SOURCE: Coupe, W. A. “Text and Illustration or Picture and Commentary? Hans Sachs and the Sixteenth-Century Tradition.” Carleton Germanic Papers 22 (1994): 46-58.

In the following essay, Coupe discusses the relationship between the illustrations and the text in the works of Hans Sachs.

It is a commonplace of German literary and cultural history that the sixteenth century was the golden age of the illustrated book. It could scarcely be otherwise: the earliest printed books, the Biblia pauperum, the Ars bene moriendi and the like were, after all, essentially picture books whose name, “block books,” bears witness to their origins in the printed pictures for which the blocks were first used. After the invention of printing by movable type, the tradition long continued and in the sixteenth century bore fruit, not only the combination of woodcut and text in the moral satires deriving from Brant's Narrenschiff, but in almost every type...