The Extract of Various Prophecies

For the booklet of excerpts from Lichtenberger and Grünpeck and other sources known variously as the Auszug etlicher Prophezeiungen, Extract of Various Prophecies, and (inaccurately) as the "Anonymous Practica"/"Anonyme Praktik," whose most thorough previous description is pp. 145-53 in Heike Talkenberger's Sintflut (1990), I have a recently published article that clears up some of the mysteries:

Jonathan Green. “The Extract of Various Prophecies: Apocalypticism and Mass Media in the Early Reformation.” Renaissance and Reformation 40.4 (2017): 15–42.

• The previously unknown source of the foreword is Simon Eyssenmann’s annual astrological prognostication for 1514 (VD16 E 4757).
• 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 same volume (Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4 Med 1284).
• 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).
• The Dutch edition dated to 1509 (NB 26021) should be dated to around 1523.
• The decisive actor behind publication of the Extract of Various Prophecies is Hans Stainberger, bookseller of Zwickau, although his personal involvement in composition is unlikely.
• The 14 known editions of 1516-1525 make the Extract of Various Prophecies the most frequently printed prophetic work during that decade.
• The circulation of the Extract of Various Prophecies 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.

I sketch out the the relationship between texts and editions as follows (this image does not appear in the published article):

Georg Meder reads Wilhelm Friess

File this under "things I wish I had seen two years ago."

When writing about prophecies, prognostications, or other sixteenth-century booklets, one naturally wonders who the readers were. (That was the question Xenia von Tippelskirch asked of me and Courtney Kneupper in June at the conference in London about "Dietrich von Zengg.") Usually the only evidence is indirect - who is the printer, what audiences does that printer usually serve, what kinds of demands does the text make on the reader.

But sometimes we have the good fortune of finding someone in the sixteenth century who quotes or cites the work in question. Here, for example, is what Georg Meder says about the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess in Meder's practica for 1583 (VD16 M 1853, fol. c5r):

Halt auch gentzlich darfür / das derselbige ein gewiser vorbot sein / eines schnellen grossen Kriegsvolcks / so vom Nidergang gegen Mitternacht zuziehen werde / da denn andere mehr Bundsverwandten sich versamlet / und dann mit gemeinem hauffen auff die Berg Israel herein fallen werden. Man lese hievon Wilhelmi Frysii Mastricensis weissagung / so ime von einem Angelo, Anno 77. den 24. Aprilis ist eröffnet worden / und albereit vor lengst in Truck ausgangen ist / und halt hiegegen das 39. und 39. Capitel des Propheten Ezechieleis / und denn auch das 19. und 20. Capitel der Offenbarung Joannis des Evangelisten / so wirdt man endlich befinden / was für jammer sich erheben / und wie Gog und Magog mit all seinem anhang sich wider uns versamlen / und letzlichen nach dem Ezechiele / mit allem solchen grossen hauffen Volcks / vom Himel herab sol nidergelegt und ausgetilget werden. Aber wir Teutschen verachten alle solche warnung / glauben weder den Propheten / noch andern Wunderzeichen / so schier alle tag am Himel und auff Erden sich begeben / ja wol auch den Engeln nicht / und solchs am meisten dise / so andere zu bus vermanen solten. Derhalben wir anders nichts / denn endlichen uberfals Gog und magogs zugewarten haben.

From the date that Meder cites, it's clear that he had read one of the Basel editions printed by Samuel Apiarius, or a copy of one of those editions, probably printed in 1577. Prior editions attribute the vision to 1574, and later ones change the month and year.

For an astrologer, Meder strikes an unusually (but hardly unique) apocalyptic tone. This was not a new development for Meder; one finds similar references in his earlier and alter prognostications. Meder's reading of Wilhelm Friess also appears to begin earlier than 1582. He states in his practica for 1580 (VD16 M 1852, fol. c4r):

[Because of various eclipses and comets,] weiß ich anders nichts zu iudicirn, denn was in fertiger Practica vermeldet / nemlich das ein Occidentischer Potentat / mit hülff etzlicher mitternechtigen und Orientischen Monarhen von mitternacht hero ein unzelich Volck zusammen bringen / und auff die berg Israhel herein fallen / und deß heerlager der heiligen umbringen werden. [Read Ezechiel 38-39 and Revelation 18-19; those who cause this bloodbath will have their reward.] Denn was einmal der liebe Gott von diser grossen und letzten Niderlag und feldschlacht (deren gleiche keine von anfang der welt niemals sich begeben hat) durch seine lieben Propheten und Apostel zuvor verkündiget / wirdt zu diser jetzigen Zeit gewißlich erfüllet werden müssen / wie dann hievon auch neulich ein Prophecey außgangen / in Belgico beschehen / hievon genugsame Zeugniß gibt / und wir gewißlich bessers nichts zu erwarten haben.

The combination of ideas and sources in both practicas is nearly identical, so that it seems that the "Belgian prophecy" is none other than that of Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht. In his practica for 1579 (VD16 M 1851, fol. e4v), Meder explicitly identifies the mountain: "auff den Bergen Israhel / das ist / (wie es denn von allen außgelegt wirdt) in Germania."

Georg Meder is another astrologer about whom not much is known. There are eleven known practicas from him, spanning the years 1577-1599. On the title page, he is described as an astronomer and poet in Kitzingen, and his practica for 1578 (VD16 ZV 22615, fol. a3r) gives Mainbernheim, just south of Kitzingen, as his ancestral origin. The dedications of his practicas suggest a long and difficult search for stable patronage. He dedicated his practica for 1578 to Marggrave Georg Friedrich I of Brandenburg-Ansbach, but for 1579 he dedicated his work to the mayor and city council of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and to the mayor and city council of Kitzingen the year after that. His practica for 1583 was dedicated to the mayor and city council of Windsheim. For 1597, he dedicated his practica to a lesser nobleman, Johann Fuchs von Dornheim, and for 1599, he refers to a lawyer, Johann Büttner, as his lord and patron. One can't escape the impression of a continuous decline in the status of the patrons to which Meder aspired. His location does not change, however. After his practica for 1577 places him in Dettelsbach, the rest of his practicas give his location as Kitzingen. Meder seems to have been a Lutheran of the Philipist variety, with little good to say about Catholics or Calvinists, while also rejecting the followers of Matthias Flacius.

Egenolff, Grünpeck, and list prophecies

The most significant contribution to the formation of a canon of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German prophecies was probably that of the Frankfurt printer Christian Egenolff the Elder. After a brush with the law in Strasbourg in the early 1530s, Egenolff moved to Frankfurt and became one of the leading publishers of popular vernacular literature. Between 1531 and 1537, Egenolff published a collection of sibylline prophecies, Zwölff Sibyllen Weissagungen, along with some additional material (VD16 Z 941-945). A decade later, Egenolff expanded the collection significantly by adding the work of Johannes Lichtenberger, Johann Carion, and Paracelsus (VD16 P 5065-5066, P 5068). Reprints of both the smaller and the larger collections appear through the end of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries.

While working on Printing and Prophecy, I wanted to consult the 1537 edition (VD16 Z 945), but by itself it didn't seem enough to justify a trip to Wolfenbüttel when obtaining a facsimile would be cheaper - but then, after I was back in the U.S., I learned the the condition of the volume was too fragile for the Herzog August Bibliothek to digitize it. Now that I've had a chance to look at it, it turns out to contain a few surprises.

The collection is the first of Egenolff's to include a work by Josef Grünpeck, but it isn't the same work that shows up in the expanded 1548-50 editions (that work, Von der Reformation der Christenheyt und der Kirchen, is known only from the latest Egenolff collections). For the 1537 sibylline collection, Egenolff instead included Grünpeck's Prognosticum of 1532 (VD16 G 3634-3640, ZV 7115, ZV 23147), making the 1537 Egenolff collection the latest edition of that work. Since the Prognosticum didn't foresee much left of the world's future after 1540, Egenolff in 1548 reached farther back to find a more timely work by Grünpeck.

The other unusual feature of the 1537 edition is that it claims to include a work by Filippo Cattaneo, identifed as being "vom Thurn auß Italia." Another prognostication attributed to Cattaneo appeared in 1535 (VD16 C 1725) - but that is not the work included by Egenolff in 1537. Instead, the work that appears in the 1537 collection is a set of terse prophecies for 1537-1550. The basic structure is a governing planet and year, the abundance of oil, wine, and grain, and then an additional brief prognostication. For example:

Mon 1537.
Ols wenig
Weins abgang
Treydt wenig
Zwitracht der Fürsten.

The interesting thing is what happens when you look only at the year and last line:

Mon 1537. Zwitracht der Fürsten
Mars 1538. Vil pestilent in allen landen
Mercurius 1539. Krieg undern Christen
Jupiter 1540. Sterben der Fürsten
Saturnus 1541. Frid in allen landen
Sonn 1542. Außbruch der verschlossen juden
Mon 1543. Juden wider die Christen
Mars 1544. Juden von Christen überwunden
Jupiter 1545. Falsche Propheten
Venus 1546. Vil laster und übels
Saturnus 1547. Kranckheyt der Pestilentz
Sonn 1548. Ein heylger man
1549. Wütten der ungleubigen

1550. Durch disen heyligen man werden alle unglaubigen zum glauben bekert / Als dann würdt werden ein Schaffstal / ein Hirt / und ein Herr / der die gantze welt under seine Herrschafft bringen und regieren würdt. Unnd als dann würdt das Gülden alter herfür kommen.

This looks to me very much like a predecessor of the list prophecy for 1570-80. Compare "Sterben der Fürsten" with "Pastor non erit," or "Ein heylger man" with "Surget maximus vir," or the culmination in "ein Schaffstal / ein Hirt / und ein Herr" with "unum ovile et unus pastor." All of these are common prophetic tropes, of course, but their combination in a list rather than a narrative suggests there may be some direct influence.

The set of people who are interested in Joseph Grünpeck, Christian Egenolff, and the list prophecy for 1570-80 may be somewhat restricted. But for those people, VD16 Z 945 is an extremely interesting edition.

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter Seven: The Last Emperor and the Beginning of Prophecy

The last chapter of The Strange and Terrible Visions does three things. First, it wraps up the argument about how the two prophecies of Wilhelm Friess are connected. Rather than the same name being used arbitrarily for two different texts published twenty years apart, "Friess II" is connected to "Friess I" by a chain of textual influence and historical context where the links are separated by just a few years, rather than a few decades: Basel editions beginning in 1577 of a text grounded in the situation of Strasbourg's Reformed community in 1574 based on historical resonance with Reformed civic unrest in Antwerp in 1567 and in reaction to a specifically Lutheran branch of "Friess I" which was circulating in the Netherlands in 1566.

The second item of interest involves taking a look at late appearances of the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess. "Friess II" is interesting because the latest edition, published in 1639 as the Thirty Years' War was giving new relevance to a prophecy about foreign armies laying waste to Germany, reflects an earlier stage of the text than any other edition. "Friess I" reappears even later, in several editions of 1686-91, when Louis XIV's annexation of Strasbourg made him a prime candidate for the tyrannical Antichrist of the west.

Finally, I suggest four characteristic ways that prophetic texts develop:

1. Selective reception of an earlier prophecy
2. Expansion into a complete prophecy
3. A historical context that requires veiling the message
4. Adaptation to a new context

These steps can come in any order, and one or more of them may be lacking in the history of a particular prophecy, but as you trace the historical development of prophetic texts, you will encounter all of them many times.

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter Six: Wilhelm Friess in Strasbourg

This is the chapter that's going to get me into trouble. There are some things that prudent scholars of the sixteenth century do not engage in, and that includes attributing anonymous pamphlets to famous writers based on circumstantial evidence. What was I thinking?

The line of thought, from the basic evidence to the crime of wanton attribution, goes like this:

The early textual history of "Friess II" identifies 24 April 1574 as the first alleged date of the vision. Another passage found only in the earliest versions gives special significance to Strasbourg for the survivors of German's future devastation. Another passage attacking Lutheran clergy, the prophecy's attitude towards sacramental theology, and its situating of the source of salvation in the south - in Switzerland - point to an ideological home among the embattled Reformed community of Strasbourg in late spring of 1574. I argue that the demonic child-eating general from the northwest in "Friess II" was meant as a reference to Henry of Valois, king of Poland and until recently a leader of the French anti-Huguenot army and, upon the death of his brother, the presumed next king of France (where he reigned as Henry III).

The dating of "Friess II" is supported by the title page illustration of an early edition, whose eclipsed sun and moon, and conjunction and opposition involving Mars, Saturn, and Mercury, again points to 1574. The zodiacal iconography of Mars, Saturn, and Mercury is also featured prominently in the text of the prophecy. In the spring of 1574, eclipses and conjunctions and anthropomorphic planets took a notable form in Strasbourg with the completion of the cathedral's astronomical clock. The first solar and lunar eclipse on the clock's tables of eclipses are the same ones featured on the title woodcut (which is also the title illustration for The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess).

As it turns out, the laudatory verse that accompanies a broadside illustration of the new clock was written by Johann Fischart, one of the leading German writers and the most accomplished satirist of the later sixteenth century. Fischart was a native of Strasbourg and a Reformed sympathizer who had earlier written some intemperate things about sacramental theology, supported the Huguenots and the Reformed of the Netherlands, had passed through Flanders at the time "Friess I" was circulating there, was known to publish works anonymously, and had knowledge of astrological and prophetic pamphlets.

That's a pretty amazing coincidence, I told myself. Maybe somebody could argue that Fischart was the author of "Friess II." Maybe I could even say what the evidence would be and what the argument would look like, if someone wanted to make that argument.

In the end, I decided the best approach was not to sketch out what a hypothetical argument might look like, but to simply make the claim that Fischart was the author, and defend that claim as forthrightly as possible. I try not to be irresponsible about it: As with other uncertain points, I give the evidence for both sides (including the not inconsequential note that one expert on Fischart finds the idea entirely ridiculous), and I avoid making Fischart's authorship of "Friess II" essential to any of my other arguments, but this time I opted to take the underdog bet.

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter Five: A Horrible and Shocking Prophecy

As you can see from the sidebar, The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess is now in print. The book was the result, among other things, of trying to figure out what connected two sets of prophetic pamphlets that appeared to have nothing in common and were separated by two decades, although both claimed to have been found with Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht after his recent death. I answer that question in chapter 5.

The first part of the answer is that the second prophecy ("Friess II"), a desolate vision of utter devastation about to be visited on Germany in the form of demonic armies invading from all sides, shares a few details specifically with the Lübeck editions of "Friess I." Also, I argue that one of the two Lübeck editions has been misdated. While the first of them, VD16 F 2844, is dated in VD16 to 1558, there is strong evidence that it dates to 1566, as nearly all references to years earlier than that have been removed or increased by eight years. In addition, the titles of the Lübeck editions are nearly identical to a lost Dutch edition printed in 1566, last seen at auction over 200 years ago. The best guide to the text it contained is found in the Lübeck editions of Johann Balhorn the Elder.

So not only do we have a version of "Friess I" circulating in the Netherlands and Northern Germany in 1566-68, but it appears to be a specifically Lutheran text. The enemies list that appears in these editions distances itself from Catholics, Anabaptists, and Sacramentarians - that is, from Calvinists. It also condemns insurrection more harshly than other versions of "Friess II," foreseeing that some people will rise up and pillage churches, but the authorities will eradicate them. The setting that gave rise to this version of "Friess I" thus appears to be Dutch Lutheranism at the time of the Dutch Revolt in 1566.

I argue that "Friess II" is a specifically Calvinist reaction to the specifically Lutheran "Friess I" pamphlets circulating in the late 1560s. I suggest that one specific catalyzing even was the Calvinist uprising in Antwerp that ended in a humiliating stand-down after the Calvinists found themselves surrounded on all sides in the city by a force consisting of both Catholics and Lutherans and representatives of Antwerp's merchant community from all the nations of Europe, a source of resentment for many years to come. "Friess II" thus recapitulates as a nightmare vision for Germany the hopeless strategic situation that the Calvinists of Antwerp found themselves in in March 1567.

While the earliest dated editions of "Friess II" were printed by Samuel Apiarius of Basel in 1577, some textual-critical detective work points to an origin in 1574 with a Calvinist sympathizer in Strasbourg, but I treat most of the Strasbourg context in the next chapter.

* * *

Due to conference presentations and summer travel, blog updates may be sporadic for a while.

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter Four: From Protest to Propaganda

One of the things I try to show in The Strange and Terrible Visions is that old-fashioned recension criticism has important uses in the twenty-first century. In chapter 4, as in the previous chapter, I try to intersperse textual and cultural history to show how textual changes were responding to cultural concerns in particular places and times.

One of the mysteries about the "Wilhelm Friess" pamphlets is how they could go within a few months from a subversive pamphlet whose publication led to a beheading in Antwerp, to a popular and frequently reprinted booklet whose sale had no apparent repercussions for the printers who openly identified themselves on the title pages of their wares. Chapter 4 examines how the sharper polemical edges were rounded off in subsequent editions, making "Wilhelm Friess" less controversial and more palatable for a wider audience, and argues that geography made a difference, too. In Antwerp, the diabolical tyrant from the west with allies in the east could be all too easily be identified with Habsburg rulers. In Nuremberg, on the other hand, the geography more easily fit the traditional identification of the Habsburg emperor and his French and Turkish rivals with the prophesied Last World Emperor opposed by enemies to the east and west. What started out as a covert anti-Habsburg tract in Antwerp mutated into an overt reaffirmation of imperial narratives in Nuremberg that stabilized traditional end-time ideas at a time following the Schmalkaldic War, Peace of Augsburg, and abdication of Charles V, when the traditional narratives were in considerable doubt.

At least that seems to be the story of the most popular version of the text. Its textual history has some complicated origins, with crossing back and forth with other branches, but the textual history stabilizes in Nuremberg and starts behaving in a more classically Lachmannian fashion. At one point I compare this later and orderly textual history with the profile of a step pyramid, where one recension differs from the next by a handful of differences that are then passed on to the next generation. In case that image isn't entirely clear, this is what I had in mind, with common changes grouped together and editions arranged more or less in order from earliest to latest.

Fig. 1: Well-behaved textual variants, grouped by recension and sorted from earliest to latest recension

The last section of chapter 4 starts laying the groundwork for answering the other mystery of Wilhelm Friess: How did there come to be two completely different prophecies attributed to Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht, and what is the relationship between them?

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter Three: From Avignon to Antwerp and from Antwerp to Nuremberg

Recognizing the German "Wilhelm Friess" pamphlets as descendants of Frans Fraet's edition of "Willem de Vriese" not only allows us to get a glimpse of Fraet's text - it also reveals his source. The prophecy of "Wilhelm Friess" turns out to be nothing but the Vademecum of Johannes de Rupescissa in disguise. The identity of the two isn't controversial; many passages are transparent translations of a redaction also known in a fifteenth-century French manuscript (BAV Reg. lat. 1728). We can therefore approach Fraet's edition in two directions, from its source and from its descendants.

What happens to the descendants of Fraet's edition in Germany is if anything even more interesting. The Vademecum includes a passage where Rupescissa listed the enemies of Christendom who would either be converted or perish: Jews, Saracens, Turks, Greeks, and Tatars. Some of the earliest German editions preserve but update this passage, putting in its place an enemies list: Papists, Calvinists, Adiaphorists, Majorists, Menianists, and Interimists. In other words, the enemies of uncompromising Gnesio-Lutherans like Matthias Flacius in the 1550s. While we can't attribute the translation of "Wilhelm Friess" into German to Flacius specifically, it's clear that someone who shared his religious perspective was behind it. Frans Fraet's covert critique of Habsburg rule in Antwerp found its first home in Germany among those who rejected the the religious compromises imposed by the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor in Germany.

Knowing the ultimate source in the Vademecum and the redaction from which "Wilhelm Friess" descends makes it possible to reconstruct the prophecy's textual history fairly accurately. In doing so, we get a sense for how rapidly the text could change at the time it was being so frequently printed and reprinted - I see at least ten generations separating the earliest and latest editions published just in 1558, and multiple contacts between different branches of the textual tradition. Some of the changes are accidental - a line lost from one edition to the next, with subsequent editions trying to restore sense in various ways. But the most interesting cases are ones where we can connect changes in the text to the specific circumstances of the people who were reading, revising, and reprinting "Wilhelm Friess."

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter Two: A Seditious Prophecy

The Dutch printer Frans Fraet was executed in Antwerp in January 1558. What we know about Fraet's career as a printer is largely due to the careful scholarship of Paul Valkema Blouw, who established that Fraet was the most prolific (and necessarily anonymous) printer of Reformation literature in Antwerp in the 1550s, and Valkema Blouw suggested that Fraet's publication of Protestant works was the cause of his execution. (See Paul Valkema Blouw, “The Van Oldenborch and Vanden Merberghe Pseudonyms or Why Frans Fraet Had to Die,” Quaerendo 22 (1992): 165–90, 245–72.)

The documents concerning Fraet's trial do not say much about printing heretical works, however. What they do extensively document is that Fraet was accused of printing seditious works, and the only work the trial documents specifically identified was a "very evil rebellious prognostication under the name of a Master Willem de Vriese." This prophecy contained "many grievous things against the secular and also the clerical rulers" and intruded in the affairs of "all clerical and secular princes and potentates and also the common people, arousing the same to sedition or desperation." All copies of Fraet's edition have been lost, but by connecting the many German editions of the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess to Fraet's publication, we now have a clear indication of what Fraet had printed. I provide a complete English translation of the most widespread German edition.

There are a few remaining mysteries whose solutions I leave up to the reader. What might Hans van Liesvelt have thought about these events? He had printed two prognostications by Willem de Vriese whose Protestant subtext wasn't difficult to discern, and now Frans Fraet had brought the name of de Vriese into connection with seditious printing. At the same time, Fraet was at least a personal acquaintance, a fellow Antwerp printer who published his own writings with Maria Ancxt, Hans van Liesvelt's mother. If an anonymous tract printed by Fraet was receiving official scrutiny, Hans van Liesvelt would very likely have been able to identify Fraet as the printer. If suspicion was falling on Hans van Liesvelt as the printer of de Vriese's earlier works, he would have had strong motivation to implicate Fraet. But would Hans van Liesvelt have saved himself by sending Frans Fraet to the same fate that had befallen Hans van Liesvelt's father a decade earlier?

In the same way, there are arguments and evidence to support the view that "Willem de Vriese" was a historically tangible human being, a medical doctor and citizen of Maastricht who died around 1557, as well as the view that "Willem de Vriese" was always a fictive author persona, including the prognostications for 1555 and 1556, Fraet's edition of 1557, and the later calendars and practicas published under the name of Willem de Vriese in 1581 and 1596. I sense essay questions waiting to be assigned.

The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Chapter One: A Strange Prognostication

As the alleged author of the most popular German prophetic pamphlet of the later sixteenth century, "Wilhelm Friess" sounds very much like pure fiction, as the pamphlet supposedly contains a prophecy found with Friess after his death in Maastricht. So I was surprised to discover that earlier works attributed to "Willem de Vriese" of Maastricht had actually been printed in Antwerp a few years before the first German pamphlets appeared. Examining the Dutch origins of "Wilhelm Friess" turned into the first chapter of The Strange and Terrible Visions.

To trace the story of "Wilhelm Friess," I had to start more than a decade before the first German pamphlets were printed with the Antwerp printer Jacob van Liesvelt, who was executed in 1545 for violating the imperial edicts on printing. His widow Maria Ancxt and his son Hans van Liesvelt continued in the printing business, including in their publication programs several annual astrological prognostications. Hans van Liesvelt published two practicas for 1555 and 1556 attributed to "Willem de Vriese" of Maastricht.

I have the name in quotation marks because there is no clear indication that "Willem de Vriese" ever existed. Supposedly an aged and well-known doctor, the city archives have no trace of him. At first glance, his practicas appear to be quite conventional, but a closer look reveals a clearly pro-Reformation message and some notable straying from scientific astrology, including a prediction that "many things that were prophesied long ago will be fulfilled this year." The practica for 1556 predicts the eventual downfall of "Esau Pharmona," supposedly a Slavic prince who oppressed the Christians under his rule. I argue that "Esau Pharmona" is a stand-in for Hapsburg rule over the Netherlands, and that the hidden transcript of de Vriese's practicas - to borrow a highly useful concept from James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance - was pro-Reformation, anti-Hapsburg agitation at a place and time where it could have severe repercussions, as Hans van Liesvelt knew all too well.

Wilhelm Friess: all finished (updated)

The final manuscript of "Wilhelm Friess" has now left my desk and made its way to the publisher. The timeline for this project might be summarized like this:

March 2010: While waiting for the contract for Printing and Prophecy, I realize I need a new project. I discover that one project I was contemplating has recently been published by Christian Kiening. There seems to be a surprisingly large number of "Wilhelm Friess" editions, but since this prophecy was published after 1550, I hadn't said much about it in Printing and Prophecy. There doesn't seem to be much secondary literature on it, so I resolve to write an article - a short, quick article - while I search for the next big project.

July 2010: After turning in the final manuscript of Printing and Prophecy, I start tracking down facsimiles. Some of the texts I find don't look familiar. It turns out that there are two different prophecies, including one that exists in four very different versions, and one attribution of something by Nikolaus Caesareus to Friess.

September 2010: I write the article. I'm not quite satisfied with it. I re-write it. I work up a cover sheet, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing something, so I hold off on submitting it anywhere. I submit an abstract to Kalamazoo instead. Then I find what I was missing: the Dutch back story to "Wilhelm Friess" in Frans Fraet's fateful publication of a prognostication by "Willem de Vriese." Another rewrite ensues.

April 2011: I discover several late-seventeenth century Friess editions circulating under different titles and authorial names. The Kalamazoo paper gets a hasty revision. I start wondering if the next big project is actually the thing I've been working on for the last year.

May 2011: I discover that several passages in both Friess prophecies are quoted from other sources, including Lichtenberger, Grünpeck, and Dietrich von Zengg, making the textual history of "Wilhelm Friess much more interesting than I had thought.

June 2011: I reorganize the article as a book, and start writing. By September I have a complete draft that comes to 56,000 words. Definitely too long for an article, but a bit short for a book.

October 2011. I revise the manuscript and ask if my editor would like to see what I'm working on. She's interested, and the manuscript goes out to readers. I plan on revising the book again, but otherwise I'm done. Still, I have that nagging feeling that I'm missing something important. I keep checking sources.

January 2012. I discover the source of the first prophecy: The Vademecum of Johannes de Rupescissa. This shakes up most of the chapters and the textual history of the first Friess prophecy. Coupled with the discovery a few months later of the French abridgment on which "Wilhelm Friess" is based, the the book manuscript needs a complete revision.

April-September 2012. I finish the revision. I revise the revision. The next afternoon, reader reports show up that need to be addressed. I do so. Two weeks later, a contract is offered. Not long after Thanksgiving, the whole manuscript - at 87,000 words - gets shipped off to the press. This time I don't have any nagging sensations that I've missed something.

July 2013. The copy-edited manuscript is sent back for me to check. I'm in the middle of moving at that point, so checking the manuscript lasts until early September.

January-February 2014. I receive the page proofs, check the page proofs, and prepare the index.

March 2014. I receive the proposed cover art. It's beautiful.

Publication: Slow Conversations

My latest post is appearing this time at the blog of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Also, the page proofs of "Wilhelm Friess" have arrived, giving me a lot to do in the next few weeks.

Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua ignota: a basic bibliography

The fourth article I ever published -  “A New Gloss on Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua ignota,” Viator 36 (2005): 217-32 - was actually the reason I became a medievalist. I had started grad school with the firm intention of becoming a historical linguist, which had been my chosen field since I was a college sophomore. Then in the third week of grad school in my survey of medieval literature, I stumbled upon a topic that was just right for my seminar paper and, eventually, for a master's thesis: Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua ignota, a list of words from an unknown language with Latin and German glosses. For the first time in my life, I was digging into centuries' worth of scholarly research, staring at manuscript facsimiles, and reclaiming new disciplinary knowledge from the unsleeping seas of ignorance and forgetfulness. At least that's what it felt like at the time. It was pretty intoxicating stuff, and I was hooked. I worked tirelessly on my thesis throughout 1997, defended it in December...and then sat on it. I didn't get around to thinking about publication until 2004, when I was in my first post-Ph.D. position and had a better idea how publishing fit into academic careers.

In some ways, the delay was unfortunate. In other ways, everyone is better off for it. When I picked up my thesis again, I had enough distance from the topic that I could pare away the wandering tangents, insignificant observations, and the parts that didn't even convince me anymore. The 160-page thesis turned into a 16-page article, and the slimming down by 90% still seems about right to me.

Those interested in the topic will find a great deal of material about the Lingua ignota, but in some cases enthusiasm outstripped understanding. A short bibliography of indispensable works might look like this:

Manuscripts 

• Wiesbaden Hessische Landesbibliothek Hs 2, fols. 461v-464v. (online facsimile)
• Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. lat. quart. 674, fols. 58r-62r.

Scholarly editions

• Higley, Sarah Lynn. Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
• Roth, F. W. E. Die Geschichtsquellen des Niederrheingaus, Theil III: Sonstige Geschichtsquellen des Niederrheingaus. Wiesbaden, 1880. 457-65.
• Steinmeyer, Elias, and Eduard Sievers. Die althochdeutschen Glossen. Berlin: Weidmann, 1895. 3:390-404.
  [Higley's edition is the most modern, but anyone thinking of digging into the topic should become familiar with the manuscripts and the older editions as well.]

Relevant sections in larger works on Hildegard

• Embach, Michael. Die Schriften Hildegards von Bingen: Studien zu ihrer Überlieferung und Rezeption im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: Akademie, 2003. 252-86.
  [Embach's book is a thorough updating of Schrader and Führkötter. I didn't become aware of it until my article was in print, unfortunately.]
• Schrader, Marianna, and Adelgundis Führkötter. Die Echtheit des Schrifttums der Heiligen Hildegard von Bingen: Quellenkritische Untersuchungen. Cologne: Böhlau, 1956. 51-54.
  [This was a groundbreaking work for Hildegard studies, and secured the Lingua ignota as authentically Hildegard's.]

Recent scholarly literature

• Green, Jonathan.  “A New Gloss on Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua ignota.” Viator 36 (2005): 217–32.
  [Yes, I would actually list my own article as required reading on the topic, but I might be biased.]
• Schnapp, Jeffrey T. “Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua ignota and the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient to Modern,” Exemplaria 3.2 (1991) 268-98.
  [As one of the first modern scholarly treatments of the Lingua ignota, Schnapp's article has been very influential.]

Older scholarly literature

• Reutercrona, Hans. “De fornhögtyska Hildegardglossorna och deras ‘Lingua ignota:’ Ett språkligt kuriosum,” Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift: Filosofi, Språkvetenskap och Historiska Vetenskaper 5 (1921): 93-110.
  [Reutercrona's article is often overlooked as it was written in Swedish, but it shouldn't be forgotten. It was one of the first scholarly articles that wasn't invested in the cultural politics of Hildegard's sainthood, and it's the most thorough attempt to date to analyze the Lingua ignota etymologically. Even if I think that method is a dead end, the idea of approaching it as a linguistic problem is still basically correct.]
• Grimm, Wilhelm. “Wiesbader Glossen,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 6 (1848): 321-40.
  [Grimm, on the other hand, was invested in the cultural politics of Hildegard's sainthood, and it shows. Since Wilhelm Grimm is Wilhelm Grimm, and he was publishing in ZfdA, people still refer to him.]

Johannes von Glogau and the Earliest German Practicas

Now in print:

Green, Jonathan, and Oliver Duntze. “Johannes von Glogau and the Earliest German Practicas: On the Dating and Authorship of Fragmentary Prognostications.” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 88 (2013): 68–85.

When I was revising chapter five of Printing and Prophecy, "Practica teütsch," on astrological prognostic booklets, I noticed that there were a few early practica authors whose work I hadn't seen, so I ordered facsimiles. There was also an anonymous fragment in Berlin, dated no more precisely than 1474-78, possibly the earliest German practica of them all, so I ordered images of it as well. Once they arrived, I glanced at them. They didn't seem to change the chapter, so I moved on.

Last spring I took a closer look at the fragment, which consists of two unfolded sheets. If you virtually reconstructed the resulting gathering, what would it look like, and how would the text be organized? Were there any datable astronomical facts?

It turned out the fragment might be datable, and the sequence of chapters looked quite similar to the sequence used by Johannes von Glogau. As stereotyped as practicas were, individual astrologers often had their own particular style, especially in the early period before the genre conventions were fully established.

I asked Oliver what he thought. He provided some useful corrections. He also pointed out another undated fragment that followed a similar sequence of chapters. Could it be dated as well? We decided it could, and so a joint research project was born, culminating in the article that just appeared in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch.

For dating fragments like these, which turn up with some frequency, we make two methodological contributions. In combination with typographic analysis, diving into the arcana of early modern astrology often permits a precise dating. Also, familiarity with the authors' individual styles will sometimes permit attribution to a particular author.

Consequently, we were able to date the earliest German practica to 1477 with possible manuscript evidence of another for 1476, all by Johannes von Glogau. This points to the route by which printing astrological booklets came to German lands, shows how important the vernacular was even in the earliest period, and makes German practicas somewhat more like contemporaries rather than late imitators of the Italian astrologers.

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

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

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

Opening the IISTC

“Opening the IISTC: An End-User’s Approach to an Essential Database.” Digital Medievalist 1 (2005), http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/green/

(Continuing an occasional series, this would be "The Third Article I Ever Published," in case anyone ever wonders where it came from.)

A decade ago, in early 2002, as I was working on my dissertation on the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel, a very helpful librarian at the University of Illinois pointed me towards the ISTC, at that time available as the Illustrated Incunable Short Title Catalog on CD-ROM. It was fantastic - I could look up every known fifteenth-century printed book, and have all its bibliographic information instantly available. Even more important, it offered a list of all known locations where a copy could be found. I had the impression that there were a lot of copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle around, but the IISTC confirmed it, although there wasn't an easy way to compare the number of copies with other incunables.

The same librarian who had pointed me towards the IISTC also referred me to Paul Needham's extensive review article: "Counting Incunables: The IISTC CD-ROM," Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1999): 457-529. The article not only compared the IISTC to its predecessors since Hain, but also pointed out a number of serious problems with the IISTC and limitations due to its implementation.

I had an idea. I knew that the IISTC made it possible to export records. What if you exported all the records as plain text? For my dissertation research, I had created an Access database to keep track of all the annotations in various copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle that I had examined. Shouldn't there be a way to turn the IISTC into an Access database and get around the limitations of its interface?

There was, but it involved some heavy data manipulation. I learned some rudimentary Perl so I could write scripts to turn the ISTC records into tab-delimited text files for easy import into Access. I also wrote scripts to add up the number of copies, as the ISTC didn't provide copy counts. It took a few months, but I've been making use of the results ever since.

I wrote to Paul Needham to let him know what I had done. He was interested. We exchanged e-mails. We discussed article ideas. And then - it turned out we weren't ready to put anything together yet. I had a method for turning the ISTC into a data source, but I didn't know what to do with it. Eventually I saw a CFP from a new journal, Digital Medievalist. I didn't know of anywhere else that would be interested in Perl scripts written by medievalists, so I submitted the paper in order to establish the method and suggest some ways it might have some significant uses, and it was accepted for publication. It's the one article I have in an open-access online journal, and the only one that lists source code in the appendix.

I imagined that would be the end of my foray into digital methods until 2008, when Paul Needham pointed out some recent work on early book survival rates. The methods of that one-off article I had published in 2005 turned out to be one of the three essential elements, along with understanding of fifteenth-century printing and statistical acumen, in what would become the article I published with Paul Needham and Frank McIntyre in 2010 on incunable survival rates. You never know when research dead ends will lead in new directions.

Digital edition of the week: Sibyllenweissagung (Basel: Martin Flach, 1472-74)

For the history of printing, the fourteenth-century Sibyl's Prophecy is a tremendously important text. It's the earliest vernacular edition from the press of Gutenberg and his associates in Mainz, and some scholars have identified it as earlier than any other edition, Latin or German, still known today. Gutenberg's types were not yet adapted to reproducing vernacular texts, so his edition of the Sibyl's Prophecy represents a fascinating and important early attempt to adapt print technology to different texts and audiences.

I have more to say about the Sibyl's Prophecy - a lot more, otherwise known as chapter one of Printing and Prophecy. I'd better stop here.

The essential scholarly work on the Sibyl's Prophecy is Frieder Schanze, "Wieder einmal das 'Fragment vom Weltgericht' - Bermerkungen und Materialien zur 'Sybillenweissagung,'" Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 75 (2000): 42–63. Schanze's article provides a list of all known manuscripts and printed editions, discusses some of the improbable things that have been asserted about the history and meaning of the text, and points out several important things that remain unknown. We still don't have a critical edition or a complete understanding of how all the printed editions and manuscripts are related.

Schanze's article provides the best accessible facsimile of Gutenberg's edition I know of. I don't know of any digital edition available online. After Gutenberg's edition, the next edition of the Sibyllenweissagung didn't appear until 1472-74 (following Schanze's dating), and then five editions appeared in 1491-93. One of these later incunable editions (ISTC is00492620, GW M41985) is available in facsimile from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. So the release this week of a facsimile from e-rara.ch of Flach's edition (ISTC is00492550, GW M41983) fills a notable digital hole in the history of an important text.

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

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

Average number of leaves in German practicas, 1480-1620

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, here's the German data:

  

And here's the Italian series:

 

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

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

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



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

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