A very short review: Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism (1998)

McGinn, Bernard, John Joseph Collins, and Stephen J. Stein, eds. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. 3 vols. New York: Continuum, 1998. ISBN 978-0826412522.

9780826412522

9780826412522

9780826412522

9780826412522

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 Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism 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.

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 Printing and Prophecy, 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 Encyclopedia of Apocalytpicism is going to be one of those reference works that stays near my desk for just about any research project.

A very short review: Sandra Rühr and Axel Kuhn, eds. Sinn und Unsinn des Lesens (2013)

Sandra Rühr and Axel Kuhn, eds. Sinn und Unsinn des Lesens: Gegenstände, Darstellungen und Argumente aus Geschichte und Gegenwart. Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2013. 246 pp. 978-3847-101284.

Ceci n'est pas une Festschrift

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.

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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. 
• 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.
• Lilian Streblow and Anke Schöning, "Lesemotivation: Dimensionen, Befunde, Förderung" reviews studies of reading education in Germany in the aftermath of the PISA-test debates.
• 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.
• 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.

These are well-written, thought-provoking essays which together add up to more than the sum of their parts. Es lebe die nicht-Feschschrift!

Regiomontanus, Bishop of Regensburg

When working with late medieval and early modern prophecies, one naturally starts to wonder when prophecy ceased. At what point did leading intellectuals, or socially respectable people, or the broad mass of the population stop putting stock in prophecies? That moment comes later than you might think. I haven't undertaken a systematic search for late prophecies, but I have taken note as I've come across them. There are at least a few examples of what look like earnestly published prophecies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Usually the late prophecies that are published or collected in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries are reminiscent but not obviously identical to late medieval or early modern prophecies, although there are exceptions, sometimes amusingly so. Johann Nepomuk Trülle's Buch der Wahr- und Weissagungen, with editions dated 1849, 1850, and 1854, contains the Latin rendition of the 1588 quatrain, only slightly altered for relevance to the year 1788, and attributed to "Johannes Müller, Bischof von Regensburg, im XV. Jahrhundert." This is recognizable as a distortion of Johannes Müller von Königsberg, the given name of the fifteenth-century astronomer Regiomontanus usually associated with the 1588 quatrain. The appearance in the Buch der Wahr- und Weissagungen gives the 1588 quatrain, first attested in 1553, three full centuries of reception in print. A facsimile of Latin verse in Trülle's 1849 edition is available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.