Over the first four decades of the Reformation, hundreds of songs written in popular styles and set to well-known tunes appeared across the German territories. These polemical songs included satires on the pope or Martin Luther, ballads recounting historical events, translations of psalms, and musical sermons. They ranged from single-strophe ditties to didactic Lieder of fifty or more verses.

Luther himself wrote many such songs, and this book argues that these songs—and the propagandist ballads they inspired—had a greater impact on the German people than Luther’s writings or sermons. Music was a powerful force of propaganda in the German Reformation. Rebecca Wagner Oettinger examines a wide selection of these songs and their role in disseminating Luther’s teachings to a largely non-literate population, while also spreading subversive criticism of Catholicism.

These songs existed at the intersection of several forces: the familiarity of popular music, historical theories on the power of music, the educational beliefs of sixteenth-century theologians, and the need for a sense of community and identity in troubled times. As Oettinger demonstrates, this music—though simple in itself—offers new insights into what most people in sixteenth-century Germany knew about the Reformation, how they acquired their knowledge, and how they expressed their views.

With full details of nearly 200 Lieder from this period provided in the second half of the book, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation serves as both a valuable study of music as a political and religious tool and a useful resource for future research.