Radical Protestant Propaganda of the Thirty Years' War

strategies of Protestant propagandists were still closely connected to those of the
Reformation. Propagandists deliberately worked with images from popular culture and
symbols with well-known meaning in order to polarize the audience and persuade them to
support their cause. Their campaign was not new in the sense of creating a range of new
symbols, but rather in adapting them to a new context so that they would be understood
quickly and successfully. These images included, among others, the fool, operations,
emblems, the theatre, Christ, the anti-Christ and the devil, mythological and historical
figures, the demonic and the monstrous. In addition, propagandists of the Thirty Years’ War
also used the same strategies as their Protestant predecessors had done: they presented
events in eschatological or dichotomous terms, exposed incongruities, based their
arguments on comparisons to events and figures of the Bible, vilified the enemy as heretical,
glorified their own leaders as paradigms of virtue, and presented contemporary events in
the framework of salvation history. Consequently, references to propaganda in this thesis
will be based on Scribner’s definition of adversarial propaganda in his discussion of the
Protestant publications during the Reformation.
Broadsheets, Pamphlets, and Protestant Propaganda of the Holy Roman Empire in the
Seventeenth Century
As a preface to the analysis of Protestant propaganda in the body of the dissertation, this
section provides a brief outline of the circumstances and general mechanics of propaganda
production and consumption in the Empire in the early modern period. The major cities of
propaganda production were Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, Augsburg and Nuremberg. 32
32 For further information see Maria Pfeffer’s sections ‘Flugblatt als Massenkommunikationsmittel’,
‘Verfasser, Produktion, Zensur, Vetrieb, Preise’ and ‘Strukturelle Merkmale’ in Flugschriften zum
Dreiβigjährigen Krieg. Aus der Häberlin-Sammlung der Thurn- und Taxisschen Hofbibliothek
(Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1993), pp. 12-17, p. 14. Henceforth Pfeffer.
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