The increasing importance of the media during the last years has led to intensified research on forms of communication and public sphere in the past. It has become obvious how important the knowledge about media and practices of communication is for understanding the function of rulership in the medieval and early modern world. There was a need for studies about propaganda in the middle ages and at the transition to the modern world, and this anthology is intended to fill the gap. The opening study surveys the whole range of medieval communication and comes to the conclusion that the modern concept of propaganda can be used to analyse medieval persuasive communication. The following contributions about Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia and Italy provide a chronological and thematic profile from the 11th to the 16th century. They show in what ways and between which social groups propaganda was employed, what the social and political context of communicative behaviour was and what situations and what media the propagandists used at the time.