread their ideas and dogmas. sity of Jena and the Gotha Foundation, consisted in preser- ving the flyers, processing their content and fully digitizing them for the first time. »This has fulfilled a long-held deside- ratum of our research work,« explains the head of the project, Christopher Spehr. Now – 500 years after the start of the Re- formation – the flyers offer a vivid illustration of Reformation times not just to scientists but also to any interested audience, according to Jena’s Church historian (interview p. 20). After all: »The Reformation was a media event,« says Prof. Spehr. With the spread of book printing in the 15th and 16th centuries, print products of all kinds became increasingly important for communication processes. »The flyers, in par- ticular, were an easily affordable alternative to books and they were especially successful in spreading.« Renowned artists, among them Lucas Cranach the Elder and the Younger or Albrecht Dürer, produced the woodcuts for the single leaf prints. The pages that were approx. 40 by 30 centimetres in size focus on the events of the time. »We find numerous portraits of secular and religious representatives, among them images of the reformers Luther and Melanchthon, but also Charles V or the founder of Jena’s university,« reports Ulrike Eydin- ger, a project staff member from the Schloss Friedenstein Foundation. We also find subjects from everyday life, politi- cal reports – for example on military conflicts – all the way to natural phenomena and sensationalist gossip. »However, a very substantial part of Gotha’s collection of flyers is devoted to matters of religious denomination,« Ey- dinger states. She explains that polemical disputes with the Catholic faith and Reformation teachings were frequently the topic of such illustrated texts. Flyer based on a template from the Cranach workshop: Martin Luther, coloured woodcut with text in type, Magdeburg 1546, Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha Flyer by Michael Ribestein: Elector Johann Friedrich I., Duke of Saxony, coloured woodcut with text in type, Berlin 1547, Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha F E AT U R E