The massive currency debasement in the Holy Roman Empire during the early years of the Thirty Years’ War, known as the Kipper and Wipper inflation, has long been considered a watershed in the economic history of early modern Germany. In 2001, the German historian Ulrich Rosseaux synthesized the large body of existing literature with his own extensive research in archival and printed sources in his dissertation Die Kipper und Wipper als publizistisches Ereignis (1620–1626). Eine Studie zu den Strukturen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Zeitalter des Dreissigjährigen Krieges. In this work, Rosseaux painstakingly analyzed the production, contents, and distribution of broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers, and treatises dealing with the Kipper and Wipper phenomenon. The reader who takes up this new book, published by a prestigious university press and praised by leading scholars of early modern Europe on the dust jacket, is bound to ask what new insights Martha White Paas and her collaborators have to offer on the Kipper and Wipper era.

In brief, the answer is nothing. Paas, an economist at Carleton College, has written an introduction of merely seventeen pages in which she summarizes developments in the European economy in general and the German economy in particular. Her sketch of the “price revolution” of the long sixteenth century, its underlying causes — a rising supply of silver and copper, increasing demand due to population growth, monetarization — and the structural problems of the German economy — a stagnant agrarian sector, a negative trade balance, lack of a coordinated economic and fiscal policy — is simply too brief to offer any original perspective. Moreover, it ignores much of the recent literature, including Rosseaux’s book, Hans-Jürgen Gerhard’s essays on the monetary debates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Gabriele Hooffacker’s analysis of the visual imagery of the Kipper and Wipper broadsheets, and Bernd Roeck’s examination of the inflation’s impact on the city of Augsburg. The reader also wonders where Paas got the idea that the Spanish state bankruptcy of 1607 may have caused the “failure” of the Fuggers (5), as their company continued to exist until 1657. Equally puzzling is the statement that “European population rose perhaps as much as two- or threefold from 1500 to 1618” (6). According to Jan de Vries, it grew from roughly sixty-one million in 1500 to seventy-eight million in 1600, an increase of 28 percent (“Population,” in Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 1, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr. et al. [1994]: 13).

Martha White Paas’s essay is followed by John Roger Paas’s four-page note on early modern broadsheets and George C. Schoolfield’s three-page introduction to his translations. The remainder of the book is taken up by the reproduction and sparsely annotated English translation of twenty-seven contemporary German broadsheets. Again, the authors of this book do not bother to summarize other scholars’ findings on the broadsheets’ visual and rhetorical features, the structure of their arguments, or their place within the European media system of the early seventeenth century. Nor do they explain how they selected the broadsheets reproduced here.

Readers unfamiliar with the Kipper and Wipper phenomenon and with the German language may regard this book as a convenient introduction. As a work of scholarship, however, it is a disappointment.