The Extract of Various Prophecies

For the booklet of excerpts from Lichtenberger and Grünpeck and other sources known variously as the Auszug etlicher Prophezeiungen, Extract of Various Prophecies, and (inaccurately) as the "Anonymous Practica"/"Anonyme Praktik," whose most thorough previous description is pp. 145-53 in Heike Talkenberger's Sintflut (1990), I have a recently published article that clears up some of the mysteries:

Jonathan Green. “The Extract of Various Prophecies: Apocalypticism and Mass Media in the Early Reformation.” Renaissance and Reformation 40.4 (2017): 15–42.

• The previously unknown source of the foreword is Simon Eyssenmann’s annual astrological prognostication for 1514 (VD16 E 4757).
• The concluding 54 lines of verse are likewise not an original compilation, but appear to be taken from a 108-line poem printed together with an astrological prognostication or calendar for 1508; see Carl Gottfried Scharold, Dr. Martin Luthers Reformation in nächster Beziehung auf das damalige Bisthum Würzburg historisch dargestellt (Würzburg, 1824), 1:64n1, xx–xxiii (appendix item vi). Fragments of both previously unknown sources appear as pastedowns in the same volume (Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4 Med 1284).
• The extracts from Lichtenberger are most closely connected to an edition published in 1497 by Bartholomaeus Kistler in Augsburg (ISTC il00209000/GW M18245) and another set of extracts published in 1532 (VD16 ZV 11958).
• The Dutch edition dated to 1509 (NB 26021) should be dated to around 1523.
• The decisive actor behind publication of the Extract of Various Prophecies is Hans Stainberger, bookseller of Zwickau, although his personal involvement in composition is unlikely.
• The 14 known editions of 1516-1525 make the Extract of Various Prophecies the most frequently printed prophetic work during that decade.
• The circulation of the Extract of Various Prophecies is associated with several interesting Reformation-era controversies, and illustrates the spread of apocalyptic motifs and the formation of audiences for apocalypticism in Reformation-era Germany.

I sketch out the the relationship between texts and editions as follows (this image does not appear in the published article):

Wilhelm Friess: all finished (updated)

The final manuscript of "Wilhelm Friess" has now left my desk and made its way to the publisher. The timeline for this project might be summarized like this:

March 2010: While waiting for the contract for Printing and Prophecy, I realize I need a new project. I discover that one project I was contemplating has recently been published by Christian Kiening. There seems to be a surprisingly large number of "Wilhelm Friess" editions, but since this prophecy was published after 1550, I hadn't said much about it in Printing and Prophecy. There doesn't seem to be much secondary literature on it, so I resolve to write an article - a short, quick article - while I search for the next big project.

July 2010: After turning in the final manuscript of Printing and Prophecy, I start tracking down facsimiles. Some of the texts I find don't look familiar. It turns out that there are two different prophecies, including one that exists in four very different versions, and one attribution of something by Nikolaus Caesareus to Friess.

September 2010: I write the article. I'm not quite satisfied with it. I re-write it. I work up a cover sheet, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something, so I hold off on submitting it anywhere. I submit an abstract to Kalamazoo instead. Then I find what I was missing: the Dutch back story to "Wilhelm Friess" in Frans Fraet's fateful publication of a prognostication by "Willem de Vriese." Another rewrite ensues.

April 2011: I discover several late-seventeenth century Friess editions circulating under different titles and authorial names. The Kalamazoo paper gets a hasty revision. I start wondering if the next big project is actually the thing I've been working on for the last year.

May 2011: I discover that several passages in both Friess prophecies are quoted from other sources, including Lichtenberger, Grünpeck, and Dietrich von Zengg, making the textual history of "Wilhelm Friess much more interesting than I had thought.

June 2011: I reorganize the article as a book, and start writing. By September I have a complete draft that comes to 56,000 words. Definitely too long for an article, but a bit short for a book.

October 2011. I revise the manuscript and ask if my editor would like to see what I'm working on. She's interested, and the manuscript goes out to readers. I plan on revising the book again, but otherwise I'm done. Still, I have that nagging feeling that I'm missing something important. I keep checking sources.

January 2012. I discover the source of the first prophecy: The Vademecum of Johannes de Rupescissa. This shakes up most of the chapters and the textual history of the first Friess prophecy. Coupled with the discovery a few months later of the French abridgment on which "Wilhelm Friess" is based, the the book manuscript needs a complete revision.

April-September 2012. I finish the revision. I revise the revision. The next afternoon, reader reports show up that need to be addressed. I do so. Two weeks later, a contract is offered. Not long after Thanksgiving, the whole manuscript - at 87,000 words - gets shipped off to the press. This time I don't have any nagging sensations that I've missed something.

July 2013. The copy-edited manuscript is sent back for me to check. I'm in the middle of moving at that point, so checking the manuscript lasts until early September.

January-February 2014. I receive the page proofs, check the page proofs, and prepare the index.

March 2014. I receive the proposed cover art. It's beautiful.

Rosenbach/Indagine cites Lichtenberger

If you want to see the context of Johannes Rosenbach/Johannes de Indagine citing Johannes Lichtenberger - the only vaguely credible claim to be an eyewitness account of Lichtenberger - the quick approach is to click here.

The long approach is to start with the footnotes in Dieter Kurze's work on Lichtenberger (11 n. 36 and 40 n. 289) and look up the cited edition (1522) of Rosenbach's Introductiones apotelesmaticae in chiromantiam. That's easy enough, and leads to VD16 R 3108. It's been digitized, so you can see the facsimile from the BSB here (if the URN resolver is working correctly - today it's not - and it doesn't require a cumbersome search to find the right link). We're looking for leaves 15v and 30v. If you turn to them, you find...pictures of hands, but no mention of Lichtenberger. You can try counting the leaves from the beginning, and you might notice that the first few leaves may be misarranged in the Munich copy. Does it help to read through them carefully and try to restore their correct order? No, it does not. How does Kurze know that Rosenbach/Indagine cites Lichtenberger? Kurze cites the biography in ADB; does that offer any clues? No, not really. But the biography of Lichtenberger there mentions Rosenbach/Indagine's mention of Lichtenberger in his foreword to the Introductiones apotelesmaticae. Will reading the foreword turn up what you are looking for? No? Maybe in the 1523 German translation, or the 1534 or 1541 Latin editions? No, no, and no.

But if you spend enough time leafing through the Introductiones apotelesmaticae, you may eventually notice that the folio numbering restarts just as Rosenbach begins to discuss astrology. If you look at leaves 15v and 30v after that, you will find the discussion of Lichtenberger just as Kurze's footnotes indicated.

I recommend the quick approach.

Kurtze Propheceyung oder Practika (1587)

One of the challenges of working with pamphlets and other short texts is that the same text can circulate under different titles and be cataloged under different authors' names. One example is the Kurtze Propheceyung oder Practika of 1586-87 with various sections ascribed to the "Pilger Ruth" and "Johannes Doleta" among others. The first name refers to extracts from Lichtenberger's Prognosticatio, while the second, as I've mentioned previously, goes along with a version of the "Toledo Letter." The only literature on these pamphlets I find is a brief mention in Dietrich Kurze's book on Johannes Lichtenberger (69). The pamphlets include additional texts besides the extracts from Lichtenberger and the "Toledo Letter," but precisely what they are, and where they're from, isn't yet known.

With the recent release of a digital edition from dilibri.de, I thought it was time to see exactly how many editions are known, and how many are available online. The answer in both cases is "more than you'd think." VD16 doesn't include two of the German editions, or links to any of the online facsimiles.

Of the two editions dated to 1586, facsimiles are available for both, although one is unknown to VD16. A quick scan finds that there are some significant differences between the two texts.

Kurtze Propheceyung oder Practita... Erfurt: Johann Beck, 1586. Not in VD16. Utrecht UB facsimile
Kurtze Propheceyung oder Practika... Cologne: Heinrich Nettessem, [1586]. VD16 ZV 9651. dilibri.de facsimle (Trier StB)
Kurtze Propheceyung oder Practica... Cologne: Heinrich Nettessem, 1587. VD16 ZV 9654

Kurtze / gewisse und warhaffte Propheceyung oder Practica... Lübeck: Johann Balhorn the Younger, 1587 ("Aus einem Cöllenschen Exemplar nach Gedruckt / durch Johann Balhorn / wonhafftig bey der Rostocker Herberg"). Not in VD16. Göttingen SUB facsimile
[NB: After a quick inspection, it looks like the text of this edition closely follows that of Beck's edition rather than the edition of Heinrich Nettessem. Perhaps the text changed significantly between Nettessem's first and second editions.]
Kurtze / Gewisse / vnd Warhaffte Propheceyung oder Practica... [n.p., n.p.], 1587. A reprint of a Nettessem edition. VD16 ZV 22756
Kurtze / gewisse / vnd Warhaffte Propheceyung oder Practica... [n.p., n.p.], 1587. A reprint of a Nettessem edition. VD16 ZV 4633

Another edition added the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess:
Kurtze Propheceyung oder Practica...Sampt einer Ander Prophetzeyung / ist gefunden worden / in Mastrich... Cologne: Nikolaus Schreiber, [1587]. VD16 ZV 28130

This was then translated into Dutch as:
Corte prophetie / van tgene  int iaer M.D.LXXXVIII... Amsterdam: Cornelius Claesz, 1588. TB 4427/NB 27073

Pamphilus Gengenbach: Der Nollhart (Updated)

The Universität Halle just released a digital edition of Gengenbach's other edition of Der Nollhart, so I've updated the post below with a link. A quick comparison suggests that there are minimal differences between the two editions. Hopefully the BSB will digitalize one of the later Augsburg editions before too long.

* * *

One reason to keep track of smaller digitialization projects is that they will occasionally provide access to editions that are otherwise unavailable, such as the digital facsimile of Der alt und neu Bruder Nollhart made available by the Universität München.

Pamphilus Gengenbach wrote his Shrovetide play Der Nollhart in 1515 and published two editions of it in 1517, with three more editions from other presses by 1525. The essential study of Gengenbach's play is
Violanta Werren-Uffer, Der Nollhart von Pamphilus Gengenbach (1983). As Gengenbach's primary sources were Lichtenberger's Prognosticatio of 1488 and Wolfgang Aytinger's tract on pseudo-Methodius first printed in 1496, Der Nollhart is significant for transferring late fifteenth-century prophetic texts onto the stage and into the sixteenth century. In 1544 and 1545, Jakob Cammerlander published two editions of a revised version of the play, Der alt und neu Bruder Nollhar. Gengenbach's original play reappears in 1700, so it might be interesting to see if Der Nollhart appeared anywhere between 1550 and 1700, or what the context of the 1700 edition was.

Pamphilus Gengenbach: Der Nollhart
[Basel: Pamphilus Gengenbach, 1517]. VD16 G 1205. Facsimiles: BSB München, e-rara.ch, HAB Wolfenbüttel
[Basel: Pamphilus Gengenbach, 1517]. VD16 ZV 6498. Facsimile: Universität Halle
[Augsburg: Johann Schönsperger the Younger, 1520]. VD16 G 1206
[Augsburg: Johann Schönsperger the Younger], 1522. VD16 G 1207
[Erfurt: Johann Loersfeld], 1525. VD16 G 1208
[n.p., n.p., ca. 1700]. VD17 12:638169C. Facsimile: Google Books (Peter Marteau confirms that this is the BSB copy with the shelf mark P.o.germ. 108. The BSB OPAC links to the Google Books scan.)


Der alt und neu Bruder Nolhard
[Strasbourg: Jakob Cammerlander], 1544. VD16 G 1209. Facsimile: LMU München
[Strasbourg: Jakob Cammerlander, 1545]. VD16 G 1210

UB Heidelberg Cod. Sal. VIII,71

One of the Codices Salemitani digitized by the UB Heidelberg, Cod. Sal. VIII,71, is described as a collection of prophecies from the second half of the sixteenth century. A quick search doesn't turn up any additional information on it, so I don't know if the manuscript has been extensively described anywhere. A quick look at the contents suggests that it consists of two parts: First, excerpts of prophecies attributed to Hildegard, Joachim, and Johannes Tauler; and second, the Zwölf Sibyllen Weissagungen, a collection that accreted around the prophecies of the twelve sibyls in the first half of the sixteenth century, principally issued from the press of Christian Egenolff in Frankfurt. By the 1530s it contained a thirteenth sibyl, extracts from the Extracts of Various Prophecies and Josephus, an Antichrist text, and the 36 signs of the last day. Eventually Egenolff would add the Prognostication for 24 Years of Paracelsus and the Prognosticatio of Johannes Lichtenberger.

The second part of the Heidelberg manuscript follows the selection of texts found in an edition of the Zwölf Sibyllen Weissagung printed in 1575 in Nuremberg by Valentin Furhmann (VD16 Z 949). However, Cod. Sal. VIII,71 includes the colophon of a different edition on its last leaf verso: Getruckt zu Rottenburg ob der Tauber, bey Hieronymo Körnlein. Hieronymus Körnlein appears as the printer of 59 editions in VD 17, mostly between 1615 and 1632. An edition of the Zwölf Sibyllen Weissagung or a similar prophetic collection doesn't appear among them, however, so this might be a manuscript witness to an otherwise unknown edition of the work from ca. 1615-30 from the press of Hieronymus Körnlein.

At first glance, it appears that the manuscript copyist rather than Körnlein was the one who expanded the collection by adding the prophecies of Joachim and Hildegard at the beginning. The first leaf recto includes the note: Durch ein Güethertzige vnd wohlmeinende Ordens Persohn aus Vnderschidlichen alten approbierten Büchern summarische weiß zusamen getragen.

Cyriacus Schlichtenberger

Recently I've been interested in the succession of best-selling prophetic pamphlets in the sixteenth century. A good example of what I mean is Josef Grünpeck's Prognosticum, a brief work of a few leaves that went through nine editions in at least six different cities in the space of one year. For the first half of the sixteenth century, I'm familiar with all the authors whose works experience a similarly sudden popularity from my research for Printing and Prophecy: Lichtenberger, Carion, Virdung, Paracelsus, Pürstinger, and Grünpeck. In the second half of the century, however, the best sellers are from an entirely different set of authors: Wilhelm Friess, Paul Severus, Nikolaus Weise, Georg Ursinus, Johann Hilten, Gregor Jordan, and Cyriacus Schlichtenberger.

I had been able to at least look at the texts from all of these except Cyriacus Schlichtenberger, for which no facsimile was available - until earlier this week. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek just digitized a copy of VD16 S 2999.

At first glance, I'm not quite sure I get this one. The text is precisely what the title promises: The report of a simple farmer's daughter who awakens at her own burial and tells about her post-death experiences before she dies again five days later. The signed editions are all from northern Germany rather than the usual major printing cities in southern Germany, so I may be missing something obvious.

Volker Leppin's Antichrist und jüngster Tag mentions Schlichtenberger several times, but notes that the alleged location in "Melwing" is not easily locatable on any map. One possibility that a quick search of Google Books suggests is that this is Elbing, now the Polish town of Elbląg.

* * *

The winter semester starts next week, and I'll be at MLA for a few days, so posting may be light for a bit.

By way of comparison

When discussing an early modern pamphlet, I'll often refer to the work's "popularity," but the question always has to be: Popular compared to what? In Printing and Prophecy, I usually focused on the most popular prophetic pamphlets - that is, compared to other prophecies. But how popular were prophecies, relatively speaking?

It might be useful to compare a few quick searches in VD16 for works of acknowledged cultural significance. (These are quick searches, so I'm undoubtedly missing some editions, particularly later editions that compile shorter works.)

Martin Luther, Ein Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen: 6 editions (1530)
Martin Luther, Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen: 8 editions (1520-64)
Martin Luther, De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium: 12 editions (1520-24)

This is not at all to say that Johann Carion (30 editions of the Bedeutnus und Offenbarung between 1526 and 1548) or Johannes Lichtenberger (31 editions of the Prognosticatio in Germany from 1521 to 1587) were as influential as Luther. Far from it - there are hundreds of editions of Luther's catechisms, for example. But some prophetic tracts were reprinted in enough editions that one has to consider more than just their relative popularity.

Printing and Prophecy is now in print

Yesterday the University of Michigan Press sent me a link to their online catalog. Printing and Prophecy is in there, on page 49. And they sent me a link to download my author's copy of the e-book edition. The printed copies are, I assume, in the mail. Amazon still lists the book as not yet released, but they also are now providing an extensive preview, as is Google Books. If it's on Google, it must be for real.

The timeline for writing and publication went something like this:

2005
March: I have the initial idea and start background reading.
May: Humboldt application submitted
October: First conference paper about Lichtenberger
November: Notification of successful grant application

2006
August: Archival research commences

2007
October: Writing begins

2008
May: Alpha draft completed

2009
May: Beta draft completed
June-July: Revisions. At the end of July, I'm ready to start querying.
August: The University of Michigan Press wants to see the full manuscript.
October: Initial reactions are positive.

2010
January: Reader reports come back. They recommend publication.
March: The editorial board agrees, and extends a publication contract.
July 1: I submit the final manuscript.

2011
January: The copy edited manuscript is submitted.
July: Page proofs and index are submitted.
November: Printing and Prophecy appears in print.

I think I can see some ways to make the next book go faster.

Digital editions of the week: Europäischer Staats-Wahrsager

There are a few things I've learned not to say in academic writing, including:

• "Scholars agree that..."
• "Scholarship on this question has until now failed to notice..."
• "The popular literature that this article studies dwindled into obscurity soon after the end of the chronological period that limits my study."

You inevitably discover - usually after page proofs have been returned - no, some very important scholar did not agree, and no, someone noticed the same thing a century before you were born, and no, the genre you're studying carried merrily along into centuries where you don't know the literature or the bibliography as well. Some works of German medieval literature (such as the courtly romance) did fade away after the late fifteenth century, but others (such as Melusine) continued into the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

Such is the case with late medieval prophecy and popular astrology. You might think it would fade away after the Reformation, or at least the Thirty Years War, but it keeps popping up again a century after you thought it was gone for good. I limited Printing and Prophecy to the century between 1450 and 1550, but there would have been no lack of material for the following century (which Robin Bruce Barnes and Volker Leppin addressed in their books), or even for the one after that. The first prophecy of Wilhelm Friess disappears after 1568 - only to reappear in the 1690s.

So the digital editions of the week are two editions of the Europäischer Staats-Wahrsager, a collection of prophecies printed in the mid-1700s. The Uni Göttingen has digitized a 1748 edition, while the Uni Halle has a 1758 edition. While many of the texts are unfamiliar, the contents include some names already well known in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Lichtenberger's complete Prognosticatio and the "Hidden Prophecy" of Johann Carion and its interpretation. There are other prophecies attributed to Birgitta of Sweden and Paracelsus, but the relationship to the authentic writings of those two is murky at best. The Europäischer Staats-Wahrsager shows just how long and how tenaciously prophetic texts maintained their place in German culture.

When paratexts go bad: Vom Michel Juden Tode

While working on Printing and Prophecy, I was interested in everything written by Johannes Lichtenberger, whose 1488 Prognosticatio was the most influential compilation for much of the period I was dealing with. So one particularly interesting edition was VD16 V 2722: Vom Michel Juden Tode (Magdeburg: Michael Lotter, 1549). The VD16 entry lists Lichtenberger as a contributor. Was this a combination of an anti-Semitic tract with some part of the Prognosticatio?

I ordered a facsimile from the Herzog August Bibliothek, and the title page indeed looks like the book will give us something from Lichtenberger.
But after eight leaves, the text just stopped. No Lichtenberger. The facsimile didn't include the verso of the last leaf. Was I missing something important?

Alas, no. A few days ago, the Universität Halle released a digital facsimile of a different copy (shown above), and the last leaf verso is blank.

So now the situation is clear. Despite the printer's use of the same type face for "Vom Michel Juden Tode" and "Johannes Liechtenbergers prophecey," only the first is a title. The second identifies the quotation being used to decorate the title page - which doesn't seem to appear in the Prognosticatio anyway, at least at first glance. Lichtenberger includes prognostications about Meissen and some anti-Semitic material, but the lines "Meissen wirt heydentzen / so wirt die Marck Judentzen / vnd Golt fur Gott anbeten" look like something attributed to Lichtenberger rather than borrowed from him. There are many other texts ranging from a few lines to several pages attributed to Lichtenberger in the sixteenth century and later, and the same thing happens with just about every other prophetic authority, so this isn't surprising.

As Lichtenberger's name is the only one that appears on the title page, authorship of Vom Michel Juden Tode is attributed to Lichtenberger in some older catalogs, however, which has carried forward into WorldCat and Google Books.

The "Michel" referred to in the title, by the way, is Michel von Derenburg; for more about him, see Rotraud Ries, "Individualisierung im Spannungsfeld differenter Kulturen," in Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Kaspar von Greyerz (2007), 95-96.

Judging a book by its cover: Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question

I put the page proofs of Printing and Prophecy in the mail today. According to the University of Michigan Press's advertisement in the program for the upcoming German Studies Association conference, the book should be out in September.

Also this week, I came across an addition to the very small number of English-language book directly relevant to the topics I cover in Printing and Prophecy, and it was published just this month:

Westman, Robert S. The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Hardcover, 704 pages. ISBN: 9780520254817. $95.00.

I'm already envious of the cover. It's gorgeous. I haven't seen the cover design of Printing and Prophecy yet, but I can only hope for something this beautiful.
I haven't had a chance to read The Copernican Question yet, although I'll need to read it soon. After scanning the excerpt on the University of California Press website and as much as Google Books would let me read, The Copernican Question is looking like a major contribution to the field.

I'm not worried about Printing and Prophecy becoming redundant, however. The two books are looking at some similar materials in similar but not identical time periods, and asking very different questions about them. My focus is squarely on the German-speaking regions, while The Copernican Question has a broader European focus. While Westman's book is examining the intellectual history of Renaissance astrology, I'm primarily interested in prophecy as a rhetorical and communicative framework for authors and genres, and in its expression in the medium of print. Consequently, I spend most of my time digging into works and authors that appear only briefly or not at all in The Copernican Question, while I treat superficially or ignore altogether its main themes--such as Nicolaus Copernicus, who gets nothing more than a passing mention in Printing and Prophecy. Where the two books might overlap, such as on the printing of prognostic pamphlets or on the flood panic of 1524, I suspect that they will be complementary rather than redundant.

This prophecy brought to you by Hartmann Schedel, Andreas Osiander, Sebastian Franck, Christian Egenolff, Twelve Sibyls, and Will-Erick Peuckert

Substantial sections of Chapter One and Chapter Four of Printing and Prophecy are devoted to untangling the development and later history of the prophetic compilations that Christian Egenolff printed in Frankfurt. The original sibylline collections that Egenolff started printing in the early 1530s go back to material from Phillip de Barberiis, Jodocus Eichmann, and Jakob Köbel, to which Egenolff began adding other short pieces, including the Extract of Various Prophecies (compiled from from Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio and Grünpeck’s Speculum), Johann Carion’s “Hidden Prophecy,” “36 Signs of the Last Day,” and others. The collections printed in 1548-1550 were made much more substantial by the addition of the Prognostication for 24 Years of Paracelsus and the complete Prognosticatio of Lichtenberger, as well as adding a few new shorter pieces. Egenolff’s collections led to a number of reprints well into the 17th century.

Late in the process of publishing Printing and Prophecy, I came across an article I hadn’t seen yet: Will-Erich Peuckert, “Zwölff Sybillen Weissagungen,” Mitteilungen der schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 29 (1928): 217-57. Peuckert turns out to be approaching the same question, but from the opposite direction. He starts with a 1677 reprint and attempts to determine its sources, eventually noting the 1549 collection of Egenolff. Peuckert identifies a few sources of the minor works more exactly than I had (but not Grünpeck’s “Reformation of Christendom and the Churches,” whose source I had hoped to find along the way), but at that point it was too late to add more than a footnote to Peuckert.

Peuckert notes that the source for the “36 Signs of the Last Day” is Sebastian Francks Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel, first published in 1531. Peuckert prints both versions in parallel columns, and the identity of the two is beyond doubt.

Thanks to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, I was recently able to check the digital facsimile of Franck’s Chronica. The “36 Signs of the Last Day” occurs at the end of the eighth and final section of Franck’s chronicle, and it’s preceded by several paraphrases of Lutheran polemic prophetic pamphlets:

1. Andreas Osiander’s preface to his edition of the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus (1527)
2. Martin Luther’s preface to the “Brother Claus” letter of Charles de Bouelles (1528)
3. Martin Luther’s Mönchskalb and Bapstesel interpretation (1523)
4. A tract on the Antichrist, borrowed (like much of Franck’s Chronica) from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, itself a compilation of older sources)
5. “36 Signs of the Last Day”

The interesting thing here is that Sebastian Franck is reading Osiander and other pro-Lutheran prophetic tracts, and that Egenolff drew on Franck for the Antichrist and “36 Signs” sections of his collection, added in 1532.* Franck is not likely to be the original source of the “36 signs,” however, and similar lists of signs were in circulation, including a list of 23 signs printed together with a work by Bullinger in 1541 (VD16 B 9753). Joerg Frell expanded the “36 Signs” with a preface and additional material in 1580 (VD16 ZV 21238).

*Also, while I still disagree that Egenolff’s collections were anti-Roman in tone, Egenolff’s use of Franck makes me 10% less right and Robin Barnes 10% more correct than we were before. Cf. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, 145.

* * *

The page proofs of Printing and Prophecy are about two thirds finished, and my semester is about two weeks from its conclusion. Posts will continue to be infrequent for a while yet.

Digital edition of the week

Earlier this week, the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt (Halle) released a digital facsimile of Hans Lufft's 1527 Wittenberg edition of Johannes Lichtenberger's Prognosticatio. This was the first edition of Stephan Roth's new German translation of the Prognosticatio, and the edition to which Martin Luther contributed a preface, so it's an essential source for the study of Lichtenberger and prophetic texts in the 16th century. There hadn't been a digital version available until now, so even very recent articles had needed to cite Luther's preface from Aby Warburg's edition, which Warburg included as an appendix to his 1919 "Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten."

Hunting citations

Last week I discovered that Wilhelm Friess does quote passages from other works after all, as a passage from the Extract of Various Prophecies (a pamphlet drawing on Grünpeck and Lichtenberger) shows up in Friess. Specifically, it's a passage that goes back to Grünpeck's 1508 Speculum, which in turn attributes the passage in question to a prophet who has recently been preaching in France, whom no one has ever been able to track down more specifically. Comparing the passages, however, it seems clear that Friess isn't quoting Grünpeck directly or even the Extract of Various Prophecies, but rather the version of the Extract that gets incorporated into the prophetic compilations that Christian Egenolff prints in Frankfurt in 1548-1550. In other words: Unknown Prophet --> Grünpeck --> Extract --> Egenolff --> Friess.

This has set off a hunt for more citations, so I'm reviewing all my notes and facsimiles. And I've found two more: One passage from "Dietrich von Zengg/Theoderic Croata" and another from "Jakob Pflaum" (not to be confused with the 15/16th-c. astronomer of the same name). "Dietrich von Zeng" is attested in manuscript as early as 1460, with nine printed editions between 1503 and 1542. "Jakob Pflaum" has seven printed editions between 1520 and 1534.

So apparently the Wilhelm Friess redactors had a taste for the odder sort of prophetic pamphlet that disdains clear organization or consistent narrative. Robert Lerner calls the pseudo-Jakob Pflaum pamphlet a "pastiche of of plagiarisms from numerous medieval prophecies...presented in such a helter-skelter fashion that no clear chronological order can be discerned" (Powers of Prophecy 161), which pretty accurately describes "Jakob Pflaum."

Chapter Four. Visions of Visions: Functions of the Image in Printed Prophecy

Chapter four of Printing and Prophecy is where I finally address the question of what all the woodcuts were doing in the books and pamphlets that I was looking at. In many cases, the woodcuts were not merely summarizing the textual meaning or making it more comprehensible for unskilled readers. For example, the woodcut images in the Prognosticatio of Johannes Lichtenberger tend to dampen the text’s emotional impact rather than heighten it. The combination of prophecy, reading in the vernacular, and images was potent enough to cause government officials - and therefore printers - some concern, and the Prognosticatio woodcuts take pains to keep the audience from getting overheated. But the woodcuts also permit individual participation in prophecy through viewing of the prophetic image. If readers are no longer meant to speak like prophets by copying and preaching the prophetic message (as Johannes Tortsch had foreseen readers of the Onus mundi, his Birgittine collection, doing), the images allow them to see like prophets. Between Lichtenberger and the prognostic works of Paracelsus (1493-1541) lies a continuous tradition in which prophecy becomes identified with images and visual interpretation.

A century after Gutenberg, the prophetic compilations printed by Wolfgang Egenolff in Frankfurt helped establish a prophetic canon (including Paracelsus, Lichtenberger, Carion, sibylline texts, and others) based on a visual approach to prophecy. Egenolff’s compilation represents a development in the history of the printed book where the medium becomes capable of the same kind of antiquity that had previously been the sole domain of manuscripts. Egenolff’s collection was also the means by which the seventeenth century rediscovered the prophetic authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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.

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.