The printed polemical religious imagery of sixteenth-century German lands is much more frequently associated with Protestants than with Catholics. Robert Scribner's seminal study For the Sake of Simple Folk emphasized the eagerness and facility with which Protestants seized the opportunity to communicate with audiences at all levels. The result was a wave of publications that were often in the vernacular and illustrated with striking images. As the Counter-Reformation gained momentum, Catholics also started to make greater use of similar publications, although these have not been studied to the same extent as their Protestant counterparts. Scribner observed that ‘the visual propaganda of the Counter-Reformation remains a gap to be filled’, a sentiment most recently echoed by R. Po-chia Hsia.

This chapter is focused on the work of one of the most active of the Catholic polemicists, the Franciscan Johann Nas (1534–90), and his use of monstrous births in a single, highly complex broadsheet that has never been the subject of a close iconographical study. Titled the Ecclesia Militans (‘Militant Church’), it combines a polemical poem by Nas with an extraordinary image in which well-known monstrous births from throughout the century are jumbled together in a sequence that includes many figures from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation (Figs 5.1 and 5.2). Little is known about the artist, who can only be identified by the monogram L with a cross, and it can be assumed from the interaction of text and image that Nas was very active in directing the artist. The imagery of the Apocalypse that permeates the print was widely known in sixteenth-century Germany, having been reproduced in book illustrations and broadsheets. As Robin Barnes has observed, the great proliferation of this sort of imagery – particularly in the increasingly polemical and eschatological period following Luther's death in 1546 – meant that many people were confused about the true meaning and significance of the Book of Revelation.