tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15008688793558123582024-03-12T22:57:29.949-07:00Research FragmentsJonathan Green's research notes on early printing and the language, literature, and culture of medieval and early modern GermanyJonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.comBlogger208125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-31317391977358734402023-12-09T13:04:00.000-08:002023-12-09T13:20:47.562-08:00Honorable mention for Theuerdank<p> My <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Theuerdank-The-Illustrated-Epic-of-a-Renaissance-Knight/Louthan/p/book/9780367148829" target="_blank">translation of Theuerdank</a> was awarded one of two honorable mentions in the <a href="https://www.mla.org/content/download/191368/file/2023-Publication-Prize-Recipients.pdf" target="_blank">19th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work</a> from the <a href="https://www.mla.org/" target="_blank">Modern Language Association</a>. </p><p>My co-author Howard Louthan deserves a lot of the credit for this, as he first suggested the idea of translating Theuerdank for use in undergraduate teaching, and the prize citation specifically mentions the "supporting materials (maps, chronology, a key to the characters and narrative, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading)" – which Howard provided. We were also fortunate to work with a great team of editors and production personnel at Routledge who worked with us to ensure the complex layout and ~ 120 illustrations were implemented correctly.</p><p>Looking back at my files, it looks like Howard and I first discussed the idea in March 2018. I started preparatory work in April and translation work in August 2018, with the initial translation finished by August 2019. Revising the translation and preparing the manuscript lasted into 2020, and the publication process was complete in 2022.<br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0United States37.09024 -95.7128918.780006163821156 -130.869141 65.400473836178847 -60.556641tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-38686836578388131902023-11-13T13:07:00.000-08:002023-11-18T18:58:45.560-08:00Some final thoughts on eScriptorium<p> After three months, I've been able to get back to eScriptorium. At this point, I think it's a reliable solution for creating the kind of digital texts I need in a timely and effective way. Being able to take advantage of the feedback loop from recognition to editing to training to recognition is a huge benefit. Some additional notes:<br /></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>I upgraded my old machine with a refurbished Nvidia 3060-based GPU, and it makes quite a difference. For a separate project, recognition tasks were sped up 6-10 times. For OCR, it made training with Kraken significantly faster, although I didn't measure it. Page recognition is much quicker. For around $200, definitely worth it - it doesn't just speed up one step, it makes it possible to test and experiment in a reasonable amount of time. I also experienced fewer hanging processes in eScriptorium.<br /></li><li> Docker crashed at one point and took everything with it. Not an eScriptorium problem, but making periodic backups or exporting XML is probably a good idea.</li><li>But re-installation was easy. I did have to remember not to reinstall eScriptorium from git in a Windows command prompt, but from git in a WSL shell. I don't know why that makes a difference to Docker, but it does.<br /></li><li>eScriptorium <i>does</i> have a panning tool. You can right click and move an image around. However, there are limits in place so you can't move an image around when it fills the workspace. If you shrink the image, you can move it around the workspace at will. If you enlarge it, you can also move it around at will. But if the image is at 100% size, you can't move it at all. I still find this counterintuitive. Why can't I pan a 100%-sized image, but I can pan every other image size?</li><li>I wish I could hold CTRL or SHIFT to toggle between scrolling up/down the screen, and resizing the image. Doing one when you mean to do the other is irritating. To scroll up/down the screen, you have to move your mouse pointer to a margin or gutter region. <br /></li><li>eScriptorium <i>does </i>let you select and delete lines and points in bulk, for example within a woodcut. Just hold down SHIFT, select, and hit DELETE. However, this only works if you <i>don't</i> have "Cut through lines" (scissors icon) selected. Why can't I select and delete lines in bulk when "Cut through lines" is selected? This is counterintuitive, especially since the first thing I would usually do after cutting through lines was deleting points and lines in bulk.</li><li>To turn editing features on/off, you click on their icon. They change from blue to green. (Or is it from green to blue?) The mask button additionally cycles from blue to green to gray. Is blue on and green off, or the other way around? And the "Cut through lines" feature changes from yellow to green. Why yellow and not blue? And I still don't remember which one is on or off, even after many hours using the editing screen. This is, I think, not optimal UI design.</li><li><strike>I wish the editing icons stayed on screen instead of scrolling off. When I'm editing the lower section of an image, it's an annoyance to need to scroll up to click on something. The web interface makes it difficult to keep buttons in place, but it's annoying nevertheless</strike>. [Just hit the "C" key to switch between "Cut through lines" and usual operation. It's fast and easy and documented in the help screen and doesn't clutter up the screen with floating toolbars.]<br /></li><li>There's a question mark icon that you can click for a help screen. Maybe my work flow isn't what the designers envisioned, but almost nothing on the help screen was relevant to how I worked. I searched for and read help files as issues came up, but I didn't watch any of the videos.<br /></li><li>Line renumbering works! If a line gets skipped for some reason, it's not too hard to add it, enter the text manually, and have it renumber automatically. I'm not sure what would happen in a multi-column environment.</li><li>The results of transcription after editing just 5 pages and retraining a model based on them are <i>astounding</i>. I can't emphasize enough how much easier this makes digitizing early modern printed texts and how radically this might change scholarship that draws on them. Things that once seemed impossible, or possible only for institutions with significant specialized personnel and IT resources, are now possible on my desktop in my spare time.<br /></li></ol><p>Anyway, thanks very much to all those who provided suggestions and corrections, and especially to the developers. eScriptorium is finally letting me do some things I've been hoping to do for almost 20 years.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-71466376410211657212023-08-16T13:24:00.007-07:002023-08-16T13:41:32.033-07:00eScriptorium: Let's try breaking some rules<p>I am not a scriptorium. I'm just one guy with a professional interest in late medieval and early modern prophetic texts who needs to turn digital facsimiles into electronic texts as quickly and painlessly as possible so I can read, skim, annotate, compare and search them.</p><p>eScriptorium uses <a href="https://kraken.re/2.0.0/index.html" target="_blank">kraken </a>as its recognition engine, and in fact it's entirely possible to install kraken as a standalone program (using the Windows Subsystem for Linux) and run it from the command line. Kraken in turn makes it possible to train or refine a recognition model using the command-line program <b>ketos</b>.</p><p>According to the kraken documentation, "Transcription has to be diplomatic, i.e. contain the exact character sequence
in the line image, including original orthography." What I need, though, is readable text. Especially if I'm searching a longer text, I need to be able to find all occurrences of a word without worrying about abbreviations or spelling conventions. </p><p>This sets up the following workflow:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Pre-edit images as necessary (much reduced with eScriptorium, which handled skewed images well)</li><li>Import images into the OCR environment</li><li>Automatically recognize baselines/regions</li><li>Manually correct baselines/regions<br /></li><li>Automatically recognize a bunch of pages </li><li>Manually correct the text as diplomatic transcription (Larissa Will added some useful pointers in a comment on my <a href="https://researchfragments.blogspot.com/2023/08/escriptorium-is-bad-and-brilliant.html" target="_blank">last post</a>)<br /></li><li>Export XML files and JPG images <br /></li><li>Train a work-specific model with ketos using these files<br /></li><li>Recognize the rest of the text in eScriptorium using this model<br /></li><li>Correct the diplomatic transcription by resolving abbreviations and lightly normalizing the text</li></ul><p>It's a lot of work. OCR4all and its models are set up to handle just about any abbreviation you throw at them, but the rest of the world isn't. It requires the use of Unicode extensions that Notepad++ and Word don't handle well in every case (or even many cases). And it requires an enormous amount of time to resolve the abbreviations and normalize the text, even with careful use of search and replace. I did it with one longer work, and it's exhausting.</p><p>But what happens if we break the rules? I don't want to deal with diplomatic transcriptions. You're not the boss of me and you can't make me. What if we <i>don't </i>give kraken a diplomatic transcription? What if we feed it transcribed pages of resolved abbreviations or even normalized text? Will it harm accuracy, and will the results be usable? Can we get kraken to take over the work of normalizing the text for us?</p><p>Yes we can.</p><p>I started with <a href="https://ub-backup.bib.uni-mannheim.de/~stweil/tesstrain/kraken/" target="_blank">UB Mannheim's recognition model</a> based on 16th-century German Gothic prints (luther_best.mlmodel), which gave results very similar to but maybe a very slight amount better than its model based on German and Latin prints of various periods (german_print_best.mlmodel). The OCR target is again a <a href="http://diglib.hab.de/inkunabeln/30-4-poet-1/start.htm" target="_blank">1498 edition of Wolfgang Aytinger's commentary on pseudo-Methodius</a>. I experimented a bit along the way, but I had 24 corrected pages (exported in PAGE XML format) by the time I conducted the final comparison.</p><p>So in my eScriptorium directory, I currently have a subdirectory, "train," containing 24 .jpg files and .xml files named 0058.jpg/0058.xml - 0080.jpg/0080.xml. Between them, there are around 650 corrected lines of text. In my WSL-based Debian distribution, I navigate to the eScriptorium directory and issue the following command:</p><p><span style="font-family: courier;"><b>ketos -v train -i luther_best.mlmodel -f page train/*.xml</b></span></p><p>To explain each part:</p><p>-v<span> </span>Verbose output, so I can see more of what's going on</p><p>train<span> The command telling ketos what to do</span></p><p><span>-i<span> </span>Instead of trying to train a new model from scratch, I want ketos to retrain an existing model, luther_best.mlmodel, found in the directory where I issue the command</span></p><p><span>-f<span> </span>The XML files are in PAGE format. </span></p><p><span>train/*.xml<span> </span>The path to the files to use for training </span></p><p>Retraining a model with just 5 corrected pages yielded much improved recognition results. On my underpowered computer, each training iteration took around 5 minutes and the whole process took a few hours. With more data, training takes longer - with 24 pages, each iteration took 20+ minutes and I had to let the process run overnight.</p><p>Was it worth it?</p><p>Here's the first 10 lines of the <a href="http://diglib.hab.de/inkunabeln/30-4-poet-1/00082.jpg" target="_blank">page I used for testing</a> from the HAB. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKplgUFVPm9bqmoNI0LnDqcyod3WzQCvougEm8DqAsYOlEcfnAL8Qp83D1oysqLG3uhTDxb5QHSFJ6-vR-UZqtF1g4_kPBLWhJNzaCHR_zQH7_FQ2-6g53E4ucU8Gc-jA6c_3emTnVi3rsbjEGv1G1yszKKJemugjlczamSQl7kyxFiB15d3czRwfd4gw/s1282/ayt1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="1282" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKplgUFVPm9bqmoNI0LnDqcyod3WzQCvougEm8DqAsYOlEcfnAL8Qp83D1oysqLG3uhTDxb5QHSFJ6-vR-UZqtF1g4_kPBLWhJNzaCHR_zQH7_FQ2-6g53E4ucU8Gc-jA6c_3emTnVi3rsbjEGv1G1yszKKJemugjlczamSQl7kyxFiB15d3czRwfd4gw/w400-h171/ayt1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"> And here are the first 10 lines using base Luther model: </p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLhOhj9DtBEZp6078TI7uXg8qtlnGB109d-jZ5G8qEdwCLL69NPyjIFrbAZMguKme_mIjqa-5AcnRqOI6a8Xhx1lZEY3mceLuxZJ8y0SEGo1q5FLi2sA8WgD6CwhHiWc3q7gpt2TEsH3U_lP9SQNjiVjAnqt0cZfXVYY6wYOg2n2642PjiQ2ts4Jty6yc/s667/ayt2-luth.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="327" data-original-width="667" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLhOhj9DtBEZp6078TI7uXg8qtlnGB109d-jZ5G8qEdwCLL69NPyjIFrbAZMguKme_mIjqa-5AcnRqOI6a8Xhx1lZEY3mceLuxZJ8y0SEGo1q5FLi2sA8WgD6CwhHiWc3q7gpt2TEsH3U_lP9SQNjiVjAnqt0cZfXVYY6wYOg2n2642PjiQ2ts4Jty6yc/w400-h196/ayt2-luth.png" width="400" /></a><br /></p><p>I mean, kind of? I could use it, but it would take a lot of work to fix. The base German_Print model is about the same:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtNQmhv8ID_b0LyTjVD5wRc29Vfiw66unOfCtxTe1IqUDD8JXQimAk_maagk_E2mZPNyItzBv7xwOEIusU3PnO2xmY8Bto4poSlHSk5E8zo6-DH3OQQLb8QMroe_iGPd-P1mGAN-VjUmkOfiLpjNJCJ76HoDrV1IejMbnNoiAZcWGzkCymscbGwBkNOSM/s655/ayt3-germprint.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="321" data-original-width="655" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtNQmhv8ID_b0LyTjVD5wRc29Vfiw66unOfCtxTe1IqUDD8JXQimAk_maagk_E2mZPNyItzBv7xwOEIusU3PnO2xmY8Bto4poSlHSk5E8zo6-DH3OQQLb8QMroe_iGPd-P1mGAN-VjUmkOfiLpjNJCJ76HoDrV1IejMbnNoiAZcWGzkCymscbGwBkNOSM/w400-h196/ayt3-germprint.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>A little better, a little worse. Still a lot of work.</p><p>After training on work-specific pages, accuracy can be expected to be much better. But how will kraken do with abbreviations after training on an undiplomatic transcription? As it turns out, brilliantly.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGS5HgJdbxIFKNIG25ZLu-gtRarKctiwKkycRraIUyiqFNfPbX5hBq4LdJXdH1sSVRP72B-1tZWiIx67r5haBNrNAvnhTC5aAx9l0FJ3I-XM2pkNFf_kZFA_uWT4mOWkhLRXsQOFaiOEryXyz6HMWGHtSrUJJYHB4BwuZd6sc9_V7okaPhEWBKB3ffGzs/s776/ayt4-resolve.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="776" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGS5HgJdbxIFKNIG25ZLu-gtRarKctiwKkycRraIUyiqFNfPbX5hBq4LdJXdH1sSVRP72B-1tZWiIx67r5haBNrNAvnhTC5aAx9l0FJ3I-XM2pkNFf_kZFA_uWT4mOWkhLRXsQOFaiOEryXyz6HMWGHtSrUJJYHB4BwuZd6sc9_V7okaPhEWBKB3ffGzs/w640-h254/ayt4-resolve.png" width="640" /></a></div><p>In this image, correct resolutions of abbreviations are marked in green and incorrect ones or other mistakes in red. eScriptorium got it right 47/57 times (82%) after training on just the abbreviations that occur in 24 pages. And the best part is that I only have to deal with plain old ASCII-compliant characters that will copy and paste anywhere without complaint.<br /></p><p>I can almost read this as is. I can work with this.</p><p>But what about normalizing i/j and u/v and similar? I re-corrected the 24 pages by normalizing the text, re-exported the XML, and re-trained. Here are the results:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVKeCxOoOK8M9rdJ9Wr8OaOsX7pqtI81F3TOjTdHrzufoUBk_1Hd_YbObS_mre6MZecD7oTlL-5jQnl03Yr100pTzy1Ks98FsrSZxEzYzJz8Mo9Kmr5osKOAz7F6meuG2ckhkyogJdEGYlvoFY-28e2VYHV55CL2IZoFFSy3cOa3f6ApZyMEXzu2iKQyg/s755/ayt5-resolve-norm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="755" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVKeCxOoOK8M9rdJ9Wr8OaOsX7pqtI81F3TOjTdHrzufoUBk_1Hd_YbObS_mre6MZecD7oTlL-5jQnl03Yr100pTzy1Ks98FsrSZxEzYzJz8Mo9Kmr5osKOAz7F6meuG2ckhkyogJdEGYlvoFY-28e2VYHV55CL2IZoFFSy3cOa3f6ApZyMEXzu2iKQyg/w640-h262/ayt5-resolve-norm.png" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p>In this image, green and red are used as above to mark correct/incorrect expansions, while blue/purple are added to mark correct and incorrect normalization. <br /></p><p>And the results are fantastic. Training on normalized text with resolved abbreviations didn't cause any loss of recognition accuracy. Kraken normalized the text correctly 10/11 times, including getting the internal "v" correct in <i>conversus</i> and <i>numeravit</i></p><p>Even some of the mistaken abbreviation resolutions are better than nothing. I just need to delete an "n" from "quenm," and the "m" is already there. The less I have to type, the faster the last step will go. This is going to save me a lot of work.</p><p>Finally, someone might ask if I couldn't just train a model from scratch using pages from Aytinger and have a completely tailor-made recognition model. Wouldn't that be even more accurate?</p><p>No. At this point, the results are laughable - quite literally. Trained on 650 lines of corrected text, the resulting recognition model has a 4% accuracy rate and yielded the following transcription:</p><p style="margin-left: 120px; text-align: left;">tee-<br />teei<br />teet<br />teei<br />tee-<br />tee-<br />tee-<br />teei<br />ees<br />teet</p><p>I don't know how much text is required to train a model from scratch, but "around 650 lines" is not the answer.<br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-30037978298315296762023-08-02T13:05:00.003-07:002023-08-04T15:36:13.169-07:00eScriptorium is bad. And brilliant.<p><a href="https://www.ocr4all.org/" target="_blank">OCR4all </a>isn't the only option for turning early printed books into electronic texts. According to Stefan Weil (via Klaus Graf), <a href="https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/escriptorium">eScriptorium </a>was able to produce usable text of pseudo-Vincent Ferrer's <i>De fine mundi</i> in German translation with moderate effort based on segmentation and text recognition models from the UB Mannheim. With 15 corrected pages, it was then possible to train a work-specific OCR model for the rest. (His results are <a href="https://dfg-viewer.bib.uni-mannheim.de/viewer?tx_dlf%5Bid%5D=https%3A%2F%2Fub-backup.bib.uni-mannheim.de%2F~stweil%2Fd-gt%2Fdata%2FDE-12%2Furn%3Anbn%3Ade%3Abvb%3A12-bsb00034304-6%2Fmets.xml&tx_dlf%5Bpage%5D=11&tx_dlf_navigation%5Bcontroller%5D=Navigation&tx_dlf_tableofcontents%5Baction%5D=main&tx_dlf_tableofcontents%5Bcontroller%5D=TableOfContents&cHash=aae1fc277ef711b3cc1daa3f12318e8b" target="_blank">here</a>.)</p><p>First the good news. The documentation states that eScriptorium runs under either Linux or MacOS, but it installs and runs without major incident as a Docker app under Windows. The recognition models from the UB Mannheim are very good for early German printed books. Using a best-case scan of <a href="http://data.onb.ac.at/rep/10A76115" target="_blank">Joseph Grünpeck's 1508 <i>Speculum</i></a> in German from the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, it produced impressively accurate results. Results were still very good for a less-than-perfect scenario (<a href="http://diglib.hab.de/inkunabeln/30-4-poet-1/start.htm">Wolfgang Aytinger's Latin commentary on pseudo-Methodius</a> from the HAB). The underlying Kraken OCR engine has finally made it possible for me to train and use my own OCR models. I can't imagine using anything but eScriptorium after this. It's that good.<br /></p><p>But eScriptorium is also bad.</p><p>The installation documentation isn't great, and the instructions for use are confusing. A quickstart guide would be helpful. I've run other OCR programs before, but it still took a long time for eScriptorium to start making sense.</p><p>Importing images into a new project went smoothly, and eScriptorium seems to handle PDFs just fine. So there's less need to pre-process images, and conversion to grayscale is unnecessary.</p><p>Segmentation, using either the default or the UB Mannheim segmentation model, worked quite well. But one of eScriptorium's major flaws is that the segmentation editing tools are very limited compared to OCR4all, and they behave erratically. There's no easy way to select an area and delete all text lines at once, which is a real problem with woodcut illustration, which are often recognize as a dozen or more short text lines at odd angles. Instead of selecting all lines or the whole region, I have to select each line and delete it one by one. Attempting to edit region outlines or lines quickly leads to frustration. The order of text lines can be displayed, but there's no way to change it if it's incorrect (which I've seen more than once so far). There's no way to "grab" the page image and move it around, so it can be difficult to move it back to the center of the screen at reasonable size. The equivalent tools in OCR4all are much more comprehensive and easier to use.</p><p>When segmenting or recognizing multiple pages, processes would stop without warning or explanation. The only reason I knew they had stopped was because CPU usage in Docker dropped back into low single digits. The failed processes weren't sequential, but instead affected pages seemingly at random, which meant I had to go back through the images one by one to see where segmentation or recognition had failed.</p><p></p><p>Some tasks proved impossible to cancel at all, even after stopping Docker or restarting Windows. My first attempts at training a model in eScriptorium were unsuccessful, but even now one of them is still listed as ongoing, and clicking the "Cancel training" button generates the less-than-helpful error "SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data." (For the curious: the raw data is "status," and nothing else.).</p><p>The transcription window is nicely responsive and easy to use. I especially like how the text resizes so the line width matches the image above it, making it easy to edit or transcribe. I prefer
it to the OCR4all transcription screen. The eScriptorium window
only shows one line at a time, however, and often it's necessary to see the next
or preceding lines to choose the best transcription. It also seems to
lack OCR4all's ability to show low-probability characters.</p><p>With good recognition models, recognition results are fantastic. A pattern I've noticed with perhaps half the pages I've processed so far, however, is that the last line on the page will have abominable recognition quality, as if eScriptorium is somehow reverting to a rudimentary model for the final line of the page.<br /></p><p>You can export recognized, transcribed and/or corrected pages in ALTO or PAGE XML formats or plain text, with or without the images - maybe. Once I had downloaded one XML format without images, eScriptorium kept generating the same ZIP file no matter what other options I chose until I restarted the whole stack in Docker. Plain text is exported only as a single block of text rather than as separate text files. If you need to generate ground truth text files, you'll have to copy and paste by hand, without even a page separator to guide you.<br /></p><p>Effective OCR relies on high-quality models, but the <a href="https://zenodo.org/communities/ocr_models?page=1&size=20" target="_blank">central Zenodo repository</a> is nearly empty and doesn't offer anything suitable for the early modern printed books I work with. I knew that better models existed somewhere and even some of the file names, but even with that information it took me two days to find them. (I eventually found them <a href="https://ub-backup.bib.uni-mannheim.de/~stweil/tesstrain/kraken/" target="_blank">here</a>.)</p><p>One of the nice features of eScriptorium is the underlying <a href="https://github.com/mittagessen/kraken" target="_blank">Kraken </a>engine. You can install it under Window's Linux subsystem (I've got it running under Debian) and work with it directly from the command line, no web interface needed. The bad news, again, is the confusing and sometimes contradictory documentation, with the same command-line switches meaning different things depending on the particular command given to Kraken.</p><p>My overall impression is: <i>nomen est omen</i>. OCR4all really is trying to bring OCR for early print to a broad audience of individual users, while eScriptorium is targeted at the digital scriptorium, with specialized hardware and trained personnel working on major digitalization efforts.</p><p>Still, eScriptorium gives me the sense, in a way that OCR4all didn't, that the promised land is in sight: I'll be able to take a digital facsimile, get a good initial transcription, then train a work-specific model that will produce very good to excellent results for the complete work. A working digital text might mean the investment of a few hours and not dozens.<br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-64961995223512771312023-07-14T11:32:00.002-07:002023-07-14T11:32:12.532-07:00Modern editions of medieval and early modern prophecies v.01<p>In my research, I keep asking myself related questions: "Are there any better options than a digital facsimile?" "Is this text edited anywhere?" "Why does everyone cite a 1690 edition of this key work?" <br /></p><p>Some prophetic works have been edited. I know because I keep stumbling over the editions. In some cases we have the best the nineteenth century could do, and in others we have exemplary modern editions. I listed several editions in my Oxford bibliography, but I couldn't list
even all the editions I knew of then, and the focus wasn't on editions
in any case. To make the process of discovery less haphazard, I'm creating this list and updating it as I come across new works.</p><p>To the extent possible, I am excluding astrology and focusing on works in the form that circulated widely rather than on "authentic" or original versions. I will include short prophecies, but generally exclude partial editions of longer works. Any comments will be brief.</p><p>Next time: Add the various short prophecies edited in the nineteenth century and later, and the Oracula cyrili.<br /></p><p><b>Birgitta of Sweden</b></p><p>Montag, Ulrich. <i>Das Werk der heiligen Birgitta von Schweden in oberdeutscher Überlieferung: Texte und Untersuchungen</i>. Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters 18. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Latin and German editions of the <i>Onus mundi</i> compiled by Johannes Tortsch.</li></ul><p><b>Hildegard of Bingen</b></p><p>Gebeno, José Carlos Santos Paz, and Hildegard. <i>La obra de Gebenón de Eberbach</i>. La tradizione profetica 2. Tavarnuzze (Firenze): SISMEL : Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>While excellent editions of Hildegard's work exist, this is the only complete edition of the widely copied <i>Pentacron</i>.</li></ul><p> <b>Johannes de Rupescissa</b></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b>Vademecum</b><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Johannes de Rupescissa. <i>Vade mecum in tribulatione</i>. Edited by Elena Tealdi, Robert E Lerner, and Gian Luca Potestà. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2015.</p><div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
<span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A978-88-343-2998-6&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Vade%20mecum%20in%20tribulatione&rft.place=Milan&rft.publisher=Vita%20e%20Pensiero&rft.au=undefined&rft.au=Elena%20Tealdi&rft.au=Robert%20E%20Lerner&rft.au=Gian%20Luca%20Potest%C3%A0&rft.date=2015&rft.isbn=978-88-343-2998-6&rft.language=Text%20of%20main%20work%20in%20Latin%3B%20notes%20and%20commentary%20in%20Italian%3B%20introductory%20essays%20in%20English%20and%20Italian."></span>
</div><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Kaup, Matthias. <i>John of Rupescissa’s Vade Mecum in Tribulacione (1356): A Late Medieval Apocalypse Manual for the Forthcoming Fifteen Years of Horror and Hardship</i>. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b>Other works</b></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Rupescissa, Johannes de. <i>Liber secretorum eventuum: Edition critique, traduction et introduction historique</i>. Edited by Robert E. Lerner and Christine Morerod-Fattebert. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1994.<b> </b><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Paracelsus</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Paracelsus. <i>Theophrast von Hohenheim gen. Paracelsus: Sämtliche Werke</i>. Edited by Karl Sudhoff. 14 vols. Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1929.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li style="text-align: left;">Where among these 14 volumes are the prophetic works located? I'll have to take another look at this later. Available by open access. Vol. 1 is <a href="https://doi.org/10.24355/dbbs.084-200510210200-759">here</a>.<br /></li></ul><b>Pseudo-Methodius</b><ul style="text-align: left;"><li style="text-align: left;">The problem with pseudo-Methodius editions is that most are focused on
the early stages of the text in Syriac, Greek and Latin from the seventh
to ninth centuries A.D., while I'm interested in what the text was
doing in Europe nearly a thousand years later. </li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">Sackur, Ernst. <i>Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius, Adso und die Tiburtinische Sibylle.</i> Halle (Saale), 1898. 1-96.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Pseudo-Methodius. <i>Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius: An Alexandrian World Chronicle</i>. Translated by Benjamin Garstad. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, DOML 14. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Grifoni, Cinzia, and Clemens Ganter. “The Third Latin Recension of the Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius – Introduction and Edition.” In <i>Cultures of Eschatology</i>, edited by Veronika Wieser, Vincent Eltschinger, and Johann Heiss, 1:194–253. Cultural History of Apocalyptic Thought. Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020. <br /></p><div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
<span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A978-3-11-069031-6&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=bookitem&rft.atitle=The%20Third%20Latin%20Recension%20of%20the%20Revelationes%20of%20Pseudo-Methodius%20%E2%80%93%20Introduction%20and%20Edition&rft.place=Berlin%20%3B%20Boston&rft.publisher=De%20Gruyter%20Oldenbourg&rft.series=Cultural%20history%20of%20apocalyptic%20thought&rft.aufirst=Cinzia&rft.aulast=Grifoni&rft.au=Veronika%20Wieser&rft.au=Vincent%20Eltschinger&rft.au=Johann%20Heiss&rft.au=Cinzia%20Grifoni&rft.au=Clemens%20Ganter&rft.date=2020&rft.pages=194-253&rft.spage=194&rft.epage=253&rft.isbn=978-3-11-069031-6&rft.language=English"></span>
</div><p style="text-align: left;"><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A978-0-674-05307-6&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Apocalypse%20of%20Pseudo-Methodius%3A%20An%20Alexandrian%20world%20chronicle&rft.place=Cambridge%2C%20Mass&rft.publisher=Harvard%20University%20Press&rft.series=Dumbarton%20Oaks%20medieval%20library&rft.aulast=Pseudo-Methodius&rft.au=Pseudo-Methodius&rft.au=Benjamin%20Garstad&rft.date=2012&rft.tpages=420&rft.isbn=978-0-674-05307-6&rft.language=eng%20lat"></span>
</p><p style="text-align: left;"> <b>Sibylline prophecies</b></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li style="text-align: left;">This will probably get split into separate categories at some point.</li></ul><p>Neske, Ingeborg. <i>Die spätmittelalterliche deutsche Sibyllenweissagung: Untersuchung und Edition</i>. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1985.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Perhaps the first vernacular printed work. <br /></li></ul><p>Sackur, Ernst. <i>Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius, Adso und die Tiburtinische Sibylle.</i> Halle (Saale), 1898. 114-187.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Tiburtine sibyl<br /></li></ul><p></p><p> <b>Ve mundo</b></p><p><b> </b>Kaup, Matthias, and Robert E. Lerner. “Gentile of Foligno Interprets the Prophecy ‘Woe to the World,’ with an Edition and English Translation.” <i>Traditio</i> 56 (2001): 149–211. <br /></p><p></p><div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
<span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A978-3-87452-669-2&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Die%20sp%C3%A4tmittelalterliche%20deutsche%20Sibyllenweissagung%3A%20Untersuchung%20und%20Edition&rft.place=G%C3%B6ppingen&rft.publisher=K%C3%BCmmerle&rft.aufirst=Ingeborg&rft.aulast=Neske&rft.au=Ingeborg%20Neske&rft.date=1985&rft.isbn=978-3-87452-669-2"></span>
</div><div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 1.35; margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
<span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A978-1-4094-6399-3&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=John%20of%20Rupescissa's%20Vade%20mecum%20in%20tribulacione%20(1356)%3A%20a%20late%20medieval%20apocalypse%20manual%20for%20the%20forthcoming%20fifteen%20years%20of%20horror%20and%20hardship&rft.place=Farnham&rft.publisher=Ashgate&rft.aufirst=Matthias&rft.aulast=Kaup&rft.au=Matthias%20Kaup&rft.date=2013&rft.isbn=978-1-4094-6399-3&rft.language=English"></span>
</div><p><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A978-2-8271-0650-9&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Liber%20secretorum%20eventuum%3A%20Edition%20critique%2C%20traduction%20et%20introduction%20historique&rft.place=Fribourg&rft.publisher=Editions%20Universitaires%20Fribourg%20Suisse&rft.aufirst=Johannes%20de&rft.aulast=Rupescissa&rft.au=Johannes%20de%20Rupescissa&rft.au=Robert%20E.%20Lerner&rft.au=Christine%20Morerod-Fattebert&rft.date=1994&rft.tpages=336&rft.isbn=978-2-8271-0650-9&rft.language=fr"></span>
</p><p></p><p></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-7806342171802259442023-05-30T13:48:00.004-07:002023-05-30T13:54:27.213-07:00OCR4all is better than Google<p>OCR4all is better than Google OCR for early modern printed books.</p><p><a href="https://archivalia.hypotheses.org/171264">Klaus Graf</a> pointed me to a suggestion from <a href="https://archivalia.hypotheses.org/171036#comment-133450">Lajos Adamik</a> on using Google Docs for OCR. It's a great idea - Google is fast and fairly accurate. For some projects I'd definitely use it.</p><p>But not for most early printed books. I had earlier tried out different OCR4all models/model combinations on a page from <i><a href="https://collections.thulb.uni-jena.de/receive/HisBest_cbu_00027210">Abbas Joachim magnus propheta</a></i> (1516) so I had images (in various stages of preparation) and uncorrected output text to compare.</p><p>(NB: I got best results using the "fraktur-hist" models. Contrary to OCR4all's documentation, I got best results from using all five "fraktur-hist" models together compared to using any one of them alone.)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3CPuzvqsUhd_bUW8vds4zoXR6iiTk31PMmZILv7JITmTqpcGPq-fi0FQfDgtNNJuEOw4sTEXgyEY2DX3m0cTpLIKZSQsm0YBDrqNcNo6oRjSoubqauyd-uMpv6zxwYumtAETwTFlRklIzy8RZZJh0qWf5CaOLjpxJF-zAHWQgTaRjCv4GcUBEQ9HI/s450/abbas1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="291" data-original-width="450" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3CPuzvqsUhd_bUW8vds4zoXR6iiTk31PMmZILv7JITmTqpcGPq-fi0FQfDgtNNJuEOw4sTEXgyEY2DX3m0cTpLIKZSQsm0YBDrqNcNo6oRjSoubqauyd-uMpv6zxwYumtAETwTFlRklIzy8RZZJh0qWf5CaOLjpxJF-zAHWQgTaRjCv4GcUBEQ9HI/w320-h207/abbas1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> Here is the uncorrected OCR4all text. This is a fairly difficult text for OCR: Latin, many abbreviations, some barely perceptible abbreviation markings (some symbols may not display correctly in your browser, but I can see all of them here).<p></p><p></p><blockquote>¶Jncipit liber de magnis tribulationibus in proximo futuris. Compilatus a docto ⁊ deuoto preſſ ptero ⁊ heremita Theoloſphoro de Cuſentia ꝓuincie Calabrie. Collectus vero ex vaticinijs nouorum prophetarum. ſ. beati Curilli: abbatis Joachim: Danda i: ⁊ Mer lini: ac veterum ſibillarum. Deinde abbreuiatus pervenerabilem fratrem Nuſtitianuʒ: vna cũ tractatu magiſtri Joãnis pa: iſini ordmis pᷣdicatoꝝ: de antichriſto ⁊ ſine mũdi: t fr̃is Tbertini de ſeptẽ ſtatib?eccleſie.</blockquote><p></p><p>Here is the manually corrected text. Clearly a lot of post-recognition cleanup work is necessary, but OCR4all does a decent job of picking up abbreviations. Here's the corrected version - to get a corrected text of the complete work, perhaps 100-200 hours of work or more would be required.<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>¶ Incipit liber de magnis tribulationibus in proximo futuris. Compilatus a docto et devoto presbytero et heremita Theolosphoro de Cusentia provincie Calabrie. Collectus vero ex vaticiniis novorum prophetarum. s. beati Cirilli: abbatis Joachim: Dandali: et Merlini: ac veterum sibillarum. Deinde abbreviatus per venerabilem fratrem Rustitianum: una cum tractatu magistri Joannis parisini ordinis predicatorum: de antichristo et fine mundi: et fratris Ubertini de septem statibus ecclesie. </blockquote><p></p><p>Here are a few examples from Google. The first one uses a deskewed base image. The amount of work required to correct the text will clearly be higher.<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>CIncipit liber de magnis tribulationibus in proximo futuris. Lompi latus a docto z ceuoro prefbytero z heremita Theolofpbozo de Lufentia puincie Lalabzie. Lollectus vero ex vaticinijs nouozum pzo/ phetarum.f. beati Lirilli: abbatis Joachim: Danda i: Delini:ac veterum fibillarum. Deinde abbreuiatus pervenerabilem fratrem Ruftitianus:vna cu tractatu magiftri Joanis parifini ordinis pdicator de antichrifto z fine müdi:z fris Ubertini de fepté ftatib ecclefie.</blockquote><p></p><p>Using one of OCR4all's preprocessed images shows what can go wrong with Google Docs:</p><p></p><blockquote>Incipit liber de magnis <u>omne malum fuper omnes habitatores terre</u>. tribulationibus in proximo futuris. Lompt <u>Itaq; fub tali impatore/tres falt pape creabus tur:vnus grecus:alius italus:z alius germa</u>/ latus a docto z ceuoro presbytero z heremita Theololphoto de Lufentia puincie Lalabae.<u>us/oium peffimus: erunt finguli adinuicez</u> Lollectus vero ex varicinije nouocum pro phetarum,f. beati Lirilli: abbatis Joachim: Danda i: dei lini:ac veterum fibillarum. Deinde abbreuiatus pervenerabilem fratrem Ruffitianuz:vna cũ tractatu magistri Joānis parifini ozdinis pdicator:de antichrifto z fine mūdì:z frio Ubertini de fepté flatib ecclefie.</blockquote><p></p><p>Pretty bad. While a cleaner image should produce better results, Google's OCR failed to recognize the page's two-column layout and instead smashed the two columns together randomly (underlined/grey text) - sometimes one line at a time, sometimes two lines, then not at all - producing unuseable results. How often would this happen when scanning a 100-page book? </p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx15jzp6KudvQfZcjf6Rg1wqpQvIkGcYjblzQ7rPYJu_EziDa4e8UPlm5jTLpejkOgaNFPreQtHr2UoNrZNy7VCXRpN2f-ntRSfB5ilRYQqfkSinUam5jZnpmTWRSKkM5JgbOzBpx5UG3HTAefik0Qli_-835GEW2KsQ3JvJAhDgqk0XA0txPjiLUS/s900/abbas2-ed2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="291" data-original-width="900" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx15jzp6KudvQfZcjf6Rg1wqpQvIkGcYjblzQ7rPYJu_EziDa4e8UPlm5jTLpejkOgaNFPreQtHr2UoNrZNy7VCXRpN2f-ntRSfB5ilRYQqfkSinUam5jZnpmTWRSKkM5JgbOzBpx5UG3HTAefik0Qli_-835GEW2KsQ3JvJAhDgqk0XA0txPjiLUS/w640-h206/abbas2-ed2.jpg" width="640" /></a> <br /></p><p></p><p>I realize this is all based on one page of one book, but I think this points to several ways that OCR4all is a better fit for all but the most straightforward projects.</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>More accurate recognition of abbreviations and other symbols typical found in early modern books</li><li>User control over page layout - you can exclude images, marginalia, etc., without editing the image</li><li>User control over models - you can check where lines/columns have been divided before recognition, and make changes if necessary</li><li>Better interface for correcting recognized text - Google doesn't reveal low-probability characters, and you're stuck with whatever it offers</li><li>Access to better recognition models/user control of models - although OCR4all will need to keep improving its models over time<br /></li></ul>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-76511853651428143142023-04-27T12:23:00.001-07:002023-05-30T13:48:49.005-07:00Digital text: Methodius, Revelationes [German], 1497<p>Who needs a digital text when digital facsimiles are available? I do. When I'm hunting citations or comparing versions, I need to be able to annotate, rearrange, and copy and paste. In addition, it's much faster to read an early modern text in a modern font, especially if I'm scanning a text I've read to find something I remember seeing previously. It's what makes the effort required to use <a href="https://www.ocr4all.org/" target="_blank">OCR4all </a>worth it.</p><p>Here's one result, for example: a <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-6Q1-0GLSVUCj3NDuBlZTjg9vLsTO6ys/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102946162254032794157&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank">complete digital text</a> of Pseudo-Methodius' <i>Revelationes</i> in German, published in 1497 (<a href="https://data.cerl.org/istc/im00526000" target="_blank">ISTC </a><span class="ample-display-content d-inline d-sm-inline-block"><span id="istc-id"><a href="https://data.cerl.org/istc/im00526000" target="_blank">im00526000</a>, <a href="https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/docs/M23065.htm">GW M23065</a>; fascimile from the <a href="https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00034531?page=,1" target="_blank">Bayerische Staatsbibliothek</a>)</span></span>.</p><p>I've prepared the text for my own purposes, so:</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The numbers count images starting from the title page, not anything useful like leaves.</li><li>I've made minimal effort to resolve abbreviations or normalize spelling.</li><li>I'm using modern equivalents for s and z.</li><li>I read through the text once to straighten out the formatting and catch errors, but there are undoubtedly still errors in the text. <br /></li></ol><p>The German text was more useful to me than the Latin text, and it uses fewer abbreviations. That does mean that this text doesn't include Wolfgang Aytinger's commentary on Methodius, so I might have to deal with it separately. I'm currently digitalizing a Latin work for the first time, and I don't know how well OCR4all will handle abbreviations yet.</p><p>I have several more texts like this that I'll post eventually, and I'm working on more as time permits. One goal is to end up with a workable electronic text of Lichtenberger's <i>Prognosticatio</i>.</p><p>Hopefully someone will find these working notes useful. If you need to cite something, cite to Albrecht Kunne's edition or a modern critical edition of Methodius.<br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-67119043877907248052023-04-06T12:32:00.003-07:002023-04-06T12:32:54.556-07:00OCR4all is good<p> For a current project, it would be useful to have an electronic text of pseudo-Vincent Ferrer's <i>De fine mundi</i> (or <a href="https://data.cerl.org/istc/if00125000" target="_blank">Anton Sorg's 1486 edition of a German translation</a>, to be precise).</p><p>Let me back up a bit. For every project that I've worked on since the beginning of grad school, I've wished for an electronic text of every primary and secondary source. They've rarely been available. When they've been essential, it usually required a lot of manual typing.</p><p>For modern works, <a href="https://pdf.abbyy.com/" target="_blank">ABBYY FineReade</a>r works extremely well, but it didn't produce usable results for 15/16th-century books, even with considerable fine-tuning. I looked at other options a few years ago, but they looked more like solutions for specialized digitalization centers.</p><p>Until recently. After seeing a colleague's results, I gave <a href="https://www.ocr4all.org/" target="_blank">OCR4all </a>another try, and it's finally giving me the electronic texts I want for a reasonable amount of effort.</p><p>The installation instructions are mostly clear. There's a learning curve and I'm far from understanding all the options, but it largely produces good enough output as is. Hardware requirements are quite modest - I'm running it on my work computer, an Intel Core i5-4590 from 2016.</p><p>There are a few things I've done to speed up the process.</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Most of the texts I want to digitize are available as scanned images. Before I turn OCR4all loose, I do some minimal preparation work using <a href="https://www.irfanview.com/" target="_blank">IrfanView</a>, a free, lightweight, all-purpose image viewer and editor: I rotate any pages that are noticeably off horizontal (OCR4all will do its own fine-tuning), and I crop out extraneous margins. I set up an <a href="https://www.autohotkey.com/" target="_blank">AuoHotKey </a>script so I can save the file with one key combination once I have the cropping rectangle selected.</li><li>Once I start up OCR4all, I can mostly let it do its preprocessing, noise removal, page segmentation and line segmentation on its own. But it's a good idea to check a few pages to make sure noise removal hasn't gotten out of control, and then to check the line segmentation of each page to make sure OCR4all hasn't skipped over anything and has chosen a rational reading order.</li><li>For text recognition, I select five historical Fraktur models. I wish it was clearer why I'm selecting five, and all Fraktur models rather than a mix or something else, but I'm getting good results.</li><li>OCR4all has a good visual editor for comparing recognized text to the page image. To speed things up, I'll zoom in the text to around 160%, or whatever makes the lines about the same length as the page image. Then I check off "Show Prediction" and "Show Confidence" and raise the Word Confidence to .95. This highlights the words I need to double-check in orange. I'll make any edits to those words and assume the rest are good enough for now.</li><li>After checking each page, I export a text file, then do some searching and replacing in <a href="https://notepad-plus-plus.org/" target="_blank">Notepad++</a>. Its pattern-matching abilities based on regular expressions are much better than what's available in Word. I replace tall ſ and ʒ with s and z, for example - the goal here isn't an edition, but an easily readable text. I also remove line breaks.</li></ol><p> And that is how I can go from a digital facsimile to a usable electronic text in less than an hour for a pamphlet, and a few hours for a longer work like <i>De fine mundi</i>.<br /></p><p><br /></p>
<table border="1" cellspacing="1">
<tbody><tr style="vertical-align: top;">
<td><div style="text-align: center;"><b>How it started<br /></b><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikmtROthzX9JZr3Pj50dWaKlVgaqmtWTqid3TeSZNweOvrrGBPe14alvO-1kaL0kgukYyey3rDV4sYmOhb6lI5ed2mQoLkmznHodaukMcZ3xEHNd_6MiUE9UemHYp3bgNJb59c4BUElg0nMU01LKOX1wLt6zU9XkxqVHg7FaRaarEdyQ2SydPOhxr1/s846/jpfl.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="753" data-original-width="846" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikmtROthzX9JZr3Pj50dWaKlVgaqmtWTqid3TeSZNweOvrrGBPe14alvO-1kaL0kgukYyey3rDV4sYmOhb6lI5ed2mQoLkmznHodaukMcZ3xEHNd_6MiUE9UemHYp3bgNJb59c4BUElg0nMU01LKOX1wLt6zU9XkxqVHg7FaRaarEdyQ2SydPOhxr1/s320/jpfl.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></td>
<td><div style="text-align: center;"><b>How it's going<br /></b><br /></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jtem/ vil wilder thier/ id est (Fürsten) werden widerwertiglich mit einander reden. Jm. 1524. jar. Vnd ein grosser adler/ id est (Keiser) desselben haupt/ vnd werden gehen auff die weitte der er den / id est (Türcken vnd das heilig land) vnd welcher den namen des sterns / id est (Bapst)hat/ derselb wirt geladen/ aber er wirt nit kumen / doch so wirt er senden den/ der den namen des visch hat/ id est (delfin/ das ist der Künig von Franckreich) vnd wirt an sich nemen der adler ein grosse samlung/ vñ der Leopardus/ id est (der Römisch Künig) auß Campo albo / vnd durch die Ritterschafft eingehen vñ machen ein haupt in der Marchia/ id est (in der Mar chia vnd eins ist in Welschen landen) vnd wirt darnach gehen wider das erdtreich/ das da seyn grund hat von verreterey/ id est (wider Welsch land vnd der Römer) vnd welcher den namen des vischs hat / der wirt an sich nemen den weg Leopardus / vñ kumen wider jn vber die lender Campaniam zwischen der grund Parmam schlösser/ id est (stet in Welschen landen) vnd wirt sich halten widerwertig / vnd da wirt dann vil blüts vergiessung durch manschlacht bey dem fluß / welcher genennet ist der arbeyt / id est (wascher fiuß) darnach wirdt derselb fluß des blůts / der von der manschlacht einkumpt/ vnd der da den gantzẽ tag billt / id est (Künig von Vngern) der wirt sterben von eisen/ vnd wirt vber jn herschen der Leopardus / darnach wirt er sterben natürlichs tods/ vñ wirt darnach frid durch dz gantz erdtrich werdẽ/ Das werd war/ AMEN.</span><br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-90320509187110641512023-03-17T13:31:00.000-07:002023-03-17T13:31:12.837-07:00A Pseudo-Methodius sighting<p>The fifteenth-century manuscript Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek Mainz, Hs I 109, from the Carthusians of Mainz, consists of four parts. A sixteenth-century addendum at the end of part 3 (fol. 109v) includes a <a href="https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/mzstb_hs_i_109/0220/image,info" target="_blank">list of around 20 books</a>. The first two items from the list belong to the third part of the manuscript, but the rest do not.</p><p>The final line of the list begins:
Item Reuelac<i>i</i>o<i>e</i>s methodij</p><p>The library's <a href="https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/list1990bd1/0189/image,info" target="_blank">manuscript catalog</a> doesn't mention Methodius, but does describe the rest of the works as "primarily theological, grammatical and medical writings, including Sebastian Brant's <i>Narrenschiff</i>, Jakob Wimpfeling's <i>Elegantiarum medulla</i> and <i>Isidoneus Germanicus</i>, Johannes Marius Philelphus' <i>Novum epistolarium</i>." (I also see Johannes de Sacrobosco's <i>De sphaera mundi</i> in the book list.)<br /></p><p>It's always interesting to get another data point on who owned prophecies, and in what context.<br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-27511916876927219932022-01-08T18:34:00.001-08:002022-01-08T18:54:46.247-08:00A Cedar of Lebanon sighting<p> Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek Mainz, Hs I 171 is a manuscript from the second half of the 15th century. The provenance is from the Carthusians of Mainz.</p><p>The <a href="https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/mzstb_hs_i_171/0046" target="_blank">text on ff. 21v-22r</a> is identified as a "Vision de anno 1387." The title identifies it as a vision found in an old book: "Sequitur alia visio Reperta in uno antiquo libro."<br /></p><p>The text is in fact the "Cedar of Lebanon" vision (see Robert Lerner's 1983 <i>Powers of Prophecy</i> for the definitive study).</p><p>The preceding text, the "Visio de anno 1454" on <a href="https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/mzstb_hs_i_171/0043" target="_blank">ff. 20r-21v</a>, is the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=GFIRAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PR41&ots=D8Ckt2vB0f&dq=%22atque%20de%20manibus%20perfidorum%22&pg=PR43#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">Revelatio I</a> of Denis the Carthusian.<br /></p>Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-2324655919458854562018-04-19T11:58:00.001-07:002023-03-17T12:25:17.577-07:00The Extract of Various PropheciesFor the booklet of excerpts from Lichtenberger and Grünpeck and other sources known variously as the <i>Auszug etlicher Prophezeiungen</i>, <i>Extract of Various Prophecies</i>, and (inaccurately) as the "Anonymous Practica"/"Anonyme Praktik," whose most thorough previous description is pp. 145-53 in Heike Talkenberger's <i>Sintflut</i> (1990), I have a <a href="http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/view/29267" target="_blank">recently published article</a> that clears up some of the mysteries:<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Jonathan Green. “The <i>Extract of Various Prophecies</i>: Apocalypticism and Mass Media in the Early Reformation.” <i>Renaissance and Reformation</i> 40.4 (2017): 15–42. </b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The previously unknown source of the foreword is Simon Eyssenmann’s annual astrological prognostication for 1514 (VD16 E 4757).</li>
<li>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 <a href="http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11219667_00001.html?zoom=0.05&numScans=250" target="_blank">same volume</a> (Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4 Med 1284).</li>
<li>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).</li>
<li>The Dutch edition dated to 1509 (NB 26021) should be dated to around 1523.</li>
<li>The decisive actor behind publication of the <i>Extract of Various Prophecies</i> is Hans Stainberger, bookseller of Zwickau, although his personal involvement in composition is unlikely.</li>
<li>The 14 known editions of 1516-1525 make the <i>Extract of Various Prophecies</i> the most frequently printed prophetic work during that decade.</li>
<li>The circulation of the <i>Extract of Various Prophecies</i> 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.</li>
</ul>
I sketch out the the relationship between texts and editions as follows (this image does not appear in the published article):<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOWjbTcLA-1VEe7L04eJkE2vSlNzNWpWbchN8DbA0gjVXEy89HetWHtonGsS41Yb7nm3ibnvTG8QR4aJU6oAipIoUkkoXTPqjQ6PujzRaeT8sTFycKYLttCK8XYOVqmhZwznAROG54O-0/s1600/auszug-stemma.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1224" data-original-width="946" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOWjbTcLA-1VEe7L04eJkE2vSlNzNWpWbchN8DbA0gjVXEy89HetWHtonGsS41Yb7nm3ibnvTG8QR4aJU6oAipIoUkkoXTPqjQ6PujzRaeT8sTFycKYLttCK8XYOVqmhZwznAROG54O-0/s640/auszug-stemma.jpg" width="494" /></a></div>
<ul></ul>
Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-87128176860196683172017-06-23T11:32:00.002-07:002017-06-23T11:32:59.721-07:00A very short review: Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism (1998)McGinn, Bernard, John Joseph Collins, and Stephen J. Stein, eds. <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/encyclopedia-of-apocalypticism-9780826412522/"><i>The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism</i></a>. 3 vols. New York: Continuum, 1998. ISBN 978-0826412522.<br />
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I usually save short reviews for academic work that is of the highest quality or makes a substantial impact on my own work. So this review is about 20 years late, but well deserved. I came across the three-volume <i>Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism</i> while browsing in the university library last fall and ended up reading it from cover to cover, from cover to cover, and from cover to cover - for all three volumes, from ancient Persia to the late twentieth century.<br />
<br />
The articles were on the whole well written, authoritative, and thoroughly documented. I thought there were only two real clunkers; the rest ranged from highly informative to truly excellent. Now matter how distant any article seemed at first, I found that almost every article was relevant to my research on early modern Germany and helped me see my work in a much broader context, while the best articles motivated me to rethink and redefine what I research and how I go about it. When I first started the research project that turned into <i>Printing and Prophecy</i>, I planned to look only at prophecy as a communicative act in late medieval and early modern Germany, but soon found I couldn't avoid dealing with astrology and the Reformation. Now I see that I can't avoid dealing with apocalypticism as well. The <i>Encyclopedia of Apocalytpicism </i>is going to be one of those reference works that stays near my desk for just about any research project.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-13270807854733416552017-04-21T10:48:00.002-07:002017-04-21T10:48:56.715-07:00Vanished booklets of the 1560s: a few core samplesWhen talking about printing, literature, or anything having to do with medieval and early modern texts, it is easy to overlook something that must not be overlooked: how much of what was once written or printed has now vanished. For practicas, annual astrological prognostic booklets, which were by nature ephemeral, we can assume that many editions have left no surviving copies, but pinning down how many or characterizing the relationship of the known to the unknown is tricky.<br />
<br />
One source of evidence are book lists that can be compared to known editions. For practicas in the 1560s, we have two interesting sources in practica compilations, one printed in Frankfurt for the year 1565 (VD16 ZV 29072) and the other printed in Basel for 1569 (VD16 P 4544), both of which claim to reprint all the astrologers who have made prognostications for that year.<br />
<br />
The first collection, for 1565, includes sections from the practicas of ten astrologers: Johannes Huldrich Ragor, Nikolaus Neodomus, Johannes Hebenstreit, Andreas Rosa, Christoph Statmion, Sebastian Brelochs, Gregor Fabricius, Nicolaus Winckler, Simon Heuring, and Moritz Steinmetz. Of these, nine are known from printed editions of practicas for 1565; only Ragor's is otherwise unknown. (This is an interesting list of astrologers. Six are well known practica authors, while four are sparsely attested: Ragor [otherwise attested only for 1581], Neodomus [attested only for 1565], Sebastian Brelochs [only attested for 1565 and 1568-69, in contrast to his widely published predecessor Anton Brelochs], and Moritz Steinmetz [only attested for 1565]. But the editor also omits a few astrologers with practicas for 1565, including Valentin Engelhart, Georg Holsthen, and the well-known Joachim Heller.) In comparison, VD16 records 16 practica editions from 12 authors, but lacks Johannes Ragor's.<br />
<br />
The second collection, for 1569, includes chapters from eight astrologers: Nicolaus Winckler, Johannes Hebenstreit, Victorinus Schönfeld, Simon Heuring, Valentin Butzlin, Erasmus Reinhold, Sebastian Brelochs, and Hieronymus Wilhelm. Again, half of the authors are well known, while the other four are more obscure (Sebastian Brelochs again, Valentin Butzlin, Erasmus Rehinhold, and Hieronymus Wilhelm). The editor again omitted some well-known astrologers with known practicas for 1569, including Georg Caesius, Andreas Rosa, and Christoph Statmion. The included chapters are drawn from four practicas that are unattested in VD16.<br />
<br />
So to sum up: The collection for 1565 tells us that VD16 misses 1 out of 13 authors (7.7%). The collection for 1569 tells us that VD16 misses 4 out of 11 authors (36.4%). For both years, VD16 records 23 editions from 14 authors. The two collections suggest that VD16 misses at least 4 out of 18 authors (22.2%). This isn't an answer to the question of missing editions, but it does give us some interesting core samples to think about.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-35090097806404304452017-04-07T11:53:00.000-07:002017-04-07T11:55:17.696-07:00A prognostication for Valentine's Day 1469 from the desk of Hartmann SchedelBettina Wagner's work on letters, notes, and other miscellanea from Hartmann Schedel has uncovered quite a few interesting things, including this cataclysmic <a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00109176/image_17">prognostication for 1469</a> copied onto a loose leaf. It's an interesting text that I haven't seen before. An attempt at a transcription and translation follow. Punctuation has been added and capitalization has been altered for sense and abbreviations have been resolved silently.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Anno M<sup>o</sup> cccc<sup>o</sup> lxviiii<sup>o</sup> quartadecima die mensis Januraii incipietur delusio mundi, evacuatio cleri, derisio christianitatis, deposit[i]o potentiarum scilicet Imperatoris et regum. Insuper quartadecima die mensis februarii circa[?] meridiem eclipsabitur sol et quasi omnino emittet formam sue dispositionis. Et significat iiii<sup>or</sup> mala. Primum quod deus movebit celum et terram in suo empisperio quasi mundum subverteret. Secundum quod virtutes superiorum movebuntur scilicet ordo contra[?] ordinem. Tercium de magna et in audita sangwinis effusione qualis numquam fuit a mundi origine timendum est. Quartum fames magna ita quod maritus non curabit uxorem nec uxor maritum nec pater et mater prolem curabit, quia quasi unanimiter desperabunt. Post hec sequitur pestis in audita de uno in alterum precedens et pauci effugient. Sed qui superstites manebunt bene habebunt et in cunctis prosperabuntur.<br />
<br />
Dicitur quod hanc prenostica Scola Parisiensium fecit que missa dicitur magistro Johanne Gerstman.<br />
<br />
On the fourteenth day of January 1469 will begin the deception of the world, the purging of the clergy, the mockery of Christendom, and the cessation of power, namely of the emperor and of kings. And then on the fourteenth day of February around noon, the sun will be eclipsed and almost entirely expel the form of its disposition. [NB. Is the thought that the sun will lose its light and weaken, or shine out its entire force at once?] And this signifies four evils. First, that God will move heaven and earth in their orbits ["hemispheres"] as if to overturn the world. Second, that the powers of the superior [planets] will be moved, namely one order against the other. Third, one must fear a great and unprecedented outpouring of blood the likes of which have never been from the beginning of the world. Fourth, so great a famine that a husband will not provide for his wife, nor a wife for her husband, neither father and mother for them children, because almost all will be united in despair. After these things, an unheard of plague will follow, advancing from one side to the other, and few will escape it. But what survivors will remain will be well and prosper in all things.<br />
<br />
It is said that the school of Paris made this prognostication, which is said to have been sent to Master Johannes Gerstman.</blockquote>
<br />
The text, an amalgamation of astrology and catastrophic prophecies, bears some resemblance to the "Toledo Letter" and to the prognostication of "Meister Theobertus von England" printed around 1470 both in their construction and in their attributions to foreign astrologers. According to the <a href="https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SE1401-1500.html">NASA catalog of solar eclipses</a>, there was a solar eclipse on 13 January 1469, which approximately matches one of the dates in the prognostication, but that eclipse was not visible in Europe. The eclipse of 9 July 1469 would have been much more dramatic. The closing note that anyone who survives will experience marvelous things is a motif that appears many times, particularly in the lead up to 1588.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-40594697249080476032015-09-19T12:25:00.000-07:002015-09-18T13:34:03.060-07:00Simon Eyssenmann: bibliography v 0.13Simon Eyssenmann was a Leipzig professor and author of astrological prognostications following in the footsteps of Wenzel Faber and Conrad Tockler. He is all but forgotten today, but there may be some interesting things going on with his work. So here is the start of a bibliography for him, beginning with his practicas and the few relevant items of secondary literature.<br />
<br />
<b>Update 0.13</b> <br />
I've added the one non-practica found in VD16 and the two additional contributions to other works.<br />
<br />
<b>Update 0.11</b>: Klaus Graf has come up with <a href="http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/1022471674/">many additional links for Eyssenmann</a> over at Archivalia. Otherwise, for now I only have time to add one work to which Eyssenmann was a contributor.<br />
<br />
<b>Practicas</b><br />
<ol>
<li>Practica for 1514. Latin. N.p., n.p. VD16 E 4756.<br />Title page only preserved in Zwickau, Ratschulbibliothek.</li>
<li>Practica for 1514. German. Augsburg: Johann Schönsperger. VD16 E 4757.<br />Copy in Erlangen UB</li>
<li>Practica for 1514. Low German. Lübeck: Georg Richolff the Elder. VD16 E 4758.<br />Described only in BC 551 A.</li>
<li>Practica for 1515. Latin. Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel. Not in VD16. <br />Wroclaw UB (<a href="http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content/36707/directory.djvu">facsimile</a>)</li>
<li>Practica for 1517. Latin. N.p., n.p. VD16 E 4759. <br /> Title page only preserved in Zwickau, Ratschulbibliothek.</li>
<li>Practica for 1516. German. Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel. Not in VD16.<br />Wroclaw UB (<a href="http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content/36710/directory.djvu">facsimile</a>)</li>
<li>Practica for 1516. German. Landshut: Johann Weißenburger. VD16 E 4760.<br />If the copy in the British Library is E 4760, then this edition is [8] rather than [4] leaves.</li>
<li>Practica for 1516. German. Nuremberg: Jobst Gutknecht. VD16 E 4761.</li>
<li>Practica for 1517. German. Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel. VD16 E 4762.<br />Title page only preserved in Zwickau, Ratschulbibliothek.</li>
<li>Practica for 1518. Latin. Leipzig: Jakob Thanner. VD16 ZV 5648.<br />Halle ULB (<a href="http://nbn-resolving.de/urn%3Anbn%3Ade%3Agbv%3A3%3A1-197888">facsimile</a>)</li>
<li>Practica for 1518. German. N.p., n.p. VD16 E 4763. </li>
<li>Practica for 1519. German. Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel. VD16 E 4764. <br />Title page only preserved in Zwickau, Ratschulbibliothek.</li>
<li>Practica for 1520. German. Nuremberg: Jobst Gutknecht. VD16 E 4766.<br />Munich BSB (<a href="http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/resolve/display/bsb10198824.html">facsimile</a>)</li>
<li>Practica for 1520. German. Augsburg: Erhard Oeglin. VD16 E 4765. <br />Munich BSB (<a href="http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/resolve/display/bsb10198649.html">facsimile</a>)</li>
</ol>
Others: A Latin practica for 1520 listed in WorldCat (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/258701715">link</a>), with the title "Juditium Lipsense ad annum currentem vigesimum supra millesimum quingentesimum," but with no additional information about a printer or location.<br />
<br />
<b>Other works</b> <br />
<ol>
<li><i>Euchiridion Arithmetices</i>. <strong class="c2"></strong>Leipzig: Jakob Thanner, 1511. <strong class="c2"></strong>VD16 E 4755.<br />Munich BSB (<a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00014148/image_2">facsimile</a>) and Leipzig UB. This brief treatise on arithmetic begins with a dedication to Conrad Tockler, another Leipzig academic who published practicas for 1504-1514, whom Eyssenmann describes as his teacher. It closes with two additional texts, addressed to Wolfgang Christophorus Udalriuch, son of Udalrich LIndacher of Leipzig, and Conrad Funck of Leipzig, son of Andreas Funck.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<b>Contributions to additional works</b><br />
<ol>
<li><a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00019616/image_2">Dedication </a>(to Conrad Funck of Leipzig, son of Andreas Funck) in a Latin edition of excerpts from Plutarch's <strong class="c2"></strong><i>De viris clarissimis liber</i>. Leipzig: Jakob Thanner, 1509. VD16 ZV 12591.</li>
<li><a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00002872/image_6">Dedication </a>(to "Simperto Widenman de Schretzen") in an edition of Petrus Gaszowiec's <i>Computus novus</i>. Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel, 1514. <b class="c2"></b>VD16 P 1863.</li>
<li><a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00003716/image_271">Six lines of Latin verse</a> contributed (along with verses from eighteen other intellectuals) to Hieronymous Dungersheim's <strong class="c2"></strong><i>Confutatio apologetici cuiusdam sacre scripture falso inscripti ad illustrissimum principem Georgium Saxonie ducem</i>. <strong class="c2"></strong>Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel, 1514. VD16 D 2947.<br />The Munich BSB copy is from the library of Hartmann Schedel.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<b>Secondary literature</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Eis, Gerhard. "Beiträge zur Spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Prosa aus Handschriften und Frühdrucken." <i>Journal of English and Germanic Philology</i> 52 (1953): 76–89.</li>
<li>Zoepfl, Friedrich. "Der Mathematiker und Astrologe Simon Eyssenmann aus Dillingen." <i>Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins Dillingen an der Donau</i> 61/63 (1961 1959): 86–88.</li>
</ul>
<br />Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-89374681180854135812015-08-28T13:16:00.000-07:002015-08-28T13:16:06.464-07:00Sanctus Columbanus fecit hos caracteresWell, that's weird.<br />
<br />
In another Vatican manuscript (Pal. lat. 482) available in digital facsimile from the Heidelberg UB, there is a series of alphabetic signs in an otherwise empty column on f. 15v (click to see the whole leaf on the Heidelberg UB site):<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/bav_pal_lat_482/0040"><img alt="http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/bav_pal_lat_482/0040" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq1CDT-UNf5m-qMhQN5iCxa2dEpfHkugLXWedtqVgec3aVdBzs1NjdhxLyxTGT1s6SVD-k4rj0jbQCoBLC9og0k9h7tW6bPkiCqW7u7bHpkeyb4TTKTa0tj1Phwd2MtSH-SJHlL7z3azY/s1600/scbavh.jpg" /></a> </div>
<br />
<br />
At first glance, this looks like a secret alphabet. In that case, the secondary literature probably starts with Bernhard Bischoff, "Übersicht über die nichtdiplomatischen Geheimschriften des Mittelalters," <i>Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung</i> 62 (1954): 1-27. I don't find other examples associating Columbanus with secret writing, but Bishoff notes several attributions of secret writing to Irish clerics.<br />
<br />
But several of the letters look quite normal. Is the series rather an initialism, with each letter standing for a word in some devotional passage? If that is the case, the secondary literature one needs is entirely different.<br />
<br />
And one can't help but notice that there's a certain symmetry between the haloed "q" and the "p" signs at the beginning and end of the fourth line, or the "Christmas trees" on the left and right side, or the forwards uncial e in the third line and the backwards uncial e in the first line. Was there some kind of mirror-image game at the basis of these characters?<br />
<br />
Who knows? It's weird. When you browse through manuscripts, you find weird things.<br />
<br />
<br />Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-15543351901012286352015-08-22T11:07:00.000-07:002015-08-22T11:07:58.004-07:00BAV Pal. lat. 461: "Prophetia Sibille conscripta per Ioachim prophetam" = Gallorum levitasFor the last few months at least, volumes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Palatina">formerly held in Heidelberg</a> and now in the Vatican library have been appearing in the digitalization project of the Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek. I try to take at least a quick look at each miscellany as it appears, and one of them, Pal. lat. 461, included a <a href="http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/bav_pal_lat_461/0558">"Prophetia Sibille conscripta per Ioachim prophetam</a>," which sounded promising. The first few words quickly revealed this to be a garbled fifteenth-century copy of the "Gallorum levitas" prophecy:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Gallorum levitas / germanis iustificabit /<br />
Ytalie gravitas / gallus confuse negabit /<br />
Annis millenis tricentis novagenis /<br />
Ter denis adiunctis / consurgit aquila grandis<br />
Constantina cadet et equi de marmore facti<br />
Et lapis erectus et erunt victricia signa<br />
Gallus succumbit / vix erit urbs presule digna<br />
Papa cito moritur / Cesar ubique regnabit<br />
Sub quo cuncta vana / cessabit gloria cleri</blockquote>
<br />
This looked interesting, so I checked the secondary literature. Here's Robert Lerner (<i>Powers of Prophecy</i> 191 n. 11): "Unpublished MS copies of this text, which underwent numerous alterations, are so numerous as to be virtually beyond surveying."<br />
<br />
Oh, well. But here's another one!<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
I've moved again. The new semester has already started, so posting will resume, but may be sporadic for a while.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-38239763922473112942015-04-24T10:03:00.000-07:002015-06-29T14:38:40.103-07:00A very short review: Sandra Rühr and Axel Kuhn, eds. Sinn und Unsinn des Lesens (2013)Sandra Rühr and Axel Kuhn, eds. <i>Sinn und Unsinn des Lesens: Gegenstände, Darstellungen und Argumente aus Geschichte und Gegenwart</i>. Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2013. 246 pp. 978-3847-101284.<br />
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<a href="http://www.v-r.de/de/sinn_und_unsinn_des_lesens/t-0/1011005/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="http://www.v-r.de/de/sinn_und_unsinn_des_lesens/t-0/1011005/" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbIQN8CfuQmmah2ZD9FBUJ2MY4QHYmR3ZHDFq3y9qWlnJa4_Up_usVewFy0_EHE97p6s-3R1SwkKqlJzSZ537H7BHFmK7vLxIY4cCGlZWLT7KpEvp65h-nChrnDY7wfMVSzu4LR-vvJfg/s1600/suudl-ed.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Ceci n'est pas une Festschrift </b></div>
<br />
This book is not a Festschrift. It is instead a volume of well-executed, thematically coherent essays with real scholarly merit published in honor of Ursula Rautenberg's sixtieth birthday. As the editors and authors have taken pains to avoid the defects often found in Feschschriften, the collected volume is a fitting tribute to the honoree.<br />
<br />
The essays are arranged in order of their chronological focus, which spans the range from medieval manuscript practice to contemporary book marketing and the future of reading. These include the following:<br />
<ul>
<li>Siegfried Grosse, "Versmaß, Reim und Syntax: Überlegungen zur oralen Poesie" examines the significance of early twentieth-century recordings of story-telling during women's down-plucking circles for our understanding of medieval literature as oral performance.</li>
<li>Anro Mentzel-Reuters, "'Wer hat mich guoter uf getan?' Studien zur volkssprachlichen höfischen Lesekultur des Hochmittelalters" presents empirical evidence (based on page size, book weight, letter height, and internal lighting conditions) for the practical use of medieval manuscripts for individual or group reading. I'm already beginning to cite this chapter.</li>
<li>Nikolaus Weichselbaumer, "'Sie solllen lesen bei Tag und bei Nacht': Akzeptanz und Funktion scholastische Leseformen" treats the transition from monastic to scholastic modes of reading with exceptional concreteness and clarity.</li>
<li>Edoardo Barbierei, "A Peculiarity of the 'Glossae' by Salomon III. of Constance" suggests that a 1474 edition of the Glossae went to press before the actual extent of another included text was known.</li>
<li>Oliver Duntze, "'The sound of silence': Eine unbekannte 'Ars punctandi' als Quelle zur Geschichte des Lesens in der Frühen Neuzeit" provides a wide-ranging overview of punctuation manuals as sources for the history of reading practices.</li>
<li>Mechhild Habermann, "Lesenlernen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zum Erkenntniswert der ersten volkssprachlichen Lehrbücher" finds in sixteenth-century didactic works on reading evidence for a new approach to reading based on meaning rather than letters, and for an increased regard for the value of reading.</li>
<li>Hans-Jörg Künast, "Lesen macht krank und kann tödlich sein: Lesesuch und Selbstmord um 1800" investigates medical treatises as a new source for the reading revolution of the late eighteenth century and official concerns about it.</li>
<li>Ute Schneider, "Anomie der Moderne: Soziale Norm und Kulturelle Praxis des Lesens" considers the formation of a literary canon and the codification of reading practices in the context of the formation of a German national identity during the nineteenth century. </li>
<li>Heinz Bonfadelli, "Zur Konstruktion des (Buch-)Lesers: Universitäre Kommunikationswissenschaft und angewandte Medienforschung" treats a seemingly simple yet consequential question: how does academic study of media and communication differ from the study of media markets and usage within the industry, and how does the treatment of books and reading compare to approaches to other media in each sphere? A serious course about the German media should include this chapter on its reading list.</li>
<li>Lilian Streblow and Anke Schöning, "Lesemotivation: Dimensionen, Befunde, Förderung" reviews studies of reading education in Germany in the aftermath of the PISA-test debates.</li>
<li>Sven Grampp, "Kindle's Abstinence Porn: Über Sinn und Sinnlichkeit digitaler Lesegeräte in der Werbung" performs a close reading of a televised Kindle advertisement and dissects its use of gender roles.</li>
<li>Axel Kuhn, "Das Ende des Lesens? Zur Einordnung medialer Diskurse über die schwindende Bedeutung des Lesens in einer sich ausdifferenzierenden Medienlandschaft" surveys twentieth- and twenty-first century discourses in which predictions of doom for literacy, books, printed books as opposed to e-books, and reading as a primary cultural technique have been made; at the end, Kuhn remains optimistic for the future of reading and skeptical of the prophets of doom.</li>
</ul>
These are well-written, thought-provoking essays which together add up to more than the sum of their parts. Es lebe die nicht-Feschschrift!Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-22206802230113698332015-03-27T09:25:00.002-07:002015-03-27T09:25:42.121-07:00Incunable leaf sizesConfirmed: The earliest printed books look very much like books. Specifically, the ratio of leaf height to leaf width and the height-width ratio of the type space are precisely what you would expect.<br />
<br />
That sounds complete uninteresting, but before making that statement in an article I'm working on, I wanted some actual data. That's the tricky part, however, as most incunable catalogs, and all of the incunable databases that I'm aware of, only record the format - as opposed to manuscript catalogs, which usually record the page dimensions, but not the format. Thanks to a tip from Oliver Duntze, I checked the British Museum incunable catalog. For 23 Mainz codex editions to 1470 recorded in BMC, the average leaf size ratio is 1: 1.44, while the type space ratio (from 25 editions) is a bit narrower, 1: 1.51. There is some variation, but most of these early printed books fall quite close to the mean, as the plot below shows. Leaf size is in red, while type space dimensions are in blue, with linear trend lines added to each.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc2qQgtmyw9cAt_45PkeWfuJMGYzK7jR_YKam6t_c8MzjiserejhbO-1VRdJWfxjQDlmWxEAu7v6zF3gfU3TBCzHzK-PjNCsKnAhmUC7igxhN3hU0IYFXN4C3Jqkd5Eiu8VX6kIc2uE0Q/s1600/bmchw.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc2qQgtmyw9cAt_45PkeWfuJMGYzK7jR_YKam6t_c8MzjiserejhbO-1VRdJWfxjQDlmWxEAu7v6zF3gfU3TBCzHzK-PjNCsKnAhmUC7igxhN3hU0IYFXN4C3Jqkd5Eiu8VX6kIc2uE0Q/s1600/bmchw.png" height="388" width="640" /></a></div>
<b>Fig. 1: Leaf height and width (red) and writing space height and width (blue) in Mainz codex editions to 1470.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
To compare incunable leaf sizes rather than ratios, the BMC records for Mainz printing to 1470 might not be the best source, as many of those volumes are deluxe folio editions on vellum. Instead I referred to the Bodleian Library incunable catalog, which also provides leaf sizes. The graph below shows the leaf height for 15 folio editions, 26 quarto editions, and 2 octavo editions. More editions would of course be preferable, but since I don't have electronic records to work with, the data have to be entered manually. You can in any case already see the distinct formats: octavo leaf heights appear in red, quartos in gray, and folios in blue.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg09_-qbSB5j1GD3BtrbBnygGHYiT1IU2mMfHWug-NAVU45Yz39KW694DYYmBBxWlVNb_V1p3CU31b1p29eBLXyWAKaXlHr8XNzK73qmowG3MzUL4s6HD_YoDBmejyqgkTyDZhO51SsFto/s1600/bodls.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg09_-qbSB5j1GD3BtrbBnygGHYiT1IU2mMfHWug-NAVU45Yz39KW694DYYmBBxWlVNb_V1p3CU31b1p29eBLXyWAKaXlHr8XNzK73qmowG3MzUL4s6HD_YoDBmejyqgkTyDZhO51SsFto/s1600/bodls.png" height="350" width="640" /></a></div>
<b>Fig. 2: Leaf heights (mm) of a selection of folio (blue), quarto (gray), and octavo (red) incunables from the Bodleian Library.</b><br />
<br />
Two things stand out: First, the folios clearly comprise different paper sizes, one with an average height around 290 mm, and another with an average height around 410 mm. Second, small quartos overlap with octavos. It would be interesting to look at more leaf sizes of these smaller formats.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-15701805037910459742015-03-13T11:02:00.002-07:002015-03-13T11:02:37.642-07:00The history of the late medieval book in one boxplot<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
One of the basic ways to describe the types used for fifteenth-century printed books is the method refined by Konrad Haebler that involves, <a href="http://www.ndl.go.jp/incunabula/e/chapter2/chapter2_01.html">among other things</a>, measuring the height of twenty lines of type. The height of a typeface affected its legibility, or how far a reader could be from a text and still be able to read it. The height of the type was also significant in relation to the other types used in a book, as a type taller than the one used for the main text often identified titles and other structural paratexts, while a shorter type was typically used for marginal commentary. So what at first glance might sound like a number only interesting to antiquarians turns out to have some interesting implications for the history of reading as a cultural practice.</div>
<br />
With the availability of the <a href="http://tw.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/html/index.xql">Typenrepertorium der Wiegendrucke</a> as an electronic resource linked to the <a href="http://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/">Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke</a>, it's now possible to survey type heights systematically, so it should be possible to look at how type heights develop during the fifty years following the invention of printing. What may not be obvious is that we can do something similar for German manuscripts as well, as the <a href="http://handschriftencensus.de/">Handschriftencensus</a> records the height of the writing space and the number of lines for manuscripts where this can be determined - so we can divide the writing space height by the number of lines, multiply by twenty, and arrive at the "Haebler height" for each manuscript.<br />
<br />
The boxplot below summarizes the means and 25th/75th-percentile limits for German vernacular mansucripts between 1351 and 1450 (with approximate dates coerced to a single year), and printed books separated by decade (with the 1450s and 1460s combined due to the small number of editions from the 1450s). While we're measuring what I think are comparable things, they're not precisely the same: the left column is looking at the line height per manuscript, while the other four columns look at the line height per occurrence of a give type - so a type used in five editions over fifteen years will be counted five times over two different decades. This is, I think, the best way to determine what a typical book might look like, with a frequently-used type counted more times than a type that was only used once. (To be completely consistent, we would also need to look only at books printed in Germany rather than all incunables.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwBDhN-P0u8FahZeoiNOOZZA3rfAv6FqAUjwJHuA4c6UKFdydtXF5B7cdqmVBhU8BKlGid6oCy3mx7bda7uaA10c1RziWCoqhiuf4RjA8gJkQrxw6FI039noH5ZqVsPzGnTNZS53BIRTQ/s1600/box1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwBDhN-P0u8FahZeoiNOOZZA3rfAv6FqAUjwJHuA4c6UKFdydtXF5B7cdqmVBhU8BKlGid6oCy3mx7bda7uaA10c1RziWCoqhiuf4RjA8gJkQrxw6FI039noH5ZqVsPzGnTNZS53BIRTQ/s1600/box1.png" height="399" width="400" /></a></div>
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The next boxplot limits the y axis to make the picture clearer.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9D4t4X2QjVru2sPSDdPUbEVJMSLF51-OpyOwqxhiiEBXtLeABC848ErfmQwoGfuJkHYDDUmRUDluOpKizXth83OUtBCn8gpgSKNowox6V1ofzkU2cgEbqoHk4mqMoctDeZvWAe6H6buk/s1600/box2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9D4t4X2QjVru2sPSDdPUbEVJMSLF51-OpyOwqxhiiEBXtLeABC848ErfmQwoGfuJkHYDDUmRUDluOpKizXth83OUtBCn8gpgSKNowox6V1ofzkU2cgEbqoHk4mqMoctDeZvWAe6H6buk/s1600/box2.png" height="398" width="400" /></a></div>
What we see here is that the earliest printed books used types that were very similar in height, on average, to the line heights found in manuscripts over the preceding century, while the 1470s form a period of transition between the earliest printed books and the 1480s and 1490s, when noticeably smaller types were preferred. The use of smaller types allowed for the production of less expensive books, with more printed text per unit of paper, but it took a few decades before the technical possibilities of the printing press could reshape reader's expectations for what their books should look like.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-40070404705907265602015-03-06T10:08:00.000-08:002015-03-06T10:08:31.639-08:00One Republic of Learning: Counting StaresRecently in the New York Times editorial pages - the most prominent platform for short-form opinion writing in the United States and equal to any in the English-speaking world - Armand Marie Leroi, a professor of developmental biology, argued that the humanities, if they are to have a future, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/14/opinion/digitizing-the-humanities.html">must make the transition to a mathematically-based science</a>.<br />
<br />
There is much in Leroi's argument that I agree or sympathize with. The digitization projects of the last decade or more truly have changed what is possible in the humanities. We have easy access to a breadth of sources that was entirely unknown just a few decades ago. It is also true that scholars in the humanities sometimes make overly broad statements based on slim evidence, and that we sometimes make assertions with statistical implications without bothering to gather data or test the likelihood of those assertions. As Leroi states, "Digitization breeds numbers; numbers demand statistics." I've beat on this drum a few times myself. At the conceptual if not the computational level, statistical and computational methods are not out of our reach. With less work than it takes to learn Latin, we in the humanities can make these methods our own.<br />
<br />
And yet several times while reading the essay, I found myself staring at the text and wondering what Leroi could possibly be thinking. Now that we have a decade of experience with digitization, we can recognize both its promise and its limits. Digitization does not turn "caterpillars into butterflies"; we have seen media change before, and we know that there are both gains and losses. The easy access to facsimile images obscures the difficulty of determining what other pamphlets were bound together as a single volume, for example, an important fact that would have once been obvious to anyone visiting an archive in person. And it is not only scientists who "know that impressions lie"; humanists have been studying representation and memory for a long time.<br />
<br />
A telling episode in Leroi's essay involves a hypothetical graduate student who reacts to the argument of a traditional scholar based on textual evidence by downloading texts, running algorithms, applying statistical analysis, and visualizing the results in order to disprove the traditional scholar's point. Now, digital texts are marvelous things, but you have to understand what it is they represent. Is it an autograph? The first edition? The last authorized edition? A critical edition? A transcription of an early, fragmentary manuscript, or a late, complete one? You can postpone some of these questions, but you can't avoid them forever. Textual editing, electronic or not, is difficult, painstaking, and often thankless work. The point is that these downloadable texts don't simply exist; they have been created by people with particular outlooks and specific places and histories, and serious work in the humanities has to be aware of those aspects. And what algorithms should the graduate student run? The coin of the realm in the textual humanities remains close reading, with careful attention to context and levels of meaning. At the moment, the algorithms at our disposal enable only distant reading. It's certainly true that the graduate student and the scholar may end up talking past each other, but that won't do anyone any good (especially the graduate student, who will be fishing for recommendation letters when he or she hits the job market in a few years).<br />
<br />
If we do in fact reach the point where the digital humanities expresses its results "not in words, but equations," where the "analog scholar won't even know how to read the results," then the digital humanities will fail. The humanities as academic disciplines have a particular set of guiding questions, and if a would-be contribution to the field does not address any of those questions, or does so in a way that is incomprehensible to practitioners, then it will be ignored. Leroi, a biologist, thinks that the new humanities disciplines will resemble evolutionary biology, with contributions from "biologists, economists, and physicists." While all of these disciplines have useful insights and methods for the humanities, what they do not have is a grasp on the questions that are of primary importance to humanists, or the language humanists use to express their findings. It is furthermore not at all clear that the tools of evolutionary biology, where reproduction is the first imperative of the most basic building blocks of life, should apply to culture, where it is not.<br />
<br />
It is not as if we have not been down this path before. There is a history of mathematical approaches to the humanities, and it is a history littered with dead ends. While lurking in the stacks as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, I would regularly come across books published in the 70s and 80s, precursors of a sort to the <a href="http://mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at/">Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank</a>, that attempted to semantically encode various medieval texts so that one could search for not just textual but rather significant semantic collocations. I know of no useful scholarship that ever came out of these efforts. On a happier note, corpus linguistics has been a well established discipline for several decades - but it has supplemented, not supplanted, other approaches to syntax and morphology. Leroi holds up the "unforgiving terms and journals that scientists read," and yet STEM peer review has not proved to be an effective arbiter of quality in the humanities. Instead, leading STEM journals have regularly published headline-grabbing articles that apply computational and statistical methods to historical linguistics, for example, and failed to recognize in the nonsensical results a mirror image of the Sokal affair. If the basic assumptions of one field (for example, that rates of gene mutation are predictable) simply don't apply to another (linguistics really and truly reject glottochronology), then the methods will not be transferable, not because analog scholars are hidebound, but because they have a grounding in their disciplines that their neighbors across the quad simply do not have.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-75187818145411281452015-02-20T09:32:00.000-08:002015-02-20T09:32:32.476-08:00How atypical are the editions in Eric White's census of print runs?In the introduction to his <a href="http://www.cerl.org/resources/links_to_other_resources/bibliographical_data#researching_print_runs">census of known fifteenth-century print runs</a>, Eric White cautions against taking his results as representative for all incunables:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As the census will make immediately apparent, a large percentage of editions for which we know the print runs were produced to fulfill institutional functions.... Remunerative and relatively risk-free for printers, the original commissions for projects such as these tended to end up in surviving archives, and they tended to afford very large editions. It should be noted, therefore, that the print runs known from such institutional commissions do not represent a normative cross-section of fifteenth-century press production, but rather a selection of large scale projects carried out with institutional funding and pressure to produce. As a group they almost certainly reflect higher-than-average print runs.... Moreover, the majority of the recorded print runs reflect the output not of the ‘average’ printing shop, but rather that of a few exceptionally successful publishers who received commissions from well-funded institutions. It is worth remembering that a documented print run may not be a representative print run.</blockquote>
White's characterization of his sample is correct. Compared to all recorded incunables in the ISTC, folios are much more prevalent in the print run census, while quartos are underrepresented, and broadsides do not appear at all.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNtALS2X7_FMNEYPcu2oi25CnCAPA_PtMsKo5RKGwXsHdKaevwQvW-H3iOQws8aj4b_5tENK6fJQp0IEc8fvnpKmY3s_5nRNEHPXfdEypOXql1sHmXopeDrCw88iFDBI-wyjLSs1jeyI/s1600/cmpfmt.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNtALS2X7_FMNEYPcu2oi25CnCAPA_PtMsKo5RKGwXsHdKaevwQvW-H3iOQws8aj4b_5tENK6fJQp0IEc8fvnpKmY3s_5nRNEHPXfdEypOXql1sHmXopeDrCw88iFDBI-wyjLSs1jeyI/s1600/cmpfmt.png" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Comparison of format distribution</b> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
For each format, the books are also substantially longer, with the average number of leaves 60-100% higher than for the ISTC as a whole. (NB: Averages can be a misleading way to describe the distribution of leaf counts, but they give a correct impression in this case.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwgnKkOrlYOm3Qr4oHLIFz6VNtv9K5RfSjA2TxbeiWueLjPvCsYHGw6dyxjycYZLDDrf1_WpcjD2qSIg4CHRw8sg9EjdZonLB1VXyPkzllta4nM0QwkjWb0ScxXHPTSL8LTXgaVkz1Dz8/s1600/cmplfc.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwgnKkOrlYOm3Qr4oHLIFz6VNtv9K5RfSjA2TxbeiWueLjPvCsYHGw6dyxjycYZLDDrf1_WpcjD2qSIg4CHRw8sg9EjdZonLB1VXyPkzllta4nM0QwkjWb0ScxXHPTSL8LTXgaVkz1Dz8/s1600/cmplfc.png" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Comparison of average leaf count by format</b> </div>
<br />
White's suggestion that the sample of known print runs enjoyed a better survival rate than other incunables is also correct, with an average number of surviving copies 20-65% higher than what one finds for the ISTC as a whole. (NB: Averages can be even more misleading for describing survival rates.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7D4j5vkqPvKYnul00KaXMT8hjtw8G535OexlHlDXQLvVBoT2SAra2m01TQiFUiKt2ACNNCR9lyuwscLPs_1YxKU9MmtmsIkpXbV1cUY5I_WvTGsTowa7I5toaqqxOFAiNgdzUR4cYTnI/s1600/cmpsrv.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7D4j5vkqPvKYnul00KaXMT8hjtw8G535OexlHlDXQLvVBoT2SAra2m01TQiFUiKt2ACNNCR9lyuwscLPs_1YxKU9MmtmsIkpXbV1cUY5I_WvTGsTowa7I5toaqqxOFAiNgdzUR4cYTnI/s1600/cmpsrv.png" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Comparison of average surviving copies by format</b> </div>
<br />
This doesn't mean that we should ignore White's census of print runs as an atypical sample, however. Rather, we can say that its sample differs from the body of known incunables in various ways, some of which have well-understood effects. For example, the size and format of editions in White's sample are larger on average than for the ISTC as a whole, and the included editions likely benefited from association with an institutional sponsor, all of which are associated with higher survival rates than other fifteenth-century printed books, so that we would expect the survival rate for White's sample to be higher than for the ISTC as a whole.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-58063209674673618442015-02-13T10:04:00.000-08:002015-02-20T08:16:10.805-08:00Paper and parchment manuscripts in the HandschriftencensusThe graph below shows in purple the number of parchment manuscripts recorded per half-century, while paper manuscripts are in red. The height of each bar represents the number of total manuscripts. Other people have done this graph before, and done it better.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPiPlv0azHg2RFnVsk6zzRTMNhG79dTvnbkbP28qUiUtCuvM22I8JFKB3-98QlWPSi8QXPzixwDfz0RRlVVc-hEsajLhXmkjJbuZcVsvnsBEXpnqitfEG8rJmlOD-pkPm3LTbSbCdbIo/s1600/mss2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPiPlv0azHg2RFnVsk6zzRTMNhG79dTvnbkbP28qUiUtCuvM22I8JFKB3-98QlWPSi8QXPzixwDfz0RRlVVc-hEsajLhXmkjJbuZcVsvnsBEXpnqitfEG8rJmlOD-pkPm3LTbSbCdbIo/s1600/mss2.png" height="396" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
What's interesting about this is the source of the underlying data: <a href="http://handschriftencensus.de/">Handschriftencensus.de</a>. Its records are primarily concerned with German vernacular texts, so the graph is less interesting for general book history, but all the more interesting for German Studies. The Handschriftencensus makes no claims to completeness, but it does represent the result of many years of thorough effort by competent experts. As the Handschriftencensus records were never intended as data sources, I've needed to clean up and massage the records into a useable form. In this case, I've compelled vague or multiple datings into a single number, rather than relying only on precise dating. I've included the sixteenth century in the graph, but the small number of manuscripts there does not reflect a decline in manuscript production, but instead only a decline in the number of post-medieval manuscripts that are of interest for medieval German literature.<br />
<br />
If nothing else, the graph nicely illustrates the extreme scarcity of manuscripts from the Old High German period, and the sudden rise of paper and decline in parchment at the turn of the fourteenth century. This is already well known, but for an initial attempt to treat a new information source as data,unsurprising results are welcome. Handschriftencensus.de provides electronic records for over 20,000 manuscripts, and there are undoubtedly more interesting results waiting to be found among them.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-91062441331555107482015-02-06T10:26:00.000-08:002015-03-06T08:07:39.434-08:00Notes on the bibliography of Johannes RaschThe bibliography of Johannes Rasch's polemical prophetic compilations give us a view of canon formation for prophetic works in the late sixteenth century, a Catholic counterpart to the Egenolff collections of the 1540s. I know the <a href="http://researchfragments.blogspot.com/2014/12/johannes-rasch-bibliography-of-his.html">primary sources used by Johannes Rasch</a> for his polemical compilations fairly well, but taking a close look at them turned up a few surprises, including<br />
<ul>
<li>the <i>Onus ecclesie</i>, ostensibly from a Catholic source, seems to have been passing into obscurity just over sixty years after its publication; </li>
<li>two editions, one of Birgitta of Sweden's revelations and another compilation of Wolfgang Lazius, that are not listed in VD16 but that can be found in Prague;</li>
<li>references to an unknown work of Joseph Grünpeck and three other unknown works; </li>
<li>reference to a sixteenth-century edition of the <i>Bildnuß eines nackenden Kaisers und Bapsts</i> sixty years before the currently known editions; and </li>
<li>indications that several editions of Rasch's work currently dated to 1584 need to be re-dated to 1588.</li>
</ul>
In addition, it's interesting to see where Rasch drew his sources from. Although he was working in Vienna, his sources were most frequently printed in Nuremberg (10), Cologne (9), Strasbourg (5), and Munich (6), compared to five editions printed in Vienna. The number of international editions is low, with just one edition each from Antwerp (plus one lost edition), Bologna, Cracow, and Rome. No place of printing is known for seven editions, of which three are lost.<br />
<br />
The dates of Rasch's sources are interesting. Only three are incunabula. One large group of his sources comprises those from recent decades, 1560-1588, with another large group around 50 years old, printed between 1520 and 1540.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq1vhJkY_dtO0tkxqvnyzE8GSwkwSBE0a28HoG7l9a8-bKEInRjCfreHiS7fAGQnenErBk1Qq08b0fRMZu0SVi_QPT5AAwJCn5WzBPgrXGG4YrS4Bp5iAEpWQW1rshFn2XLLtLE3IDlpM/s1600/rasch2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq1vhJkY_dtO0tkxqvnyzE8GSwkwSBE0a28HoG7l9a8-bKEInRjCfreHiS7fAGQnenErBk1Qq08b0fRMZu0SVi_QPT5AAwJCn5WzBPgrXGG4YrS4Bp5iAEpWQW1rshFn2XLLtLE3IDlpM/s1600/rasch2.png" height="398" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Finally, it's interesting to note which editions apparently known to Rasch are lost to us today. The graph below marks the lost editions in red.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZnhOLr5SByKImfJF7d0ifyxXY_aSLDoH5rHdWTCfGEJPdjGG2odC6TX66rnZjxEMImmWWOrqbpXxYS2_MnhInnEfHk2J74xtEO2BlAimtTaicGRJx4O1jJGTjUgy6CeFXky7RnOgYRSg/s1600/rasch3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZnhOLr5SByKImfJF7d0ifyxXY_aSLDoH5rHdWTCfGEJPdjGG2odC6TX66rnZjxEMImmWWOrqbpXxYS2_MnhInnEfHk2J74xtEO2BlAimtTaicGRJx4O1jJGTjUgy6CeFXky7RnOgYRSg/s1600/rasch3.png" height="398" width="400" /></a></div>
All of the editions he mentions up to 1520 can be identified today, and there are only two missing editions before 1550 (the lost work of Grünpeck, and an unknown Latin edition of Lichtenberger's <i>Prognosticatio</i>). The other seven lost editions are all from relatively recent years, with six printed after 1560. This is relevant to how we model the disappearance of printed editions, as it suggests that while there are processes that lead to the loss of editions over the space of several decades or centuries, the most common processes of destruction operate over the space of a few years or decades. It would be interesting to see if a close look at other sixteenth-century book lists would lead to similar results.Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1500868879355812358.post-75334173163709673702015-01-30T10:12:00.000-08:002015-02-06T09:24:05.816-08:00Johannes Rasch: A bibliography of his sources, version 0.45[<b>Update 6 February 2015</b>: I have made a few small changes to the list of sources. Discussion has been moved to a separate post.]<br />
<br />
For our knowledge of sixteenth-century prophetic works, Johannes Rasch is an interesting figure. His responses to various controversial works are not extensive, but he collects and cites from many different sources, and he takes a more critical view than Wolfgang Lazius, who was active in Vienna thirty years before Rasch. Most importantly, Rasch often includes a list of his sources, and many of them can be matched to known editions. What follows is an initial attempt to match Rasch's sources to printed works, with the hope that at the end we'll have a better idea of what was circulating in Vienna in the 1580s and what might be lost to us today.<br />
<br />
The entries in Rasch's bibliographies are often numbered and begin with a title in German and/or Latin, the author, the format, and the place and year of publication if known. The final piece of information, taking the form of "pag. 8." for example, appears to give the number of quires in each edition, and the number is usually close if not always identical to the number of signatures found in known editions. As a bibliographer, Rasch is reasonably reliable, but not completely accurate in all cases. For the entries below, I've changed the order to give the author, title, place, and date of publication.<br />
<br />
In one edition of Rasch's practica for 1588 (VD16 R 315), Rasch gives a <a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00026264/image_2">list of authors he cites</a>, and then notes that he has listed the authors of Latin printed works in his <i>Liber vaticiniorum</i>, while the German authors are listed in the index of his <i>Gegenpractic</i>. This note is significant, as it tells us to expect to find printed editions.<br />
<br />
As for Rasch's own life and work, the situation isn't all that bad. There are a number of treatments of his biography and writings (see bibliography at the end of the post).<br />
<br />
<b>Sources cited by Rasch in the <a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00023324/image_4">Gegenpractic of 1584</a></b>, (VD16 R 302-303, 320)<br />
<ol>
<li>Wolfgang Lazius. <i>Catalogus aliquot Vaticinorum</i>... Vienna 1554. <br /><b>Not in VD16</b> or in most bibliographies of Lazius's work, but a copy does exist in the <a href="http://aleph.nkp.cz/F/?func=direct&doc_number=005675596&local_base=SKC">Czech National Library</a> in Prague.</li>
<li>Wolfgang Lazius. <i>Fragmentum Vaticinii cuiusdam Methodii</i>... Vienna 1547. <b>VD16 ZV 9507</b></li>
<li><i>Methodii episcopi et martyris Chronica. Von den letzen zeitten / von anfang und end der Welt / geschriben Anno Domini 250</i>. <b>Probably ISTC im00522000/GW </b><span class="bold"><b>M23054</b></span><br />Rasch doesn't give any bibliographic information, but see the sources of the <i>Vaticiniorum liber primus</i> below.</li>
<li><i>Julianus episcopus Tolet scripsit prognosticum futuri seculi Anno 450</i>.<br />Again, no bibliographic information, but this appears to be <b>VD16 J 1046</b>.</li>
<li>(pseudo?)-Vincent Ferrer. <i>De tribus prophetiis Danielis</i>. Krakow 1527. <b>USTC 240820, 240821, or 240828</b>.</li>
<li> Pseudo-Vincent Ferrer. <i>Drey erschröckliche prophecey Danielis...Item / Sanct Hipolitti Predig von dem end der Welt</i>. Munich 1575 (octavo edition; <b>not in VD16</b>), 1582 (quarto edition, <b>VD16 V 1211</b>).<br />Note that Rasch was the translator of the 1582 edition and presumably of the 1575 edition as well, but the 1575 octavo edition is otherwise unknown.</li>
<li>Birgitta of Sweden. <i>Bestättung der Offenbarung S. Brigitten / Burd der Welt genant</i>. Nuremberg 1481. <b>GW 4400</b>, <b>ISTC ib00676000</b>.</li>
<li>Birgitta of Sweden. <i>Himlische offenbarung S. Birgitten / etc</i>. Nuremberg 1502. <b>VD16 B 5595</b>.</li>
<li>Birgitta of Sweden. <i>Revelationes coelestes D. Birgittae, etc.</i> Nuremberg 1517. <b>Not in VD16</b>.<br />This appears not to be the smaller folio edition by Anton Koberger Jr. of the <i>Revelationes </i>in 1521, (VD16 ZV 25691), but another edition of 1517 not yet recorded in VD16. Like the 1554 edition of Lazius above, a copy is in the <a href="http://aleph.nkp.cz/F/?func=direct&doc_number=006493345&local_base=SKC">National Library</a> in Prague.</li>
<li>Joseph Grünpeck. <i>Ein Spiegel der natürlichen / himlischen unnd prophetischen sehungen aller trübsalen / angst und not / die uber alle Ständ / Geschlecht und Gemaine der Christenheit / sonderbar so dem </i>[Zodiac sign: Cancer] <i>underworffen / und in dem 7. clima begriffen sein / in kurtzen tagen ergehn werden / Onus ecclesiae genant / Joseph Grunbeck Priester</i>. Nuremberg 1508. <b>VD16 G 3642</b>.<br />There is little doubt that Rasch is describing the first German edition of Grünpeck's work, but his addition that this work is known as the <i>Onus ecclesiae</i> is entirely erroneous.</li>
<li><i>Welsch gattung / Windpractic</i>. Strasbourg, 1513. <b>VD16 W 1880</b>.</li>
<li><i>Newer außzug etlicher Prognostication unnd propheceyen...</i> N.p. 1518. <b>VD16 A 4439</b>.</li>
<li>Johannes Lichtenberger. <i>Prognosticatio Joan. Liechtenberger</i>...<i>durans C. annos</i>. Strasbourg 1526. <b>Not in VD16?</b> New editions of Lichtenberger's <i>Prognosticatio</i> are frequent in the 1520s, but none of them are from Strasbourg. In 1526, there are four editions, but the only Latin editions are by Peter Quentel in Cologne (<b>VD16 L 1591</b> and <b>L 1592</b>). Rasch is again either describing a lost Strasbourg edition, or mixing up the place of printing.</li>
<li>Theophrastus Paracelsus. <i>Theophrasti Paracelsi wider Liechtenbergers weissag / etc. im buch Astronomica et Astrologica, auß dem buch der Weissager kunst</i>. <b>VD16 P 402</b>.</li>
<li><i>Kaiserliche Practica und Prognostication, auß allen alten Weissagungen / von 300 jaren her zusamen geschreiben / von Carolo V. Auch werden hierinn vil Wundergeschichten / in der Welt zukünfftig / durch den hochgelehrten Maister Alofresant zu Rhodis practi[ci]ret / etc</i>. N.p., n.d. <b>VD16 A 1934, ZV 415, or ZV 416</b>.</li>
<li>Johann Carion. <i>Außlegung der verborgenen Weissagung Domini Johan. Carionis, von veränderung und zufelligem glück der höchsten Potentaten des Röm. Reichs</i>. Nuremberg 1547. <b>VD16 ZV 21897?</b><br />Rasch mentions two editions, one with two quires (no format given) and a quarto edition of one quire.<i></i> Neither corresponds exactly to ZV 21897, an octavo edition of 16 leaves, which is however the only known Nuremberg edition of 1547. There are numerous editions of 1546 and two more in 1548.</li>
<li>(Pseudo-) Johannes Capistranus. <i>Bildnuß eines nackenden Kaisers und Bapsts / gefunden in einem Felsen in Welschland 20. jar vor Christi geburt / auff den untergang des Reichs der Teutschen gedeutet / durch Capistranum. Anno 1460. und auch durch Carionem. Patenttafel / gedruckt 1556</i>. N.p. 1556. <b>Not in VD16, but cf. VD17 14:003063G</b>.<br />From the description, it's clear that Rasch is describing a work very similar to VD17 14:003063G, 39:148285H, and 23:258724U, although these were printed only in 1621, 1622, and 1663, respectively. So it's clear that Rasch definitely had access to a much earlier edition that is currently unknown to VD16.</li>
<li>Cyprian Leowitz. <i>De</i> [<i>conjunctionibus] magnis superiorum Planetarum</i>... Lauingen 1565. <b>VD16 L 1257</b>.</li>
<li>Matthaeus Zeise. <i>Beschreibung und erklärung der schröcklichen / ungewöhndlichen / harechtigen / feurigen Sternen / so man Cometen nennet... </i>Frankfurt 1578. <b>VD16 Z 252</b>.</li>
<li>Wilhelm Misocacus. <i>Prognosticon oder Practica auff das jar 1583</i>... <b>VD16 M 5481 or </b><b><b>5482</b>; a third edition not in VD16</b>.<br />All three editions are by Jakob Rhode of Danzig.</li>
<li>Geronimo Cardano. <i>Ex Cardani supplemento Almanach et ex comment in quadripart. Ptolemaei: Seind hierin vil Sprüch angezogen wider die Sternkündiger / die von der Fürsten glück oder fall auß dem gestirn warsagen / dann dise zway Bücher seind bey den Astrologis in sunderm wehrt</i>. N.p., n.d. <b class="c2"></b><b>VD16 C 940 or <b class="c2"></b>VD16 C 941?</b><br />Both of these editions (published in Nuremberg by Johann Petreius in 1543 and 1547, respectively) might correspond to Rasch's description.</li>
</ol>
<b>New sources cited by Rasch in his revised <i>Gegenpractic</i> </b><br />
Rasch also published a thorough revision of his <i>Gegenpractic</i> (VD16 R 304-305) that included a <a href="http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00061503/image_4">new but unnumbered list of works cited</a>. The first edition (R 304) is dated 1584 in VD16, but that cannot be correct. Rasch's dedicatory epistle is dated 1584 in R 304 (while it's dated 1588 in R 305), and his list of sources does not explicitly date any of them after 1584, so perhaps Rasch chose not to emphasize precisely when he was writing. But he does cite two editions of his own practica for 1588 (number 5 in the list below), and those two editions are dated 1587 and 1588, including a dedicatory epistle dated 18 April 1587 in both, and a signed date of 1588 in the case of R 315. So the first edition of the <i>Gegenpractic</i>, VD16 R 304, needs to be redated to 1588.<br />
<br />
There is still one small mystery: Both editions are dedicated (with slightly different formulations of the royal
titles) to Maximilian, archduke of Austria - who died in 1576. Why would
Rasch dedicate a work of 1588 to a patron who died in the previous
decade?<br />
<br />
Unlike the list above, the numbering of the list below is my own.<br />
<ol start="22">
<li>Johann Rasch. <i>Gegenpractic / wider etlich ausgegangene warsagschrifften</i>... Munich 1584. <b>VD16 R 302-303, 320</b>.</li>
<li>Johann Rasch. <i>Practica auff das jar 1588</i>... Munich, 1587 = <b>VD16 R 319</b>. Graz, 1588 = <b>VD16 R 318</b>.</li>
<li>Johan Nas. <i>Concordia Alter unnd newer, guter, auch böser Glaubens strittiger lehren</i>. Munich 1583. <b>VD16 N 118</b>.</li>
<li>Joseph Grünpeck. Doctor Joseph Grunbecks Visiones auff das 29. 30 und 31. jar / und ain erklärung uber ein articl / darinn er durch etlich unverständige grobe klaffer gestrafft wierd / als sol er inn ainem büechlein / an den künig Ludwig in Ungarn unnd künigin Maria außgangen / treflich geirret und unwarhait anzait haben. 4. N. pag. 2. <b>Not in VD16</b>.<br />This seems to be an otherwise unknown work by Joseph Grünpeck, from whom we have nothing between 1523 and his <i>Prognosticum</i> of 1532. It would appear to be a new prognostication and also a reply to a critique to his final judgment on the conjunctions of 1524<i></i>, which was dedicated to the king and queen of Hungary (VD16 G 3629). It would of course be extremely interesting to see the critique of Grünpeck and his response.</li>
<li>Joseph Grünpeck. <i>Prognostication Doctor Joseph Grunbecks von dem 1532. jar an biß auff das 40. jar</i>... Nuremberg 1532. <b>VD16 G 3638 or G 3639</b>.</li>
<li>Weissagung der zwelff Sybillen / vil wunderbare zuekunfft von anfang biß zu end der weld besagende. Niachaula künigins von Saba prophecey. Merckliche künfftige ding von S. Brigitt / Cyrillo, Methodio, Ioachimo, brueder Reinhard / Johan Liechtenberger brueder Jacob aus Hispania, Doctor Joseph Grunbeck / Philippo Cataneo, beschriben auff jetzige und kunfftige zeit /etc. Frankfurt 1537. <b>VD16 Z 945</b>.</li>
<li>Antonius Torquatus. <i>Prognosticon</i>...<i>von änderung des gantzen Europae</i>... Vienna 1535. <b>VD16 ZV 25351</b>.</li>
<li>Antonius Torquatus. <i>Prognosticon, Weissagung und urthail von betrübungen und grossen anfechtungen Europae</i>..., translated by Caspar Goldwürm. Frankfurt 1558 and 1561. <b>VD16 T 1584</b>, <b>VD16 T 1585</b>.</li>
<li>Alofresant. <i>Ein prophecey und weissagung von den vier erben hertzogs Johansen von Burgund</i>... N.p., n.d. <b>VD16 A 1933 or A 1935</b>.</li>
<li>Johannes Trithemius. <i>Von den siben geistern odern engeln / denen Gott die himel zu füeren von anfang der weld bevolhen hat. Ein warhafftig büechlein / darinn auß vergangnen zeiten / was kunfftig zu gewarten / erklärt und angezaigt ist / durch Joh. Trithaim und Jac. Pflaum</i>. N.p. 1534. Quarto, ca. 20 leaves. <b>VD16 T 2006</b>.<br />This is interesting - unique among editions of <i>Von den Sieben Geistern</i>, this one contains an extract from the prophecies attributed to Jakob Pflaum.</li>
<li> Georg Tanstetter. <i>Tröstbüchlein</i>. Wienna 1523. <b>VD16 T 160</b>.</li>
<li>Esdra. <i>Practica auff das 1544. jar</i>. Strasbourg 1543. <b>VD16 E 3966</b>.</li>
<li>Cyprian Leowitz and Samuel Eisenmenger. <i>Prognosticon der fürnembsten ding so von dem 1564. biß auff das 1607. jar sich zuetragen werden / auß Cypriano und Siderocrate</i>. N.p. 1567. <b>Not in VD16, but cf. VD16 L 1272 and VD16 ZV 25875</b>.<br />No edition of this work from 1567 is known, but there are editions of 1564 and 1568.</li>
<li>Cyprian Leowitz. <i>Klärliche beschreibung und historischer bericht der fürnemsten grossen zusamen kunfft der obern planeten / etc</i>. Lauingen, [apparently the edition of 1564]. <b>VD16 L 1259</b>.</li>
<li>Johann Rasch. <i>Cometen buech</i>...<i>darinn der dritte thail sagt von asgtrologen practic vom end der weld</i>. Munich 1577. <b>Not in VD16, but cf. VD16 R 310</b>.<br />Like Number 6 above, here is another work by Rasch published in the 1570s which is not found in VD16, but which is known from a (likely revised and expanded) edition of 1582.</li>
<li>Paul Werner. <i>Practic oder Prognosticon auff die zukunfftigen 1582. 83. 84. 85. jar. etc. auß den propheten Daniel / Ezechiel / und offenbarung S. Johannis</i>. Basel 1581. <b>Not in VD16</b>.<br />According to Rasch, a quarto edition of two gatherings or eight leaves. I can't find any reference to the title or author in the usual sources, so this looks like a true lost work.</li>
<li>Otto Brunfels. <i>Der Christen practic</i>. Erfurt 1578.<b>VD16 B 8485</b>.</li>
<li>Konrad Schomer. <i>Siben bueßpredig von zuekunfftigen schrecklichen straffen</i>... Lemgo 1584. <b>VD16 S 3837</b>(?).<br />The edition known to VD16 is from 1583, so either Rasch is off by a year, or he had access to a later edition not recorded in VD16.</li>
<li>Pseudo-Jakob Pflaum. <i>Etlich weissag / zusamen getragen im jar. 1500...</i> Wittenberg 1532. <b>VD16 P 2400 or P 2401</b>.</li>
<li><i>Reimundus offenbarung / ist gefunden worden in ainem alten buech vor vil jaren geschriben / durch Cyrillum, Joachim / Birgitten / Francis. Reichard / und Methodium, etc...</i> N.p. [Augsburg], 1532. <b>VD16 ZV 11958</b>.</li>
<li><i>Wunderbarliche weissag von dem Papstumb / wie es im biß an das end der weld regehn soll / in figuren oder gmähl begriffen / gefunden zu Nürnberg im Cartheüsercloster / und ist sehr alt</i>. N.p., 1527. <b>VD16 W 4643-4645</b>.<br />This is interesting - Rasch, a Catholic, cites one of the more provocative uses of prophecy as Lutheran polemic from the height of the opening pamphlet wars of the Reformation. He manages this by reading the work as if it targeted Luther: "Sagt von dem vermainten Papste der Teutschen Saxen / der vol teüfels sein / und von dem rechten Papst wierd uberwunden und vertilgt werden."</li>
<li>Dietrich von Zengg. <i>Wunderbarliche Weissagung von vergangenen / gegenwertigen und zuckunfftigen dingen / durch brueder Dietrich Parfuesser münich / etwan Pischof zu Zug in Kracen (oder Zeng in Croatia) Anno 1410 offenbaret.</i> N.p., 1536. <b>VD16 T 737</b>.<br />Based on the parenthetical addition, Rasch knew at least one more printed edition of this work, either VD16 T 732 or T 734, and probably a manuscript version as well.</li>
<li><i>Kurtze propheceyung oder practica was sich ungfährlich auff das 1587. und 88 jar zuetragen soll. durch Bilger Ruth im wald verborgen. item / Prophecey / gefunden in Mastrich bey Wilhe[l]m von Frieß</i>. Cologne 1576. <b>Probably VD16 ZV 28130 </b>[1587].<br />I would like to believe Rasch, as this would document the first appearance of "Friess II" in print, a year earlier than the earliest dated edition. Unfortunately, the editions of the <i>Kurtze Propheceyung</i> (combining a version of the "Toledo Letter" with extracts from Lichtenberger") that include "Friess II" are the later ones. The <i>Kurtze Propheceyung</i> <a href="http://researchfragments.blogspot.com/2012/09/kurtze-propheceyung-oder-practika-1587.html">went through several editions in 1586-87</a>, and I have a hard time believing that one of them, focused on the years 1588, appeared a decade earlier. I suspect 1576 in Rasch's text is a mistake for 1587.</li>
<li><i>Discurs, uber die groß coniunction der planeten des 1584. item / von veränderung weldlicher propheceyen / unnd ende der weld / auß H. Göttlicher Schrifft unnd Wiettenbergischen patribus, auch auß leüffen der natur / des 83. bis auff das 88 un 89. jar begriffen</i>. <b>Not in VD16</b>.<br />Rasch doesn't provide a place, date, format, or number of signatures. I can't find any reference to this title in the usual places.</li>
</ol>
<b>Sources cited by Rasch in the <i>Vaticiniorum liber primus</i> (VD16 R 323)</b><br />
According to Rasch, he reserved Latin works for the <a href="http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10198790_00007.html">bibliography</a> appearing here. Rasch's list of sources also includes several authors without any claim that they appeared in print, which I am omitting here. The numbering in the list below is also my own, and I am also omitting works already mentioned above.<br />
<br />
Note that Rasch explicitly cites works printed in 1588 (see item 57 below), so it seems that the <i>Vaticiniorum liber primus</i> also needs to be redated from 1584 to 1588. <br />
<ol start="46">
<li>Prophetia Abbatis de Flore Veneti (qui vixit ante annos 400.) de nostri temporis iconoclastis, miserandoque eroum exitu, insuper de reformatione et Unione ecclesiae, ante annos plures dimnitus producta et mirabiliter inventa. Iusti Iodoci Blankwald presbyteri. Antwerp tab. Col. 1567. <b>Not in VD16</b>.<br />I'm not finding any references to Justus Jodocus Blankwald of Antwerp, or to a Cologne edition of Joachim of Fiore published in 1567. There are editions of 1570 and 1577, however,</li>
<li><i>Titulus in libellum S. Methodii Martyris et episcopi Partinensis Graeciae: cum autenticis concordandtiis prophetiarum. </i>Augsburg 1496. <b>ISTC im00522000/GW </b><span class="bold"><b>M23054</b>.<br />This is a reference to the first edition of pseudo-Methodius to include Wolfgang Aytinger's tract, published in 1496 in Augsburg, and helps clear up the confusion surrounding number 3 on the first list above.</span></li>
<li><span class="bold"><span class="bold">Johannes </span>Annius Viterbiensis. <i>Prognostica M. Johan. Viterbien. de Imperiis, Christiano et Turcico</i>. Nuremberg 1560. <b>VD16 N 77</b>. <br />Rasch also lists a Nuremberg edition of 1471, but that seems to be taken not from personal knowledge but from the title forumulation of the 1560 edition.</span></li>
<li><span class="bold">Johannes Lichtenberger. <i>Prognosticatio</i>. Strasbourg 1526 (<b>not in VD16; see number 13 above</b>), Cologne 1528 (<b>VD16 L 1593</b>).</span></li>
<li><span class="bold">Cyprian Leowitz. <i>De coniuntionibus magnis</i>... Lauingen 1564. </span><b>VD16 L 1257</b>.</li>
<li><i>Antichristus, sive Prognostica finis mundi, ex Mattaeo, Daniele, et aliis scripturae locis</i>. Basel [ca. 1565]. <b>VD16 A 2936-2937</b>.</li>
<li>Leonhard Krentzheim. <i>Coniecturae piae et eruditae, de impendentibus in ecclesia et imperiis horum temporum mutationibus et calamitatibus</i>... Görlitz 1580. <b>VD16 K 2346</b>.</li>
<li>Antonius Torquatus. <i>De eversione Europae...</i> Nuremberg 1534. <b>VD16 T 1578</b>.</li>
<li>Bartol Ðurđević. <i>Prognoma sive praesagium Mehemetanorum, primum de christianorum calamitatibus, deinde de suae gentis interitu, ex Persica lingua in Latinum sermonem conversum</i>. Antwerp 1545. <b>NB 10557, USTC 404893</b>.</li>
<li>Theophrastus Paracelsus. <i>Exposition vera imaginum olim Noribergae repertarum, ex Vaticiio magiae dedeucta</i>... N.p. 1570. <b>VD16 P 409</b>.</li>
<li>Marcus Wagner. <i>Tres vetustissimae prophetiae de Germania, vivis coloribus tristem et miserabilem statum omnium rerum depingentes</i>. N.p. 1579. <b>VD16 W 133</b>.</li>
<li>Johann Wilhelm Stucki. <i>Prognosticon, sive praedictio certissima, de Anno Christi. 1588. et iis quae sequentur</i>... Zurich 1588. <b>VD16 S 9780-9781</b>.</li>
<li>Philippus de Barberiis. <i>Discordantiae sanctorum doctorum Hieronymi et Augustini; Sibyllarum et prophetarum de Christo vaticinia</i>. Rome 1481. <b>GW 3385-3386/ISTC ib00118000-ib00119000</b>.</li>
<li>Joachim de Fiore. <i>Pauli principis de Scala, indubitata explanatio Vaticioniorum et imaginum Joachimi abbatis Florensis Calabriae</i>... Cologne 1570. <b>VD16 J 287</b>.</li>
<li><i>Prophetia pontificalis, cum figuris Joachimi Abbatis</i>. Bologna 1515. <b>USTC 763465</b>.</li>
<li>Joachim Camerarius. <i>Commentatiuncula super Ovidii Versu, exitus acta probat</i>... Leipzig 1572. <b>VD16 C 373-374</b>.</li>
<li>Theodor Graminaeus. <i>Mysticus Aquilo. declaratio vaticinii Jeremiae prophetae, Ab aquilone pandetur malum</i>... Cologne 1576. <b>VD16 G 2805</b>.</li>
<li>Joachim de Fiore. <i>Abbatis Joachim divina in Jeremiam interpretatio, plurimis referta Vaticiniis</i>... Cologne 1577. <b>VD16 J 286</b>.</li>
<li>Aratus. <i>Phaenomena et prognostica</i>... Cologne 1569. <b>VD16 A 3200</b>.</li>
<li><i>Trutina pacis, qua examen seu iudicium revolutionis annie praesentis 1579. astrologicum continetur</i>... Cologne 1579. <b class="c2"></b><b>VD16 T 2133</b>.</li>
<li>Heinrich Efferhen. <i>Homeliae 13 in caput 38 et 39 prophetae Ezechiel de Gog et Magog, seu de Turcis</i>... Strasbourg 1571. <b>VD16 E 565</b>. </li>
</ol>
<br />
<b>Secondary literature on Rasch</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Barnes, Robin Bruce. <i>Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation</i> (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 161, 165.</li>
<li>Hille, Martin. <i>Providentia Dei, Reich und Kirche: Weltbild und Stimmungsprofil altgläubiger Chronisten 1517–1618</i> (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 146-47.</li>
<li>Schöne, Renate. Afterword to Johannes Rasch, <i>Das Weinbuch: Nachdruck der Ausgabe um 1580</i> (Dortmund: Harenberg, 1981), 125–27.</li>
<li>Schottenloher,
Karl. “Untergang des Hauses Habsburg, von Wilhelm Misocacus aus den
Gestirnen für das Jahr 1583 vorhergesagt: Eine verkappte politische
Flugschrift.” <i>Gutenberg-Jahrbuch</i> 26 (1951): 127–33.</li>
<li>Smolinsky, Heribert. <i>Deutungen der Zeit im Streit der Konfessionen</i> (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000).</li>
<li>Wagner, Joseph Maria. “Oesterreichische Dichter Des XVI. Jahrhunderts,” <i>Serapeum </i>25 (1864): 317–20 (on Rasch; the rest of Wagner's contribution extends across multiple issues). Nachträge, <i>Serapeum </i>26 (1865): 123–24.</li>
</ul>
Jonathan Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15647979894557895741noreply@blogger.com0