The Medium and the Message: Evangelical Propaganda

Simon Lemieux examines examples of German Protestant propaganda.

In 1964, the Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘The Medium is the Message’. By this he meant that the form of the medium (be it written, visual etc) embeds itself in the message, and that one has to study the medium itself more than its content or message. The nature of the media should therefore be a key focus for study, influencing as it does the culture and society in which it was produced. Perhaps nowhere in Early Modern History is this truer than the written propaganda, woodcuts and images associated with the German Reformation.

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