The Protestant Reformation was Europe’s first mass media event. The movement, begun by Martin Luther in 1517, caused a surge in printing across the Holy Roman Empire, as readers sought to stay updated on the movement’s development. Luther’s collaboration with Lucas Cranach, court painter to the Elector of Saxony, provided a new and vibrant visual culture to Europe’s reading and non-reading public. This is most famously seen in the depiction of a papal tiara upon the Whore of Babylon in Luther’s translation of the New Testament.
This paper discusses applying machine learning and image recognition software to the illustrations, ornate letters and title page borders in scanned editions of early modern books. Libraries in Germany and Austria represent some of the most digitised, freely available collections in Europe. The project unites over 30,000 digitised books, representing millions of images, from various libraries and links them to the Universal Short Title Catalogue, ensuring standardised bibliographic metadata. This allows for a systematic examination of the role of images before and during the Protestant Reformation.
Such an analysis provides for multiple strands of investigation. How were iconographies the same or different across regions and time? Many books during this period fail to include publication information. By applying image recognition software, woodcuts used in anonymous editions can be matched to publications identifying the printer. Furthermore, works by Luther were some of the most counterfeited books in this period. Printers even copied the woodcut title page borders used in the original Wittenberg editions. This software can assist in distinguishing between otherwise identical woodcuts. As increased internet speeds have allowed for more digital humanities research on data intensive images, this will be the first large-scale analysis of the role images played in the development of Europe’s reading culture during the Reformation.