Focusing on the territories of the Holy Roman Empire from the early Reformation to the mid-eighteenth century, this volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examines some of the structures, practices and media of communication that helped shape the social, cultural, and political history of the period. Not surprisingly, print was an important focal point, but it was only one medium through which individuals and institutions constructed publics and communicated with an audience. Religious iconography and ritual, sermons, music, civic architecture, court ceremony, street gossip, acts of violence, are also forms of communication explored in the volume. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and scholarly backgrounds, this volume transcends narrow specializations and will be of interest to a broad range of academics seeking to understand the social, political and cultural consequences of the "e;information revolution"e; of Reformation Europe.

Contents: Introduction, James Van Horn Melton; Violence and urban identity in early modern Augsburg: communication strategies between authorities and citizens in the adjudication of fights, B. Ann Tlusty; Patricide and pathos: a 1565 murder in deed and word, Joy Wiltenburg; From public event to publishing event: court funerals and the print medium in early modern Germany, Jill Bepler; Anticlericalism in Bamberg on the eve of the Peasants' War, William Bradford Smith; Anabaptist liars: communicating and concealing the faith in early modern Tyrol, D. Jonathan Grieser; Preaching and discipline: the case of 17th-century Rostock, Jonathan Strom; Debating the meaning of pilgrimage: Maria Steinbach, 1733, Marc R. Forster; The public of confessional identity: territorial church and church discipline in 18th-century Hesse, Robert von Friedeburg; Conspiracy and denunciation: a local affair and its European publics (Bern, 1749), Andreas Wÿrgler; Garlic and the Jews: Jörg Breu the Elder's The Mocking of Christ as Protestant "Thesenbild" or Catholic devotional image?, Andrew Morrall; Standing by the ancient faith: Fribourg's fountains and the coming of the Reformation, Donald A. McColl; Musical pedagogy in the German Renaissance, Susan Forscher Weiss; "Not like the unreasoning beasts": rhetorical efforts to separate humans and animals in early modern Germany, Susan C. Karant-Nunn; Expanding the therapeutic canon: learned medicine listens to folk medicine, Martha Baldwin; The debate between Johann Weyer and Thomas Erastus on the punishment of witches, Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr.; Index.