Catholic Controversial Literature, 1518-1555: Some Statistics

High clergy and printers: anti-Reformation polemic in the kingdom of Poland, 1520-36

“…Using Klaiber's data, in two major publications (1988, 1994) Mark U. Edwards stressed the relative paucity of anti‐Reformation texts produced in German‐speaking lands as a whole, and the extent to which they were dwarfed by the flood of pro‐reformer writings, often at a rate of 1:5. Edwards suggested that this was the result of institutional and cultural obstacles to ‘Catholic controversialist’ printing, such as a lack of patronage for polemicists, and anxieties about debating openly with heretics. Using an alternative dataset, however, Richard Crofts (1985) offered a different reading, concluding that in Germany ‘after 1525, the number of Catholic publications was surprisingly high, nearly matching the total of the reformers’.…”

“… Edwards suggested that this was the result of institutional and cultural obstacles to ‘Catholic controversialist’ printing, such as a lack of patronage for polemicists, and anxieties about debating openly with heretics. Using an alternative dataset, however, Richard Crofts (1985) offered a different reading, concluding that in Germany ‘after 1525, the number of Catholic publications was surprisingly high, nearly matching the total of the reformers’. In a major subsequent intervention in 2004, Andrew Pettegree and Matthew Hall used the Index Aureliensis catalogue of sixteenth‐century books to argue forcefully that the early modern European book‐market consisted of a series of distinct local markets and industries, which should not necessarily be judged against (and especially not judged as deficient against) a German ‘norm’.…”