ABSTRACT
It is fitting to begin this study with Luther’s words, for his opinions on the relationship between music and morality and on the power of song were to shape a popular movement that swept Germany during his lifetime and afterwards. German songs, sung by the people, helped Luther’s Reformation spread like wildfire, not only through the scholarly and literate, but through all levels of German society. In the first four decades of the Reformation, hundreds of songs written in a popular style and set to familiar tunes appeared in German territories. Some of these works expressed the high ideals and deep faith of sixteenth-century German Christians; others were slanderous, scandalous cries of anger at the papacy, at the clergy, at merchants who benefited from the Catholic church’s downfall, at Luther or at theologians whose specific articles of faith were at odds with those of a song’s composer. They varied from ditties of one satirical strophe to didactic Lieder of more than fifty. No matter the length, subject or approach, however, songs were perfectly adapted to spread rapidly through the still primarily oral culture of sixteenth-century Germany. While the literate had access to the full flowering of printed information about Martin Luther’s movement, most people depended on the more traditional media of woodcut, sermon and song. This study explores the role of popular songs in the German Reformation, and how they spread ideas through all levels of German society. It focuses especially on the lower strata of the population, the uneducated who had limited access to the polemic of the printed word.
