This volume of 15 interdisciplinary essays is based on papers given at a conference at Duke University in 1998. Focusing on the territories of the Holy Roman Empire from the early Reformation to the mid-eighteenth century, the volume examines some of the structures, practices and media of communication that helped shape the social, cultural, and political history of the period.

Contents: Introduction, James Van Horn Melton; Violence and urban identity in early modern Augsburg: communication strategies between authorities and citizens in the adjudication of fights, B. Ann Tlusty; Patricide and pathos: a 1565 murder in deed and word, Joy Wiltenburg; From public event to publishing event: court funerals and the print medium in early modern Germany, Jill Bepler; Anticlericalism in Bamberg on the eve of the Peasants' War, William Bradford Smith; Anabaptist liars: communicating and concealing the faith in early modern Tyrol, D. Jonathan Grieser; Preaching and discipline: the case of 17th-century Rostock, Jonathan Strom; Debating the meaning of pilgrimage: Maria Steinbach, 1733, Marc R. Forster; The public of confessional identity: territorial church and church discipline in 18th-century Hesse, Robert von Friedeburg; Conspiracy and denunciation: a local affair and its European publics (Bern, 1749), Andreas Wÿrgler; Garlic and the Jews: Jörg Breu the Elder's The Mocking of Christ as Protestant "Thesenbild" or Catholic devotional image?, Andrew Morrall; Standing by the ancient faith: Fribourg's fountains and the coming of the Reformation, Donald A. McColl; Musical pedagogy in the German Renaissance, Susan Forscher Weiss; "Not like the unreasoning beasts": rhetorical efforts to separate humans and animals in early modern Germany, Susan C. Karant-Nunn; Expanding the therapeutic canon: learned medicine listens to folk medicine, Martha Baldwin; The debate between Johann Weyer and Thomas Erastus on the punishment of witches, Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr.; Index.