Research links you need to know about: All things VD16 edition

For a very insightful discussion forum about early modern German literature and the development of VD16, take a look at Walter Behrendt's discussion forum. It's hosted at Mediaevum.de, a one-stop source for links to nearly everything related to the German Middle Ages. It's resources for relevant primary and secondary literature and links to digitized manuscripts really shouldn't be missed.

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Six months after sending the final manuscript of Printing and Prophecy to Michigan, I have now received the copy edited manuscript for my review. I'm excited to see the book starting to move into the production process, but I need to respond to the copy editing in the next few weeks, which also coincides with Christmas, prepping two new courses for next semester, and MLA. Posting may be light for a bit.

Going meta

So a little bit of research - namely, following up on the footnotes in Barnes's Prophecy and Gnosis - finds that the history and historiography of Johann Hilten has been untangled to a large degree by Hans-Ulrich Hofmann in an excursus (pp. 662-672) in his Luther und die Johannes-Apokalypse (Tübingen: Mohr, 1982). Hofmann admits that the picture is still murky and more remains to be done, but I don't know if there's enough left for a viable article on Hilten.

And that's good! If Hofmann has already taken care of the philological heavy lifting, then it's much easier to use Hilten as one of the leading examples of another phenomenon I've noticed lately, namely the pronounced interest in early 16th-century prophets in the late 16th and 17th centuries. I've run across several examples of prophecies allegedly first written before 1550 which don't appear in print until 60 or 100 years later. Another is the vision of Sigismund Gratman/Gartanar/Gadaner, supposedly from the year 1526, but with no edition earlier than 1621. There are several others as well. Early Lutheranism apparently becomes a preferred setting for prophecies in the late 16th century, and again during the 30 Years War. At least that's my first impression. Someone should write an article about it.

Chapter One: The Sibyl’s Book

I wrote earlier that my upcoming MLA paper is based on the central argument of Chapter Two in Printing and Prophecy. What about Chapter One? My central concern there is the Sibyl's Prophecy, a fourteenth-century poem that combines the Legend of the True Cross and a narrative of the End Time, and the earliest vernacular work printed by Gutenberg. While his edition of the Sibyl’s Prophecy is preserved in just a single fragment, the text is known from several fifteenth-century manuscripts. (By far the best scholarship on the Sibyl's Prophecy is Frieder Schanze, “Wieder einmal das ‘Fragment vom Weltgericht’ – Bemerkungen und Materialien zur ‘Sibyllenweissagung,’” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 75 [2000]: 42-63.) I argue that, in addition to popular interest in devotional aspects, the manuscript context of the Sibyl’s Prophecy suggests that the work could function as a narrative legitimation for chronicles and prognostications. The manuscript context is admittedly allusive, but the typographic context—comprised of the vernacular editions printed by Gutenberg in Mainz—is unambiguous: all these early editions are related to prophecy and prognostication. While this fact was noted by the print historian Carl Wehmer over 60 years ago, it has been overlooked in cultural and literary studies of early printed texts. Chapter One places Gutenberg's printing of the Sibyl’s Prophecy in the context of fifteenth-century debates about literacy, and suggests that Gutenberg was influenced not only by technological and mercantile concerns but also by the cultural and intellectual currents of his time.

The germ of an article

While looking through Andreas Engel's 1597 Bericht von Johann Hilten, I noticed that Engel describes Hilten as Martin Luther's teacher, and has Hilten prophesying various dramatic things for the years 1516, 1546, 1584, 1600, and 1606. It struck me as curious that Hilten didn't appear in print before 1550 if he had any connection to Luther, so I started searching for other editions. Caspar Füger published a compilation of prophecies for the years 1584-1588 attributed to Hilten, Lactantius, and various biblical passages, and in Füger, Hilten's prophecies are for the years 1580, 1582, 1584, and 1588. In addition to the divergent dates, Engel and Füger attribute different prophecies to Hilten. Several pamphlets attributed to Hilten were later published in 1628-1629 that update the relevant time period but otherwise follow Füger.

So: There's a widely divergent prophetic tradition attributed to someone who had died nearly a century earlier. This seems a bit curious. That's ingredient one.

A first pass through the bibliography finds several references to Johann Hilten in secondary literature, but the most recent article about him looks to be from 1928. Marjorie Reeves has a note referring to Hilten as obscure. The go-to source on 16th and 17th-century Lutheran apocalypticism, Robin Barnes's Prophecy and Gnosis, also mentions Hilten only briefly.

So: Hilten is relevant to studies of Martin Luther and apocalypticism, but there doesn't appear to be significant literature about him. There might be a need for a fresh look at Hilten. That's ingredient two.

Ingredients three and four are luck and time. To untangle the textual history of Johann Hilten, you'd need to find some more sources, and there's no guarantee that they exist. Hunting them down will take some time looking in all the usual places (and, inevitably, some unusual ones as well).

Of course, the place to start is Interlibrary Loan. It's entirely possible that the article from 1928 answers every question anyone might have. It wouldn't be the first time that I've been 80 years late to the game. The other possibility is that the article I can imagine writing was published in 2008. That also wouldn't be the first time.

The utraquist reverse sacramental martyrdom

The UB Halle delivered a new miracle this morning in the form of Andreas Engel's 1597 Kurtzer / Jedoch gewisser vnd gruendtlicher Bericht / von Johan Hilten / vnd seinen Weissagungen (VD16 ZV 5013). I've come across Hilten's name before, but the works in question were too late to be relevant to Printing and Prophecy, so I hadn't taken a close look at him yet.

There's a lot of great material here, including a note that Johann Hilten (died ca. 1500, here transformed into Luther's teacher) died of hunger in prison because he refused to take only the sacramental wafer - apparently living saints can sustain themselves from the eucharist alone, but Reformation martyrs would rather die than partake of the eucharist in diminished form.

And Engel's note about his reading prophetic pamphlets as school assignments, and translating them into Latin as an exercise in style, has a ton of implications for how popular literature was disseminated.

Toledo, Toledo Letter, am Toledosten

I thought I was just asking for a book, but Interlibrary Loan brought two gigantic folio volumes to my office this week, Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling's commented edition of broadside prints from the Wickiana collection in Zürich (thank you, Berkeley).

And immediately a whole new set of Toledo Letters show up. In vol. 2, pp. 314-15 and 334-35 (VII, 156 and 166 for the entire series), two broadsides are reproduced in facsimile that turn out to contain the Scandinavian version of the Toledo Letter (see Mentgen, Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit 111), printed in Augsburg in 1585 and 1585. The footnotes point to further editions, including a translation into Czech. (To my knowledge, broadside prints are not indexed in VD16, unfortunately, or at least not uniformly, so that these broadsides have no VD16 entry.)

These broadsides attribute the prognostication to Johannes Doleta, whose name was already familiar to me. Two editions combine Doleta's prognostication with that of Wilhelm de Friess, while others stylize Doleta as the "Pilgrim Ruth, hidden in the forest," recycling the woodland prophetic identity created a century earlier by and for Johannes Lichtenberger. There are at least five editions of Doleta's prophecy in booklet form known from the years 1586-88 (VD16 ZV 4633 and ZV 22756, as well as two others not recorded in VD16, and one Dutch edition,TB 4427). The Utrecht pamphlets collection has a digital facsimile of one of the unrecorded editions here.

And now it turns out that Doleta is none other than "Johannes of Toledo," at least in a very late and highly modified version (the pamphlets add a foreword and prognostications for the years 1587-1588 and other material that is not part of the older Toledo Letter). So now it appears that the Toledo Letter really did enjoy renewed popular interest in the 1580s with at least 5 pamphlets and 4 broadside editions, and appeared at least once more in the 1620s. Not bad for a prophecy that was already 400 years old.

The Toledo Letter (late late edition)

The prophecy known as the "Toledo Letter" circulated throughout Europe from the late 12th century onwards. Its origin and later versions have been thoroughly documented by Hermann Grauert and, most especially and more recently, Gerd Mentgen's 2005 book Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter. Mentgen's book, which I found extremely useful while working on Printing and Prophecy, records versions of the Toledo Prophecy as late as the early 16th century.* There is only one known version of the "Toledo Letter" in print (known from two editions, VD16 P 4549 and P 4550), in a highly modified version, the "Practica of the High Learned Masters of the School of Athens" (and so the "Toledo Letter" barely gets a mention in Printing and Prophecy). Mentgen suggests that the motifs and rhetoric of the "Toledo Letter" were incorporated into the predictions of mass flooding and other disasters for 1524.

So I was surprised when I glanced at a newly digitized pamphlet, the anonymous Grüntliche und Astronomische Widerlegung / zweyer außgesprengten / falscherdichteten Propheceyungen / uber das 1629. Jahr, and discovered a refutation of the "Toledo Letter," apparently as published in late 1628. No title is given for the pamphlet that is being refuted, but the key components are all there: a conjunction of all the planets in the Cauda draconis as the Sun enters the sign of Libra, a solar eclipse, war, bloodshed, death, and most significantly, the advice to seek refuge from the coming storm winds and earthquakes in a vault between mountains stocked with food for 20 days (see especially the 1460 version of the "Toledo Letter," Mentgen 98 n. 381). The newly digitized pamphlet looks like a close variant of VD17 23:250802M; another edition, for which a complete facsimile is available, is VD17 12:641205M.

*My one wish is that Mentgen, like many other medieval historians, would cite early printed books by referring to a GW/ISTC/VD16 index number to permit easier identification of the precise editions. Citing an author, title, and year, and even adding a printer and place of publication, is often not enough to completely specify the edition consulted.