"In His Image and Likeness": Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600

In this ground-breaking book, Kristin Zapalac brings together the methods of social, intellectual, and art history to achieve a new understanding of how the Protestant Reformation altered the terms of political discourse in a German free imperial city. In Zapalac's view, visual and verbal images, many of them having their origins in conceptions of the sacred, were more central to sixteenth-century political thought within the city walls than was the rationalized language of law. Drawing on a wealth of sources including bookbindings, sermons, wills, frescoes, decrees, and woodcuts, she traces the impact of religious change on the languages of judgment and authority used in the city of Regensburg, and thereby sheds light on the nature of political thought in early modern Germany.