Bibliographic Essay
Visual sources for violence can be viewed on a growing number of institutional websites, such as the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum, or in image databases such the ARTstor Digital Library.
Significant print collections include Max Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500-1550,4 vols. (New York: Hacker, 1974); Walter Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550-1600,3 vols. (New York: Abaris, 1975); Dorothy Alexander and Walter Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1600-1700, 2 vols. (New York: Abaris, 1977); David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheetfrom c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); John Roger Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, 1600-1700, 9 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1985-2012); and Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling, Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, 7 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997-2005).The most serious studies of violence in visual representation are those exploring religious suffering, such as Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reaktion, 2001), and John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (eds.), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). On the related subject of martyrdom see Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002); Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, and Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991); and Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, ‘The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments', in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 1997), pp. 66-142. On Reformation propaganda see Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, rev.
edn 1994); and on iconoclasm see Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and David Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1566-1609 (New York: Garland, 1988).Images of war are the subject of many recent studies, although violence is seldom addressed directly or theorised. For overviews see J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1990), David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), which emphasises the social meaning of art; and the many essays in Klaus Bussman and Heinz Schilling (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, 2 vols. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1998). Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) is critical of early sixteenth-century martial ideology, while other works with important insights include Pia Cuneo (ed.), Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2002); James Clifton and Leslie M. Scattone, The Plains of Mars: European war prints, 1500-1825 (New Haven, CT and Houston, TX: Yale University Press and Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2008); and the broad survey by Bernd Roeck, ‘The Atrocities of War in Early Modern Art', in Joseph Canning, Hartmut Lehmann and Jay Winter (eds.), Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 129-40.
Broadsheets and pamphlets contain much on social violence. Important overviews are Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling, Das illustrierte Flugblatt der frühen Neuzeit: Traditionen, Wirkungen, Kontexte (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2008), and Andrew Pettegree (ed.), Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print (Leiden: Brill, 2017). A critical study of war violence is Philip Benedict, Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin (Geneva: Droz, 2007).
For crime and its punishment in the new media see Joy Wiltenburg, Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Karl Härter, ‘Early Modern Revolts as Political Crimes in the Popular Media of Illustrated Broadsheets', in Malte Griese (ed.), From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War: Premodern Revolts in Their Transnational Representations (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), pp. 309-50; Karl Härter, ‘Images of Dishonoured Rebels and Infamous Revolts: Political Crime, Shaming Punishments and Defamation in the Early Modern Pictorial Media', in Carolin Behrmann (ed.), Images of Shame: Infamy, Defamation and the Ethics of oeconomia (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 83-5; and Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 179-209, and ‘Violence, Anger and Dishonour in Sixteenth-Century Broadsheets from the Collection of Johann Jakob Wick', in Susan Broomhall and Sarah Finn (eds.), Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 37-58. For the impact of disasters see Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika (eds.), Disaster, Death and the Emotions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and for ‘Turkish cruelty' see James G. Harper, The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450-1750: Visual Imagery Before Orientalism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), and Charlotte Colding Smith, Images of Islam, 1453-1600: Turks in Germany and Central Europe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014).