Paul Grebner bibliography 0.50

Update 0.50 This update starts filling in Grebner's appearances in England,the last empty category in the bibliography, with entries drawn from the ESTC. I haven't started listing the English works that mention Grebner in passing or give short excerpts but do not mention him on the title page. A problem yet to be addressed is how the English broadsides and pamphlets are related to the excerpts that appear in compilations.

I've also reordered the categories to something that makes a bit more sense based on what I've found so far: Early printed works, manuscripts, German editions, Dutch editions, British editions, other European editions, and secondary literature.

Update 0.43. The early Dutch editions now include the hybrids of Grebner's second prophecy and "Friess II," and I've simplified the early Dutch pamphlets, now that I see that the later pamphlets use different titles for what is in most respects the same work. The relationship between the Dutch pamphlets of ca. 1590 and those of 1599-1610 needs some work. I've also added an unattested early English and French edition, and the manuscripts listed by Carlos Gilly in the footnotes of his recent article.

Update 0.40. This update adds the following:

• Three encyclopedic entries on Grebner from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• Six German pamphlets from the early seventeenth century indexed under "Paul Gräbner."
• One more Dutch pamphlet from 1599.
• The entries IV-VII have been renumbered as V-VIII.

I'm adding a break to this entry here because it's becoming rather long. Click below for more.

If you find an intriguing title

If you find a seventeenth-century Dutch pamphlet with a title that seems too similar to "Wilhelm Friess" to be a coincidence, you will want to find a facsimile.

If you find the item in the special collections catalog of the university library that owns it, you will probably ask yourself what else might be in this collection. Your keyword search for "proph*" may turn up 393 hits.

As you search through the results, you will find dozens of pamphlets you wish you could see.

Before you contact the library to order facsimiles, you will ask yourself if some of these pamphlets are already available online. You will type the titles into Google.

If you type the titles into Google, you will find a half-dozen digitized pamphlets available through Google Books.

You may even find among them a seventeenth-century Dutch pamphlet with a title that seems too similar to "Wilhelm Friess" to be a coincidence...

That - with apologies to Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond - is more or less the process that led to the discovery of two new editions of "Wilhelm Friess II." I'm still waiting to see the "Night Vision of 24 April 1601" attributed to Paul Grebner, which I suspect is "Friess II" in disguise, but the search through the Leiden UB catalog turned up another night vision, this one ostensibly translated from German and attributed to the otherwise unknown "Jerrassemus van Eydenborch" (see the Grebner bibliography). Facsimiles of two Ghent copies are available on Google Books (here and here), and it turns out that the text has combined "Friess II" with Grebner's "Second Marvelous Prophecy" and some other material. The Friess text is thoroughly reworked, with the appearance of the armies reordered to create a final conflict between two sides (as in Grebner) rather than an invasion from all sides from which a small band of survivors escapes. The printer of the first of two editions, "Frans de Vlamingh" of Emden, appears to be a pseudonym that only appears in connection with this work.

I've suspected that Friess and Grebner are connected in some way, but now there is some firm evidence for it.

Paul Grebner

As I've been working on "Wilhelm Friess," I've come across several references to the prophecies of Paul Grebner, who would appear to be something of a contemporary of the Friess prophecies and also ideologically compatible with them, at least to a degree. But Friess and Grebner seem to follow much different paths. Friess, for one, is a pseudonym attached to two or more texts; Grebner is real enough to merit a biography in ADB. Almost all editions of the (supposedly Dutch) Friess prophecies were printed in Germany in the sixteenth century, while almost all of the prophecies attributed to the German Grebner are published posthumously in the seventeenth century, and outside Germany, first in the Netherlands and then very broadly in Britain. Friess eventually faded into obscurity, while excerpts of Grebner were still being printed at least as late as 1793.

Grebner remains a bibliographic and historical puzzle. Apart from the ADB biography, one finds many brief references to Grebner, but few treatments of any extent. The one exception appears to be:

Åkerman, Susanna. “The Myth of the Lion of the North and its Origins in Paul Grebner’s Visions.” In Cultura Baltica: Literary Culture around the Baltic 1600-1700, edited by Bo Andersson and Richard Erich Schade, 23–43. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1996.

Even tracking down Grebner's works is tricky, as his name is recorded in numerous forms, including Grebner, Gribner, or simply "Paulus Secundus" or "Paulus Iunior" (not to mention "Ezekiel Grebner, Son of Obadiah Grebner, Son of Paul Grebner"). There's a need for more work connecting Grebner's earliest published works in the 1560s to the manuscripts of the 1580s to the earliest pamphlets of the 1590s and early 1600s to their diffusion across Europe during the rest of the seventeenth century.

But it won't happen today. I still need to finish work on my SCSC conference paper, and posting may be sporadic for the next several weeks.