Approaching the Protestant Reformation as a Comprehensive Reform of Religious Media
“Approaching the Protestant Reformation as a comprehensive reform of religious media, my paper will take its starting point the congenial alliance between Martin Luther’s religious message and the emergence of the world’s first technical medium: printing with moveable type. While “no Reformation without print” has become a historiographical commonplace, its chiastic inversion “no print without the Reformation” reflects the fact that the flagging new media technology was literally saved from premature extinction by history’s first bestseller author Martin Luther. Thus, I will examine the role religion and theology played for the fortunes of print and the Gutenberg galaxy and, more broadly, for the formation of modern media culture.”
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This seminar provides a forum for scholarship-in-progress in the area of German studies. The seminar is particularly interested in papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state. The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.