Fliegende Blätter

The upsurge in publishing in the sixteenth century turned the Reformation into a media event, and printed products of every kind superseded the communication methods used thus far. Alongside printed books and leaflets, flyers were particularly successful in reaching their audiences as an easily affordable information medium. Renowned artists such as Hans Sebald Beham, Lucas Cranach Sr, Lucas Cranach Jr, Albrecht Dürer, Michael Ostendorfer, Georg Pencz and Niklas Stör produced the woodcuts for these single-sheet prints, which thematised the political, religious and societal happenings of the time. Portraits of protagonists, such as Luther and Melanchthon, Karl V. and John Frederick the Magnanimous, but also fables and proverbs as well as reports on miracles and celestial phenomena, abnormalities, catastrophes and crime all found their platform in these pages. One of the largest German collections of illustrated single-sheet prints in the Palace Museum of the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha, whose beginnings reach back to the sixteenth century, provides a rich treasure trove of prints that informed the Reformation. Once received as pure consumer goods, the Gotha inventory of around 700 flyers from 1480 to 1599 is today considered unprecedented. Now for the first time it has been published in its entirety. The development of the complete inventory originated within the work of the Project Group Reformation History with the involvement of the Theological Faculty of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Gotha research library affiliated to the University of Erfurt, and the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha.