ABSTRACT
While public religious instruction in medieval Europe was largely reliant on imagery, some of which remains on the walls of the Continent's Romanesque and Byzantine churches, Protestant reformers were able to take advantage of technological change and more widespread literacy in the sixteenth century to use catechisms to convey ideas about salvation to ordinary lay believers. Johannes Honterus, leading reformer of the Saxon Germans in Transylvania, commented that the message of religious reform soon spread onto the very fringes of the occidental Church. The Hungarian kingdom never recovered from the catastrophic defeat inflicted by the Ottomans at the battle of Mohács in 1526. From the 1540s to the 1580s between twenty-five and thirty different versions of Protestant catechisms were produced in the languages of this region, most of them in print, marking a period of intensive dissemination of religious knowledge in east-central Europe. Catechisms in sixteenth-century east-central Europe therefore had didactic purposes, polemic purposes and political purposes.
