Some intensive searching in VD16/VD17 turned up something interesting this week: the prophecy of Wilhelm Friess published five times between 1686 and 1690 as a "wonderful prophecy concerning the years 1686 to 1691 in which great changes are discovered by a highly learned man well known to the world" (VD17 1:063073H, 1:088281P, 3:600599Z, 12:121140B, and 32:648152). Except the unnamed learned man wasn't well known; the source was a version of a prophecy last published 120 years earlier. The surprising thing is that the few changes in the text don't have anything to do with the Last Emperor or Angelic Pope, figures from the medieval Christian apocalyptic narrative who show up to set Christendom aright at the end of time. Andreas Schoppe had rejected as a clear sign of devilish influence the idea of a Last Emperor already in 1597, so it's surprising to see the idea return unchanged in 1686. Fortunately I'm not giving a paper in two weeks about the last appearance of the Last Emperor in 1558.
Oh, wait...
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Chapter Four. Visions of Visions: Functions of the Image in Printed Prophecy
Chapter four of Printing and Prophecy is where I finally address the question of what all the woodcuts were doing in the books and pamphlets that I was looking at. In many cases, the woodcuts were not merely summarizing the textual meaning or making it more comprehensible for unskilled readers. For example, the woodcut images in the Prognosticatio of Johannes Lichtenberger tend to dampen the text’s emotional impact rather than heighten it. The combination of prophecy, reading in the vernacular, and images was potent enough to cause government officials - and therefore printers - some concern, and the Prognosticatio woodcuts take pains to keep the audience from getting overheated. But the woodcuts also permit individual participation in prophecy through viewing of the prophetic image. If readers are no longer meant to speak like prophets by copying and preaching the prophetic message (as Johannes Tortsch had foreseen readers of the Onus mundi, his Birgittine collection, doing), the images allow them to see like prophets. Between Lichtenberger and the prognostic works of Paracelsus (1493-1541) lies a continuous tradition in which prophecy becomes identified with images and visual interpretation.
A century after Gutenberg, the prophetic compilations printed by Wolfgang Egenolff in Frankfurt helped establish a prophetic canon (including Paracelsus, Lichtenberger, Carion, sibylline texts, and others) based on a visual approach to prophecy. Egenolff’s compilation represents a development in the history of the printed book where the medium becomes capable of the same kind of antiquity that had previously been the sole domain of manuscripts. Egenolff’s collection was also the means by which the seventeenth century rediscovered the prophetic authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
A century after Gutenberg, the prophetic compilations printed by Wolfgang Egenolff in Frankfurt helped establish a prophetic canon (including Paracelsus, Lichtenberger, Carion, sibylline texts, and others) based on a visual approach to prophecy. Egenolff’s compilation represents a development in the history of the printed book where the medium becomes capable of the same kind of antiquity that had previously been the sole domain of manuscripts. Egenolff’s collection was also the means by which the seventeenth century rediscovered the prophetic authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Monday, April 18, 2011
My wish is their demand
As of fifteen minutes ago, the online catalog of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek included searches limited to VD16/VD17, and it supports Zotero. I wish it would add the VD16 number and grab the URL of digitized editions automatically, but it's still huge progress.
I don't know how recent a development this is, as I was misdirected there by a wonky SSL certificate, and as of five minutes ago I'm getting the familiar VD16 search interface again. If this had been in place a few years ago, it might have saved me many hours of copying and pasting individual fields from VD16 searches.
PS. And Google Books now finds digital copies of both volumes of Johann Wolf's 1600 Lectionum memorabilium, a vast collection of prophecies, chronicle entries, and similarly dubious texts from (what Wolf thought was) sixteen centuries. It's an incredibly important source for many medieval and early modern topics, but it's not widely available, and until now hasn't been digitized. One of the digitized volumes is from the BSB, but the digital edition doesn't turn up in their catalog yet.
I don't know how recent a development this is, as I was misdirected there by a wonky SSL certificate, and as of five minutes ago I'm getting the familiar VD16 search interface again. If this had been in place a few years ago, it might have saved me many hours of copying and pasting individual fields from VD16 searches.
* * *
PS. And Google Books now finds digital copies of both volumes of Johann Wolf's 1600 Lectionum memorabilium, a vast collection of prophecies, chronicle entries, and similarly dubious texts from (what Wolf thought was) sixteen centuries. It's an incredibly important source for many medieval and early modern topics, but it's not widely available, and until now hasn't been digitized. One of the digitized volumes is from the BSB, but the digital edition doesn't turn up in their catalog yet.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Zotero
I've been experimenting with the Zotero citation and note manager plugin for Firefox. Many people recommend it and it's free, but I've never quite figured out what to do with it yet. So lately I've converted my Printing and Prophecy bibliography to a Zotero database. The idea of a one-click bibliography that switches citation format on demand is appealing, although checking footnotes and bibliographic entries is something I don't really mind doing. There are also extensive note-taking and management features for keeping track of all your good ideas. For Printing and Prophecy, I mostly relied on MS Word documents for this. I made notes with the transcriptions of the primary sources, and then compiled the notes into their own document. It seems like having everything in one database might make things simpler.
So, which of the standard bibliographic databases I use everyday are compatible with Zotero?
Answer: None of them. MLA, WorldCat, JSTOR, and the rest work fine for secondary literature, but ISTC, GW, VDiB, ZVDD do not know about Zotero. Or rather, Zotero doesn't know about them. Someone needs to write a web-scraping plugin for each site, and apparently no techie early modernist has done it yet. I've worked on similar projects before, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to looking at the inner workings of Zotero plugins. For now, Zotero will have to prove itself as a citation manager.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Digitalization just in time: Andreas Schoppe, Christliche und Nötige Warnung für dem erdichten Lügengeist der falschen Propheten (1596)
This week the Universitätsbibliothek Halle released a digital facsimile of Schoppe’s Christliche und Nötige Warnung (and of the 1597 edition of the same work under a different title). This comes at just the right time, as I had been hoping to consult it for my article on Wilhelm Friess ever since seeing a reference to it in Robin Barnes’s Prophecy and Gnosis. I’ve been debating whether I should order a facsimile or if I could wait for Halle’s ongoing digitalization project to make it available.
Halle finally came through, and Schoppe turns out to hold a few surprises. Unsurprisingly, Schoppe thinks that many of Friess’s predictions for 1558-1563 failed to come true. What’s more surprising is that Schoppe sees the devil’s handiwork in Friess’s prediction of a righteous emperor who will suppress all heretics and reconquer the Holy Land before giving up his crown; Schoppe objects that a truly righteous emperor should remain in office and continue to govern effectively. But what Schoppe is objecting to is simply the well-known Last World Emperor motif from the standard medieval End Time narrative. There are both chronological and ideological boundaries between “Wilhelm Friess” in 1558 and Schoppe in 1596. On one side, the Last World Emperor is still firmly a part of the eschatological future; on the other, a Last World Emperor is scarcely imaginable.
Halle finally came through, and Schoppe turns out to hold a few surprises. Unsurprisingly, Schoppe thinks that many of Friess’s predictions for 1558-1563 failed to come true. What’s more surprising is that Schoppe sees the devil’s handiwork in Friess’s prediction of a righteous emperor who will suppress all heretics and reconquer the Holy Land before giving up his crown; Schoppe objects that a truly righteous emperor should remain in office and continue to govern effectively. But what Schoppe is objecting to is simply the well-known Last World Emperor motif from the standard medieval End Time narrative. There are both chronological and ideological boundaries between “Wilhelm Friess” in 1558 and Schoppe in 1596. On one side, the Last World Emperor is still firmly a part of the eschatological future; on the other, a Last World Emperor is scarcely imaginable.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Chasing Paracelsus
Or, how I spent my morning.
The Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel just released a new Paracelsus facsimile. Many of Paracelsus's works were printed in the late 16th century, but this was a copy of Paracelsus's Prognostication for 24 Years, one of the most intriguing treatments of prophecy in word and image in the 16th century (which therefore plays a starring role in Chapter 4 of Printing and Prophecy). Heinrich Steiner printed two Latin and one German editions in Augsburg in 1536. According to the HAB, their Latin edition was also from 1536, so I assumed I would find another facsimile of one of Steiner's Latin editions.
I didn't. The HAB copy, place and publisher unknown, has an entirely different title formulation and text layout, and copper etchings rather than woodcuts. I couldn't find any trace of this edition in VD16. Could this possibly be a third Latin edition that had escaped my notice?
Alas, no. A quick look at the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog found two more copies in Germany (BSB München, SBPK Berlin) and one in Austria (UB Salzburg), and Salzburg and Munich date this edition as ca. 1580. That would make much more sense, considering the quality of the images and the boom in publication of Paracelsus's works after 1560.
Extending the search in the KVK outside of German libraries turns up even more copies: University College London and the Wellcome Library in the UK, Toulouse (with a PDF facsimile) and six more copies in France. WorldCat finds 11 copies in U.S. libraries (but I'd treat that figure with some caution, as some American libraries don't always distinguish between originals and facsimiles in their catalogs). This isn't a distribution of copies that points strongly to Germany as the place of origin, by the way.
The record from the Wellcome Library catalog provides to the answer: "Referenced by: Sudhoff, K. Bibliographia Paracelsica 504." The fundamental bibliographic work on the editions of Paracelsus is still Karl Sudhoff's Versuch einer Kritik der echtheit der Paracelsischen Schriften (1894). For this edition, Sudhoff ignores the date of 1536 on the title page and treats this edition as undated. Sudhoff notes that the duration of the prognostication is twice changed from 24 to 44 years and suspects that it was printed, perhaps in France, around 1580 (=1536 + 44). The relatively high number of copies in France suggest that Sudhoff was on the right track.
As usual, I've needed a few hours and access to several different computer databases and digital facsimiles to get up to speed on the state of the art from 117 years ago.
The Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel just released a new Paracelsus facsimile. Many of Paracelsus's works were printed in the late 16th century, but this was a copy of Paracelsus's Prognostication for 24 Years, one of the most intriguing treatments of prophecy in word and image in the 16th century (which therefore plays a starring role in Chapter 4 of Printing and Prophecy). Heinrich Steiner printed two Latin and one German editions in Augsburg in 1536. According to the HAB, their Latin edition was also from 1536, so I assumed I would find another facsimile of one of Steiner's Latin editions.
I didn't. The HAB copy, place and publisher unknown, has an entirely different title formulation and text layout, and copper etchings rather than woodcuts. I couldn't find any trace of this edition in VD16. Could this possibly be a third Latin edition that had escaped my notice?
Alas, no. A quick look at the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog found two more copies in Germany (BSB München, SBPK Berlin) and one in Austria (UB Salzburg), and Salzburg and Munich date this edition as ca. 1580. That would make much more sense, considering the quality of the images and the boom in publication of Paracelsus's works after 1560.
Extending the search in the KVK outside of German libraries turns up even more copies: University College London and the Wellcome Library in the UK, Toulouse (with a PDF facsimile) and six more copies in France. WorldCat finds 11 copies in U.S. libraries (but I'd treat that figure with some caution, as some American libraries don't always distinguish between originals and facsimiles in their catalogs). This isn't a distribution of copies that points strongly to Germany as the place of origin, by the way.
The record from the Wellcome Library catalog provides to the answer: "Referenced by: Sudhoff, K. Bibliographia Paracelsica 504." The fundamental bibliographic work on the editions of Paracelsus is still Karl Sudhoff's Versuch einer Kritik der echtheit der Paracelsischen Schriften (1894). For this edition, Sudhoff ignores the date of 1536 on the title page and treats this edition as undated. Sudhoff notes that the duration of the prognostication is twice changed from 24 to 44 years and suspects that it was printed, perhaps in France, around 1580 (=1536 + 44). The relatively high number of copies in France suggest that Sudhoff was on the right track.
As usual, I've needed a few hours and access to several different computer databases and digital facsimiles to get up to speed on the state of the art from 117 years ago.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Abstract: “The Last Last Emperor and the Birth of the Death of the Author: The Prophecies of Wilhelm de Friess”
This is the paper I'll be giving at Kalamazoo in May in the session on German literature sponsored by Fifteenth Century Studies. The article on Wilhelm Friess is nearly ready to submit, but I'll wait to see what kind of feedback I get on the conference paper.
Abstract: “The Last Last Emperor and the Birth of the Death of the Author: The Prophecies of Wilhelm de Friess”
With more than 30 attested editions between 1557 and 1587, the prophecy attributed to “Wilhelm de Friess of Maastricht,” allegedly found after his death, stands out as one of the most popular German prophetic tracts of the sixteenth century. Although several recent scholarly works have taken note of these pamphlets, secondary literature on Friess is virtually non-existent. A comprehensive survey reveals that the prophecy is in fact two entirely separate texts: the first summarizes long-established End Time tropes including false prophets, an Angelic Pope, and the Last Emperor, while the later version is anti-imperial and pessimistic, describing the invasion of German lands by a diabolical “Destroyer” and drawing motifs from the medieval “Gamaleon” prophecy. Despite an alleged Dutch origin, evidence of popular resonance in the Netherlands is scant. In contrast, printers of Nuremberg and Basel enjoyed great success with German audiences. Both versions of the prophecy appeared during times of religious transition and imperial succession, but the radical differences between the two versions result from their appearance on opposite sides of national and chronological borders. Where the earlier version attempts to reinforce traditional imperial and religious mythologies with the Netherlands at the center of Hapsburg Europe, the latter versions challenge those same mythologies with the Netherlands as part of the Reformed margin. The prophecies of “Wilhelm de Friess” illustrate how current concepts in textual criticism such as Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” arise from the historical context and material conditions of early printing.
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