Abstract: "And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids: Illiteracy and the struggle for authority in the lost visions of Lienhard Jost"

This is the abstract I submitted for the paper I'll be giving at the annual conference of the German Studies Association in September in the session "Prophecy and Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Germany." It's based on a paper that was recently accepted by Sixteenth Century Studies, although it may not be in print until next fall or later. This is the first time in several years that I'm dealing not just with a prophetic text but with an actual visionary as a source. I'm excited about this project, as I think it might point in some interesting new directions, not specifically at the Strasbourg prophets (it sounds like Christina Moss, a doctoral student at Waterloo, will do that in her dissertation, which I'm looking forward to seeing). Instead, I think the case of Lienhard Jost might just point towards a general theory of prophecy, from vision to text to excerpt to literary allusion.

In any case, here's the abstract.

Abstract: "And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids: Illiteracy and the struggle for authority in the lost visions of Lienhard Jost"

Lienhard Jost is recognized today as one of the leading members of the Strasbourg Prophets associated with Melchior Hoffman in the 1530s. Because Jost’s works have been lost for centuries, however, basic facts of his biography have been uncertain, and he has been treated as a secondary figure behind Hoffman and behind his visionary wife Ursula Jost. With the rediscovery of Lienhard Jost’s visions in a copy preserved in Vienna, we now have access to a unique account in his own words of the experiences of an early modern German folk prophet. Jost’s visions, published by Melchior Hoffman in 1532, establish that he was an illiterate woodcutter. Popular accounts of learned discourse, including the Reformation and predictions of a second deluge in 1524, inspired Jost’s prophetic experiences. Jost’s account of his visions documents his progressive transformation with respect to literacy. At the beginning of his preaching, Jost regarded the written word as a silencing of and a loss of control over his own speech. Jost’s prophecies included not only oral preaching but also active performance of his message. In Jost’s account, these prophetic episodes transformed the city’s insane asylum, where he was confined, into a school. Although still illiterate when released, Jost saw himself as now authorized to comment on scripture and engage in other textual activities typically reserved for the learned, and he became increasingly confident in having his visions committed to writing and ultimately to print.