Research links you need to know about: All things VD16 edition

For a very insightful discussion forum about early modern German literature and the development of VD16, take a look at Walter Behrendt's discussion forum. It's hosted at Mediaevum.de, a one-stop source for links to nearly everything related to the German Middle Ages. It's resources for relevant primary and secondary literature and links to digitized manuscripts really shouldn't be missed.

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Six months after sending the final manuscript of Printing and Prophecy to Michigan, I have now received the copy edited manuscript for my review. I'm excited to see the book starting to move into the production process, but I need to respond to the copy editing in the next few weeks, which also coincides with Christmas, prepping two new courses for next semester, and MLA. Posting may be light for a bit.

Going meta

So a little bit of research - namely, following up on the footnotes in Barnes's Prophecy and Gnosis - finds that the history and historiography of Johann Hilten has been untangled to a large degree by Hans-Ulrich Hofmann in an excursus (pp. 662-672) in his Luther und die Johannes-Apokalypse (Tübingen: Mohr, 1982). Hofmann admits that the picture is still murky and more remains to be done, but I don't know if there's enough left for a viable article on Hilten.

And that's good! If Hofmann has already taken care of the philological heavy lifting, then it's much easier to use Hilten as one of the leading examples of another phenomenon I've noticed lately, namely the pronounced interest in early 16th-century prophets in the late 16th and 17th centuries. I've run across several examples of prophecies allegedly first written before 1550 which don't appear in print until 60 or 100 years later. Another is the vision of Sigismund Gratman/Gartanar/Gadaner, supposedly from the year 1526, but with no edition earlier than 1621. There are several others as well. Early Lutheranism apparently becomes a preferred setting for prophecies in the late 16th century, and again during the 30 Years War. At least that's my first impression. Someone should write an article about it.

Chapter One: The Sibyl’s Book

I wrote earlier that my upcoming MLA paper is based on the central argument of Chapter Two in Printing and Prophecy. What about Chapter One? My central concern there is the Sibyl's Prophecy, a fourteenth-century poem that combines the Legend of the True Cross and a narrative of the End Time, and the earliest vernacular work printed by Gutenberg. While his edition of the Sibyl’s Prophecy is preserved in just a single fragment, the text is known from several fifteenth-century manuscripts. (By far the best scholarship on the Sibyl's Prophecy is Frieder Schanze, “Wieder einmal das ‘Fragment vom Weltgericht’ – Bemerkungen und Materialien zur ‘Sibyllenweissagung,’” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 75 [2000]: 42-63.) I argue that, in addition to popular interest in devotional aspects, the manuscript context of the Sibyl’s Prophecy suggests that the work could function as a narrative legitimation for chronicles and prognostications. The manuscript context is admittedly allusive, but the typographic context—comprised of the vernacular editions printed by Gutenberg in Mainz—is unambiguous: all these early editions are related to prophecy and prognostication. While this fact was noted by the print historian Carl Wehmer over 60 years ago, it has been overlooked in cultural and literary studies of early printed texts. Chapter One places Gutenberg's printing of the Sibyl’s Prophecy in the context of fifteenth-century debates about literacy, and suggests that Gutenberg was influenced not only by technological and mercantile concerns but also by the cultural and intellectual currents of his time.

The germ of an article

While looking through Andreas Engel's 1597 Bericht von Johann Hilten, I noticed that Engel describes Hilten as Martin Luther's teacher, and has Hilten prophesying various dramatic things for the years 1516, 1546, 1584, 1600, and 1606. It struck me as curious that Hilten didn't appear in print before 1550 if he had any connection to Luther, so I started searching for other editions. Caspar Füger published a compilation of prophecies for the years 1584-1588 attributed to Hilten, Lactantius, and various biblical passages, and in Füger, Hilten's prophecies are for the years 1580, 1582, 1584, and 1588. In addition to the divergent dates, Engel and Füger attribute different prophecies to Hilten. Several pamphlets attributed to Hilten were later published in 1628-1629 that update the relevant time period but otherwise follow Füger.

So: There's a widely divergent prophetic tradition attributed to someone who had died nearly a century earlier. This seems a bit curious. That's ingredient one.

A first pass through the bibliography finds several references to Johann Hilten in secondary literature, but the most recent article about him looks to be from 1928. Marjorie Reeves has a note referring to Hilten as obscure. The go-to source on 16th and 17th-century Lutheran apocalypticism, Robin Barnes's Prophecy and Gnosis, also mentions Hilten only briefly.

So: Hilten is relevant to studies of Martin Luther and apocalypticism, but there doesn't appear to be significant literature about him. There might be a need for a fresh look at Hilten. That's ingredient two.

Ingredients three and four are luck and time. To untangle the textual history of Johann Hilten, you'd need to find some more sources, and there's no guarantee that they exist. Hunting them down will take some time looking in all the usual places (and, inevitably, some unusual ones as well).

Of course, the place to start is Interlibrary Loan. It's entirely possible that the article from 1928 answers every question anyone might have. It wouldn't be the first time that I've been 80 years late to the game. The other possibility is that the article I can imagine writing was published in 2008. That also wouldn't be the first time.

The utraquist reverse sacramental martyrdom

The UB Halle delivered a new miracle this morning in the form of Andreas Engel's 1597 Kurtzer / Jedoch gewisser vnd gruendtlicher Bericht / von Johan Hilten / vnd seinen Weissagungen (VD16 ZV 5013). I've come across Hilten's name before, but the works in question were too late to be relevant to Printing and Prophecy, so I hadn't taken a close look at him yet.

There's a lot of great material here, including a note that Johann Hilten (died ca. 1500, here transformed into Luther's teacher) died of hunger in prison because he refused to take only the sacramental wafer - apparently living saints can sustain themselves from the eucharist alone, but Reformation martyrs would rather die than partake of the eucharist in diminished form.

And Engel's note about his reading prophetic pamphlets as school assignments, and translating them into Latin as an exercise in style, has a ton of implications for how popular literature was disseminated.

Toledo, Toledo Letter, am Toledosten

I thought I was just asking for a book, but Interlibrary Loan brought two gigantic folio volumes to my office this week, Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling's commented edition of broadside prints from the Wickiana collection in Zürich (thank you, Berkeley).

And immediately a whole new set of Toledo Letters show up. In vol. 2, pp. 314-15 and 334-35 (VII, 156 and 166 for the entire series), two broadsides are reproduced in facsimile that turn out to contain the Scandinavian version of the Toledo Letter (see Mentgen, Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit 111), printed in Augsburg in 1585 and 1585. The footnotes point to further editions, including a translation into Czech. (To my knowledge, broadside prints are not indexed in VD16, unfortunately, or at least not uniformly, so that these broadsides have no VD16 entry.)

These broadsides attribute the prognostication to Johannes Doleta, whose name was already familiar to me. Two editions combine Doleta's prognostication with that of Wilhelm de Friess, while others stylize Doleta as the "Pilgrim Ruth, hidden in the forest," recycling the woodland prophetic identity created a century earlier by and for Johannes Lichtenberger. There are at least five editions of Doleta's prophecy in booklet form known from the years 1586-88 (VD16 ZV 4633 and ZV 22756, as well as two others not recorded in VD16, and one Dutch edition,TB 4427). The Utrecht pamphlets collection has a digital facsimile of one of the unrecorded editions here.

And now it turns out that Doleta is none other than "Johannes of Toledo," at least in a very late and highly modified version (the pamphlets add a foreword and prognostications for the years 1587-1588 and other material that is not part of the older Toledo Letter). So now it appears that the Toledo Letter really did enjoy renewed popular interest in the 1580s with at least 5 pamphlets and 4 broadside editions, and appeared at least once more in the 1620s. Not bad for a prophecy that was already 400 years old.

The Toledo Letter (late late edition)

The prophecy known as the "Toledo Letter" circulated throughout Europe from the late 12th century onwards. Its origin and later versions have been thoroughly documented by Hermann Grauert and, most especially and more recently, Gerd Mentgen's 2005 book Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter. Mentgen's book, which I found extremely useful while working on Printing and Prophecy, records versions of the Toledo Prophecy as late as the early 16th century.* There is only one known version of the "Toledo Letter" in print (known from two editions, VD16 P 4549 and P 4550), in a highly modified version, the "Practica of the High Learned Masters of the School of Athens" (and so the "Toledo Letter" barely gets a mention in Printing and Prophecy). Mentgen suggests that the motifs and rhetoric of the "Toledo Letter" were incorporated into the predictions of mass flooding and other disasters for 1524.

So I was surprised when I glanced at a newly digitized pamphlet, the anonymous Grüntliche und Astronomische Widerlegung / zweyer außgesprengten / falscherdichteten Propheceyungen / uber das 1629. Jahr, and discovered a refutation of the "Toledo Letter," apparently as published in late 1628. No title is given for the pamphlet that is being refuted, but the key components are all there: a conjunction of all the planets in the Cauda draconis as the Sun enters the sign of Libra, a solar eclipse, war, bloodshed, death, and most significantly, the advice to seek refuge from the coming storm winds and earthquakes in a vault between mountains stocked with food for 20 days (see especially the 1460 version of the "Toledo Letter," Mentgen 98 n. 381). The newly digitized pamphlet looks like a close variant of VD17 23:250802M; another edition, for which a complete facsimile is available, is VD17 12:641205M.

*My one wish is that Mentgen, like many other medieval historians, would cite early printed books by referring to a GW/ISTC/VD16 index number to permit easier identification of the precise editions. Citing an author, title, and year, and even adding a printer and place of publication, is often not enough to completely specify the edition consulted.

A footnote

I had a few minutes to write this morning. I managed to get one footnote written. It wasn't even a long footnote with an interesting but tangential argument. Just a simple: "On this topic, see A, and also B and C."

But if you start to write a footnote, you'll want to double-check the page numbers in your sources. When you check the page numbers, you'll want to check the footnotes, too. While you're checking the footnotes, you might notice that your source cites some primary material you haven't seen before. When you try to find a digital copy of the promising new material, you might stumble onto a whole digitalization project with 3000+ sixteenth-century books (so far) that you have never browsed before.

I've only made it through the first 600 items from the ULB Sachsen-Anhalt/Universität Halle's list of sixteenth-century digital editions, but there were a few high-priority items, including two 1516 editions of the Extract of Various Prophecies. I only got one footnote written, but it was still a morning well spent.

Why I love medieval studies, the Internet, and librarians

I need to take a look at a copy of an uncataloged edition of an obscure sixteenth-century pamphlet in a small library on another continent. So I e-mailed someone whose job it is to support the cataloging and management of smaller collections in his state. I mentioned what I was working on and the book I was hoping to get digital copies of, and asked who the best contact person would be.

The reply: Well, the contact people are quite busy and don't really have the resources, but I have to visit that library in a few weeks, so I'll bring the pamphlet back with me and have it digitized here. Will that work?

Yes. Yes, that will work just fine.

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I need to take a look at another obscure pamphlet. According to VD16, there's one copy, not in a major research collection. But a bit of Google searching and wading through digitized card catalogs turns up a second copy. So I e-mail another librarian: any chance of getting a digital copy? Digital photos arrive by e-mail the next day. Is this the work you mean, the librarian asks? (Well, no, it's not quite the right one, and we're having a bit of difficulty tracking down which one it is. But it's still awesome.)

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Yesterday someone contacted me about an older project of mine. Available images weren't great; did I have any digital photos available? Why, yes, I did, and I've now sent them off to help that person with his research.

It's the digital-images-of-obscure-old-books Circle of Life.

Research links you need to know about VII: surfing for digital editions

If you want to leave no stone unturned in your search for an online digital edition of a book printed in the15th or 16th century, then you need to work your way through the entire list of libraries with digital editions over at Archivalia. It will take days, but it will be worth the effort, unless you get distracted and start looking at books you never existed, in which case it will take weeks or months but be even more rewarding.

Your next-best option is to check the catalogs of the major digitalization projects (see links in the sidebar). If you don't find what you're looking for, however, there are still two places worth checking.

For incunables, try the verteilte digitale Inkunabelbibliothek (vdIB). Its search data comes from ISTC, and it has links to digital editions from Cologne and Wolfenbüttel. (I'd like to see some evidence that the project is still being actively developed, however. With ISTC and GW adding their own links to digital editions, vdIB may be becoming redundant.)

A more general search engine is the Zentrales Verzeichnis digitalisierter Drucke. Its coverage reaches from 1501 to the present, but its focus is on the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, it's turned up some new sources for me in the past.

And don't forget Google; it led me to a recently digitized first edition of Rheticus's Narratio prima, the first printed description of Copernican cosmology, at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology.

Abstract: "Prophets, Profits, and Paratexts" (or Chapter Two: Prophets in Print)

Following one of the sessions on German literature before 1700 at MLA in Philadelphia last year, Elio Brancaforte asked me if I might have something that would fit the topic of a session he was organizing for 2011 on "Inventing Lives."

As it turned out, the topic perfectly matched a section of of Printing and Prophecy that I had just revised. For a long time, chapter two was a long, disordered amalgamation of interesting material that didn't really add up to anything. But after several false starts and partial revisions, I finally recognized that the chapter was at its core the story of Johannes Lichtenberger's Prognosticatio transformed the author from a high-flying astrological consultant into a prophetic forest hermit.

So when Elio asked, I had something nearly ready to go, over a year in advance. I worked up an abstract, which has since been accepted, and I'll be giving the paper at MLA in Los Angeles in January.

Abstract: “Prophets, Profits, and Paratexts”

The fifteenth-century German astrologer Johannes Lichtenberger’s primary work, the Prognosticatio first published in 1488, soon became the most popular and influential prophetic compilation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the vehicle by which medieval prophecies were transmitted to the seventeenth and later centuries. But where Lichtenberger had been the fifteenth century’s equivalent of a high-society astrological consultant, later centuries remembered him as a prophetic forest hermit. The transformation of the author from an expert astrologer into a hermit crying in the wilderness began already in the first Latin and German editions. The woodcut images and title page, as well as the image captions, colophon and other paratexts (to use Gérard Genette’s term) helped invent an authorial biography substantially different from that found in the text. All of these extra-textual elements were determined not by the author but by the printer, and they served the printer’s interests. Primary among these interests was forestalling censorship by allaying the concerns of ruling authorities, while also meeting popular demand for prophetic insight. While research over the last 50 years has helped restore Lichtenberger’s biography, the current scholarly view of the author is still distorted by regarding the printed Prognosticatio as the expression of a single author’s thoughts. But to understand literature as preserved in the medium of print, we have to understand books as products of a rational division of labor in which multiple authorial biographies compete and conflict with each other.

Frankenstein's article

The "Wilhelm de Friess" article has reached that stage where the meat of the argument is completely covered in scar tissue. When I was a couple pages away from wrapping up the first draft, I started adding notes in square brackets in various places, reminding myself to add something important. Then I added a few more notes. Then a few more. Now I have successfully reduced a budding article to a pile of notes and references.

This was not unexpected, actually. It's more or less what happened when I wrote my Copernicus article. It's a useful part of the writing process, because it helps me identify those areas where I no longer support the article's original narrative, and it shows me what open questions still remain at this point. I find that I need to send a couple inquiries to a few libraries and archives to tie up loose ends.

The coolest thing that you can do every day as a professor is to request books from anywhere in the world through interlibrary loan - and get them. The coolest thing that you can do occasionally, though, is to write to librarians and archivists anywhere in the world with questions about obscure topics - and get answers.

Research links you need to know about VI: my other favorite digitalization projects

While I was working on Printing and Prophecy, I found several additional useful collections of digitized manuscripts and early printed books. Some are large and growing (the HAB Wolfenbüttel and e-rara.ch) and have a place on my list of RSS feeds, while others are smaller but well-indexed collections that reward an exhaustive search. My favorites include:

• The Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Their focus is on the 17th century, and lately they've focused on funeral orations and academic disputations, but their online catalog turned up many important sources.
• e-rara.ch. The history of science and astronomy, as well as Swiss printers, are both points of emphasis of this newer project, which resulted in a relatively high number of interesting sources so far.
• Lutherhalle Wittenberg. It's currently offline for unknown reasons. Hopefully they're reworking the awkward interface and will be back online soon.
• Utrecht pamphlets. The digital offerings of Utrecht University are actually much broader, but the pamphlet collection turned up a few unique sources for me.
• Klassik Stiftung Weimar/HAAB. A small but easily searchable collection.
• Johannes a Lasco Biblithek Emden. I think I only found one relevant source here, but a different project would find many more.
  

Research links you need to know about V: Handschriftencensus.de

I really wish I had the entire Verfasserlexikon as an electronic database. The only problem is that it doesn't yet exist (except as a shadowy scanned version rumored to exist among doctoral students of Germanistik in Germany).

Barring that, I really wish I had the entire Verfasserlexikon sitting on my bookshelf, or at least in the library. The only problem is that all the volumes and indices together cost thousands of dollars. (I do recommend the reasonably priced one-volume Studienauswahl, however. The paperback 11-volume Studienausgabe is attractively priced, but still a significant investment.)

So for tracking down manuscripts, secondary literature, and links to archival descriptions and digitized images, the first place I check is handschriftencensus.de, which combines the Marburger Reportorium (for 13th-14th century manuscripts) and the Paderborner Reportorium (8th-12th centuries).

My own, indirect contributions are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Progress

I can finally log on to the interlibrary loan system, and the first requests have been submitted. I feel much better now.

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Also, the first draft of the "Wilhelm de Friess" article is up to 5,000 words, and it's not bad. I may hit 7-8,000 by the time it's polished, which is just about right for the journal I'm targeting.

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And my "Wilhelm de Friess" paper has been accepted for presentation in the 15th Century Studies session on German literature at Kalamazoo. I missed Kalamazoo this last spring, so I'm looking forward to returning in May.

Another blogging American German medievalist

I don't know if Alexander Sager is still updating sagemaere, but his podcasts of a selection of medieval German literary works are great. I used his recording of the "Hildebrandslied" in class with my students. I have maybe 20 minutes during the whole semester to talk about OHG literature, and it was great to let my students get a taste for the sound of Old High German.

Research links you need to know about IV: GW and ISTC

For editions printed in 16th- or 17th-century Germany, VD16 is the first place to look. But for the 15th century, there are two indispensable indices: The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke and the Incunabula Short Title Catalog. Both are searchable online databases for long-running projects to index all books printed between the invention of printing around 1452/53 and the end of the century. Both databases will provide the same basic information (printer, place and date of publication, format, some additional bibliography and location of known copies), but each offers somewhat different additional information, and sometimes they disagree even about the basics, so it's a good idea to check both.

I find ISTC numbers a bit opaque and unwieldy, but for the time being they offer the most easily citable and searchable index for 15th-century printing. I prefer the system in Goff, as it's easy to remember that "S-308" refers to the 1493 Latin edition of Hartmann Schedel's Liber cronicarum printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg, while the ISTC number "is0030800" is much less memorable. The ISTC, however, is not limited to American libraries and is being constantly updated. The GW numbers are also widely used, but the regular numbers end somewhere in the middle of the database. Recently the GW has made its entire record set searchable, but the mixture of regular GW identifers and provisional "m" numbers makes the ISTC my preferred citation for now.

It's good to be familiar with the history and limitations of both projects, about which a number of articles have been written. (A good place to start is "Counting Incunables: The IISTC CD-ROM," Huntington Library Quarterly 61 [1999]: 457-529.) But even upon first use both databases will quickly point the user towards key elements of a work's edition history.

Research links you need to know about III: Handschriftenkataloge Online

For medievalists, manuscript catalogs are like neutron stars. The useful information is so densely packed that you can barely comprehend it all. If you're on the trail of an obscure text, you can spend hours looking at incipits and provenances or just browsing individual entries. If you're lucky, your library has shelved all the manuscript catalogs together, so you can wander over and browse when you have a moment. If you're not lucky, your library doesn't have any manuscript catalogs at all.

Hopefully this is sufficient context to explain the miracle that is Handschriftenkataloge-Online. It has high-quality scans of published manuscript catalogs for just about every major German research library. Rather than sending away for volumes one at a time through interlibrary loan, or waiting for your next opportunity to drive 1200 miles to a major research library with a focus on medieval German studies, you just point, and click. And click. And click. And click. And click...

Now if they only had something like that for incunable catalogs. That would rule.

Good and Bad

Printing and Prophecy will be my first book. I've undertaken other lengthy projects (an overgrown master's thesis and my dissertation), but this is my first published book. All my contact with the press has been by post and e-mail with people I've never met in real life, so at times it's hard to entirely shake the feeling that I've been hooked by an elaborate hoax. But behold: I just discovered that Printing and Prophecy now appears on the University of Michigan Press web site, as a book in the Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World series. My book is real!

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I can't log on to ILLiad, and no one here knows why, so I'm cut off from interlibrary loan. I'm like a junkie who can't get his fix. Listen, people, either you let me order articles from obscure journals soon, or I'm going to start making a scene right in the middle of the quad.

Research links you need to know about II: VD16

The "VD16" I mentioned in my previous post is the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts. It's a constantly updated index of all known editions printed in German or in the German-language area in the 16th century. The interface is awkward and the project is woefully underfunded, but VD16 is incredibly valuable for studying 16th-century printing and early modern literature. Recently, the VD17 index became accessible through the same interface, so you can search two centuries at the same time. To learn more about it, read here, but to search the database, click here.

One thing I wish more scholars would do when citing German 16th-century editions is to include the VD16 number. As printers could and did print several editions of the same work in the same year, identifying an edition as "Augsburg: Heinrich Steiner, 1530" is not specific enough (let alone "Augsburg, 1530" or simply "1530"). With a VD16 number, readers can look up precisely what edition is meant, and find the cataloging source, and possible links to digital editions, and (via the "SFX" module) the shelf marks of known copies.

When I was researching Printing and Prophecy, I identified likely title words and checked every year from 1501-1550, and later checked all the authors for works I may have missed, and then double-checked every entry in the appendix against VD16 before submitting the final manuscript. For any research project that even tangentially deals with 16th-century German printing, VD16 is absolutely essential.

Research links you need to know about I: BSB digitalization

There are just a few sites I check every day, or even multiple times each day. The one I check most often (via RSS feed) and where I most often find something new, useful, surprising, or just plain cool has got to be the digitalization project of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Their area of focus is 16th century printed books (in order to digitize their holdings of VD16 titles), but you'll also find a rich collection of medieval manuscripts, musical works, non-Western works, and many others. Check it every day. It's better than Christmas.

What I'm working on: "Wilhelm de Friess"

Prophetic pamphlets show us people's deepest hopes and fears. From the 15th century onwards, they provide insights on what was going on in the minds of Europeans from all parts of society, and on how that society was structured, during a time of tremendous change.

For Printing and Prophecy, I drew the chronological boundaries of 1450-1550, so I had relatively little to say about earlier or later works. It turns out, though, that one of the most popular authors of prophetic tracts was Wilhelm de Friess of Maastricht, whose pamphlets appeared in more than 30 German-language editions between 1557 and 1587. That puts him ahead of any of the 16th-century astrologers, and in the same league as Johannes Lichtenberger.

How much has been written about de Friess? Nothing. He gets mentioned in passing in a handful of books and articles, but despite his popularity, no one has written specifically about de Friess.

Maastricht is in the Netherlands, right? So the pamphlets were translated into German from Dutch, right? The answer is a definite "sort of."

• There's evidence for some early reception in the Netherlands, but none of those editions are extant.The Germans, though, kept buying "de Friess" for 30 years.
  
• "Wilhelm de Friess" is nearly non-existent as a historical person. The title pages all insist that the prophecies were found under his pillow after his death, but the death of de Friess is just about the only fact of his biography that's mentioned.
• And the 30+ editions are actually two totally different texts. Friess I (1557-1568) is a pastiche of End Times tropes (Angelic Pope, Last World Emperor, Antichrist, etc.), while Friess II (1577-1587 and later) is a much different (and much more pessimistic) kind of prophecy. The name of de Friess is even attached to a third prognostic text as well.

Dead authors are useful, apparently.

Status: I've done most of the heavy lifting on this one. I'm working on writing up the manuscript and submitting it right now.

Moving in

This is where I'll be posting research updates. Right now my office is still full of unopened boxes and I'm busy with new faculty orientation, so posting will be light. This week's goal: start a research blog. Status: accomplished.