Common Medicine for the Common Man: Picturing the “Striped Layman” in Early Vernacular Print

Abstract

The disruptive figure of the “striped layman” appeared in printed texts and images around the year 1500 in the southern German lands. This essay shows how it came to represent a new kind of reader of vernacular medical publications. Exploring the illustrated books of the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, their local context of humanist discourse, and the visual practice of their publisher, Johann Grüninger, I argue that their oft-neglected woodcuts of people in striped clothes constitute powerful visual commentary of Brunschwig's (and others’) mission to impart medical agency and expertise to the “common man” at the eve of the Reformation.

Woodcuts as reading guides. How images shaped knowledge transmission in medical-astrological books in Dutch (1500-1550)

“…138 Pantin 2013 qualifies this image series as 'more picturesque than informative. ' Taape 2021, in a meticulous unravelling of the visual rhetoric of Brunschwig's series, makes a powerful case for 'a comparative reading of printed images that appear purely decorative as a layer of commentary on society and the role of print in the politics of knowledge' (p. 51).…”