Abstract

The article deals with the Protestant genre ‘Lügende’ (word combined from ‘Legende’ [legend] and ‘Lüge’ [lie]) as a disparagement of Roman Catholic legends in the 16th century. The investigation concentrates on paratextualisation as elementary invective mode of ‘Lügenden’. The analytical focus on titles, marginalia and so called ‘reminders’ (‘Erinnerungen’) shows the correlation between the generic term ‘Legende’ resp. ‘Lügende’ and the invective pattern of language use ‘Lügende’. According to this, the article discusses ‘Lügende’ as a communicative genre. Furthermore, by understanding ‘Lügende’ as a meta genre, whose paratexts are its basic elements of metaization, paratexts refer to text transgressions. Therefore, they are specified as secondary forms of religious communication during the denominational conflicts and negotiation processes in the 16th century.