I told me so: Notes on Paul Severus

As I was working on the previous draft of the "Wilhelm Friess" project, I took a quick look at other prophetic pamphlets that went through many editions quickly around the same time as "Wilhelm Friess." One that sticks out is the prophecy of Paul Severus, the Bedeutungen die folgen werden, appearing in 17 editions dated 1560-69. The literature on Severus, as far as I can find, is confined to appearances in five footnotes in Volker Leppin's Antichrist und jüngster Tag and two paragraphs in Robin Barnes's Prophecy and Gnosis (pp. 118-19). Another thing that sticks out about Severus is how defective the text is. Barnes notes that although Severus claimed to have based his prognostication on astronomical events, "no reference to astrological evidence appeared anywhere outside the title of his tract."

In the previous "Friess" draft, I wrote about Severus:

The printed text of the Bedeutungen seems to reflect a considerable and not always skillful interference with the original text, leaving some clauses with ungrammatical disagreement between subject and object. "Following the aforementioned constellation and eclipses, a very horrible storm will come," the tract begins, without having described any astronomical events at all.  The astronomical explanation appears to have been removed from an astrological interpretation, leaving only a prognostication of future events.

Now, of the seventeen editions, sixteen are quarto booklets of four leaves, with two available in online facsimile (VD16 S 6142 and ZV 14383). One edition, however (VD16 S 6144), is a quarto booklet of eight leaves. Now that I've had a chance to consult it, there's no need to to qualify the statements above: The longer edition turns out to contain the missing first half of Severus's prognostication with all his astrological reasoning. So the paragraph above will get scrapped and replaced with facts rather than suppositions.

Graphs you didn't get to see 1: European practica printing, 1470-1500

I have an article coming out in an upcoming volume of Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens that expands on my discussion of practicas in Printing and Prophecy. One of the things I added to the discussion is a comparison of early German production to elsewhere in Europe. I put together a graph, but it wasn't as essential to the article as other graphs, so I cited the statistics in the text instead. Here's the graph:



Italian astrologers are usually credited with being the first to publish their annual prognostications, and with contributing half of all practicas before 1501. The first statement is probably correct; it looks like the Italians have a head start of around four years, and Italian production is clearly in the lead before 1480. But German production quickly catches up and moves into the lead by 1490. Based on what appears in the ISTC, German production for the fifteenth century comprises about 49% of the total, followed by Italian production at 44%. Despite some early production in the Low Countries, practica printing remains marginal everywhere else in Europe during the fifteenth century.

The usual caveats apply, though: I've examined the German sources much more closely than the Italian ones, so I'm undoubtedly missing a few Italian practicas, and one has to be extremely cautious when making statements about fifteenth-century production based on twenty-first century preservation of ephemeral booklets.

A book I'm looking forward to: Darin Hayton, The Astrologers of Emperor Maximilian I

Not long ago I came across Darin Hayton's website and blog, which linked to his list of publications, where I was happy to see that he is revising The Astrologers of Emperor Maximilian I: Nature, Knowledge, and Politics in the Holy Roman Empire for publication. I took a look at his dissertation while working on Printing and Prophecy, and it was a very helpful source on several topics, particularly on rounding out the acrimonious dispute between Andreas Perlach and Johann Carion. (As far as disputes between sixteenth-century German astrologers go, this one's pretty good, with accusations of necromancy, illiteracy, and methodological incompetence.) I'll also be quite interested to see what he says about Joseph Grünpeck and the controversy over a second deluge in 1524, two topics where there has been a real lack of good scholarship in English.

A quick look at Darin Hayton's blog provides another reason to look forward to the book: He's been reflecting about the place and function of academic writing, and thinking about how to reach audiences outside of the history of science. This book might be not just useful, but also readable.

Adventures in Zotero (AGB edition)

I just submitted an article to Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens on the origin and development of the the specifically German format for annual astrological prognostications ("practicas") between 1470 and 1620, which expands on my discussion of the practica format in Printing and Prophecy. Since I didn't want to format the footnotes and bibliography by hand when I already had most of the sources entered into Zotero, I needed a Zotero style definition for AGB. There was no preexisting style definition, however, so I had to create one.

I ended up using Kritische Ausgabe as a base style, while importing various snippets from tah Geistes- u. Kulturwissenschaften and Chicago note with bibliography. Once I got the hang of what I was doing, I even added some macros of my own. Having access to the Zotero test pane (chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul) helped, as did using notepad++. Next time, I'll read up on the Zotero CSL syntax a bit more before starting out.

So how'd it turn out? The results were not too bad, actually. I was able to format most footnotes and bibliographic entries according to AGB style. Anybody who would like to look at the file can find it here. Keep in mind the following caveats, however:

• I only needed references to books, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. Everything else probably won't work.
• I didn't try to implement specifying the issue of a journal volume, because I didn't have many of them to deal with, and the AGB format for issues is a bit unusual. Next time.
• I had to replace colons with periods manually to separate titles from subtitles.
• And the biggest caveat of all: This was for an English-language article in a German journal, which necessarily involves some unusual style tradeoffs. I won't know exactly how some formatting issues will be treated until I see page proofs.

It's not quite ready for the Zotero style repository, but in the future, I'll definitely do more Zotero hacking, rather than editing footnotes by hand. The AGB style is fairly close to that used by Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, which might be my next target.

Digitalization project of the day: Altenburg Calendars

In my own work I'm primarily interested in practicas and prognostications rather than calendars, which are a very different kind of text, and I'm primarily interested in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even if recently I've extended my view to 1620, which means that a calendar from the late seventeenth century would not normally hold my attention.

But a complete digitized archive of complete runs of dozens of calendars over several decades, many with accompanying prognostications? That gets my attention.

The digital archive of the Kalendersammlung des Stadtarchivs Altenburg is browsable by title via the UB Jena. There are a few calendars earlier than 1650 and several from after 1700, but the bulk of the collection covers the second half of the seventeenth century. A description of the project is here. (And while you're at Archivalia, be sure to read Klaus Graf's excellent and extensive post on "Christian August Vulpius als Quellenfälscher.") Even without reading the calendars or knowing the authors, I'm confident that there is a lot of interesting research waiting to be done using this archive. An archive that is so unique, thorough, and accessible is a rare and wondrous thing.

1570-80 and other year-list prophecies

The unnamed prophecy for 1570-80 that I mentioned here and here is interesting for its wide and durable circulation (here's a facsimile of a version printed in 1620), but it should probably be seen as just one instance of a particular type of prophecy. Other prophecies also take the format of a list of events associated with a succession of years.

The clearest example I know in print is the prognostication of "Theobertus von England" (ISTC it00142500), with predictions for 1470-78. Robert Lerner (Power of Prophecy 6 n. 10) mentions Latin versions of what appears to be the same prophecy in Latin, beginning Anno lxx^o erunt tempora frigida... This prophecy for the years 1470-78 appears in three Munich manuscripts, cgm 754, clm 3586 (in German, according to the catalog), and clm 18770. Karin Schneider's manuscript catalog gives the years for the cgm 754 version as 1370-78, and it's not clear if the author "Theobertus Anglicus" is found in the manuscript. The Latin incipit in cgm 754 is similar to the ending of the first sentence of the German text (ouch wirt ein kaltes weter und schedlich uber den Sumer), but the correspondence of first to last parts of a sentence suggests that the text has undergone some modification. None of the manuscripts have been digitized yet, but someone should check the German broadside text against them.

The prognostications for particular years are different from those found in the 1570-80 prophecy, which makes the year-list prophecies for 1470-78 and 1570-80 an interesting case where one prophecy borrows the structure from another, but not the content. The influence of "Theobertus von England" lies not just in how it brought certain predictions into circulation, but also in how it served as a template for other prognostications.

Johannes Capistrano

While updating my database of printed German prophecies and prognostications up to 1620, I came across several works that experienced bursts of popularity, the latest of which was the prophecy of Johannes Capistrano that went through over a dozen editions soon after 1619. This prophecy, attributed to the well-known fifteenth-century preacher, is one of several prophetic works that appeared at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Complicating the picture is that some editions of the same prophecy are anonymous or attributed to someone else, while other works attributed to Capistrano appear to be different prophecies. How these works all relate to each other, let alone to the historical Capistrano, does not appear to have been worked out yet. I find only brief mentions of these booklets in Leppin's Antichrist und jüngster Tag and in Barnes's Prophecy and Gnosis. One possible place to start looking: Ottokar Bonmann, “Zum Prophetismus des Johannes Kapistran, 1386-1456,” Archiv Für Kulturgeschichte 44 (1962): 193–98.

Here is my initial attempt to sort out the seventeenth-century editions.

A. Woldenckwürdige Weissagung unnd Propheceyung von den jetzigen Läufften / und sonderlich von dem noch instehenten 1619. Und nachfolgenden 1620. 1621. 1622. 1623. Jahren.

An extract from a longer work? Note the beginning of the text: "Aus Capistrani Propheceyung ist ins Gemein zu mercken..."

1. N.p., n.p., 1619. VD17 1:623600X
2. Breslau, n.p., 1619. VD17 1:063418D
3. N.p., n.p., 1619.VD17 3:312297Y
4. N.p., n.p., 1619. VD17 14:002792C
5. N.p., n.p., 1619.VD17 23:254248T
6. Frankfurt am Main, n.p., 1619. VD17 23:657415H
7. N.p., n.p., 1619. VD17 39:124824V
8. N.p., n.p., 1620. VD17 39:125809Z

B. Prognosticon, Das ist / Weissagung Auff das Jahr / nach der Geburt unsers Herrn und Seligmachers Jesu Christi / MDCXIX...

The prophecy also appear anonymously in four editions.

1. N.p., n.p., 1619. VD17 14:002803G
2. N.p., n.p., 1619.VD17 23:238261P
3. Prague, n.p., 1620. VD17 3:608064Z
4. Prague, Carol Schwing, 1620. VD17 23:266472Q
   

C. Prognosticon, Daß ist: Weissagung Darinnen Vom Zustand der Christenheit...In eines alten gelehrten Mannes Andreas Perlachius genant / von Wien seiner Bibliothek gefunden worden

Attributed not to Capistrano, but to the Viennese astrologer Andreas Perlach. Considering that Perlach had once accused Johann Carion of resorting to necromancy rather than the honorable art of astrology, the publication of this pamphlet probably saw Perlach rolling over in his grave.

1. N.p., n.p., 1631. VD17 3:021230Y

D. Prognosticon. Das ist. Woldenckwürdige weissagung oder Prophezeigung von den jetzigen und letzten laufften der Welt und der betrübten Jahren Erstlich / 1620. Und nach folgenden 1621. 1622. 1623. 1624. 1625. Jahren...

This may be the longer work from which the previous ones provide an extract. The preface to the reader in the digitized Schlüsselseiten is in any case more extensive, and the following material is similar but not identical.

1. Breslau: Georg Baumann, 1621. VD17 23:291795E
   

E. Capistrani Prophezey / Vom Zustand des Römischen Reichs. Seit der Offenbahrung deß Heiligen Evangelii

This appears to be a much different work. The first edition below includes a Latin text and a woodcut image of papal oppression. This text claims an origin in 1460 and a rediscovery in 1547. Despite the similar place, printer, and date, the two Baumann editions appear to be different texts, and I'm not confident that the second is actually Baumann's.

1. N.p., n.p., 1621. VD17 14:003063G
2. Breslau: Georg Baumann, 1622. VD17 39:148285H
3. N.p., n.p.,1663. VD17 23:258724U