The Breakthrough of Typographic Printing | 29suspended from balloons. Last but not least, his circulation of print-work was
an attempt to secure his posthumous fame (Füssel 1999: 102–4).
This political utilisation of media entailed censorship in all European
nations. Subsequent to previous ecclesiastical surveillance, secular and cleri-
cal censorship developed at the end of the fifteenth century. Starting in the
1520s, with the amount of critical discourse in printed media gradually
increasing, restrictive laws came into being, such as pre-censorship (1529) and
the requirement to display imprint (1530) in the Reich (Eisenhardt 1970:
29; Hemels 1982: 32; Wilke 2000: 36). In addition, restrictions were made
with regard to printing locations, giving precedence to university towns, royal
seats and imperial cities in the Reich, and London as well as the two univer-
sity towns Oxford and Cambridge in England (Briggs and Burke 2002: 50).
Religious and confessional aspects initially took precedence over political ones
in censorship laws. This circumstance did not change until the second half of
the eighteenth century (Eisenhardt 1970: 153). Moral and ethical misdemean-
ours were punished chiefly in connection with other offences (Schilling 1990:
201). Besides territorial censorship under the superintendence of the emperor,
there was ecclesiastical surveillance which in regard to Protestants was also
carried out at the territorial state level.
Censorship edicts and their justification are pre-eminent for identifying the
powerful effect attributed to print media by contemporaries. When viewing
the practical implementation of censorship laws, however, one may find that
researchers have on various occasions projected the police state regime of the
Vormärz in the early nineteenth century onto the early Modern Era. More
recently, on the other hand, scholars have emphasised the limits of censorship
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spurred on by investigations of
the underground journalism of French hacks prior to 1789. These include
the omission of imprints, the stating of false names and places of publishing,
the smuggling of books from abroad, and the local censorship practice. Not
only did censorship rules differ regionally, there was also a considerable leeway
in applying them. Various sovereigns, for instance, did not implement the
emperor’s decisions. Moreover, many of them commissioned people who were
already entrusted with other tasks, such as preachers or professors, with media
supervision, instead of appointing special control committees. Not least, pun-
ishments were discriminative and arbitrary. In order to demonstrate respect for
the much-maligned nation of Scotland, the Duchy of Prussia even imposed
the death penalty on someone for launching a vituperative attack. Some cases
of long prison sentences are also recorded. In other comparable instances,
though, punishments were usually lenient or restricted to ‘mere’ exile (Körber
1998: 271). France, on the other hand, dealt with her perpetrators more strin-
gently (Minois 1995). Generally speaking, however, it was certainly possible
for media dynamics to avoid political control.