An overlooked essential source: Melchior Ambach, Vom Ende der Welt

While working on Printing and Prophecy, I made a note to myself about a work that looked interesting but that I didn't have a chance to consult, Melchior Ambach's Vom Ende der Welt (VD16 A 2161). My time in München was limited, the booklet only contained six leaves, the date of printing of 1545 was near the end of the time period I was interested in, and the title formulation (Vom Ende der Welt / Und zukunfft des Endtchrists. Wie es vorm Jungsten tag in der Welt / ergehn werde. Alte und newe Propheceyen / Auff diese letzste böse zeit ... in rheumen gestelt) suggested that this was merely some pastor's versified treatment of Daniel and Revelation.

All of that turns out to be wrong.

Paul Nagel cites Paul Severus

In my list of early printed prophetic and prognostic works, I have several marked with the note "what is this?" where the title sounds promising, but I've not yet had a chance to look at the work itself. Periodically I'll go through the list and see if any new facsimiles have been released.

One of the authors I've finally been able to check is Paul Nagel. His works are similar to several other early seventeenth century German prophetic pamphlets, such as those attributed to Johannes de Capistrano. I was skimming through the SLUB Dresden's facsimile of Nagel's 1605 Himmels Zeichen when I came across a passage that reminded me of a passage in "Paul Severus," published forty years earlier. The passage from Nagel turns out to be a rather direct quotation from Severus:

The Nuremberg Chronicle/die Schedelsche Weltchronik: the essential bibliography (updated)

Update 19 April 2013: I've added two articles to the previously empty section on the illustrations of the Nuremberg Chronicle, as well as a link to Christoph Reske's online summary, and added one book to the content and context section.

At SCSC last fall, the topic of one conversation turned to the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) and which aspects of it have been treated by scholarly literature. The coverage is uneven. For some topics, there are several essential books or articles, while for others there are none. Since then, I've been thinking about which contributions to the secondary literature anyone planning to write about the Nuremberg Chronicle should read without fail. Here is a first attempt at an essential bibliography.

Teaching materials for medieval/early modern devotional literature

This last semester, my literature/culture/civilization course returned to the Middle Ages. Last time, I taught the course as a survey of literary works and was frustrated by the lack of focus, so this semester I decided to concentrate on religious history and devotional literature, broadly understood. It actually required only a modest alteration of the readings, since many of the medieval German literary classics also have a religious aspect. For the primary texts, I used Reclam editions of Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, and Geistliche Lyrik, supplemented with several shorter works. Overall, I think the course was a success.

Totentanz

One of the works that I find very useful for teaching the later Middle Ages is the Dance of Death. The Totentanz in its various versions has a double payoff: it illustrates late medieval attitudes towards death, and it provides a graphic overview of the structure of late medieval society. In manuscript and print (not to mention a number of famous murals), the tradition lasts more than two centuries, so there are numerous possibilities for student papers. Best of all, several different versions of the Totentanz are now available online. The next time I teach the medieval to early modern course, we're going to spend some more time on the Totentanz, and I'll make it a required paper. Here's a first attempt at a bibliography.

Practica teütsch, ca. 1505: market collapse or bibliographic accident?

One of the questions I couldn't definitively answer when Printing and Prophecy went to press was what exactly happened to the market for annual astrological prognostic booklets - the Practica teütsch - after 1500. The graph of editions per year starts to decline int the late 1490s, and then it falls dramatically at the end of the century and never reaches its previous height until the late sixteenth century. Here's what the graph looks like grouped by half-decade:

One-hit wonders of Reformation printing

Among sixteenth-century German printers, many - over 300 - are known from only a single edition. Some of these are accidents of bibliography, where the majority of their careers fall outside of the sixteenth century, or European printers with a single German edition recorded in VD16, but most of them are people whose known career in publishing comprises a single edition. In some cases, like "Degenhard Pfeffinger," printer of VD16 B 8454, one wonders if the name was actually a pseudonym. In other cases, like Andreas Reich, printer of VD16 C 6339, there is simply no more than a single edition.