A printer and a preacher’s daughter. Occasional panegyrics on Fryderyk Ludwik Rhete and Anna Reimar wedding on September 22nd, 1696

Abstract

At the beginning the author briefly presents relations among prints, printing and church, stating that catholic and reformed churches had become particular recipients of “the dark art”. In such a context he focuses on the role of ephemera and occasional prints, analysing their role in an information landscape of the 17^th century cities, on the example of Gdańsk, Królewiec and Szczecin. One of the Szczecin printers who often produced such texts was Fryderyk Ludwik Rhete. It’s him who published a few epithalamia on the occasion of his wedding with Anna Reimer in September 1686. The author analyses in details content and functions of such publications. It reveals that the printer’s wedding was for the panegyrists an excuse to praise merits of printing as a tool of religious propaganda. Printers’ activities for the benefit of faith, dissemination of the God’s Word, were – according to the panegyrists – proper use of the dark art, as it led to eternal happiness.