Friday, April 26, 2013

Paul Nagel cites Paul Severus

In my list of early printed prophetic and prognostic works, I have several marked with the note "what is this?" where the title sounds promising, but I've not yet had a chance to look at the work itself. Periodically I'll go through the list and see if any new facsimiles have been released.

One of the authors I've finally been able to check is Paul Nagel. His works are similar to several other early seventeenth century German prophetic pamphlets, such as those attributed to Johannes de Capistrano. I was skimming through the SLUB Dresden's facsimile of Nagel's 1605 Himmels Zeichen when I came across a passage that reminded me of a passage in "Paul Severus," published forty years earlier. The passage from Nagel turns out to be a rather direct quotation from Severus:

Friday, April 19, 2013

The Nuremberg Chronicle/die Schedelsche Weltchronik: the essential bibliography (updated)

Update 19 April 2013: I've added two articles to the previously empty section on the illustrations of the Nuremberg Chronicle, as well as a link to Christoph Reske's online summary, and added one book to the content and context section.

At SCSC last fall, the topic of one conversation turned to the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) and which aspects of it have been treated by scholarly literature. The coverage is uneven. For some topics, there are several essential books or articles, while for others there are none. Since then, I've been thinking about which contributions to the secondary literature anyone planning to write about the Nuremberg Chronicle should read without fail. Here is a first attempt at an essential bibliography.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Teaching materials for medieval/early modern devotional literature

This last semester, my literature/culture/civilization course returned to the Middle Ages. Last time, I taught the course as a survey of literary works and was frustrated by the lack of focus, so this semester I decided to concentrate on religious history and devotional literature, broadly understood. It actually required only a modest alteration of the readings, since many of the medieval German literary classics also have a religious aspect. For the primary texts, I used Reclam editions of Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, and Geistliche Lyrik, supplemented with several shorter works. Overall, I think the course was a success.