Short Description

This project envisaged an art-scientific monograph on the richly illustrated early prints in Basel, which was the most important center of early letterpress printing in the territory of present-day Switzerland. The focus is on 18 works containing a total of more than 1,000 woodcuts, comprising the most important surviving series of Basel images from the late Middle Ages after the massive destruction caused by the Reformation. The texts are almost exclusively German and Latin compilations of religious, didactic content, including many contemporary works and those produced in Basel, alongside 15th-century translations and completely revised editions of works already in circulation. Extremely well-known books such as Ship of Fools or The Mirror of Salvation stand alongside little-known ones.

In addition to the source analysis of the images and texts, the project aims to comprehensively investigate the image-text relationships, taking into account questions of reception ethics. The analysis of the image and text sources provides a comprehensive case study on the change of media between manuscript and early print, while the analysis of the image-text relationships in the field of tension between oral transmission and the written fixation of religious didacticism provides a case study on late medieval reception research. Methodologically, the project ties in with reception-aesthetic concepts and studies of recent literary research, which are combined with iconographic analyses.