Propaganda, Kommunikation und Öffentlichkeit (11. bis 16. Jahrhundert)

Increasing importance of media during the last years has led to intensified research on forms of communication and public sphere in the past. It became obvious how important the knowledge about media and practices of communication is for understanding the function of rulership in the medieval and early modern world. There was a lack of studies about propaganda in the middle ages and at the transition to the modern world. This anthology is intended to fill the gap. The opening study surveys the whole range of medieval communication and arrives at the conclusion that the modern concept of propaganda can be used to analyse medieval persuasive communication. The following contributions about Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia and Italy provide a chronological and thematic profile from the 11th to the 16th century. They show in what ways and between which social groups propaganda was employed, what the social and political context of communicative behaviour was and what situations and what media the propagandists used at the time. The authors also present an analysis of "literalization" (Verschriftlichung), propagandistic sources and their functions and strategies. They consider the organization of propaganda in social systems of producers and consumers and show that written propaganda was used in a public and even in a "private" sphere in the late middle ages. The institutions involved were the Catholic Church (popes, councils, ecclesiastic orders, reformers), kingship, towns, universities, revolutionary movements and also single "private" persons. Consequently, the propaganda topics reached from private legal causes to legal and politic affairs of whole realms and countries.