Although the printed book has been an integral part of the Reformation from its start, its importance as a constitutional factor in the history of the Reformation and of the town of Wittenberg is still far from being recognised in its entirety. With volume xxi of its monograph series, the Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten has finally reached to the core of what made the little Middle-north German town of Wittenberg a place of central importance for religion, academia and book culture in the sixteenth century. Printing and preaching evolved alongside each other, one influenced the other. The articles in this volume are usually well supported, even though they attach primary importance to questions of publishing and printing. All but one of the articles is based upon papers presented at a conference of the same name which took place in Wittenberg in 2013.

In an intellectually enjoyable article, Thomas Kaufmann addresses the theory that there was ‘no Reformation without printing’ and locates it within a contemporary historiographical context highlighting the quantitative development of printing in the vernacular at least two decades before the Reformation. Given the book-historical context of the Reformation, Kaufmann thinks it no longer surprising to state the importance of indulgences not only as the stumbling block of Luther, but also as a promotor of a transregional print culture that became the prime motor of the Reformation. This argument is confirmed by Ulrich Bubenheimer's case study on the media strategies of Albrecht von Brandenburg, Luther and Karlstadt on the occasion of the Halle indulgence of 1521. The Reformation itself proved to be crucial for the development of printing in Wittenberg as well as for the development of a mass book market that saw an exceptional increase in individual titles, less bulky non-academic works, literary actors and contemporary themes.

Much of the rest of the volume supports Kaufmann's theory, featuring among others a number of case studies on Wittenberg printers. Martin Treu's article on Lucas Cranach and Christian Döring, the most prominent Wittenberg publishers, is astonishingly insignificant though, probably because it uses the Holtzhausen-collection as its only source. The editor's own contribution to this volume, a biographical study of the printer Nickel Schirlentz, seems to be somewhat disproportionately large, even after the author excluded prints which have not survived physically. All the same, he points out new sources as well as the fact that Schirlentz has been underestimated as a reformation printer due to the fact that he was not part of the consortium that printed the Luther-Bible. It is a little bit surprising to find a few unnecessary overlaps between the articles by Christoph Reske (on the earliest period of printing in Wittenberg before the Reformation) and Uwe Schirmer (on a group of publishers). Schirmer's comments on Cranach and Döring on the other hand, though picking up the theme of Treu's article, succeeds in putting these two publishers’ activities in a wider local and socio-economic context.

A substantial contribution to the history of libraries in Wittenberg is Ulrike Ludwig's history of the libraries and minor academic book collections connected to Wittenberg University during the sixteenth century. She paints a picture of continuity in formal academic book culture from the start in the early Reformation. A group of four articles then focus on special categories of print media produced in Wittenberg, for example printed music by Georg Rhau (Jürgen Heidrich). Eberhard Nehlsen's article on the subject of broadsheet or pamphlets containing popular songs is one of the more interesting contributions to this volume, almost monographic in its ambition to present the production of this type of media in one specific location and likewise academically ambitious by including both physically preserved copies as well as prints which are documented by archival sources alone (an effort which has not been achieved by all his colleagues). In some ways, this article is accompanied by Michael Schilling's study of the broadsheets and pamphlets written by Melanchthon. In particular, this is a study about the correlation between layout and market orientation. Thomas Fuchs's article on historiographical works printed in Wittenberg succeeds in expounding quite a number of problems within its fourteen pages: those connected to a quantitatively less significant category of texts printed and published in Wittenberg, of the VD16 as a basic tool for studying the print culture of Wittenberg, and finally of the methodology in such an analytical approach. The epistemological implications of the fact that printed books have to be regarded primarily as an offer of reception to the buyer/reader, not as the discourse itself, is important but should have been acknowledged by more than Fuchs. This theme at least flashes up in the case study by Hans-Peter Hasse on the remains of a book collection that once belonged to Claudius Textor, a Calvinistic teacher at the university in Wittenberg, due to his final remarks on the well-documented wealth of provenance information preserved in Textor's books.

It seems logical that Hasse's article is followed by one of the most substantial contributions to book history in this volume, namely Andrew Pettegree's in more than one regard external view on the topic of Reformation book culture in Wittenberg. The author himself, a professor at St Andrews University, is not connected with Wittenberg or Germany. Moreover, his approach to the theme of the conference is one characterised by the transnational paradigm. It is a paradox, he writes, to try to study the book culture and print production of a place of supra-regional importance such as Wittenberg by means of a national bibliography. Although primarily promoting the USTC, Pettegree's approach can be applied in a much broader sense to the academic study of Reformation book culture as a whole. His evaluation of the statistics of print underlines, among other matters, the importance of the ‘brand’ Luther as well as of the publication of works in other German cities that boosted the ‘Luther-effect’.