The Breakthrough of Typographic Printing | 2776–90). Recent research, though, stresses that their news reporting was chiefly
of a political-military nature and that sensations were less common than has
been assumed (Pfarr 1994: 124). News travelled all the way to the Ottoman
Empire and America, and was furnished with various verification strategies.
According to Schilling, such news was seldom subject to scrutiny in the six-
teenth century. In the ensuing century, however, people gradually began to
question news contents (Schilling 1990: 140).
Closely associated with this is, fourthly, the significance of broadsides as a
means of social disciplinary action. In the depiction of crimes, the punishment
of the offender always took centre stage. It often concluded with religiously
based moral passages which provided a guideline for exclusion, crisis man-
agement, and the (re-)establishment of order. On the basis of such reports,
printing contributed to the standardising of perception – for instance, how
deformities or comets were to be interpreted (Mauelshagen and Mauer 2000:
104). In other words, leaflets were also a medium intended to influence.
Despite their similarity, leaflets did differ from pamphlets in several ways.
Pamphlets (in German: Flugschriften) were usually of a smaller format, were
made up of several pages, including more text passages, were aimed to a greater
extent at influencing the reader, and often had a somewhat polemic under-
tone. Authors published their work anonymously for the most part, and their
various text forms were primarily concerned with questions of religion, pol-
itics, or legal issues. Some historians waive such functional ascriptions and
merely define pamphlets as multi-page, non-periodical, self-contained writings
(Harms 1989: 622; Repgen 1997: 50). After all, elaborate statistical exam-
inations of 3,100 pamphlets from the reformation period have demonstrated
that they were chiefly informative and seldom ‘pugnacious-polemic’ (Köhler
1986: 261–64). In international research, in fact, they are considered as print-
work, ‘which was intended sometimes to inform, but usually to persuade the
reader about current events’, regardless of their scope (Harline 1987: 3). The
term ‘pamphlet’ thus describes a specific literary genre (Raymond 2003: 25).
When observing the emergence of pamphlets in respective countries but in
an international context, it is striking that their greatest expansion is found
in times of social conflict. In Germany, they began to thrive as early as 1517
during the course of the Reformation, moving from Latin polemic papers to
German pamphlets. Neighbouring Western countries also showed this crescive
trend, albeit slightly later in the second half of the sixteenth century. Its incip-
ience in the Netherlands can be pinpointed to 1565, and a second detectable
upsurge in the years after 1607, when an increasing number of polemic papers
surfaced in connection with the beginning of the revolt of the Seventeen Prov-
inces against Spain, the founding of the Dutch Republic, and the start of the
Eighty Years’ War. However, these papers remained an important part of the
Netherlands’ public culture of political discussion, the more so as there was