Comments on a CFP: Christian Prophecies and Competing Concepts of Order, 1500-1800

This CFP came across H-Soz-u-Kult this week (in German, English, and Spanish):

Christian Prophecies as a Reflex to Competing Concepts of Order (ca. 1500-1800)
Numerous cases of early modern prophecies are strongly bound in certain research traditions, e. g. national and religious contexts, or the interpretation as religious or social deviation. For the planned conference, main discussion topics are concrete case studies of early modern prophecies from a broad range of cultural, political, social, and religious backgrounds. There are no geographical limits for the provenance of the case studies; they can have their origin in Europe, the New World, or anywhere else. Thus, we will be able to compare a wider and more diverse range of these case studies and specific aspects of the prophecies. Prophecy is in this context defined as a discussed “divine” revelation to an individual which is linked with concrete instructions and which is addressed to a certain parish, the church as a whole, Christendom, or mankind

Prophecies are more than textual phenomena or rhetorical camouflage. They can rather be seen as a possibility to understand concepts of social order: Whereas one group of individuals could accept the present social order as a divinely ordained system, another group could perceive the divine will to change this very order and propose an alternative, new social order. The competition of diverging concepts of order made it necessary for each group to justify their own analysis of the status quo as the “correct” perception of the current order on earth and of the normative and divine conception of order. In these situations, implicit assumptions and unreflected practices were expressed, reflected, and actualized on a performative level.

Potential prophecies were, however, examined by specific institutions or individuals. In formal proceedings it was discussed whether a case was based on a divine revelation or not. Thus, in a way, ‘real’ prophecies were generated by a process of examination.

In the analysis and contextualization of each prophecy case study, the following main aspects should be discussed:

1. To which concepts of order does the prophecy refer?
   Here, apocalyptic concepts as an offered interpretation of social order are especially of importance, expressed in the diagnosis of the status quo and in an alternative order. Which time concepts are expressed in this context?
2. Which institutions or authorities examined the prophets and prophetesses?
   In this way, the social relevance of the prophecies could be explained. By considering which other types of offences also fell under the cognizance of the institutions concerned, one can reconstruct the social category and context of the phenomenon of prophecy and of the prophetic texts. Whether these authorities at the same time interpreted prophecies for their own needs could be checked.
3. Which arguments are raised in debates on a concrete prophecy case?
   The prophet’s threat can claim evidence through authentication strategies. The so-called “discernment of spirits” (discretion spirituum), for instance, could be based on empirical methods as well as emotions, and could moreover refer to specific bodies of knowledge. A Prophet was not judged immediately, but only after a discussion between different interest groups.

Please send a proposal (max. 2 pages), along with a short CV to Dr. des. Fabian Fechner (fabian.fechner@uni-tuebingen.de) by July 1, 2014.

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This should be a good conference, and I'll be very interested to see the papers that come out of it, but I don't know if I would have anything to contribute to it. I've published some things about early modern prophecies, but the organizers seem to be primarily thinking of a specific kind of prophecy that I haven't often encountered.

Although the geographic scope is broad, the definition of prophecy is quite narrow: "eine zeitgenössisch diskutierte Offenbarung Gottes gegenüber einer Person, die mit einem Handlungsauftrag verbunden war und die sich über das Individuum hinaus an eine einzelne Gemeinde, 'die' Kirche, 'die' Christenheit oder die gesamte Menschheit richtete." Many of the early modern prophecies I've worked with do represent themselves as revelations to a specific person, but others are simple statements of events to come that don't attempt to represent the moment of revelation or an authorial persona. Texts can also move between these two categories by creating a fictive author and revelatory context for a previously anonymous prophecy. It's quite possible that the conference organizers are primarily interested in the preaching of living prophets, which is of course a much different kind of thing, but not all of the early modern prophets I'm aware of were instructed to act or to transmit their revelations to an external audience.

Some early modern prophets certainly were directed to act and to deliver their message to other people - I'm giving a paper about such a case at GSA this year - but the organizers of the Tübingen conference are specifically interested in prophecies that promote "konkurrierende Vorstellungen sozialer Ordnung." While the early modern prophetic texts I work with have a good amount to say about the existing social order, few of them want to upend it; some want to improve it (with rulers who are more just and clergy who live more humbly), and others want to preserve it. So I may not have anything to contribute to that aspect of the conference.

The other question that the conference organizers are interested in concerns the "[k]onkrete Institutionen, Instanzen und Akteure[, die] mit der Überprüfung von potentiellen Prophetien betraut [wurden] oder von sich aus aktiv [wurden]." Here again, I'm not sure that what I work on is relevant. Printers who published prophecies seem to have undertaken their activity on their own, but without a great deal of interest in demonstrating the authenticity of the prophecies; the usual attitude is "discard the false and keep whatever is good (while I make a quick buck off your purchase)." As for the institutions that examined prophecies, the ones that I've come across appear to have always suppressed and never authenticated a prophecy, but that may be due to the nature of the specific material I work with.

So I don't know about this one. It looks like a very interesting conference, but I'm not sure I can address the specific questions that the organizers are interested in. addressing.

Visualizing the seventeenth century

How did the Thirty Years' War affect the German publishing industry? One way to obtain a quick overview is to look at the number of different editions printed per year during the seventeenth, and the most obvious place to turn for that is VD17. While it's farther from completion than VD16, it also contains far more records, well over 265,000. Here's the count of VD17 records per year:

I've done a couple things here. First, I've knocked out the totals for years that are multiples of ten, as editions that have been dated "ca. 1670" and the like would give them undue weight. I've added a 2-year moving average trend line to compensate.

The results seem quite clear. After a burst of printing activity just before 1620, the number of titles declines precipitously. There is an interesting spike in 1630-31 that deserves more scrutiny, and then the number of titles printed annually declines even farther. The recovery beginning in 1640 does not reach pre-war levels until 1660.

Beyond looking at titles, we can also get an impression of how much paper was being consumed by the publishing industry by estimating the number of sheets each book required. Instead of counting titles, we divide the total number of leaves in a book by its format, then add the result for all books published in a given year. We have to ignore differing paper sizes and print runs, so the results have to be treated with caution, however. With that in mind, the result looks like this:

I've knocked out the round decades again. Because the data is noisier, I've added a 5-year moving average. In this view, the decline in German publishing due to the Thirty Years' War is deeper - a decline of nearly 70% compared to a decline of titles by 50% - and longer lasting. The publishing industry's consumption of paper doesn't appear to entirely regain its prewar level even by the end of the century. We have to keep in mind that there might be other explanations. Perhaps publishers were choosing larger paper sizes and thus needing fewer total sheets, or perhaps they were printing larger print runs than earlier.

Abstract: "Dietrich von Zengg in Print"

For the upcoming Revisiting Early Modern Prophecies conference in London in June, this is the abstract I submitted. In the same session, Courtney Kneupper will present a paper on the fifteenth-century context of "Dietrich von Zengg," while I'll cover the print transmission.

Abstract: “Dietrich von Zengg in Print”

The print transmission of the German prophecy known as “Dietrich von Zengg” in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is characteristic for the genre of prophecy, including in ways that call into question the boundaries usually assumed to exist between periods, authorial identities, texts, genres, and media. While most editions were published in the first three decades of the Reformation, others precede the Reformation, and the prophecy enjoyed an active reception as late as the 1620s, another period of crisis in Germany. The prophecy made the leap from manuscript to print at least twice, while some later manuscripts are derived from print sources. The medium of print gave the prophecy its lasting identity as the work of one “Dietrich von Zengg,” supposedly a Franciscan monk from Senj in present-day Croatia, a shared authorial attribution that is not found in the fifteenth-century manuscripts. But the medium of print did not stabilize the text or its alleged author. The prophecy was attributed in some editions to an anonymous Carmelite monk of Prague, and “Dietrich von Zengg” evolved from a monk into a bishop in several editions, and was replaced altogether by “Jeremias von Paris” in another. The transmission of “Zengg” includes both compilation of the prophecy together with other prophetic works; extracting of passages from “Zengg” into other prophecies; extension of “Zengg” with material borrowed from other prophecies; translation of “Zengg” into Latin for use in Lutheran polemic; discussion of “Zengg” in learned debates about prophecy and political fortunes; and use of “Zengg” for oral preaching by a popular prophetic figure of southwest Germany.

How much has VD16 grown?

How complete is VD16? There are many sixteenth-century German printed editions that have entirely disappeared, of course. But how close is the database getting to covering everything that still exists in some form?

Completion is still a ways off yet. One type of evidence for that is how easy or difficult it is to discover undescribed editions. New incunables are still discovered fairly often, but it's not easy to find them - I've never managed it, despite several years of looking. On the other hand, intensive work with the card catalog in just about any large collection of sixteenth-century books, or a long look at the collection in a library off the beaten path, would often turn up editions that hadn't been cataloged in VD16.

Another kind of evidence is the number of editions being added. Since around this time last year, VD16 has added around 757 new records, putting it around 104,000 total records and over 122,500 titles. I believe the only sigla to which new titles are being added are ZV and XL (for German titles printed outside of Germany). If I'm reading things correctly, VD16 has added XL 134-159 over the last year, and ZV 29126-29866. By June of this year, the additions to VD16 will probably bump into ZV 30000, a somewhat amusing test entry meant to illustrate the underlying record format.

Printing the Classics, 1501-1600: How Luther killed Cicero

To give one example of the potential value of the links between VD16 and the PND GND (about which, see here for more), let's take a quick look at printing of works by authors of classical antiquity in Germany in the sixteenth century. The classics were an important part of the market in printed books, and there has been a good amount of research on it.

To get an overall view of the market working just with VD16 would be arduous, however. You would have to identify all the relevant authors and then search for titles by each one. If you're determined to try it, you should expect to spend many days at it.

An easier solution would be to search instead for titles whose authors have a death date before, say, 200 A.D. With the VD16 data linked to the GND, we can do that. Authors who died before 200 are almost entirely limited to Greek and Roman authors of classic literature rather than patristic authors, and excluding "Personen zu Kirchengeschichte" will eliminate the exceptions.

Here's a graph of the results.

Printed titles by authors of classical antiquity per year, 1501-1600

There are clearly some visible patterns, but the data is noisy, and we're suspicious of all those spikes on even decades, so let's smooth out the picture a bit by looking at production by half-decades instead.

Printed titles by authors of classical antiquity per half-decade, 1501-1600

Things look pretty stable after 1525, but the big run up to 1520 and then the steep drop over the next five years looks interesting. When we see something like that happening in German printing, a good guess is that the Reformation is behind it. Did Martin Luther kill off the market for Cicero, the most popular of the classical authors between 1501 and 1520? Perhaps for a while. Cicero editions peak at 94 per half-decade in 1516-20 and then decline to half that number before recovering by 1545. (The first two graphs count editions in slightly different ways than this one does, so there may be discrepancies between them.)

Printed titles by Cicero per half-decade, 1501-1600

This all comes with a few caveats, of course. If the GND is lacking a death date for a relevant author, our search will miss him or her. And the precise mechanism through which an increase in Reformation-related printing would cause a decline in editions of classical authors remains murky at best. On the other hand, it only took a few minutes to see some initial results rather than a few months, and it points towards some interesting areas to look into.

It came from the Personennormdatei

One of the things that makes VD16/17 the most important bibliographic database of early printing at the moment is how authors and contributors are hooked into the Personennormdatei (PND) of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Thus authorial names appear in standardized spelling and are clearly disambiguated. Among all the databases I regularly work with, VD16/17 is the one whose technological framework I'd like to see more widely adopted. There are of course some duplications and other problems, but these can be resolved with time.

Until they are resolved, however, VD16 and the PND will contain a few surprises. For example:

Oldest VD16 author tells all
Bernhard Schmid, author of VD16 S 3129, lives to 157 years of age!
(Year of death should be 1592.)

Time traveler from the sixteenth century
Leonhard Lechner: born in 1553, dies in 1906!
(Year of death, 1606, correct in PND HTML format, but listed as 1906 in RDF format.)

Time traveling astrologer from the twentieth century
Leonhardt Thurneysser zum Thurn born in 1931, dies in 1596!
(As above, correct in HTML but wrong birth year in RDF format.)

Time traveling pope
VD16 H 2143, including (as VD16 J 675) the elegies of Pope John XXIII (1881-1963)!
(I suspect they really meant to link to the antipope of that name.)

The negative man
Kaspar Jungermann, author of VD16 ZV 8792, has come unstuck in time: born in 1567, died in 1537!
(Correct in HTML, but with birth and death years reversed in RDF format.)

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.