Digital edition of the week: Passive-aggressive Reformation apocalypticism; or, Johann Copp, Waß auff diß 23. und zum tail 24. jar des Himels Lauff künfftig sein

 

For high-octane Lutheran polemic disguised as astrology in the context of the 1524 flood controversy, Johann Copp has few equals. After publishing practicas for 1521 and 1522 dedicated to Martin Luther, he published a prognostication for 1523 and 1524 that claimed merely to represent the influences of the stars on the  upcoming years. And if the motions of the planets foretold warfare, bloodshed, and a rebellion of the common people against the clergy, he certainly meant them no ill-will and was sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

No one was really fooled about Copp's threat against the clergy, and he seems to have found it necessary to walk back his predictions, which were over the top even in a Lutheran-sympathetic territory. In 1523 he published a prognostication "written more clearly than a year before," in which his dedicatory epistle goes to an equivalent extreme in its obsequiousness towards Prince-elector Frederick III of Saxony. Even that wasn't enough, and Copp had to leave Saxony for Bohemia.

The secondary literature on Copp is limited. The one article on him was published in Swedish in 1923: O. Walde, "Doktor Johann Copp. En Astrolog Och Läkare Från Reformationstiden i Svensk Tjänst," Lychnos 2-3 (1937-38): 79–111, 225–67. Heike Talkenberger also discusses Copp and his works extensively in Sintflut (pp. 224-35).

Until recently, the only digital facsimiles of Copp's works were several editions of a treatise on the use of the astrolabe and one edition of his practica for 1522 (VD16 C 5022). Recently the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek released a digital edition of his prognostication for 1523 (VD16 C 5026). I wish either Leipzig or the Germanisches Nationalmusem in Nuremberg would digitalize Copp's last prognostication of 1523 to complete the trilogy (VD16 C 5023; I don't see an extant copy of the other two editions, VD16 VD16 C 5024 and ZV 24182).

Graphs you didn't get to see 3: Averages leaves per practica

Pictures have to be worth at least a thousand words to justify the added expense of including them in a book or article - and this one didn't quite make it. In my discussion of practicas in Printing and Prophecy, and the more detailed treatment in an upcoming AGB article, it turned out that I could summarize the changes in average pamphlet length pretty efficiently in words. But I still think the graph below neatly expresses how the two-gathering, eight-leaf format became predominant by the early fifteenth century and remained the standard through 1550. At that point, an additional gathering, or twelve leaves, became the norm for a few decades, followed by the addition of a fourth gathering in 1590 and later. The average number of leaves doesn't change smoothly, but rather with the granularity that comes from adding entire quarto signatures.

Average number of leaves in German practicas, 1480-1620

Generating this graph was one of the benefits of entering every edition that was relevant for Printing and Prophecy into a Microsoft Access database. Once the data was there, it was easy to select only the German practicas, drop the format field into an Excel spreadsheet, and turn the various format formulations into leaf counts through a combination of Excel formulas and manual editing. (An example from VD16 is "[10] Bl. : TH. ; 4"; it's not too difficult to tell Excel to grab only the parts between the square brackets.)

The following table summarizes how many practicas from each decade had known leaf counts (so excluding fragments), and the average as seen in the graph above.

	n	avg
1490	27	9.7
1500	39	9.2
1510	13	8
1520	42	7.9
1530	74	7.6
1540	75	8.7
1550	83	9.3
1560	50	13.4
1570	108	12.7
1580	159	12.8
1590	170	15.5
1600	183	16
1610	49	16.2
1620	38	17

And thus five years of intermittent data collection and an hour of fiddling with a database query and a spreadsheet yields three sentences of expository prose and one neat graph that didn't make it into print.

Going to Cincinnati

A month ago, I submitted an abstract to the Sixteenth Century Society Conference, which will be held this October in Cincinnati. This was a good year for it, as I missed Kalamazoo, and SCSC is being held in what is for me a relatively convenient location. A few days ago I was notified that the abstract was accepted. I'll be attending SCSC for the first time, so I don't know quite what to expect from the conference yet. I haven't seen the program, so I don't know what panel I'll be on, or when it will be.

While I was debating whether or not "Wilhelm Friess" was a book-sized project last year, I gave a paper in Kalamazoo about the first "Wilhelm Friess" prophecy and its path from Antwerp to Nuremberg. Now, a year later, I know it's a book-sized project because I've finished the book manuscript. I've finished it twice, actually, and now I know that some central chapters need to be rewritten for the third, and hopefully the last, revision.

In Cincinnati, I'll be talking about how the first and second prophecies are connected. They are two entirely different texts representing different and in some ways opposite perspectives, and yet they are both attributed to the same deceased author, and both claim to have been found with him after his death. Among late medieval and early modern prophecies, this is to my knowledge unique. Did whoever wrote the second prophecy merely appropriate Friess's name for the second prophecy?

I don't think so. I think the two texts are intimately connected. In Cincinnati, I'll try to trace the path from Friess I to Friess II, this time from Nuremberg back to Antwerp and then on to Strasbourg and Basel.

Graphs you didn't get to see 2: Vernacularity of German and Italian practicas, 1470-1500

One of the points I emphasize both in Printing and Prophecy and in a forthcoming article is that annual astrological prognostications in booklet form - or practicas, to use the most common contemporary term for them - took on a distinctive appearance and function, which I refer to as the Practica teütsch, in the German language area. One of the many things that distinguishes German and Italian practicas is their preference for the vernacular. In Germany, German quickly achieves parity with Latin and becomes the dominant language by 1495, while Italian remains marginal before 1495 and always remains less common than Latin, at least before 1501. A couple graphs illustrate the difference:

First, here's the German data:

  

And here's the Italian series:

 

This is why I see the vernacular prognostications rather than Latin practicas as the driving force behind the development of the genre in Germany. The Latin production  barely increases after 1490 (and declines precipitously in the sixteenth century). Already in 1486-1490, the majority of expansion in production is coming from vernacular editions. Italian vernacular expansion comes later, and doesn't displace Latin. In addition to the differences in format, organizational structure, and content, the different language preferences are one more reason why I think that practicas had different functions north and south of the Alps.

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.