Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) [1 ed.] 9780199844661, 0199844666

Citation preview

Miracles and the Protestant Imagination

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor David C. Steinmetz, Duke University Editorial Board Irena Backus, Université de Genève Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoff rey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia THE POVERTY OF RICHES St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered Kenneth Baxter Wolf REFORMING MARY Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century Beth Kreitzer TEACHING THE REFORMATION Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 Amy Nelson Burnett THE PASSIONS OF CHRIST IN HIGHMEDIEVAL THOUGHT An Essay on Christological Development Kevin Madigan GOD’S IRISHMEN Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland Crawford Gribben REFORMING SAINTS Saint’s Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 David J. Collins GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS ON THE TRINITY AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD In Your Light We Shall See Light Christopher A. Beeley THE JUDAIZING CALVIN Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms G. Sujin Pak THE DEATH OF SCRIPTURE AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL STUDIES Michael C. Legaspi THE FILIOQUE History of a Doctrinal Controversy A. Edward Siecienski

ARE YOU ALONE WISE? Debates about Certainty in the Early Modern Church Susan E. Schreiner EMPIRE OF SOULS Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth Stefania Tutino MARTIN BUCER’S DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism Brian Lugioyo CHRISTIAN GRACE AND PAGAN VIRTUE The Theological Foundation of Ambrose’s Ethics J. Warren Smith KARLSTADT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSY A Study in the Circulation of Ideas Amy Nelson Burnett READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 Arnoud S. Q. Visser SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–1714 Variety, Persistence, and Transformation Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. MIRACLES AND THE PROTESTANT IMAGINATION The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany Philip M. Soergel

Miracles and the Protestant Imagination The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany

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PHILIP M. SOERGEL

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3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Soergel, Philip M. Miracles and the Protestant imagination : the Evangelical wonder book in Reformation Germany / Philip M. Soergel. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–19–984466–1 1. Lutheran Church—Germany—Doctrines—History—16th century. 2. Curiosities and wonders—History—16th century. 3. Miracles—History of doctrines—16th century. 4. Christian literature, German—History and criticism. 5. Germany—Church history—16th century. I. Title. BX8020.S58 2012 230'.4109031—dc23 2011026824

135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Marcia, Elizabeth, and Will

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Contents

Acknowledgments

1. The Appropriation of Wonders in Sixteenth-Century Germany 2. Luther on Miracles 3. Nature and the “Signs of the End” in Job Fincel’s Wonder Signs 4. Caspar Goltwurm on the Rhetoric of Natural Wonders 5. The Polemics of Depravity in the Wonder Books of Christoph Irenaeus 6. Enduring Models and Changing Tastes at Century’s End

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

a book that has been as long in gestation as this one has accumulated considerable debts. The research presented here has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities; the American Philosophical Society; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Duke August Library, Wolfenbüttel; Arizona State University; the University of Maryland, College Park; and the University of Bielefeld. Innumerable conference papers, seminars, and lectures have taken its author on numerous trips around the globe, and the comments and suggestions of many scholars have sharpened the arguments made here. Among these are Joel Harrington, Franz Mauelshagen, Neithard Bulst, Sachiko Kusukawa, Joan Scott, Natalie Davis, Tony Grafton, Peter Brown, Giles Constable, Irving Lavin, Jill Bepler, Jenny Spinks, Jürgen Miethke, Johannes Fried, Charles Zika, Ann Moyer, Susan Karant-Nunn, Erik Midelfort, Robin Barnes, Andrew Barnes, Retha Warnicke, Lynn Stoner, Lyndal Roper, Art Eckstein, and the late Bob Scribner. In addition, I am grateful to two thoughtful, yet anonymous reviewers who read the book for Oxford University Press. A large debt, too, is owed to my editor, Cynthia Read, and also to Sasha Grossman at Oxford University Press, both of whom fielded my many questions patiently and carefully shepherded the book through the process from review to final production. I am grateful to both my chairs and colleagues at Arizona State and the University of Maryland, for creating a positive environment in which I could write. At Maryland, I want to mention especially the late Jeanne Rutenburg, a specialist in the exegesis of the patristics, scholastics, and Renaissance humanists, who generously offered her research notes on medieval and early modern commentaries on the Flood, which were infinitely useful in writing Chapter Five. Jeanne did not live to see this work come to conclusion, yet I hope that some of her optimism, humor, and

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faith in the ultimate worth of religious experience are to be found animating these pages. My chief intellectual debts are to Tom Tentler, who has generously discussed most of the issues examined here over many years. He has prodded gently, enlarging the questions I have asked, and he has always done so with a mixture of good nature and erudition. While my family, my wife Marcia and children Elizabeth and Will, are less familiar with the intellectual dilemmas, disputes, and controversies that are treated here, their congeniality and their patience in dealing with a husband and father who has often been engrossed in stories of hydra-headed monsters, blood rains, and strange stalks of wheat has earned them this work’s dedication.

Miracles and the Protestant Imagination

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The Appropriation of Wonders in Sixteenth-Century Germany around noon on November 7, 1492, the thunderous crash of a 350pound meteorite terrified the inhabitants of Alsace, southern Germany, and Switzerland. A small boy was the only witness to the stone’s impact in a wheat field outside the Alsatian town of Ensisheim, but the blast was heard more than a hundred miles away in Lucerne and a number of other southern German towns. In the coming days and weeks, curious pilgrims made their way to Ensisheim to view the rock, including Maximilian I. Although Maximilian took home his own souvenirs chipped from the stone, the king commanded that the rock be moved from its point of impact to the local parish church for safekeeping. There, hung far above the grasping hands of the curious, the meteorite continued to draw tourists for three centuries, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who recorded his visit to the town’s “uncommon aerolith” in the late eighteenth century. The French Revolution and modernity proved to be less congenial to the stone’s integrity. During a wave of late eighteenth-century “de- Christianization,” Ensisheim’s stone was removed from its lofty perch and taken to a nearby museum at Colmar. Eventually returned to Ensisheim, the rock later came to be housed in the town hall, rather than the parish church. In the course of the nineteenth century, the town’s municipal overseers sold off chunks of the meteorite to be displayed in the new natural history museums of the era. Shards of Ensisheim’s rock were thus put on view in places as distant as Chicago and St. Petersburg. Despite such vandalizing, the Alsatian town and its St. George’s Confraternity of the Meteorite continue even today to protect what remains of their treasure, holding periodic fairs to which meteorite fans and amateur astronomers travel from throughout the world to visit the oldest preserved meteorite.1 The centuries-long narrative of this stone’s fortunes is far more than a Ripley’s Believe It or Not tale. Meteorites had, to be sure, fallen in Europe

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since time immemorial. Yet it was not until the late fifteenth century that such an event figured prominently in the historical record, touching off a series of responses that led to preservation and sustained commentary. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, memory of the rock’s impact was kept alive in any number of historical chronicles, books of wonders, and collections of eschatological signs, earning Ensisheim’s stone the pride of place it still enjoys today. The “thunderstone” captivated Europeans’ imagination precisely because the exact forces that had caused it were so imprecisely understood, for it was not until the late eighteenth century that the German physicist Ernst Chladni theorized that such objects came from outer space, not from terrestrial objects that were somehow mysteriously picked up and propelled through the sky. In the early modern world, such stones were exotica—mysterious and inexplicable because the crystalline spheres that composed the heavens were perceived as impermeable to such solid intrusions. Consequently for many, the impact seemed to foretell events of momentous significance. Commentators often agreed that the din of the stone’s crash pronounced the onset of a new age, an age filled with wonders, strange portents, and prodigies. And, in part, they were correct. For in the years immediately following the impact of the Ensisheim meteorite, sustained attention to this and similar events soon became a vital part of the era’s print culture. The most anxious of commentators in these years associated this seeming rise in natural signs and wonders with the imminent end of history, while others saw a natural riddle that presented itself for the untangling. To the modern observer, the events at Ensisheim occurred at a critical juncture in European history: they took place at the boundary between medieval and early modern attitudes toward natural wonders. As Caroline Bynum has shown, the concept of wonder had long been a subject for medieval theologians, chroniclers, and natural philosophers.2 Yet for most of the high and later Middle Ages, Europeans pondered strange events in the natural world as intellectual puzzles. Recommended to readers and listeners alike for their ability to evoke fascination at the myriad complexities hidden in nature, wonders were also subjected to the probing speculation of natural philosophers anxious to unlock the riddle of their causes. As mirabilia (marvels), they were considered inferior to miracles not because they violated nature’s normal patterns as a miracle did, but because—as Augustine and other theologians had long counseled—they occurred against what was known of nature. The wonder, in other words, had long represented nature in search of explanation. As the Middle

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Ages drew to a close, a shift occurred in the centuries-long discussion of these phenomena. It became increasingly common for observers to appropriate nature’s wonders by possessing and preserving deformed infants, strange growths of grain or malformed flowers, and a host of other seemingly curious and mystifying bits of creation. Certainly one of the most visible and tactile evidences of this intensifying fascination with these inexplicable natural events was the rise of the early modern Wunderkammer, the curiosity cabinet, into which kings and nobles poured representative samplings of all manner of puzzling fragments assembled from near and far.3 The discovery of strange new lands across the seas certainly heightened the allure of such collections, prompting speculation about the meanings that reposed in the absolute otherness of these lands and peoples, yet domestic events like the Ensisheim meteorite were also being avidly tracked and their residues collected and displayed.4 This exploitation of wonders was not confined to the shuttered cabinets of princely palaces. In the course of the sixteenth century, the fascination with marvels produced a flood of cheap prognostications and prophecies, as well as more imposing theological and natural philosophical treatises that aimed to broadcast these oddities to a broad audience anxious to understand their deeper meanings. The display of deformed “freaks” and preserved monstrous births commonly documented in public taverns, private houses, and town squares throughout the sixteenth century shows that the concern for nature’s oddities and seeming violations absorbed the interests of the literate and illiterate alike.5 At its inception, this fascination developed unevenly and in very different ways across the continent. In Italy, heightened concern about monstrosities, strange astral events, and natural disasters soon gave birth to a broad and truly popular “prophetic moment” in which commentators linked their dire predictions to the peninsula’s tangled political and military situation during the first phase of the Italian Wars (1494–1529). Particularly in the cities of the northern peninsula, a “highly visionary and charismatic form of religious life” emerged in these years, centered on the consumption of cheap printed pamphlets and broadsides as well as the oral pronouncements of visionary seers, who tried to predict the outcome of developments in the political arena through the reading of natural “signs.”6 Chief among these signs were monstrous births,7 but Italians came to train their eyes intently on the heavens and on the flora and fauna as well, all in the hope of finding a roadmap out of the dismal realities of the present. In the three and a half decades that followed

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1494, a cacophony of prophecies streamed from the presses and pulpits of Northern Italy, and stories about the coming judgments and misfortunes that might one day soon be relieved by some great apocalypse were avidly traded in letters and even diplomatic dispatches. The German fascination with nature’s disorders was slower to develop and coalesced as an interest among the elite circles that surrounded Maximilian I and the empire’s urbane humanists, not as a general fascination of society as in Italy. In the weeks immediately following the impact of the Ensisheim meteorite, for instance, the first of many broadsides appeared to publicize the event, its text written by the Rhenish humanist Sebastian Brant (1457/8–1521).8 In the years that followed, Brant was also to publish a series of accounts of similarly momentous events, exploiting them both in cheaply produced broadsides and in more polished Latin poems. The light that he and others in court and town circles shone on these incidents gradually encouraged other purveyors of cheap print to exploit similar events that had occurred in their own backyards. In turn, humanist attention to natural signs and wonders soon inspired renewed study of ancient divinatory texts, even as it also encouraged many of Germany’s early sixteenth-century historians to track and examine nature’s deviations over time. Thus the German humanist attention to natural wonders did much to touch off both learned and unlearned exploitation of natural wonders in the sixteenth- century empire. As the fountainhead of much of this fascination, Sebastian Brant’s pronouncements on signs and portents clearly deserve a closer look. Although often treated in nineteenth- century literary histories as a revolutionary figure, a humanist who advocated the pure light of learning over suspicion and intolerance, Sebastian Brant shared many of the same strikingly conservative values as other scholars of the early German Renaissance. As an author, Brant is best known today for his Ship of Fools, first published in 1494 and revised several times before his death in 1521. That epic poem recounts the journey of a cavalcade of fools to the imaginary island of Narragonia and is a summing up of the wisdom literature of the Bible, the ancients, and the medieval tradition. Nonetheless, elements of the same social criticism that German humanists were developing at the time infuse the text, including a vitriolic critique of the church and of monks and churchmen. If The Ship of Fools helped to inspire an entire genre of often anticlerical works condemning human foolishness, including Erasmus’s famous oration In Praise of Folly, these criticisms were

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sometimes amplified in the more broadly addressed poems and prophecies that Brant published from the late 1480s through the early 1500s. Although a native Strasbourgeois, Brant worked until 1501 in Basel, where he had taken the doctoral degree in law in 1489. During a long struggle to obtain a permanent university post, he served as a Latin tutor and an editor for several Basel printers, while also composing a steady stream of poetry, much of it copy for broadsides and pamphlets. Like other humanist scholars in these years—most notably Conrad Celtis, with whom Brant shared a number of similarities9 —his works celebrated the Virgin as protector of the Holy Roman Empire, and he longed for the unification of Europe under the emperor.10 Yet Brant, like other humanists, was drawn to the occult sciences, particularly to astrology; his poems often aimed to forecast the political future from the implications he sensed lay hidden in recent earthly and heavenly events.11 These prophecies frequently adopted a propagandistic tone, expressing extravagant praise for Maximilian I and heralding his coronation as King of the Romans in 1493 as the beginning of a golden age in German national life. At the same time, Brant often modulated and reworked his predictions over time to take advantage of the new knowledge unfolding events provided. In contrast to the polished Ship of Fools, the texts for these prophetic broadsides and pamphlets were composed quite quickly. Brant notes in one of them, for instance, that he was rushing to finish his poem within the hour.12 True to that ephemeral style, Brant’s fi rst pronouncement concerning the 1492 meteorite, “Of the Thunder-Stone that Fell in 1492 near Ensisheim,” was printed within the month after the event.13 To search for consistency or an overarching vision in these pieces, then, may be a hazardous task, because in many cases Brant was just trying to get the rhyme right. But if these poems sometimes lacked literary polish and interpretive finesse, they still presented strains of interpretation that were to become important to the armchair prophets that followed him. Brant’s 1492 meteorite broadside was typical of his approach to many of his textual prophecies about natural wonders. Latin and German poems were laid out side by side, while at the bottom of the page a poem consisting of eleven couplets praised Maximilian I.14 At the top of the page, a woodcut cartoon depicts the triangular-shaped stone plummeting through space and crashing in the fields just outside Ensisheim.15 As was often typical of portent prognosticators, Brant locates the meteorite’s importance within a swirling narrative of natural disorder. In recent years

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the skies had been illuminated with comets and strange lights, and odd circles were seen surrounding the moon. The mountains had rumbled; trumpets and armor were witnessed in the skies; and storms of iron, milk, steel, bricks, meat, and wool had fallen from the angry heavens.16 Next, Brant proceeds to relate a series of momentous portents that had also occurred in the reigns of the Hohenstaufen emperors Frederick I and Frederick II, relying on the historical record as a way to fi x more precisely the meaning of the events at Ensisheim. In the time of Frederick I (r. 1155–90), for example, an earthquake and eclipse occurred, and three suns and moons were seen in the heavens. Under Frederick II (r. 1220–50), a powerful landslide brought down a huge stone inscribed with a cross and other secret hieroglyphs. Now, in the time of Frederick III, Brant observes, a “thunderstone” weighing three hundred pounds has landed in a field near Ensisheim.17 Its impact caused several acres to burn, and the crash was heard along the Danube, the Aar, the Rhine, and as far away as the Swiss Canton of Uri. The thunder terrified the Burgundians and the French as well. Only in the final lines of the account does Brant venture a theory about the meteorite’s meaning: it points to coming troubles for the French. The German couplets that follow at the bottom of the broadside praise Maximilian and encourage him to mete out punishment on the French. Austria, Burgundy, and the entire German nation, Brant warns, stand behind Maximilian, ready to support him in these endeavors. Although Maximilian was soon successful in his campaign against the French, Brant’s predictions had hardly been prescient. Even as his broadside was being sold in Basel’s streets, the military offensive he recommended was being executed. On November 26, 1492, in fact, Maximilian had stopped in Ensisheim to view the meteorite (less than three weeks after the impact) while en route to wage battle against Charles VIII of France.18 This battle, part of the ongoing Habsburg–Valois rivalry over the Netherlands, was caused by Charles’s decision to renege on his promise to marry Maximilian’s daughter, Margaret of Austria, and to marry in her place Anne of Brittany, who was already Maximilian’s wife by a previous proxy marriage.19 Following a short siege at Senlis in Franche- Comté, Maximilian was successful in securing Alsace and the Netherlands from the French threat, an achievement that Brant celebrated in a work authored shortly after the conclusion of the battle. In that text, “On the Clear Victory of the Germans at Senlis,” Brant reminds his readers that he had previously correctly interpreted the meaning of the Ensisheim meteorite as a sign of coming good luck for the emperor

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in his battles against the French. Now he went even further, predicting that Ensisheim’s stone signaled not just immediate victory over the French but was also a good omen for Maximilian’s long-term fortunes. Thus Brant concludes “Clear Victory” with counsel for the French king: he should not thwart Maximilian’s designs, since the “auguries and auspices” pointed to a “terrible and disgraceful end” if he continued to oppose the emperor.20 In the months and years that followed, Brant continued to return to the subject of the Ensisheim meteorite, subtly altering his interpretations in light of changing political circumstances. For example, in a Latin poem he wrote late in 1493, he revised his predictions concerning the Ensisheim meteorite, insisting that since the stone’s fall had been an event of enormous significance, its true meanings might be revealed only gradually.21 With the benefit of this improved hindsight, Brant treated the stone’s impact as a sign of the impending death of Frederick III as well as good fortune for his son and successor Maximilian. This reformulated prediction continued to serve the needs of imperial propaganda. Maximilian, Brant observed, should capitalize on his unusual position: all Europe stood behind him—the French, Spanish, and Germans were ready to help him expel the infidels from Europe and end three hundred years of Turkish oppression in the Holy Land. Even the stars were moving into an advantageous position for victory, since hot Mars was soon to achieve supremacy over cold Saturn. It was clear, Brant reasoned, that the time was now ripe for Maximilian to move against the Turks, and in doing so he might initiate the long-hoped-for golden age. It was this revised 1493 interpretation—that the meteorite pointed to a coming victory over the Turks—that eventually came to figure most prominently in later discussions of the significance of the Ensisheim meteorite. The shift had its origins in imperial foreign policy. For most of the 1490s, imperial forces had faced off against Charles VIII, first in the borderlands of France and the empire, but by the late 1490s in Italy, too. In the years after 1500, though, Maximilian temporarily set aside this long-standing rivalry and allied himself with France as he faced the seemingly greater threat of the Turks in the east and south of Europe. As a result, the momentary victory Maximilian had achieved over the French at Senlis faded from commentary in favor of new predictions that, like Brant’s, interpreted the meteorite as a sign of coming victory over the Turks. In 1502, for example, the emperor’s amanuensis, Josef Grünpeck, completed his treatise, On the Interpretation of Prodigies, a work that

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reveals the growing importance the interpretation of signs and natural wonders had among the scholarly circle that surrounded Maximilian. The title page illustration of this work depicts Grünbeck discussing the meaning of celestial signs with another member of the imperial court, Blasius Höltzl. Above their heads, the Ensisheim meteorite soars in midair, while the heavens are bursting forth with a jumble of astral figures and hieroglyphs.22 The interpretation that Grünbeck now ventured—that the Ensisheim meteorite pointed to victory over the Turks—had become standard within the imperial court by that time. Maximilian eventually took seriously the predictions about the stone and the messages it implied concerning the Turks. In the months following his successes against the French in 1493, he turned his attention to Turkish encroachment in the eastern empire, reviving the Order of St. George, an organization his father had founded a generation earlier to combat the growing Turkish threat to Habsburg lands. Initially, Maximilian’s intentions seem to have been defensive, but by 1505 he was emboldened to announce a new crusade against the Turks, mounted not in Europe but in the Holy Land. Although problems plagued and eventually doomed this enterprise,23 Maximilian defended his decision to initiate a crusade by pointing to the many signs and portents that had occurred in recent years. Chief among these was the Ensisheim meteorite: Several years ago the Almighty sent us, as the preeminent head of Christianity, a hard stone, weighing approximately two hundred pounds. It fell from heaven upon a wide field completely unexpectedly. This happened as we were gathering our courage and forces to oppose the French. On the way to that campaign we stopped to view the fallen stone and ensured that it be hung in the local church in our city Ensisheim. This event was a warning, but also a divine command that we lead Christianity from its heavy sins and disorders into the paths of blissful perfection . . . so that the holy faith be multiplied, saved, and preserved.24 The Christian kings of Europe and the princes and estates of the Holy Roman Empire, Maximilian observed, had not heeded that call. God had sent a host of other warnings, including the heavy burden of syphilis, to admonish sinners and urge Christendom to pious action. The purpose of these signs had been twofold: to prompt repentance and encourage Christians to battle against the enemies of the faith, the Turks.

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In this way Maximilian’s pronouncement adopted Brant’s interpretation of the Ensisheim meteorite, even as it transformed that event into the first in a series of wonders he alleged was continuing even as he wrote. This notion—that a string of signs and portents was acting to encourage Christian perfection and unity—had also figured prominently in the poetic prophecies Sebastian Brant published to broadcast those natural wonders that followed Ensisheim in the 1490s. As with his interpretation of the meteorite, Brant’s subsequent prophecies insisted that these wonders were incomprehensible on natural grounds, miracles beyond earthly explanation. Several of these texts evidenced a fascination with recent instances of deformed or monstrous births, including prints commemorating the births of conjoined human twins near Worms in 1495, conjoined sows at Landser near Nuremberg in 1496, and conjoined geese and two six-legged pigs at Gugenheim near Strasbourg in the same year.25 In the first Latin poem he wrote concerning the birth of the so- called Worms twins, Brant concentrated on the political implications of the event. The twins were females born on September 10, 1495 in Bürstadt, a few kilometers east of the city of Worms. Like the Ensisheim meteorite, the children were also a historical first. They were the first-recorded case of craniopagus twins,26 joined at the forehead in a rare, but not always fatal, form of conjoined birth. Despite their disability, the twins survived for ten years and were put on display in cities throughout the empire. Their birth occurred shortly after the conclusion of an imperial diet in Worms that dealt with the growing Swiss rebellion, the French threat to the west, Turkish incursions to the south and east, as well as the mounting restlessness of certain ranks of the imperial nobility and the peasantry. The diet addressed these problems with a number of measures, including the promulgation of the Eternal Land Peace (Ewiger Landfriede), a legal code that outlawed feuding among the nobility; the establishment of an imperial court of appeals, the Reichskammergericht; and the levying of the “Common Penny,” intended to provide a more secure revenue source for the imperial government.27 Although the years ahead would moot the effect of such innovations, Brant hailed these achievements at the time for stemming the tide that seemed to be chipping away at the empire’s integrity. Thus, in his pronouncements concerning the birth of the Worms twins, he turned what might have been an ill omen into a highly optimistic prediction about the imperial future. The children, he observed, had been born joined only at the head, but with otherwise perfectly formed bodies facing each other. Their

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form and appearance, as well as their birth in close proximity in time and place to the imperial diet, was an undeniable sign of divine approval for the recent forces of confederation that had joined the empire closer together than ever before. The event, in other words, confirmed that God approved of binding the Reich together under the leadership of its “head” Maximilian, even as it pointed to the coming unification of the offices of pope and emperor in the figure of a single person and the re-unification of the Western church with its Greek counterpart.28 In the dedication to this work—addressed to Jacob Stürzel, a member of the imperial court, Brant warned of the enormous negative consequences that might follow if subjects did not flee to the protective wings of the Reich’s eagle. He styled the emerging political compromise between the emperor and his most powerful nobles as a defense against the enemies of Christianity and the empire. In the months and years that followed, as his initial hope and optimism began to fade, Brant’s comments concerning the Worms twins grew more negative. Similarly, his discussions of the Landser sow, a conjoined birth famously immortalized in an engraving of Albrecht Dürer, as well as the conjoined geese and six-legged suckling pigs, were extremely pessimistic.29 In these, the traces of hope evident in the immediate aftermath of the Worms diet evaporated; instead, Brant promised that only dire and distressing consequences would follow these “wondrous” events. In these works, it is clear that Brant’s view of nature admitted to a complex order in God’s creation. He believed, in other words, that the Creator had endowed the world with certain patterns and laws from which he rarely deviated. When an occurrence ran counter to this blueprint, Brant invariably considered it a sign, a purposeful event that pointed to even greater changes in the near future. Such a view was clearly opposed to the medieval notion that natural wonders (mirabilia) were inferior to miracles because they were naturally produced but beyond human understanding. Brant’s understanding of natural disturbances—that God produced each and every seeming violation of nature as a message to humankind—thus came squarely up against long-standing ecclesiastical prohibitions of divination as well. In his City of God, Augustine argues that all nature is potentially charged with the miraculous power of God’s hand, and that the single greatest miracle of all is the daily sustaining of creation through his providence.30 Much that appears to be miraculous in nature’s order only seems so to human eyes because human observers are barred from the view that God himself possesses of creation. Here Augustine’s view of the

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natural world echoes his interpretation of time, for while humans in their fallen state can only understand the past and the present, God experiences all epochs, including the future, simultaneously. Thus, when Augustine turns to consider nature’s deviations and wonders, he adamantly denies that these events might be divined for clues to the course of the future. Instead, he insists that anyone fascinated with monsters and prodigies look to them not as a map to coming events but as proof of God’s omnipotence over nature. When viewed properly, Augustine counsels, these events prove certain tenets of the Christian faith. Most notably, the transmutation of bodies evident in events like monstrous birth or the strange growths of plants and animals proves the reality of the resurrection of the blessed and the eternal damnation of the wicked, since such events make obvious God’s ability to transform creation into whatever forms he wishes in the fullness of time. “Yet, for our part,” Augustine pronounced, these things which happen contrary to nature . . . and are called monsters, phenomena, portents, prodigies, ought to demonstrate, portend, predict that God will bring to pass what He has foretold regarding the bodies of men, no difficulty preventing Him, no law of nature prescribing to Him His limit.31 Certainly, such ancient prohibitions of divination had discouraged, without completely destroying, the medieval taste for predicting the future based on wonders.32 Yet as the end of the fifteenth century approached, changing political realities in the empire and throughout Europe mingled with an intensifying curiosity about nature. In turn, there was a growing historical sophistication about ancient forms of divination. At the court of Maximilian I, in particular, humanists came to study ancient divinatory handbooks, new printed editions of these texts appeared, and scholars ventured to amass their own accounts of the meanings and consequences of recent prodigies and portents.33 As a result, humanist seers and prophets realized how the ancients had read the entrails of animals, the flights of birds, and other natural deviations in their attempts to fi x the course of the future. Beyond the more detailed knowledge that study of ancient divination offered, the larger renaissance in learning in the occult sciences opened up new avenues for forecasting the future through astrology, numerology, and cabbalistic magic. Yet for all the inspiration these figures derived from “pagan” and occult sources, the predictions of late-medieval German prophets evidenced

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a deeply traditional Christian flavor. In an epigram treating the stars and signs and their influence on human lives, Sebastian Brant enveloped all thoughts about predicting the future within a traditional despairing commentary on sin and its effects on the natural order. The foul influences the heavens had on people’s lives, Brant contended, arose from no other source than human wickedness: Eclipses, stars, all heaven’s brilliance Planets, signs, influences Work as adversaries, As our own evil does. Then sin brings us to sorrow, To death, tribulation, and sufferings of the heart To pestilence, war, and famine. To illness, pain, and impending death. If we lived in God’s favor without sin And held God as a friend, Then the stars’ influence Would bring no sorrow or care But because we desire to be fools, And live in sin, It is no wonder that the stars disturb us And lead us into all unhappiness.34 Inherent in such pessimism was the notion that an essential sympathy attained between human wrongdoing and larger heavenly and terrestrial forces. The signs “work as adversaries” because of the weight of sin, which “brings us to sorrow.” God produces them as a response to human evil, and thus the misfortunes that follow omens and portents are hardly extraordinary, but completely to be expected. Such observations, of course, rendered Brant’s act of predicting the future moot, but there was little that was specific in his forecasts. “Pestilence, war, and famine”— a triad that German prophets frequently repeated in predictions during the century ahead—was, after all, often the norm rather than an unusual state of affairs. Thus, if the fascination with natural signs and wonders often led sixteenth-century learned observers into “pagan” arts of divination, as Aby Warburg once observed,35 these seekers still ventured there with the traditional voice of a biblical prophet, promising sure and certain punishment as the natural outcome for human wickedness.

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When we turn from the learned humanist culture of late fifteenthand early sixteenth-century Germany, these same despairing strains, which linked nature’s deviations with human guilt, disappear. In contrast to the trappings of Latin learning that characterized works like those of Sebastian Brant, these more broadly addressed texts are noteworthy because of their very lack of moral interpretation or future forecasting. Although the cheap broadsides that survive from these years share the same interest in signs and portents entertained in imperial and humanistic circles, these accounts, broadly addressed to learned and unlearned alike, concentrated on providing readers with both a visual and literary testimony to the events rather than in venturing explanations for their possible significance or their import for the future. In a broadside published in 1512 to commemorate the births of conjoined twins Elsbeth and Elisabeth in the village of Esslingen near Aidlingen in Württemberg, three-fifths of the broadside’s page was given over to illustrating the girls. The accompanying text merely set out the date, place, and precise nature of the children’s abnormalities, without suggesting any theory about the event’s possible meaning.36 In another print published in a different city, details of the specifics of the birth were even more abbreviated. The children were renamed Elsbeth and Margit, but in most other details the account was largely the same. Written in a telegraphic style, it is noteworthy for its utter lack of interpretation: In Upper Swabia a monster has been born from a woman in the city of Esslingen (as one says); from the navel up [it consisted] of two breasts and two heads so that they looked upon each other; four arms surrounded these; and [the monster] had two sets of genitalia. From the hour after birth [they] were dead.37 The printer of both texts exerted far more energy on visually cataloguing the children in a specimen-like way, rather than in commenting upon the surrounding circumstances or predicting the event’s consequences for the future. Although this second text stated that the twins had died shortly after birth, the children were shown in the accompanying illustration as still living, standing in the sparest of landscapes. By contrast, many of the illustrations that had accompanied humanist interpretations of such mirabilia located the misbirth, astral apparition, or other natural deviation within a chorus of disorders, a chorus that was often visualized as occurring simultaneously. Such a pattern of illustration, of course, buttressed

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central contentions of the developing consensus about such events: that these incidents were rising in contemporary times; that such signs were interconnected; that their ultimate causes could be traced to human shortcomings; and that their correct interpretation required proper schooling in classical and Christian traditions, theology, and natural philosophy. Beyond the rarefied discussions of schoolmen, the surviving cheap accounts from the early sixteenth century reveal different interpretive tactics. In this world, printmakers and authors gave their viewers a closeup, so that consumers could concentrate on the specific abnormalities of a single event. Such strategies heightened the sense of awe and wonder evoked by an individual marvel, but at the same time militated against interpretation of the event as a logical outcome of human shortcomings. Such moralizing was actually quite rare in the cheap prints that treated these events at the time. Most of these accounts, like those that told of the Esslingen conjoined twins, were extremely terse. But even when authors did comment in greater detail, they were more interested in establishing the veracity of their “news” than in linking the incident to predictions about future changes and misfortunes. In a broadside treating the 1511 birth of conjoined twins at Spalt near Nuremberg, the text related the precise nature of the children’s malformations. In its conclusion it called attention to all those who had witnessed the birth, including the local parish priest, an advisor to the margrave of Brandenburg, a suffragan priest, and “many others” who had seen the children with their own eyes.38 Such a concern with corroboration became a common preoccupation of the many cheap accounts published in the early sixteenth century that told of similar events. A print announcing a deformed birth at Tettnang in Upper Bavaria in 1516 went to great length to show precisely how the accompanying illustration of the child had been obtained.39 The local count had summoned his painter to draw the infant’s likeness, and the printer had employed the accomplished woodcut illustrator, Hans Burgkmair the Elder, to model his block after that rendition.40 The resulting illustration displays two separate poses of the child, a girl who had a partially formed male twin growing from her abdomen (figure 1.1). In one of these poses, the child sits upright, its right hand poised to grant a benediction like a Salvator Mundi; in the other, the child lies recumbent, grasping her brother’s foot with her left hand. The accompanying text endeavored to establish a lineage for this birth’s image, assuring viewers that “honorable men” had witnessed it and approved of its publicity. Burgkmair’s depiction of the scene aimed to evoke what had been witnessed that day in

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figure 1.1 Abnormal birth at Tettnang near Lindau of a girl with an impartially formed “twin” protruding from her abdomen. The local duke rushed to the scene with his artist, who produced a drawing of the child, presumably upon which the printmaker relied upon as he fashioned his woodcut of the child (Max Geisberg and Walter L. Strauss, eds., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500–1550 [New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974], 2:477).

Tettnang as “an extraordinary and mysterious event” and a “pathos-filled domestic scene.”41 Even when these accounts attempted to satisfy the curiosity of their readers in a more sustained fashion, the information they included often spoke to an event’s temporal reality, its meaning here and now, rather than its future significance. In a broadside published to commemorate the birth of conjoined twins at Landshut in Bavaria in 1517, the printer

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included both front and back views of the children. The infants had two heads, but shared a single torso and had only two legs. The accompanying text recounted which organs the children shared and which were fully formed and separate from each other. To corroborate this evidence, the print observed that a local physician had been called and that a surgeon had anatomized the twins following their death. This examination had determined that the children were, in fact, two souls inhabiting a single body—a judgment likely based upon the presence of two livers in the cadaver. With such highly specific information about the autopsy, the account aimed to dispel the criticisms of doubters and emphasize that two children would live on in the afterlife.42 The divergences evident in the portrayal of these wonders and those that issued from learned, humanist culture point to a variety of competing attitudes toward nature and its deviations. Of course, the differences between learned culture and that of the streets and marketplaces was not absolute, and much was shared between these two spheres. But where humanists like Sebastian Brant looked to signs and wonders as proof of the order that existed in God’s creation and searched for the meaning beneath the suspension of normal rules, those who consumed the cheapest, sparest pronouncements about portents and signs in Germany’s cities seem to have been more concerned with reliable testimony. They desired, in other words, to direct their awe and wonder toward events in the physical world in which the very hand of God could be seen at work. Reconstructing entire mental universes based upon this scant evidence remains, at best, a risky venture. The access to the technologies of literacy that both audiences—the learned and the city dwellers—shared marked them as distinctive and rare in late-medieval Germany and meant that each likely had more in common with the other than with the illiterate world of the countryside. Yet, at the same time, the folklore of the later Middle Ages is replete with episodes and anecdotes evidencing a more unpredictable, less moralized attitude toward nature than that found in the learned culture of the age. Efforts to protect individuals, communities, and livestock from the harsh effects of natural disasters, failed harvests, and disease had long figured as one prominent aim of the religious rituals of town and countryside. Processions involving the Eucharist and saintly images, blessings of fields and cattle, and a rich variety of extra-sacramental acts were practiced everywhere, providing rituals that people hoped might protect against the harsh and unyielding realities of a world in which many lived at the cereal barrier. These rituals were

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not pre- Christian or “magical,” that is, they were not perceived to convey an automatic effectiveness. Instead—as was widely recognized—too often the saints did not hear. The sprinkling of holy water or the grasp of a blessed amulet all too frequently failed to protect against the elements. Yet the seeming alternating ineffectiveness and efficacy of such acts helped to sustain the search for new modes of prayer and practice that might prove successful defenses against nature’s onslaughts.43 Accounts of wonders worked in nature had also circulated in collections of exempla, the lives of the saints, and in the sermons of medieval preachers; notorious sinners struck suddenly by lightning or killed by flood, earthquake, or fire were so numerous as to make them a topos of the age. Certainly, such stories upheld the notion that nature was sympathetic to human acts and behavior. Yet the ability of the saints, the sacraments, and other rituals to defend against or to forestall the normally expected courses of the physical world might also buttress the teachings of the church, belief in the cult of the saints, and other Christian practices and doctrines. Consecrated hosts, statues, and other religious objects that emerged unharmed from flood, fire, or similar natural disasters quickly became the destinations of pilgrims. Raging fires or floods sometimes ceased at church doors, even as the truly pious were able to overcome the body’s fundamental need for food.44 In contrast, the force of other stories fed the widespread assumption that events in the physical world were punctuated by unexpected outcomes, odd fits and starts produced by the finger of God. The very unpredictability of nature inspired tales and incidents in which creation challenged churchly authority. The search for evidence of God’s continuing communication with humankind may have been persistent, in other words, but this quest did not always result in agreement between ecclesiastical officialdom and the laity about the ways in which the divinity operated in the natural world. In 1383, for example, marauding knights burned the Saxon village of Wilsnack, and—in the still smoldering ashes of their church— parishioners found three unconsumed, blood-flecked hosts. As news spread of this Eucharistic triumph over the forces of nature, Wilsnack became an enormously popular pilgrimage destination, even as the incident soon prompted questions from members of the church hierarchy. Wilsnack’s miraculous hosts seemed to have reenacted Christ’s sacrifice in a manner more tangible than usual. But had they actually been consecrated? Most ecclesiastical officials agreed that they had not. To allow pilgrims to venerate unconsecrated hosts was, from the perspective of the

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ecclesiastical hierarchy, to sponsor idolatry. On several occasions in the fifteenth century, church officials in dioceses and archdioceses in northern Europe condemned the devotion and prohibited pilgrimage to the site, but Wilsnack survived nonetheless. Its popularity grew, until its eventual suppression in the sixteenth century at the hands of Protestant reformers.45 Despite centuries-long prohibitions, holy place cults also continued to flourish on mountains and in streams, lakes, and springs throughout the countryside. The faithful revered these places because they sensed that there was a numinous presence at such sites, although devotions like these sometimes produced controversies as bitter and protracted as those that raged around Wilsnack. In the minds of many theologians, bishops, and ecclesiastical officials, the taste for these sites was a remnant of a preChristian world that needed to be vigorously suppressed. The connection of springs and wells with the underworld raised fears of demon spirits as well. But outside ecclesiastical circles, the divine presence listed in the world where it willed. In his sixteenth-century Bavarian Chronicle, the humanist Johannes Aventinus related a by-then folkloric tale of one such notorious site, a holy spring at Laaberberg, whose curative powers were discovered in 1417. Locals and even the ruling duke of Lower Bavaria came to bathe in the holy spring, and the site’s healing powers became widely known throughout the region. When the presiding bishop of Regensburg learned of the site, he sent investigators who pronounced it a superstition; the spring was filled in and the surrounding chapel boarded up. In telling the story, Aventinus allowed Bavaria’s peasants to have the last word. The following spring, he concluded, heavy rains and floods ravaged the countryside around Laaberberg, and the locals blamed the bishop for raising God’s anger.46 Flood was thus nature’s response to the bishop’s attempt to hold back the healing effects of a divinely sanctioned spring. Similarly, any number of local folktales told of pictures and statues that had been discovered in trees, streams, or in the midst of prominent natural features in the countryside. When priests retrieved them, they often mysteriously returned to their points of initial discovery, which only seemed to confirm a numinous presence and initated new devotions at the sites.47 Pessimism, punctuated by glimmers of hope like these, was thus a part of the broader universe of possibilities late-medieval Germans shared about nature. Fire, earthquake, and flood were all too unstoppable; as a consequence, statues, pictures, Eucharistic wafers, and relics that had survived these forces became objects for people’s wide-eyed, pious gaze. Objects like these were revered and sometimes collected, carefully

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catalogued and preserved for display before throngs of curious onlookers at regularly convened “salvific shows” (heilbringende Schauen).48 As natural wonders like the Ensisheim meteorite and dramatic misbirths like the Worms twins fascinated sixteenth-century society, it was these longstanding traditions of visual piety that shaped these events’ publicity in German streets and markets. There people craved images, narrative testimonies, and physical remnants of wonders—events outside all known natural processes, dramatic testimonies to God’s power to intervene in the daily order of things and change the course of subsequent events. Certainly, many of those who consumed accounts of deformed infants, natural disasters, and celestial apparitions may have freely admitted that such events were an all-too-common reality in this vale of tears, a realm shaped and subjected to the weight of the race’s shortcomings. Yet it was a taste for spectacle and mystery that dominated among the audience that consumed cheap print in the early sixteenth-century German towns. Among these consumers the very unresolved nature of the wonder—that it was a perplexing riddle whose meaning was known only to God—sustained its force and popularity. A half century later, the demands that nourished such publications had changed, and the tone of most prints that appeared in Protestant cities had grown undeniably darker. Even a cursory glance at the cheap print of the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s yields the undeniable conclusion that we have entered another world.49 Those who consumed cheap print in these years now heard an incessant Cassandra’s chorus denouncing sins, either as specific transgressions in the traditional mold of the seven deadly sins or as the newer incarnation of the uncompromising Protestant principle of human depravity. In this late-Reformation world, fashion often provided Lutheran divines the thin edge of the wedge to criticize specific human failings. In his 1555 devil book, On the Pant’s Devil, the prominent preacher and theologian Andreas Musculus made the point that the contemporary craze for men’s Pluderhosen, capaciously wasteful pants that were worn in tandem with an immodest codpiece, deformed the divinely created human form and transformed men into something monstrous.50 It did not take long for others to seize upon Musculus’s metaphor to argue that such vanities were now springing to life and were being divinely condemned in the contours of misshapen nature. In December 1563, for instance, a girl born near Erfurt appeared with a number of abnormalities, including a horse’s snout instead of a face, a pointy hat, flesh that looked like elaborately worked sleeves at the arms, and hands and feet that

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figure 1.2 1563 Monstrous birth of a girl at Renchen in the vicinity of Erfurt. The commentator, Johann Gölitz, identified the wasteful style of the Pluderhosen in the folds of skin at the child’s legs and related the girl’s other abnormalities to sins present among princes, nobles, burghers, and peasants (Walter L. Strauss, ed., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600 [New York: Abaris Books, 1975], 3:916).

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were monkey’s claws (figure 1.2). Perhaps most prominently, though, the child sported the detestable Pluderhosen.51 That this last item had been discovered on a young girl might have figured as a sign of God’s displeasure with the pants’ effeminacy. Instead, Johann Gölitz, the local minister who interpreted this event, saw the child as a highly specific condemnation of society’s four estates. From head to toe, he related the girl’s deformities to the princely estate, nobles, burghers, and the peasantry. Every order, though, suffered from a similar malady, a combination of pride, arrogance, and gluttony that caused them to squander their resources in vainglorious display. The evils Dame Fashion inspired were thus identified in the contours of this female infant, but when a woman’s ruff was found on a stillborn boy in 1566 at Brotterode near Schmalkalden, the theologian Christoff Vischer took a different interpretive tack. Vischer’s commentary outlined a dual meaning in the child’s deformities. The boy, to be sure, pointed to the rising ills pride was working in contemporary times, but he also represented God’s intentions to sow a contrite, feminine heart in all his children.52 If Fischer and Gölitz found that deformities in nature pointed to the ills Christians had long understood under the rubric of the seven deadly sins, others were to transform such displays into proof for the more thoroughgoing concept of total depravity. After having witnessed the birth of a hideously deformed child at Pleetze near Stendhal in 1579, pastor Andreas Celichius published a pamphlet relating the child’s infirmities: the infant had been born without skin and with a helmet-like form atop its head, crystalline eyes, and roomy folds at the legs that again resembled Pluderhosen. Like Fischer and Gölitz, Celichius related these infirmities to specific ills in the body social, yet he also saw a more complete denunciation at work, a condemnation of a general unworthiness that inscribed a gaping abyss between the divinity and his subjects. “We are all degenerated devil’s spawn,” he observed, “and we carry the worm of Adam’s apple in our bones, blood, and marrow.”53 For Celichius, then, the monstrous infant was more than a set of encoded messages about the future or human failings, as Sebastian Brant had imagined it. Instead, the child was an icon of sin—icon in the original sense of that word—because the minister believed the child’s deformities had been inscribed directly by God. Such inscriptions might appear, not only within the human family, but also in the barnyard. On the Monday following Low Sunday in 1578, a shepherd had delivered a deformed lamb with eight legs, four ears, and a serpent’s mouth in the village of Stedersdorf in the territory of Lüneburg (figure 1.3).

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figure 1.3 1578 deformed birth of a lamb at Stedersdorf in the County of Lüneburg. Because of the animal’s surplus limbs, the commentator saw the lamb as looking more like a crab, a sign of humankind’s regression and partnership with the devil (Walter L. Strauss, ed., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600, 2:824).

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To the observer who wrote the text for the broadside treating the birth, the lamb was a clear sign of divine anger at the poisoning effects of human depravity. This did not prevent the author from entertaining even more specific speculations about just why God’s anger had taken this particular shape, a shape that transformed the seeming innocence of a lamb into a crab-like creature: Perhaps with this four-eared, eight-legged monster with its snake’s mouth He is sending us an image of how we prefer to be the devil’s serpent and ram rather than righteous sheep and how we are now going backwards like the crab, having attained the crab’s walk.54 Relying upon the wisdom of the Volksmund, wisdom that had long associated the crab’s movement with regression and retrograde motion,55 the commentator here linked the deformed birth to fears of human devolution. For late-Reformation readers, monstrous infants, malformed plants, and other “freaks of nature” may have stirred fears of human decline and degeneracy in this way, but events observed in the skies were even more immediately troubling. Among these must be counted the discovery of the first supernova in 1572, the appearance of the unusually bright comet of 1577, and the sightings of many instances of multiple suns and moons known respectively as parhelia and paraselene—all subjects frequently exploited in the late sixteenth-century press, most often to terrifying effect. Many of these events could be explained on natural grounds, yet long-standing lore—both learned and unlearned—nonetheless linked them to a subsequent increase in misfortunes on earth. In addition, a far larger number of celestial incidents treated in the press defied all natural explanation. These included a host of celestial visions in which the nighttime skies were illuminated with rods, pitched swords, and massed hordes of warriors. In 1562, for example, the Wittenberg theologian Paul Eber told readers of a vision that had lasted in his town for most of the night of March 18. Fiery images of warring hordes had lit up the skies, a sign of some great coming change in the political regiment, which would not occur without the gruesome destruction of war.56 A few years later, observers at Dessau witnessed the midnight vision of a white eagle with outstretched wings and an armor-clad warrior riding a steed. The horse’s bridle sparkled with a yellow light at the mouth that looked like a star, while another star appeared above its head. The vision persisted

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well into the night in a sky that was illuminated only by a quarter moon. Eventually, the warrior disappeared and then his horse, but the white eagle remained a while longer floating above the town. The meaning, the broadside warned, was clear: “Punishment is at the door; the rod is readied.” All that was left to do was to throw oneself on God’s mercy, confess, and await the Last Judgment with joy.57 If the end was imminent to this commentator, others were not so certain. The author of a broadside relating a “terrifying” sign seen in the heavens on October 17, 1570, was convinced that his vision (a rod poised in the hand of God seen around a moon surrounded by emanating rays and other symbols) foreboded coming war, pestilence, famine, and inflation—all signs of the end times. But he reminded his readers that in this vision, the hand of God had not yet taken up the rod to strike but was merely caressing that instrument between his fingers. As before the Flood and before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God was giving men and women one last chance to repent.58 Heavenly signs like these promised coming retribution, even as an uptick in natural disasters suggested to some that the reckoning was already underway. A steady stream of reports of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, floods, and other natural disasters flowed from the presses in Protestant towns in these years. When those reports touched on meteorological events, they often confirmed a fact disciplined observers well knew: in the years after 1560, average temperatures were becoming colder and the weather more extreme. Such were the conclusions the Zurich theologian Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75) recorded in his diary, conclusions that were shared by other members of his city’s intelligentsia, including Zurich’s indefatigable collector of cheap, sensationalistic broadsides and pamphlets, pastor Johann Jakob Wick.59 Climate change underway in Central Europe certainly contributed to an increase in misfortunes, as the warming period of the early sixteenth century began to give way to the Second Little Ice Age around 1570. During the next sixty years, this climatic event would suppress spring and fall temperatures and increase precipitation, decreasing agricultural yields dramatically and leaving populations prey to rising food prices, more frequent flooding, and famine.60 While the disasters arising from a colder and often wetter climate did figure in the press in these years, it is interesting to note that the most common category of prints to express optimistic hopes—that God would provide sustenance for his children and that the dearth and famine might soon end—sometimes opposed the pessimism bred by generally bleaker

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weather. Reports of “corn” or “grain rains” in which grain fell from the heavens like Old Testament manna (figure 1.4),61 of wheat stalks discovered bearing a superabundance of fruit,62 and of a fruit tree that “miraculously” bloomed twice in a season63 were just a few of the instances in which we can see a deep longing for more seasonable weather shining through the moralistic rhetoric. Even a glut of prints relating the many appearances of “bearded grapes” (figure 1.5),64 a phenomenon due to mold nourished by persistently wet conditions at harvest time, could be presented in a more upbeat tone, although one that likely had a limited appeal. Such events, their publicists proclaimed, were not fearsome, but God’s fatherly reminder that wine must be consumed with an elder’s wisdom. Still, the grapes rotted, rendering their vintage an undrinkable moral commentary. This transformation of decaying fruit into a sermon of

figure 1.4 1570 “grain” rain reported at Zwiepalen and Ried in southern Germany. Grain rains were typically interpreted as signs of God’s benevolence and said to recall the manna of Exodus (Walter L. Strauss, ed., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600, 2:666).

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figure 1.5 1610 cluster of “bearded grapes” discovered at Prague, a sign that was usually interpreted as a warning of the wisdom and temperance necessary to consume spirituous drinks (Wolfgang Harms, ed., Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Die Sammlung der Herzog August Bibliothek (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), I:30).

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amendment of life suggests the almost boundless limits to which late sixteenth-century evangelical moralists might go in their efforts to convince their audience of human shortcomings and the evils of sin. The record shows, though, that these efforts were not, as has sometimes been argued, symptomatic of a society gripped by anxiety65 or suffering the inordinate effects of a guilt complex. Instead, the Lutheran fascination with nature, born of the moral appropriation of awe and wonder that was well underway in the late-medieval world, came to be used instead by evangelical divines anxious to promote nature as a tool for inculcating those Protestant teachings that flowed from the doctrine of total depravity. The present study is not a general study of miracles and the varied functions they came to play in a distinctive German Lutheran piety. Nor does it concentrate on broadsides and pamphlets, those documents greeted a generation ago as indicative of a “popular” voice in the sixteenth century but more recently revealed to have been linked to learned speculations. Instead, it examines one genre of evangelical writing about natural wonders and miracles—the Wunderzeichenbücher (literally, “books of wondrous signs”)—that began to appear in Lutheran centers in the 1550s. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to these texts as “wonder books.” With one notable exception—the series of three volumes of signs and portents published by the natural philosopher Job Fincel between 1556 and 156266 —Lutheranism’s sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century wonder books were written exclusively by university-educated theologians and pastors. These texts were compendia, that is, their accounts of wonders were collected from other preexisting broadsides, pamphlets, and cheap ephemera—from correspondence and word of mouth and from ancient, medieval, and contemporary histories. In the years immediately following their appearance in the 1550s, wonder books and cheap broadsides became linked in a circuit of continual cross-fertilization. Wonder book authors turned frequently to recent broadsides and pamphlets, anxious to collect evidence of events that confirmed their views on the mounting effects human sinfulness was working in nature. In turn, many of those who subsequently exploited similar events in cheap print had read, or had a passing familiarity with, the arguments used to explain these events in wonder books. As a result, the rhetoric treating these events in more broadly addressed broadsheets and pamphlets grew darker and their warnings about human failings more extreme. Over time, wonder book authors tried to outdo one another in cataloguing signs, so that by the end of the sixteenth century these collections

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had often grown from octavo and quarto books of several hundred pages into enormous multivolume folio editions. Although many became highly influential and were frequently reprinted, these texts were aimed not at a general, but a learned audience. The wonder book was a prescriptive book; it hoped to explain the various pathways, media, and reasons behind God’s intervention in the natural order for its readers, even as it also included hundreds of accounts of wonders that came to do double duty as exempla in sermons and other texts. Carefully examined, then, wonder books allow us to gauge changes in the uses of wonders by evangelical theologians in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as well as the ways in which evangelical divines tried to define, defend, and promote belief in miracles. Numerous other insights also become apparent from a close examination of these texts. The general flourishing of this genre in the years following Luther’s death reveals tensions and strains within the emerging evangelical confession. In these troubled years, as evangelical theologians and church officials squabbled over numerous issues, the testimony of nature offered guidance and indisputable proof for some who searched for confirmation of their theological judgments. The attention these thinkers granted the book of nature in these years ran counter to Luther’s own notions about the relative importance of signs and wonders. In Chapter Two, I examine the Reformer’s own attitudes toward nature and its wonders. While he occasionally indulged a fascination for explaining some recent sign or portent, Luther was always insistent that miracles and natural wonders were a form of divine revelation distinctly inferior to the Word. But if he usually downplayed prophecy constructed from natural events, Luther did inspire watchfulness among his followers anxious to discern the presence of God in the natural order. As Chapter Two demonstrates, Luther’s views concerning the natural world were complex. If at times he expressed the typically bleak notion that nature was little more than a mirror of human sins, he also took much consolation from the beauty and seeming regularity of natural processes. Overall, he frequently expressed a surprisingly optimistic assessment of worldly order. Such buoyancy, though, is frequently absent from those who examined miracles following Luther’s death. While each of these figures contended that their interpretation of the meaning of signs and wonders lay closest to the mind of the Reformer, it is often the influence of Philip Melanchthon that can be seen animating the discussions of these late sixteenth-century scholars concerning wonders. And even when these figures distanced themselves from Melanchthon during the fractious

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years of the 1550s, they could not escape the training they had received in the educational system he had fashioned, with its foundations in natural philosophy, rhetoric, and history. Job Fincel, the subject of Chapter Three, may have turned his back on Melanchthon and joined the competing faction of schoolmen active in Gnesio-Lutheran Jena, but he continued to treat wonders in terms of the natural philosophy he had been taught in Wittenberg. Fervently apocalyptic, he approached miracles as proof of a decay of nature, paving the road to the Last Judgment. Although Caspar Goltwurm was similarly urgent in warning of the end, the methods by which he arranged his Wunderwerck und Wunderzeichen Buch (Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles) were quite different.67 In Chapter Four, I examine this popular work that relied on the disciplines of historical chronology and rhetoric that Melanchthon had nourished for years at Wittenberg. Convinced that the signs and wonders God worked in the heavens and on earth were analogous to the tropes that constituted rhetoric, Goltwurm aimed to provide his readers with a key for unlocking the hidden meanings of these divine utterances. In the years that followed Fincel’s and Goltwurm’s treatments of wonders, others stepped into the fray to evince new systems for schematizing these events, as well as explanations for their rising frequency. Certain that the seeming surge in natural aberrations was a warning of evangelical apostasy, the Gnesio-Lutheran extremist Christoph Irenaeus published a series of jeremiads from the 1560s to the 1580s warning of the enormous consequences that would occur from blunting the harsh edges of Luther’s doctrine of total depravity. Chapter Five examines Irenaeus’s texts. A follower of the uncompromising Matthias Flacius, Irenaeus was, like his master, convinced that in the postlapsarian world sin was the very essence of human nature. Although both Flacius and Irenaeus came to be condemned as latter-day Manichees and lived as itinerant exiles, they still managed to defend their positions frequently in print and to attract dedicated admirers. If Flacius, the editor of the great project of the Magdeburg Centuries, looked to history for confirmation for his theological positions, Irenaeus was instead drawn to find proof for his conclusions in the world of nature. The three wonder books Irenaeus wrote between the 1560s and the 1580s displayed an increasingly bleak and dismal perspective that contended the human race was, in fact, demonic.68 Irenaeus’s attempts to prove this dark interpretation of the doctrine of original sin testify to the role that evangelical theological disputes played in these years in conditioning attitudes toward nature. When I began this

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study, I was convinced that vast distances of rhetoric and interpretation must have separated his brand of Flacian extremism from the disciples of Melanchthon in the same period. The final chapter of this work, however, shows that few differences in theological conclusion separated those who wrote about natural wonders in this period. Chapter Six examines Andreas Hondorff ’s 1572 Promptuarium Exemplorum—the most widely reprinted Philippist collection of exempla and natural wonders from the period—as well as Hondorff ’s many imitators in Philippist Saxony.69 These texts relied on Melanchthon’s methods in Loci Communes to order the wonders, signs, and exemplary acts they catalogued, but their emphasis on the enormous weight of Original Sin and on the sympathy of the natural realm to human wrongdoing was as persistent as any GnesioLutheran literature. For all the authors of late sixteenth- century wonder books, human violation of the Law was the ultimate cause for all disturbances in nature, and—by extension— a rising tide of sin was the cause for the contemporary rise in signs, portents, and natural disasters. These authors did not perceive of sin in an abstract or distanced sense as moderns might, but in a highly particular way. For the processes of nature, these authors often warned, worked according to a kind of inexorable mechanics, directly overseen by God and as certain as the rising and setting of the sun. The production of wonders—understood as signs and portents painted in the heavens; as malformations revealed in barnyards or birthing chambers; or as disasters of fire, flood, and earthquake—were the media through which God expressed highly specific dissatisfactions with humankind. Each event, these authors warned, was explicit punishment for a particular vice. In this way, the evangelical wonder book attempted to drive home a vital distinction long central to Reformation teaching: the relative differences between the realms of Law and Gospel. Wonder book authors were wont to tell their readers that all things in the worldly realm operated according to the stipulations of the Law, but in the perfection of the Gospel that would one day exist, the prohibitions and punishments of an angry God would no longer hold sway. This was not meant to console, but to prompt the mostly clerical readers of these collections to preach repentance and Christian discipline ever more intensely. Thus a close analysis of these texts reveals a deep uneasiness at the heart of a maturing Reformation, an uneasiness prompted by the growing realization that the teachings of faith alone were insufficient to ensure social discipline.

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Shortly before his death, D. P. Walker examined the long history of Protestantism and miracles in a short but suggestive essay.70 Walker observed how the modern Protestant doctrine of the “cessation” of miracles—miracles had been worked only to establish the church and had ceased once that institution had been planted—had developed only slowly, espoused as a firm principle only at the end of the seventeenth century. From his previous study of possession and exorcism in early modern England and France,71 Walker was well acquainted with the vastness of both Catholic and Protestant writing on miracles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet he knew that the long-reigning Weberian paradigm of a Protestant “disenchantment of the world” had frequently discouraged scholars from examining much of the literature treating the supernatural in the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican traditions. Consequently, he encouraged future historians to take up the task of unwinding the many threads of experience and discussion in which miracles continued to play a vital role in the early modern Protestant world. The present study aims to contribute to that unwinding. Like Walker, I have become convinced of the complex genesis of the theological principle that most “mainline” Protestant churches still espouse today: at some point in the post-Apostolic age, miracles ceased. But, in studying the birth of that principle, I have realized that the journey is just as fascinating and provocative as the destination itself. This study consequently abandons the consideration of miracles at a point well before the firm establishment of the principle of the cessation of miracles around 1700. It concludes just after 1600, at a time when the pulpits and presses of Lutheran Germany still resonated with miracles. That point nonetheless marks an important marker in the development of the principle of cessation. For the bleak vision that nature could only be understood through the lenses of sin began to give way in those years to other notions, notions that stressed that human beings could apprehend other, more positive reasons for the divinity’s interventions in nature. That realization proved to be a critical foundation for the increased scrutiny of the supernatural by seventeenthcentury natural philosophers. Two final clarifications are in order before embarking upon the discussion that follows. First, I want to explain my use of the terms miracles and wonders in this work. I refer to the texts compiled by sixteenth-century evangelicals as “wonder books” to distinguish them from the “miracle books” of late-medieval and early modern Catholics, which were collections of favors granted through the intercession of saints and were usually

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kept at a specific shrine. The word wonder best captures the subject matter of these Lutheran texts, since they most often related events worked in nature, as opposed to the healings that occurred at contemporary shrines. Yet, to denote the larger phenomena of speculation about all these events, I rely on the word miracles. This distinction is rooted in sixteenth-century usage. While evangelical wonder book authors might carefully catalogue the differences between omens, wonders, prodigies, portents, signs, ostenta, and the like, they just as often used the term Wunderzeichen (miracle) to refer to an individual event, or to the phenomena of natural wonders generally. Consequently, I have also used the word miracles in this study’s title and at points throughout the text to denote this commonly accepted evangelical terminology, a terminology that elevated these events above their role as mere “marvels” in the Middle Ages, a category long considered distinct from and inferior to miracles. Finally, the charged word imagination here refers not to the role that wonders played in the developing Lutheran confession as a whole but to the vital speculations these events sparked in scholarly studies and university classrooms.

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Luther on Miracles the protestant reformation erupted in a world that was simultaneously expectant and complacent. For some, the natural order and the heavens seemed to be speaking with an increasingly clear voice, warning that some great apocalyptic transformation was about to occur. For others, nature’s punishments were an ancient and inexorable burden. Perhaps nowhere can the interplay between these opposing assessments be witnessed more vividly than in the controversies surrounding the prediction for a great flood in 1524. First promoted in 1488 in the work of the Habsburg court astrologer Johannes Lichtenberger, the prediction fermented in a host of practica and prognostications in the years after 1500, before escaping from the hands of learned speculators and inspiring a torrent of cheap, spectacular pamphlets and prints.1 As the fateful year approached, fear gripped many quarters of the continent. In Germany, as the pamphleteering heated up, the polemical combatants divided into “flood” and “anti-flood” camps. With their title pages emblazoned with images of rainbows, the majority anti-flood party warned their readers that the prediction of a second deluge was a dangerous extra-biblical prophecy, one that surely could not occur because it would violate Noah’s eternal covenant with God. Against such comforting reassurances, prophets of a coming flood published rebuttals, decorated with inverted rainbows. The weight of human depravity was now so great, such tracts warned, that God was surely soon to set aside his consoling promise to Noah and expunge the human race.2 It was in this milieu, both pregnant with anticipation for dramatic change and weighed down by skepticism, that Martin Luther’s message of justification by faith attracted its first converts. Regarding the predictions of a second great flood, Luther was a skeptic. During Advent in 1522, he preached against such prophecies, while admitting then and at other times that the “signs” did seem to point to coming change.3 His opposition to divining the future through the motions of the stars or the shape of some

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natural anomaly was consistent with his underlying Augustinianism. It was also consistent with his evangelical theology presented in his treatises of 1520: prophecy, miracles, and the natural knowledge of God could never supersede the teachings of the Word. Yet apocalyptic hopes and fears accompanied the movement he inspired from the outset, drawing Luther into those speculations as well. In the historical justification he sometimes granted his movement, which his followers even more vigorously promoted, the light of the Gospel had been allowed to shine forth once again, but only for a time. The Word would now accomplish its redeeming work, preparing the world for the Last Judgment. These dimensions of Luther’s thought are well known, but his attitudes toward nature and God’s interventions in it are less familiar and often surprising. The present chapter explores three dimensions of Luther’s natural and supernatural theory. First, it examines his famous critique of the saints and their wonders, demonstrating how the campaign to eliminate traditional saintly thaumaturgy was consistent with other dimensions of Luther’s early Reformation theology. Then, it explores the Reformer’s own statements about natural wonders, examining his pronouncements on the famous case of the deformed Monk Calf of Freyberg of 1523 and a number of other comments on signs and portents. Finally, the chapter concludes with an examination of Luther’s more general, Augustinianinspired theology of nature. The Luther that emerges from this close textual reading is quite different from the pessimistic character that figures in some recent studies.4 This picture is also at odds with the unrelieved bleakness that was often expressed by the wonder book authors who followed Luther in the later sixteenth century. In short, Luther’s ideas about nature and its wonders proved as elusive to them as they have often been to the generations that followed him.

The Saints and Their Miracles During the later Middle Ages, belief in the saints and their miracles sustained a widespread, truly popular religiosity—shrines and pilgrimages multiplied almost everywhere throughout Europe. The tens of thousands of accounts of wonders recorded at these shrines and often publicized to the faithful were primarily responsible for this surge. The medievalist Richard Southern once argued that the most important map of early medieval Europe would be one representing its pilgrimage routes rather than

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its commercial traffic.5 Certainly, by the year 1500, commerce had made far greater inroads into European society than in the dreary days of the sixth or seventh century, yet Europe’s pilgrimage networks remained vital to both its spiritual and financial wellbeing. In the years before the onset of the Protestant Reformation, scores of new shrines appeared in central Europe, and traffic to these sites increased. This wave of deepening devotion had both a “long-distance” and a local dimension. While some sought out the promise of indulgences in Rome, Santiago, or Walsingham, locally confraternities, parishes and villagers journeyed to shrines nearby. In his famous colloquy, “A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake,” the humanist Erasmus mocked the vogue for new saints and shrines, yet he focused on the most ambitious religious tourists of the age, those “extraordinary pilgrims” who neglected hearth and home to endure months, even years of journeying in search of cures and the promise of grace at the continent’s most prominent shrines.6 Erasmus’s famous criticisms, though, belie the far more common experience of Europeans. Most sought the intercession of the saints in their own neighborhood, making promises and vows to these figures in almost every conceivable life situation in the hopes of attaining a friendly saint’s aid. Over the centuries, Europeans’ affection for saints became intricately entwined with the church’s “economy of salvation”; the faithful routinely left gifts at these holy places, and the church hierarchy attached indulgences to pilgrimages and the veneration of relics and images. It was these beliefs and practices that Luther began to attack around 1517. Although the Reformer’s distaste for vows, pilgrimages, and all manner of what he judged “idolatries” and superstitions was firmly fi xed by that date, Luther’s attitude toward the saints and their miracles nonetheless displays subtle shifts over time. There was little in the early life of Martin Luther, though, that would have marked him as the future revolutionary interested in expunging the saints and their shrines from the religious landscape. From an early age, Luther was certainly aware of the long-standing custom of vowing to saints, and—although he may never have promised a pilgrimage—he too appealed to these figures as a young adult in at least two critical circumstances. The most famous of these instances is Luther’s famous vow to St. Anne in the thunderstorm, which occurred around 1505, when he was in his early twenties. It was this promise to St. Anne that led Luther to the monastery rather than a legal career. That famous incident was preceded by another one, a year or two earlier. While traveling home alone from Erfurt, Luther severed an artery in his leg. Fearing that he might bleed

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to death, he prayed to the Virgin Mary to stop the flow. Although Luther would later mock his faith in the Virgin’s aid, in the years that immediately followed the event, he seemed to have found solace in the teachings of the church concerning the saints and the efficacy of prayers and pilgrimage directed to them.7 During his famous trip to Rome in 1510–11, for instance, Luther appeared to have been far more interested in the traditional rituals of a pilgrim than in the negotiations that he and his companion were conducting about the future of his order.8 On the way home from that journey, he made a detour to meet the famous beata, Ursula Lamenit, who was notable for subsisting only on the Eucharist.9 Although Lamenit was later revealed as a fake, Luther accepted at the time the widely held notion that sanctity and miraculous feats of asceticism were linked. In the years after his 1512 transfer from Erfurt to Wittenberg, Luther’s attitudes toward traditional religious practices began to change, subtly at first, but with increasing speed in the period leading up to the Indulgence Controversy. During most of this period, though, Luther’s theology of grace and salvation remained fundamentally orthodox. As Martin Brecht has shown, Luther strove in his early years as a professor and preacher at Wittenberg to develop a theology of humility, one that stressed that sinners’ contemplation of their own unworthiness was necessary in working out the processes of salvation. Luther, in other words, laid out a theology that emphasized cultivating a deep sense of personal sinfulness that might throw into stark relief the gracious aid Christ offered the sinner. These were still essentially voluntaristic and synergistic assumptions, well within the traditions of late-medieval theology. And within these views, the saints and martyrs of the Church might still play a significant role, a role that Luther styled in 1514 as a refuge for the sinner.10 By 1515–16, though, Luther’s tone and tactics were altering, and his statements concerning the saints and their miracles over the next five or six years show a considerable range of views concerning these traditional beliefs. In his first series of Lectures on Romans, for example, Luther insisted that the saints had no independent merit apart from that which Christ gave them; these figures should thus function as models for the Christian, but in a new way. The faithful should realize that one did not venerate the saints themselves, but instead concentrated on the ways in which their lives exemplified the great works Christ might produce in human subjects.11 At the same time that Luther outlined this notion he also adopted a newly critical stance toward the historicity of the legends and exempla long associated with the saints. Here his attitude was similar

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to that of Erasmus and other humanists, who were beginning to subject traditional hagiography to a new skepticism they hoped might prune away age-old legends about the saints and instead concentrate the attention of the devout on these figures’ piety. Luther’s pursuit of such an aim can be seen in August 1516, as he prepared a sermon for the annual celebration of St. Bartholomew’s Day. On the morning of the feast, August 24, he wrote a hasty note to Georg Spalatin, Elector Frederick the Wise’s archivist and librarian, asking him to send along relevant passages from St. Jerome’s Letters and his On Famous Men about the martyred Bartholomew because he was dissatisfied with the “nonsense and fables” that he had read in Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend and Peter de Natalibus’s Catalogus Sanctorum.12 With the passages from Spalatin in hand, Luther proceeded in the day’s sermon to attack the ways in which the stories about the saints had been embarrassingly embroidered over time.13 The scope of Luther’s attack on the traditional cult of the saints was not just historical or textual. The range of his early criticisms of the evils of traditional devotion to the saints can be witnessed most vividly in a series of sermons the theologian gave on the Ten Commandments between July 1516 and February 1517.14 In these, he demonstrated a thorough understanding of folk religious customs as he attacked the ways in which Christians sought aid and gain through venerating the saints. While Luther rejected the many new cults that had recently appeared, including those devoted to St. Anne, he also counseled that disease had its place in God’s scheme since it might lead the Christian to heaven. He criticized the veneration of saints for the sake of obtaining protection from the plague or some other mishap or disaster as a superstitious practice that violated the first commandment’s prohibitions against idolatry.15 Attacks on the social and religious ills saintly veneration caused—neglect for the parish, immoral behavior at saints’ festivals, and so forth—also found their way into this critique. Yet at this early date—that is, before the “salvific breakthrough” that followed the Indulgence Controversy— Luther advocated clearing away these specific evils rather than eliminating saintly veneration altogether. As a result of this purification of devotion, he hoped that Christians might strive more vigorously toward righteousness through true works of merit, rather than through the false rituals long associated with the saints.16 For several more years, Luther continued to envision this kind of purified and internalized memorializing of the saints, a new sort of veneration that might concentrate the Christian’s attention on the great works God

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had wrought through these figures and the role that saints might play as models for pious emulation. The saints, for instance, continued to function in Luther’s influential “Sermon on Preparation for Death” of 1519, in which they are pictured as present at the deathbed of sinners, communing with the dying in their afflictions.17 In that widely circulated sermon, they are no longer intercessors; they might be more aptly described as fellow travelers, companions who suffer with the dying in their travails. But Luther’s most extravagant praise and reworking of the concept of sanctity in these years was in his famous commentary on the Magnificat of 1521,18 where again he advocated an internalized, highly spiritualized concentration on the Virgin’s piety and its ultimate divine causes. Mary is a model of true humility, Luther argues, because in her famous prayer before the angel she is completely unaware of her own selflessness; she is surprised that God has chosen “to regard the lowliness of his handmaiden.” As such, her true humility admits of no human cause but is worked in her, produced by God. The completely passive nature of such a view is also mirrored in Luther’s denial of any kind of intercessory or mediating role to the saint. God’s grace flows to her, transforming her into a paragon of virtue, but that virtue admits of no ability to intercede or alter the course of events among her admirers. Through this new kind of intellectualized, internalized devotion, Luther aimed to replace the bargaining and bartering he sensed lay at the heart of the evils of contemporary devotion to saints. Although Luther strove to reform saintly veneration, new strains of criticism of the saints and their miracles were beginning to multiply in the Reformer’s works around this same time, too. In 1520, for instance, Luther published the three famous treatises that presented the kernel of his early evangelical message: The Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On Christian Liberty. Salvation by faith awarded as a free gift of God’s grace, the primacy of the scriptures, and the priesthood of believers—these ideas prepared the way for the dramatic reduction of traditional religious practices that occurred among evangelicals in the years that followed. Most notably, though, in their embrace of notions of total depravity and utter human passivity, these treatises outlined a radically new path to salvation. Any possibility of the Christian’s participation or mediation in the process of salvation was here rejected in favor of a new vision in which the sinner was completely subject to the divine will. Not surprisingly, then, two of the tracts of 1520 considered the evils of venerating the saints; in them,

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Luther contemplated the role that miracles had long played in sustaining the belief in saintly intercession. In the Address to the Christian Nobility completed in June 1520, Luther vigorously stated his case against the traditional links between sanctity and miracles.19 He denounced the veneration of the saints, with its confirming miracles, as part of a “deceived religion,” and he compared the vogue for pilgrimages and other worship directed at the saints to the idolatries of the Israelites following the time of the patriarchs.20 He attacked the “field and forest chapels” to which people went “running off ” senselessly, without forethought.21 The wildly popular devotions of the later Middle Ages—places like Wilsnack, the Grimmental, Regensburg, and so forth—Luther charged, served only to increase clerical greed, even as they wasted the time, money, and efforts of the laity. Sometimes, as Luther pointed out, these devotions had been sustained by a slew of fraudulent miracles that were merely clerical forgeries. Yet the Reformer also knew that it was hardly credible to dismiss as frauds all the thousands of miracles that had been recorded at Europe’s shrines over the centuries. Instead, Luther set forth several ideas about miracles that were to play a vital role in many of his later treatments of the subject and in evangelical theology over the coming decades. First, he insisted that miracles did not confirm the sanctity of belief because the devil could also work wonders to deceive people and encourage false faith.22 Here Luther molded the dire eschatology of his day to his condemnation of contemporary miracles, drawing—as he would often do in subsequent years—upon Christ’s preaching of the last days in Matthew 24:24 (“There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders”) and Paul’s prediction in 2 Thessalonians 2:9 that the coming of Antichrist would be accompanied by “signs and lying wonders.” In this way Luther admitted the reality of many of the miracles long recorded in the medieval tradition, while judging them all the same as demonically produced fantasies. If the many idolatrous devotions that had grown up around the saints were prohibited, he contended, such false wonders “would quickly cease.” The development of a second strain of Luther’s thought concerning miracles can also be seen in the Address to the Christian Nobility, although in this first of three great treatises from 1520, it is not expressed in such a straightforward and direct manner as it would later be. In this work, the Reformer judged miracles to be inferior confirmations for religious teaching compared to the power of faith and the Word of

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God.23 The many innovations, corruptions, and idolatrous practices that he condemned within the church were thus a direct consequence of the infidelity of Christians to the Word of God and were—at their foundation— a rejection of true religion. The elaborate testimonies of the late-medieval church of devotion to these figures did the saints no honor, but still popes and bishops “rained down” indulgences upon these practices so that their coffers were enriched. The spontaneous “running off ” of the faithful in search of indulgences, shrines, and wonders was, moreover, a sign of a “great unbelief among the people, for if they truly believed, they would find everything in their own churches . . . ” For it was in the parish, Luther counseled, that one found “Baptism, the Sacrament, preaching, and his neighbor, and these are worth more than all the saints in Heaven because it is through God’s word and sacrament that they have all been hallowed.”24 Luther was to return to the question of the relationship between faith and miracles in the months ahead. At the conclusion of his Babylonian Captivity of the Church,25 completed several months following the Address, he pondered the sacrament of extreme unction and outlined the relationship between faith and miracles more explicitly. The Reformer denied any sacramental character to the anointing of the dying, insisting instead that it had been a practice of the early church “by which they wrought miracles on the sick,” but that its efficacy had long since ceased. Such anointing was not practiced generally, but only for those who, because of their infi rmity, were unable to bear with a firm faith the trials of sickness God had sent upon them. “These, the Lord allowed to remain in the Church, in order that miracles and the power of faith might be made manifest in them.”26 As he continued to explore the implications of these healings for contemporary times, Luther aimed to demonstrate that the Apostle James had credited such healings, not to the actual ceremony of anointing, but to the “prayer of faith” that was said over the sick. If such prayer were made, even today, over a sick man—that is, prayer made in full faith by older, grave and saintly men—it is beyond all doubt that we could heal as many sick as we would. For what could not faith do?27 In this way Luther came to attribute the outward signs worked among the apostles and saints to the strength of their inward faith, a distinction that again shifted attention away from human agency toward the

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miraculous potential of the belief that God produced in the elect. In numerous subsequent sixteenth-century evangelical treatments of this theme, Lutheran theologians were often to reproduce this distinction, insisting that it had been the miracle-working power of faith, not the merit or the agency of the apostles, that had performed the wonders recorded in the New Testament.28 Luther’s statements here may have held out the possibility that the “age of miracles” had ceased, but his praise of faith’s potentialities tended to undercut that conclusion all the same. This tendency—insisting on the one hand that the apostles were able to work miracles for a time only to establish the Church and on the other hand maintaining that faith has its own miracle-working power—continued to interact in Luther’s mature evangelical theology. The interplay between these two notions prevented Luther from articulating a firm doctrine of the “cessation of miracles,” as it did for his later sixteenth-century followers as well. As in other areas of his thought, the Reformer proved to be cautious about making blanket pronouncements, since such judgments might presume to know the will of God and the workings of the Holy Spirit. This ultimate reluctance was often typical of Luther’s comments on any issue that impinged on divine power or the course of future events. When he considered questions about the imminence of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment, for instance, Luther frequently insisted that the “signs seemed to be ripe” for some transformation, even as he usually cautioned that he was “no prophet” or that the will of God was not readily discernible. Similarly, Luther sometimes argued that miracles had been granted only for a time, but then he countered—as in the Babylonian Captivity—with extravagant praise of the possibilities inherent in the untapped wellsprings of a faith that might “move mountains.” In the more than two decades that followed, Luther used the evangelical principles outlined in these early Reformation works as a razor, subjecting an increasing number of traditional church teachings to examination. The trajectory of his thinking about the saints and miracles was similar to that of other dimensions of his theology. At first he aimed to keep as much medieval belief and practice about the saints alive as was possible within the new religious reality, trying to remold the traditional popularity of the cult of the saints into a new evangelical religion, before ultimately discarding such beliefs and practices altogether. In 1521, for instance, Luther still envisioned that a new internalized memorializing of the saints would take the place of the perceived “excesses” of devotion

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he attacked, as indicated in his famous exposition on the Magnificat celebrating the Virgin Mary’s piety as testimony to God’s benevolence in providing exemplary human models for Christians. But by the following year, he had abandoned even that position of compromise, and in his exemplary collection of sermons, the so- called Christmas Postil, he insisted that any attention to the deeds, lives, and miracles of the saints was altogether too dangerous. In the “Sermon for the Festival of the Epiphany,” which took Matthew 2 as its text (the account of the journey of the Magi), Luther advocated a test of scripture for all beliefs and preaching and recommended his readers steer clear of a “flood and storm of miracles.” The examples of the saints were too dangerous, leading Christians to prize the purely human teachings and innovations of these figures and causing them to ignore the “pure and clear” testimony of the scriptures: So it is not the will of God that we should fi x our eyes on their [the saints’] example, but rather on his Scriptures alone. For this reason he ordains that the saints often confront us with human doctrines and works; likewise he disposes that the impious often teach the pure and clear Scriptures, so that he may better preserve us on either side against both offenses, on the left hand from the evil lives of the impious, and on the right hand from the fine and ostentatious lives of the saints. For if you do not look to the Scriptures alone, the lives of the saints are ten times more harmful, dangerous, and offensive than those of the impious. For the wicked sin gravely and their sins are easily recognizable and must be avoided. But the saints present a subtle and fine show with their human doctrines and this is likely to lead astray even the elect as Christ says, in Math 24[:24].29 In this passage Luther rejected any hint of the medieval concept of imitation; even the “modeling” piety envisioned in the commentary on the Magnificat, for instance, is here completely abandoned in favor of a new concentration on the Word, a concentration he hoped would clear away the human innovations that over time had clouded the clarity of the scriptural message. Luther returned on many occasions to explore the relationship between faith, the scriptures, and miracles, making the distinctions that were sometimes only hinted at in his works from the years 1520 to 1522 bolder and more explicit. Still, the development of Luther’s thinking on the subject of

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the saints and their miracles was not always linear, and particular events sometimes caused him to fall back on traditional notions about the importance of miracles and the “gifts of the Holy Spirit” as a proof of apostolic authority and a preacher’s calling. At the end of 1521, for instance, Luther’s close associates Philip Melanchthon and Nikolaus von Amsdorf became powerfully impressed by the preaching, prophecy, and visions of Thomas Müntzer and the Zwickau Prophets, whose antinomian tendencies were calling for the abolition of infant baptism and other traditional practices. Melanchthon, who was in charge of the church at Wittenberg during this period of Luther’s friendly arrest in the Wartburg, judged the sincerity of these figures genuine and thought that their appearance might be a sign of that “pouring out of the Spirit” foretold in the scriptures as a sign of the last days. Yet in dealing with the group, Melanchthon also sought advice from Luther, who responded that the early Christians had dealt with similar problems of “false prophets” whose messages seemed to be confirmed by miracles. Luther advised Amsdorf and Melanchthon to “try the spirits,” insisting that Müntzer and the prophets must by necessity prove their calling. God sent trials (Anfechtungen) to those he singled out for prophetic revelation. The office of a prophet was not easily undertaken; the Old Testament figures had not wished it, and had labored under it. The pain of this experience of becoming a conduit for the voice of God seemed to be missing in these latter-day figures, and Luther dismissed the predictions, dreams, and visions that Müntzer and the prophets were then promoting.30 While in this case Luther dismissed prophetic claims, he sometimes insisted—in later battles against other “false brethren”—that miracles be present as a sign of divine calling. As radical preaching continued in the months after the suppression of the Peasants’ War, for example, Luther preached his “Sermon against the False Prophets.” Here he took aim at the unsanctioned street preachers (Winkelprediger) and enthusiasts (Schwärmer) who were common figures in a reformation far more radical than his own.31 He argued for strong prohibitions against unsanctioned preaching and insisted that when a figure lacked a call from the authorities or a community, his message had, by necessity, to be confirmed by miracles.32 Two years later, though, the Reformer had jettisoned this demand for miraculous confirmation, insisting that miracles were not sufficient proof, since “the devil could work miracles, too.”33 And by the early 1530s, Luther was insisting that a regulated office of the preacher needed to be overseen by both worldly and spiritual authorities.

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Despite such a recommendation, Luther came to hold out the possibility, even as late as 1532, that a preacher’s ability to perform miracles might trump government regulation. In a published letter originally sent to his longtime friend, Eberhard von der Tannen, he advised him on dealing with unsanctioned preaching. Tannen was the castellan of the Wartburg and a decided opponent of the Anabaptists in his vicinity; he had approached Luther for advice on how to stop the practice of second baptism as well as the furtive house preaching that was occurring in the area under his oversight. Luther’s colorful response likened the Anabaptist and sectarian preachers to serpents who slithered into communities and aimed to do the devil’s bidding through seductive words—words that were leading thousands to damnation. The Reformer outlined the measures that should be adopted to deal with them, even as he advocated applying strong state and church oversight of the office of a preacher. Yet in his denunciation of such preachers, he still taunted with the ironic question: “Where are your miracles, [that prove] that God has sent you?”34 Clearly, the notion that miracles confirmed apostolic authority still tempted Luther, even at this late date, although by this point that principle may have been little more than a rhetorical taunt. In this same period Luther made bolder his early Reformation observations that miracles were a distinctly inferior form of confirmation; the signs, he often warned, might deceive, and such events were clearly of less significance when placed against the authority of the Word of God and the faith it produced. In his Lectures on Isaiah, which were delivered at Wittenberg in 1528 and published in 1531, Luther examined the role that the signs played in Old Testament prophecy. God worked these miracles, as he always did, “for the confirmation of the Word,” and although miracles continued to occur after the establishment of the Gospel of Faith, they “seem foolish.”35 Similarly, in his Sermons on John, delivered during 1530 and published in 1532, Luther argued that miracles only had a role as an initial confirmation for the Word and that they were always subordinate to the saving, life-transforming function of faith.36 Miracles, Luther reminded his audience, preserved only the body, but faith granted eternal life. Because they were a lesser form of proof, they were problematic— leaving the Christian open to deception and to pride. In his sermons on The Sermon on the Mount (1530), for instance, Luther treated wonders and signs as “seductive,” and the ability to perform them, he argued, had led many a saint into error. Such gifts, in other words, could be a tremendous burden, since they might beget pride in those who were singled out to

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perform them, and they often led the faithful who observed them into the great apostasies Christ warned of in Matthew 24.37 And in his Commentary on Galatians of 1535, the third and final treatment the Reformer conducted of that Pauline epistle, he devoted the fullest attention yet to the potentially deceptive power of miracles. The Galatians, Luther charged, had been deluded by the pharisaical arguments of those who claimed that they had witnessed Christ’s ministry and miracles. These “false prophets” may have performed miracles themselves to mislead the young church in Galatia, since Christ declares in Matthew 7:22 that “the wicked also perform miracles.” Not unpredictably, Luther used this observation polemically against the “papists” of his own day. But as he ultimately observed, the miracles by which the Galatians were seduced were no match for the apostolic truth of Paul’s evangelical message.38 As Luther more clearly divided the respective roles of miracles and faith, he also advanced a new argument in the 1530s in which he delineated two different kinds of miracles: wonders God worked on the soul and those he performed on the body. The Reformer seems to have fi rst made this distinction sometime in 1531, since it is recorded in an early conversation in the Table Talk, the record of Luther’s refectory discussions his student boarders kept and published posthumously.39 Yet it was in a sermon delivered on Septuagesima Sunday in 1535 (January 27) in which he left behind his fullest exposition of the concept.40 In that sermon, Luther insisted that the apostles had been able to heal the sick, cast out demons, and work a host of bodily signs and wonders—both among the Jews and heathens—in order to plant the Gospel. Once that faith had been established, though, these signs worked on the body had ceased. Since that time, far more important “spiritual” (geistliche) miracles had also been occurring, and these would continue to take place until the “end of time.” These wonders were, in fact, qualitatively superior to any physical healing. Miracles of the body were fleeting, since eventually everyone must die, but those God worked on the soul were transformative and granted eternal life. Exploring the Gospel reading for that Sunday, Matthew 8 (the stories of Christ’s healing of the leper and his encounter with the Roman centurion), Luther explained that Christ had worked both types of miracles in that passage. First, he had healed a leper through the touch of his hand. Then, a centurion seeking healing for his paralyzed servant had approached Jesus. Christ had offered to visit the soldier’s house, but the centurion demurred because of his unworthiness. Instead, the soldier expressed the simple faith that the

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Savior’s word alone would heal. In this way, Luther argued, Matthew 8 revealed the two types of miracles God had shown throughout history. In the first case, the Savior healed the body of the affl icted, a fleeting miracle since the leper ultimately died. That miracle was typical of the methods God had always used when he introduced some great religious change, as when he led the Israelites out of their bondage in Egypt through the parting of the Red Sea. These miracles, though, were ephemeral and uncommon, granted only to nourish new belief. Yet how much more remarkable, Luther observed, was the life- changing faith of the centurion, an uncircumcised man who had no knowledge of the Law of Moses or the pronouncements of the Prophets and yet believed in the “healing,” transforming Word of Christ.41 Thus, Martin Luther’s distinction between miracles of faith and miracles of the body discounted the traditional importance that thaumaturgy and intercession had long played in the Middle Ages to legitimize the cult of the saints. In Luther’s conversations, letters, and theological works, he often brandished the sword of faith against the appetite for miracles, insisting in rhetorical flourishes that faith had worked great spiritual miracles in contemporary times: in the elimination of monastic vows, the vain repetition of the Mass, and so forth.42 However, Luther was not always consistent in the corollary observation that the “age of miracles” worked on the body had passed. He continued to celebrate the power of prayer and faith, insisting that their potential, freed from claims of saintly mediation, might also work great miracles of healing.43 In the main, though, Luther was consistent in his efforts to do away with the long-hallowed, routinized channels of assistance the faithful had sought in the saints. These violated one of the German Reformation’s most cherished principles: the total depravity and utter helplessness of humankind before the majesty of God.

Natural Signs By eliminating saintly mediation Luther may have limited the play of supernatural events in daily life, but at the same time, he was convinced that God often spoke through nature, sending signs in its orders and disorders that could be read for clues about his favor and disfavor. Often, he expressed the longing that these events might reveal the imminence of the last days. In this regard, Luther was no more credulous than other sixteenth-century religious figures and intellectuals. Nor does his

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apocalypticism appear to have been more pronounced than that of many other theologians of his time. Living in anticipation of the end and constructing predictions about how those events might unfold was a common preoccupation of the times.44 In part, this expectancy was fed in both urban and learned societies by a string of prophecies that had gained broad currency in the years between 1490 and 1520. In Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, itinerant preachers and street corner prophets commented upon the momentous events of the Italian Wars; on the monstrous births of hybrid human-animals at Ravenna, Florence, and elsewhere; and on the strange signs that seemed to be occurring in the nighttime skies.45 These, their commentators warned, pointed to momentous changes about to occur. Sometimes the predictions of these prophets were quite specific, a feature that they shared with learned astrologers and the other occult scientists of the day. The prediction that a second great flood would occur in February 1524 was certainly one case in point.46 Luther was undoubtedly affected by this trend of predictions—as were many—and he wrote on several occasions in the early Reformation years about the fateful signs occurring in the heavens that seemed to point to some coming transformation. At the same time, he also heaped scorn on the doomsayers when the promised flood did not materialize, something he did generally with those who were too specific in their predictions about the future.47 Luther’s attitude toward natural signs was nuanced. On the one hand, he often freely admitted that God was warning humankind of impending disaster and the nearness of the end through events in the natural order. On the other, he refused to forecast too closely the precise contours of the future, even though he often expressed a longing for some great apocalyptic resolution. At the height of the Peasants’ War, for example, Luther counseled his readers that celestial signs pointed to coming catastrophe, hoping that the fear nourished by such a prediction would stem the rising tide of peasant resistance and encourage Christians to repent. But when the war was concluded, Luther wrote a preface for a new edition of Johannes Lichtenberger’s famous 1488 collection of predictions, a set of prophecies that many believed the recent political and religious developments had confirmed. In his remarks Luther pointed out the instances in which the recent events seemed to verify the fifteenth- century prophecies but then pointed out all their deficiencies. Christians, he warned, should not seek out too specific predictions about the future, he concluded. Instead they should heed signs as a warning to cultivate a proper fear of God. The primary purpose of omens and portents was to spur the

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faithful to humility and amendment of life, not to reveal a specific map of future events.48 This same reluctance to predict the precise contours of the future can be seen in Luther’s reactions to the case of Michael Stifel, a fellow Augustinian who developed a close association with the Reformer. Stifel arrived in Saxony around 1528 after having been expelled from a preaching position in Austria for his evangelical sympathies. Luther secured him a parish, and in the years that followed, Stifel continued to pursue his fascination with arithmetic and apocalypticism. A formidable mathematician, Stifel dabbled in cabbala and subjected biblical passages to a complex form of analysis based upon the letters of the alphabet that appeared in their words. In 1532, he published the fruits of this research in the short Booklet for Calculating Christ’s Return,49 in which he set the precise date for the Second Coming at eight o’clock in the morning on October 19 of the following year.50 Although Luther often remarked and wrote in these years that the end of the world seemed to be near, he judged Stifel’s efforts at precision a case of fanaticism. He refused to provide a preface for Stifel’s Booklet, and after the prophet gave away his possessions, Luther tried to counsel him. As the October deadline approached, though, the Saxon elector Johann Friedrich I feared the unrest Stifel’s apocalyptic preaching might cause, and so he summoned him to Wittenberg for an inquiry. Even then, Stifel refused to recant his predictions, and by the end of September 1533, the elector had forbidden him to preach. A few weeks later as October 19 approached, villagers from the vicinity began to stream to Stifel’s parish in Lochau. When the fateful morning passed without the great event materializing, the prophet had to be brought again to Wittenberg, in large part to protect him from the angry mob that was percolating in the countryside around Lochau. In the ensuing controversy and investigation, Luther advocated for Stifel, whom he argued “had fallen prey to a tiny temptation” but was still theologically sound. For his part, the elector of Saxony required Stifel to live in Luther’s house for a time, so that Stifel might receive instruction before he was allowed to assume a new parish.51 Luther’s enthusiasm for grave warnings about the last days and yet his cautious desire to avoid sins of presumption can also be seen in his most famous pronouncement on a natural sign, the short pamphlet he wrote interpreting the birth of the Monk Calf, a deformed animal that observers agreed looked like it was wearing the traditional garb of a monk. The birth had occurred on December 8, 1522, in Ducal Saxony, in the small

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village of Waltersdorf not far from Freyberg. On January 5, 1523, Margrave George of Brandenburg-Ansbach wrote a letter of apology to Luther from Prague where he had long served as a royal tutor to the Bohemian kings. The margrave explained that the court astronomer there had recently published a short poem interpreting the birth as a divine condemnation of Luther. George assured the Reformer that he had personally seen to the suppression of the print. Luther may have first heard of the event from the margrave’s letter of January 5, although he mentions the calf’s birth in one of his own letters dated January 12, perhaps too soon for the margrave’s letter to have traveled to Wittenberg. Certainly, as a consequence of this correspondence from Prague, Luther was aware of the polemical advantage the event might offer to Catholics; he quickly published his own account of the misbirth to promote his own interpretation.52 That work, The Meaning of the Monk Calf at Freyberg, first appeared in print alongside Philipp Melanchthon’s examination of the legendary case of the “Papal Ass,” a strange hybrid creature consisting of a donkey’s head, scaly body, female torso, and a strange tail that included a human face peering out from the animal’s behind. The monster had allegedly been pulled from the Tiber near the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo in 1496. Until Melanchthon’s time, the legendary incident seems to have been unknown in Germany; accounts of it had primarily circulated north of the Alps in Bohemia, where the heretical Bohemian Brethren had exploited the legendary monster as antipapal propaganda.53 Melanchthon had previously published a short piece about the creature, and at Luther’s instigation he revised his work into a tract intended for a broader audience. Together, both pieces appeared in January of 1523 under the title The Meaning of Two Horrific Figures, the Papal Ass at Rome and the Monk Calf Found at Freyberg in Meissen.54 The Wittenberg artist Lucas Cranach the Elder provided two woodcuts for the tract, one showing the Papal Ass standing in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo at Rome, the other depicting the Monk Calf in a barren pasture. Both Melanchthon’s and Luther’s texts were widely circulated in the coming years in Germany; Luther’s On the Meaning of the Monk Calf was eventually to be translated into French, Dutch, and English.55 Later interpreters of similar misbirths often followed Luther’s and Melanchthon’s accounts when fashioning meanings for the events they reported. But the famous woodcuts that Cranach provided for the texts were emblazoned on the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century imaginations, since they were frequently copied and reproduced in the many compendia that interpreted

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natural wonders throughout Europe at that time.56 Luther, in fact, chose the image of the Papal Ass to decorate the cover page of his last antipapal statement, the Depiction of the Papacy, published in 1545.57 Because Cranach’s images became part of the easily intelligible visual language of the era, both pictures could be called upon whenever a printer needed a readily comprehensible symbol for propaganda.58 In this regard, there were key differences in the way each image came to be used. Whereas the Cranach rendition of the Papal Ass almost always served as a denunciation of traditional papal authority, the artist’s depiction of the Monk Calf had more open-ended meanings, for the obvious association that might be drawn between it and Luther meant that both Catholics and Protestants could use it in polemical disputes. If the image of the Monk Calf made famous by Luther’s tract sometimes had a dual message, the interpretations both authors fashioned in their accounts for these natural signs were in most respects similar. The tone of Melanchthon’s treatment of the Papal Ass may have been more outright apocalyptical than Luther’s treatment of the Monk Calf, however. Melanchthon related the monster to Christ’s predictions of “signs and wonders” in the last days, in other words, that the ass was a revelation of the papacy’s nature as a force of Antichrist, and consequently, a sign of the end times. Luther was more cautious—he insisted that he was certainly no prophet—but he also expressed the fervent hope that the Monk Calf was a revelation of the coming end.59 In examining their respective cases, each author relied on allegory—a technique long used in scholastic biblical interpretation, but which these reformers ultimately rejected in their own exegesis—to examine the divinely encoded messages on each monster’s body.60 The Papal Ass and the Monk Calf became microcosmic symbols of the degenerate macrocosmic world, with each deformity revealing another divine pronouncement about the detestable state of affairs in the church and society. Both Luther and Melanchthon thus read these infirmities through the lenses of long-standing notions that imagined society in terms of the human body. The ass’s head, for instance, became a sign of the pope’s false, “fleshly” lordship over the church. The animal’s right hand, which resembled an elephant’s foot, symbolized the papacy’s spiritual tyranny over the human soul, while the monster’s human female torso and breasts were an image of the many “cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, students, and whoring folk” who live for their own pleasure. In this way, Melanchthon roamed over the body of the beast, insisting that each of its manifold deformities revealed some ill or corruption in a particular part of the body social.

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Luther’s commentary on the Monk Calf followed this same pattern. The Reformer began by insisting that the animal’s birth happened in a time fi lled with numerous signs that seemed to foreshadow an imminent change in world affairs. The Monk Calf appeared to be yet another of numerous divine warnings that had been occurring over the past few years. At the same time Luther cautiously refused to assume the mantle of a prophet, even when nature presented what seemed to be clear evidence of coming change. The scriptures were the only certain guide in these matters, and the station of a prophet could only be conferred through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.61 All attempts to determine the significance of the Monk Calf, Luther cautioned, had to proceed along provisional lines. Notwithstanding that caution, the temptation to fi x the calf’s meaning more definitely drove Luther to make highly specific pronouncements about the animal’s physiognomy. In his commentary on this page from the book of nature, the Reformer granted allegory free rein, and in the treatment of the Monk Calf’s meanings he indulged a taste for abstruse symbolism.62 Here nature became a realm of signs that provided observers with clear, divine commentary on human shortcomings. The birth of the deformed animal, Luther insisted, revealed the degenerated state of monasticism and the church. That elements of monastic dress had been found upon a calf in the improbable location of a Saxon barnyard was, Luther argued, potent proof of the divinity of the pronouncement. Obviously, God was displeased with the contemporary depravity of “monkery” and “nunnery.”63 The Reformer’s interpretation did not stop here. For eight pages, he examined the animal’s body, dissecting its abnormalities to reveal a running commentary on monasticism and the church. The animal, for instance, had a growth-like abnormality that resembled a monastic cowl. This cowl had been torn, a sign of the many human deviations and divisions that had crept into the monastic estate over the centuries. That this cowl-like growth had been torn at the animal’s back and that the animal had been stillborn were proofs of monasticism’s imminent demise.64 Luther multiplied his observations to consider a number of minutiae that were revealed on the calf. The animal’s tiny ears pointed to the tyranny of auricular confession.65 The calf had been born bearded and looked as if it were holding up one of its legs in a preacher’s gesture— both signs that confirmed the divinity of its message. Through such precise attention, Luther transformed the incident’s meaning—which he had

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admitted at the outset could not be fi xed with complete certainty—into a highly specific divine message. It is easy to dismiss Luther’s and Melanchthon’s tracts as mere examples of the overheated polemic of the early Reformation, works of pure propaganda necessitated by the ecclesiastical and political dynamics of the 1520s. Yet Luther’s fascination with natural signs, in particular, was persistent; it recurred over and over again in his works, particularly in the Table Talk and in his correspondence with friends and associates. Often when he pondered stories about recent incongruous events in nature, Luther expressed the hope that the incident might point to the nearness of the Last Judgment. His response to a letter from his friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf is typical. Amsdorf wrote to Luther to ask his opinion about a case where foxes had been discovered in his vicinity hunting near their dens. Luther wrote back to Amsdorf, assuring him that he had asked his hunting acquaintances about the incident and they had told him that foxes were always too cunning to behave in this way. Stymied, Luther concluded that he did “not know what this is supposed to mean except that perhaps a change of all things is pending, for which we pray and which we await.”66 The apocalyptic “perhaps” Luther suspended over hunting foxes recurs in many of the accounts of natural wonders and prodigies retold in Luther’s Table Talk, although not every sign admitted an eschatological explanation. At times, sheer curiosity shines through in these discussions, while in other instances natural wonders prompt Luther and his students to ponder moral and existential problems. Certainly, the Reformer’s circle seems to have enjoyed trading these tales as pure entertainment. In a conversation recorded in 1532, one lunch partner reported the recent case of a woman who had given birth to a mouse. Immediately after being delivered from its human mother, the animal fled and disappeared into a mouse hole in the wall. Yet beyond such an amusing and seemingly fantastic tale, Luther and his students considered other cases of deformed infants.67 Luther once recalled an incident of a woman who had given birth to a dormouse during his youthful days as a student in Erfurt. In order to put other pests to flight, a neighbor had tied a bell to one dormouse, and the sight of the animal one day startled the expectant mother. Her imagination impressed the form of the rodent on her unborn child. Luther concluded that the case was testimony to the tragic consequences of a neighbor’s carelessness and the power of the maternal imagination to deform. As the questioning from

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students continued, the group discussed whether deformed infants like the dormouse child should be baptized. Luther at first insisted that such children should not, since they were only “animal life.” But when pressed by his students, he changed his mind. The requirement of a timely baptism after all births, he ultimately concluded, would prompt greater maternal discipline and discourage mothers and midwives from lying over children with birth defects.68 In this way nature’s wonders and deformities prompted Luther to consider thorny ethical issues, even as, at other times, contemporary events evoked for him in a poetic fashion the miracles recorded in the New Testament. Here Luther’s own lifelong bouts with serious illnesses were a powerful spur, encouraging him to fi nd similarities between contemporary events and those recorded in apostolic times and in the early church. In 1527 the Reformer was taken seriously ill at a time when the plague also threatened Wittenberg. As the epidemic began to lessen in late November of that year, his wife Katy’s pigs proved to be the only casualty, a fact that Luther said in a letter to a friend reminded him of Christ’s driving a legion of demons into a herd of pigs in Mark 5:13. In his comments about the similarities between the two events, Luther did not treat the death of the pigs at Wittenberg as an actual recurrence of a miracle recorded in the scriptures.69 It was not a repetition of a New Testament wonder, but rather an event that served to recall the biblical miracle as a metaphor, prompting him to contemplate God’s benevolence and mercy in preserving him and his family. His conclusions about the role that such “miraculous” preservations played in recalling divine benevolence were also echoed in an observation the Reformer made fairly late in his life, an observation recorded in the Table Talk. Turning to consider the efficacy of prayer, Luther argued he was acutely aware that the prayers of the church could work great miracles—a fact he himself recognized in the seeming “resurrections” God had worked on his own body, which had suffered deadly illnesses on numerous occasions, and in the lives of his wife Katy and his friend, Philip Melanchthon, both of whom had lain in death’s bonds.70 Yet even such miracles of healing, styled here poetically as Lazarus-like raisings from the dead, were mean and fleeting when compared to the great wonders God worked in the church on a daily basis through baptism, the Sacrament, and the absolution of sin—all of which helped to deliver souls from death and eternal damnation. In this way the healing of the body and the “exorcism” of disease through the medium of a herd of pigs reminded Luther

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of the superiority of faith in relation to fleeting cures of the physical body. Death would occur for all, and thus any temporary victories over it were trivial compared to the eternal triumphs accomplished through the Word of God and the sacraments.

Re-envisioning Creation Creation, though, could still provide powerful testimony to the will and providence of God, and to the secrets he had hidden in its processes. As a theologian, Luther’s many ideas concerning creation and its wonders were shaped by the long tradition of medieval commentary that had treated Augustine’s influential On the Trinity, The City of God, and The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, the three most prominent places in which the late-antique bishop had discussed nature and its miracles.71 In those texts Augustine outlined a distinctive, nuanced treatment of creation that opposed certain ideas current in the Mediterranean world in his day. Augustine aimed, in other words, to refute pre- Christian ideas that stressed the eternity of creation, even as he opposed the specter of a materialistic atomism, the long “shadow of Lucretius” that might make God completely irrelevant to nature. As he turned to comment upon Genesis 1 and 2, he was led to uphold the integrity of those passages that stressed that the act of divine creation had been a time-bounded process. Nature and all its matter had been shaped in the first six days of the world; on the seventh day, God had rested from those labors, and he now continued to abstain from further processes of creating.72 The divine work, Augustine reasoned, was complete and nothing new could now be created, but in the process of fashioning creation, God had charged everything in the universe with the potentialities to develop according to the designs of his providence.73 The implications of such a view in Augustine’s thought were numerous, but perhaps most importantly for Luther’s subsequent adaptation of these principles, this theology came to celebrate every natural event— from the rising and setting of the sun to the most dramatic celestial portent—as intensely “natural” and yet “miraculous” at the same time. These events were natural because nothing happened in the world contrary to the processes God had established at the creation. At the same time they were miraculous because they pointed to the sustaining hand of God, to the tremendous foresight he had exercised “in the beginning,” and to the dominion he continued to maintain over all nature’s forces.

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In considering a frightening portent, for instance, Augustine had counseled his readers to realize that such an event only appeared fearsome and seemed to point to future change to its observers because it was outside the normally observed patterns human beings had witnessed over time: For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature.74 Such events thus manifested the powerful dominion God maintained over each and every created thing. Augustine concluded, and Luther echoed a millennium later, that nothing happened against nature (contra naturam) but only against the grain of what human experience had taught one to expect from the natural world. The frightening portent, in other words, was natural; at the same time, it revealed the miraculous ordering God had worked at the creation. Fueled with this realization, Augustine counseled even the most time-worn and jaundiced eyes to look to the earth and heavens, and to see in all their processes proof for the claims of the Christian religion—including the most spectacular and incredulous, that is, that God would raise the bodies of the blessed, even as he would torment the wicked in eternal fire: Why, then, cannot God effect both that the bodies of the dead shall rise, and that the bodies of the damned shall be tormented in everlasting fire—God, who made the world full of countless miracles in sky, earth, air and waters, which itself is a miracle unquestionably greater and more admirable than all the marvels it is filled with?75 In this way Augustine celebrated nature’s most mundane processes as proof of God’s miraculous and providential ordering of creation, an ordering that proved his abilities to accomplish the seemingly fantastic transformations of the resurrection of the dead and the damnation of the wicked that would occur at the end of time. Nature, in other words, revealed the Creator’s power and might, even as it pointed to the coming events he would work through his grace and predestination. Such ideas were also important to Luther as he refined his evangelical theology; in that process, he frequently turned to these Augustinian

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notions about nature to underscore his own principles of justification by faith, human depravity, and divine election. Outside of God’s gracious preservation, nature often loomed for Luther as a harsh and threatening realm, filled with uncertainties and the constant specter of catastrophe; within God’s protection, though, the Christian might marvel at the hundreds of daily occurrences that sustained life. The dramatic bifurcation inherent in such notions could obviously serve as a powerful buttress for Luther’s teachings concerning faith and grace. But beyond the theological imperatives of these attitudes toward nature, Luther seems to have genuinely enjoyed contemplating, as an exercise in piety, God’s role as preserver of the universe. In a letter he wrote in early August 1530 to the Saxon chancellor Gregory Brück during the imperial diet at Augsburg, Luther attempted to lighten Brück’s spirits through a poetically charged description of two “miracles” he had recently witnessed in the heavens. At the time evangelicals were lobbying for legal recognition of the Augsburg Confession, and the fate of the Reformation hung in the balance. Luther attempted to buoy Brück’s spirits by insisting that the present troubles were only a test of the evangelicals’ faith in God’s mercy. In the months ahead, Luther’s encouraging letter, with its exhortation to faith, was frequently copied and circulated among other important leaders in the Protestant cause.76 His remarks show that Luther viewed the concentration on nature’s processes as an exercise in piety and humility that bred a consciousness of dependence on God. He drew explicit connections between the daily workings of creation and the preserving hand of God, deducing from even the most mundane natural occurrences miraculous proofs for the Gospel of Faith. Luther wrote to Brück that one evening he had seen “the stars in the sky and the whole beautiful vault of heaven,” but “saw nowhere any pillars” that supported that vault. Following hard on that “miracle,” Luther witnessed a second wonder when a storm passed overhead with clouds that brought a “sour face” before they drifted on. As they left, a rainbow appeared, a “frail ray of light” that nevertheless held back the waters and protected the earth. Luther concluded that most people were more apt to “look at, pay attention to, and be afraid of the water and the thickness and the heavy weight of the clouds” than they were to trust in the “thin, narrow, and fragile ray of light” of the rainbow.77 Yet both miracles—the preservation of the heavens from collapse and the holding back of the deluge through the rainbow—were clear signs of God’s daily preservation of creation and confirmations that in the end his

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mercy would prevail. In the remainder of his letter to Brück, Luther thus urged him to trust in the miracles of the skies and rainbow as signs of God’s promises and protection, rather than dwelling on the momentary threat of the “storm clouds” of imperial advisors anxious to destroy the evangelical cause: By his Spirit God will bless and further this work which he has graciously given us to do; he certainly will find the ways, time and place to help us, [and] he will neither forget nor forsake [us]. Those men of blood have not yet brought to an end what they are now beginning, nor have they all achieved security, or whatever it is that they desire. Our rainbow is frail, their clouds are mighty; but in the end it will be clear which type of music is being played.78 Such a view evinced a fundamental optimism on Luther’s part, even as it cautioned that the processes of divine justice might not proceed according to human timetables. The Gospel of Faith would ultimately triumph, but suffering and uncertainty might reign in the interim. On a daily basis, evidence of numinous protection was still available to any and all who would look around them, as Luther frequently counseled in his letters and sermons. Here a developing evangelical theology of the angels as preservers of the Gospel of Faith and protectors of Christians and their communities came to play one important role in Luther’s thought in explaining the mechanisms through which God dealt with his creation. Following his famous letter to Gregory Brück, for instance, Luther delivered the traditional sermon for Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, on September 29. Since June of that year, Luther had been staying at the southern Saxon outpost of Coburg so that he could be closer to the unfolding events at Augsburg. Luther used the occasion of Michaelmas to denounce the imperial diet, which was moving closer to an outright condemnation of the evangelicals’ confession of faith. The tone of Luther’s rhetoric was now darker than in the remarks he had made to Brück about seven weeks earlier. At the same time, Michaelmas provided Luther with the opportunity to set forth his own evangelical teachings about the angels, one of the many ancillary issues that he had been refining in his theology in previous years. The feast of St. Michael the Archangel had long been the chief celebration of the angels, figures who— particularly in the later Middle Ages—played an enormously important role in both personal piety and theological speculation.

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From the thirteenth century onward, angelology, the “science” of the angels, had undergone a tremendous expansion and elaboration across Europe. In the later Middle Ages, the disciplined study of the angels had flourished, first as a subspecialty within theology, and somewhat later as an avid pursuit of Renaissance humanists. Medieval angelology, which usually numbered the celestial hierarchies at nine distinctive ranks, had attracted some of the most brilliant minds of the period, including the “seraphic doctor” Bonaventura, the “angelic doctor” Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Magnus. These scholars had turned for inspiration to many ancient authorities, both Jewish and Christian, but most notably their works had expanded on Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Celestial Hierarchy, a late-antique text that for most of the Middle Ages was widely believed to have been written by the Dionysius the Areopagite mentioned in Acts 17:34.79 Although Renaissance humanists like Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus dismissed the authenticity of the Dionysian text, many humanists continued to be as concerned as their scholastic counterparts with delineating these spirits’ functions. Lorenzo Valla, for instance, may have discounted the apostolic authenticity of the Pseudo-Dionysian On the Celestial Hierarchy, but he was all the same an avid devotee of that work’s insights and relied on it as he crafted his own angelology. And from the time of Marsiglio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola onward, the angels were to have an important place within the developing traditions of Renaissance Platonism.80 The efforts of Platonists, in particular, from figures as diverse as Ficino to the French scholar Jacques Lefèvre D’Étaples to the English magus John Dee, strove to delineate properly the numerous functions of these heavenly spirits. The long-standing intellectual popularity of the angels can be more easily understood if we consider the many and varied tasks that they had come to fulfill over the centuries. The discipline of angelology had divided these spirits into distinctive ranks, ranks that were charged with controlling different functions in the universe and ministering to earthly dominions and individuals. Thus, it sought to answer very specific questions about how God dealt with humankind and the rest of his creation. In this way, medieval and Renaissance angelology provided explanations for intellectuals of these eras that modern people often locate in the theories of physics and other sciences. Martin Luther initially accepted much of medieval angelology intact; after 1520, however, he undertook reform of its teachings by subjecting them to the razor of the scriptures. Although he came to insist that

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certain ideas, particularly the angelical hierarchies derived from PseudoDionysius, were extra-biblical innovations, he nevertheless saw the angels performing a broader range of roles than John Calvin and later Calvinist divines were to admit. The Calvinists confined the angels’ roles to being mere “messengers” of God’s will. Luther may have been skeptical about many of the traditional miracles attributed to the angels, including accounts of angelic apparitions, thaumaturgy, and other feats long associated with these spirits. But at the same time he did not deny the possibility that the angels continued to appear on earth. On at least one occasion at table, for instance, he celebrated the case of a woman’s preservation from starvation as a miracle likely worked by an angel.81 Accordingly, the reshaped angelology Luther helped to inspire was nuanced. On the one hand, he tried to downplay the most fantastic stories about angelic apparitions and other miracles long associated with the angels; on the other, he insisted that angelic appearances and intercession were still possibilities. In addition to these issues, Luther preserved a prominent place for the angels as guardians, more prominent than was to become normative in many Protestant traditions. He insisted, for instance, that each and every person had an appointed and distinct guardian angel, who protected that person from the onslaughts of demons.82 In fact, his view on the invisible forces that shaped life on earth did not move far beyond the tradition of the late-medieval ars moriendi, in which the deathbeds of the sick and dying were imagined as battle sites where a continual combat occurred between the spirits of the “good” angels and those of the rebellious “fallen” demons. These views were important in the centuries ahead, because in the absence of outright prohibitions of beliefs in the continuing intimacy of the angels with human beings’ daily affairs, numerous accounts of angelic apparitions came to circulate throughout Lutheran towns and territories.83 Certainly, Luther would have disapproved of such a development; in his lectures, sermons, and other writings he often reminded his audience that the messages of visions, prophecies, and angelic visitations were distinctly inferior to the clarity of the Word of God.84 Yet at the same time, we can see the stimulus that Luther gave to a culture of angelic apparitions at work in the comments he crafted for the 1530 Michaelmas sermon at Coburg. In them he intended to set forth a purified evangelical treatment of the angels as protectors of individual human beings and communities. At the outset, for instance, he recalled that the celebration of the feast of St. Michael was not intended to honor the angel himself but to praise

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God and the work of all the angels God created. Luther denounced the many incredible traditions and dubious fables that had come to cloud the figure of the Archangel Michael, although the teachings of scripture concerning both the good and fallen angels were clear. Next, Luther turned to recount the exploits of the devil and his fallen angels, devoting more than four-fifths of the sermon’s space to these rather than to treatment of the angels’ place in the heavenly hierarchy or in Christian theology. His comments concerning the devil adopted a strikingly intimate tone; the devil as Luther picturesquely observed, “lies closer than the shirt on our body.”85 Among the laundry list of trials the devil sends upon the human race, Luther included unchastity, pestilence, famine, war, and murder. The devil, Luther counseled, accomplishes these misfortunes furtively, and his actions are undetectable to the human eye. So too, he argued, the angels are working just as vigorously and invisibly behind the scenes to preserve humankind. Although he spent far less effort cataloguing the attributes of the angels than he did listing the misfortunes sown by the devil, Luther was always quick to remind his listeners that the good angels’ powers far exceeded those of the demons. He recalled the Gospel reading for the day, Matthew 18:10: “That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” Because of the force of this vision, Luther argued, the angels act constantly to overcome the evils that the devil places in the way of ordinary Christians, which include discord, strife, and apostasy, as well as the physical torments of fire, flood, and other natural catastrophes. While the devil and his minions work extraordinary trials, the feats of protection the angels work are more extraordinary still. In concluding his observations, Luther reminded his audience, “Now when you see that a stable, a village, a house still stands, that is a sign that the angels protect us, and that the devil has not been able to wrench these things away.”86 Thus Luther’s essentially conservative reformulation of traditional angelology supported his evangelical theology in a way similar to his more general preoccupation with nature: outside the ministration of the angels—as indeed outside the protective powers God wields over creation—chaos and destruction threaten; inside the circle of security circumscribed by each, merciful preservation exists. This vision of the natural order posited a relationship between God’s grace and nature’s processes, allowing the world of rising and setting suns, catastrophes, and seeming happenstance to be seen at once as a transparent revelation of both the divine and demonic spiritual elements that shaped its destiny.

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In the final years of his life, Luther was to expand upon these themes on numerous occasions. The vision he promoted was sometimes austere, yet always charged with an underlying hope, even at times with a cockeyed optimism that ran counter to empirical evidence. Although Luther sometimes pictured human beings and their communities as dramatically poised between the opposing combat of demons and angels or of God and the devil, he inevitably reminded his audiences of the far greater power of divine forces to overcome evil. In his sermons on the Gospel of John delivered during 1537, for example, Luther elaborated on the sustaining power of God in protecting the human race from disease. Here his remarks reveal an essential exuberance and optimism, one that is surprising because it appears at odds with the picture that modern social history has provided us of a pervasive sixteenth- century pessimism born of ill health and natural disaster. For if God were disposed to be angry with us, to condemn, punish, and torment us, He would not forgive us our sins through Christ. He would not remove the penalty for sins from the paralytics, the lepers, and others, who were possessed of, and tormented by, the devil. Furthermore, if God took delight in death, He would not raise and quicken the dead. But that is what He did in Christ: He taught us to look upon and recognize Him as a gracious Father, who is eager to help and save us.87 The purpose of such ministrations may have been to throw the sinner back helpless before a God who is the final author and arbiter of salvation, but at the same time, Luther saw the world as fi lled with signs of divine benevolence. Proof of this goodness was evident in the preservation of almost everyone from disease, for, as Luther rather astoundingly remarked, one found “a hundred thousand healthy people for every ailing, blind, deaf, paralytic, or leprous person.” Further, God demonstrated his qualities as a gracious father daily, by constantly preserving all His creatures, bestowing so many benefactions on the whole world, and bountifully pouring out His goods, except when of necessity and for the sake of the godly He must punish and restrain the wicked. But He rules in such a way that even physically we always see more of his grace and blessing than of His wrath and punishment.88

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“Wretchedness and misery,” to be sure, were to be found in the world aplenty, but such sufferings were the “work of the devil, who delights in bringing ruin and death on man . . . ”89 They did not arise from a God who displayed in the protection he so plentifully offered his essential generosity and magnanimity toward humankind. Thus, in passages like this, Luther sought to blunt the “hard” edges of an evangelical theology based in notions of divine election, human helplessness, and the promise of swift damnation for those who stood outside the Gospel of Faith. The equation that sin produced disease, disorder, and natural disaster was nonetheless a constantly mouthed piety of late-medieval preachers and moralists; Luther, too, sometimes succumbed to this time-worn rhetoric. A certain anxiety is to be found in his works of these late years, particularly in the massive series of Lectures on Genesis that Luther delivered between 1535 and 1545. We know these texts in an imperfect way today, since they were prepared from students’ notes and only the first volume was published while Luther was alive.90 In these printed editions certain scholastic and humanistic arguments came to be interpolated into the texts that were foreign, even anathema, to Luther. These included scholastic arguments for the existence of God, rationalistic defenses for the immortality of the soul, as well as defenses of astrology—ideas that were certainly not in keeping with Luther’s.91 The Lectures’ positions concerning nature and its miracles, though, are consonant with arguments Luther made elsewhere. In the Lectures Luther celebrated nature as a place in which God’s presence is continually made visible and active. Creation, Luther argued—like Augustine before him—is charged with enormous miraculous potential. As he considered the Genesis episodes, Luther always carefully pointed to both the obvious miracles God worked in nature and the hidden wonders God continually worked to preserve creation. Luther treated the parting of the Red Sea as one of God’s most obvious miracles. But at the dawn of the world, Luther observed, God had created the firmament to separate the waters of the heavens from those of the oceans and from the dry land. Each day, the divinity sustained this miraculous parting of the waters “lest the seas break forth in the deluge.” The entire life of the human race is thus a “passage through the Red Sea.”92 A benevolent God may sustain creation on a daily basis, but he also fashions his responses to human beings based upon their obedience and disobedience to his will. In the Lectures on Genesis, Luther reminded his students continually that faith, or conformity to the Word of God, had produced numerous wonders and miracles. The stories of Abraham, Lot,

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the patriarchs, and the prophets find frequent mention in these observations. But it is interesting to note that Luther turned to one account, the story of the woman cured of a twelve-year hemorrhage recorded in Matthew 9:20–22,93 to prove the wonder-working power of faith. In Catholic treatises on miracles in the sixteenth century, the woman’s case was frequently invoked to prove the reality of a theology of mediation.94 Catholic theologians, in other words, pointed out that it was through the touching of Christ’s garment that the woman was made whole. Christ’s garment was thus the most ancient example, traditionalists reminded, of brandea—that is, of objects that had acquired power by contact with holy people—to be found in the scriptures. God continued to work through similar channels: the saints, their relics, and holy places. Luther turned this equation on its head, downplaying Christ’s thaumaturgy and insisting instead that it was the woman’s faith that healed her. The cessation of her hemorrhage was, in other words, a natural, almost non-miraculous outcome of her conformity to the Word of God. At times, nature may have presented Luther with evidence of positive outcomes resulting from human obedience to the divine will like this. But its sympathies were more often aroused by human rebellion. As Luther narrated the story of the Flood, he warned: “God’s practice has always been this: whenever He punishes sin, He also curses the earth.”95 In successive sections Luther treated the history that stretched between the Creation, the Flood, and contemporary times to show that God had steadily stepped up his punishments of the earth to match the rising tide of human deviance. In the wake of Eden, Luther observes, the natural order was afflicted merely with thorns and thistles. Physical disease had not yet apparently multiplied. In the wake of the Flood, diseases and plagues soon appeared. And from that time until the present, these physical punishments had steadily increased. In the present day, Luther reflected, the torrent of human affliction was continuing to mount, so that syphilis, the sweating sickness, and a host of new diseases had now appeared. And so it is that “the misfortunes which were placed upon Adam were insignificant in comparison with ours. The more closely the world approaches its end, the more it is overwhelmed by penalties and catastrophes.”96 In this way Luther returned again and again to the effects that the human race’s sin produced in deforming creation; a panoply of diseases was the logical outcome of the race’s disobedience. That these diseases were presently rising, Luther observed, was just one of many “traces of God’s wrath, which our sin has deserved.” Thus, as he surveyed creation, he pointed to “thorns,

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thistles, water, fire, caterpillars, flies, fleas, and bedbugs” as well, as signs of a God who fashioned chastening trials for a deeply sinful humanity.97 Other strains also appear in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, strains that are not nearly so despairing nor fearsome. At many points in his commentary, for instance, Luther reminded his students of the beauties of creation, beauties that remained intact, not yet corrupted by human weakness and disobedience. Often, his language approaches the kind of extravagant praise of nature that would later captivate readers of German romantic figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In these lectures, for instance, Luther frequently recommended to his students that they look around them to revere the divinity in nature’s remaining glories.98 Yet, as we assess the Lectures, we do find a significant undercurrent lamenting the effects human corruption has produced in the natural world. Certainly, Luther’s attitudes were not new; as we have seen, their origins stretched deep into the past. But the way in which Luther articulated these arguments does appear peculiarly “sixteenth-century” in style, if only in the ways in which he often reminded his readers of the enormous weight of human depravity, a weight that proves burdensome to the natural order. In his attempt to harmonize notions about God’s immanent presence in the world with principles like justification by faith, then, Luther jettisoned the traditional role the saints had fulfilled as conduits between God and humankind. At the same time he maintained that God still spoke with a discernible voice in nature, relying on certain events—like the birth of the Monk Calf—to war polemically against his Catholic opponents. If such natural wonders did not speak with the same clear voice of authority as the scriptures, Luther remained fairly sure that they could be decoded for their messages about the present and the future. But the Saxon Reformer was hardly an urgent apocalyptic prophet because he frequently clothed such pronouncements in the rhetoric of “perhapses.” More generally, Luther came to insist that nature’s order could be “read” for the clues it offered about God’s daily preservation of the world and, more importantly, of the faithful. On some fronts, then, Luther moved to trim back the lush luxuriance of the late-medieval religion of immanence, even as he insisted that if Christians’ eyes focused on the right things, they could still see ample testimony of God’s presence in the world. Luther’s attitudes toward nature and his notions about the way in which God intervened in it were therefore similar in many respects to his theology of the Eucharist. In fact, there was a direct connection in his work between the miracles of creation and the miracles of “re-creation” that

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God worked through the sacraments.99 In his theology of the Eucharist, for instance, the Reformer maintained that the concept of ubiquity was the most important characteristic for understanding Christ’s presence in that sacrament; he relied on that concept to preserve the dignity of the Savior’s presence in the ritual and the integrity of the scriptural injunction, “This is my body,” even as he insisted that God was everywhere in creation at all times. God could not be called into place in the Eucharist through the spoken formulas of priests; instead, he was omnipresent and came only to accompany the accidents of bread and wine at the appropriate time. Such communication between divinity and humanity in the sacrament was now a distinctly “one-way” street. As in his attitudes toward nature, Luther came to insist that human beings could not hope to propitiate God, or to coax him to act through elaborate outpourings of devotion. Such reworking of traditional religious notions, Luther sensed, was necessary to preserve God’s right to be God. Regarding nature, Luther posited this same ubiquitous presence, insisting that the powers God demonstrated through thousands of daily acts of preservation should become the subject for the devout’s meditation. God’s power was not to be seen as concentrated in objects or controlled by ritual acts, as it had been in the late-medieval cult of the saints. Instead, nature witnessed to the continuous intimacy the Creator maintained with every created thing in the world; that intimacy could be seen in the rising and setting of the sun, in the daily preservation of the firmament, and even in the great aberrations that occurred in the world testifying to divine anger at human shortcomings. Nature’s mysteries, its seeming violations, and its puzzling and devious wonders were thus made to speak with the traditional voice of favor and disfavor they had long had in the medieval church; at the same time, the communication that had long occurred between God and humankind through the intermediaries of the saints was now proscribed, even as human beings could not hope to convince the divinity to act to their advantage through elaborate outpourings of devotion. Sometimes, Luther observed, the messages that God presented in the world were clear and forceful, revealing his Word and will. At other times, as in the famous case of the Monk Calf, the messages were less certain. Yet any such attempts to find divine commentary in events like the Monk Calf’s birth paled in favor of the far more important task of being faithful to the Word of God, a mission that Luther’s theology buttressed with the notion of a nature in which God’s immanent presence and enormous power over each and every created thing was continually

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being made evident. Thus, the legacy that Luther transmitted to his followers was twofold: on the one hand, he upheld the greater power and authority of the scriptures when compared to the book of nature; on the other, he insisted that nature might still speak with a divine voice, revealing evidence of God’s favor and disfavor as well as his dissatisfaction with human sinfulness. At any rate, the subtlety of his hierarchical argument left open the possibility that his followers could exploit the natural world and its wonders, which they soon did enthusiastically.

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Nature and the “Signs of the End” in Job Fincel’s Wonder Signs in 1556, the Lutheran natural philosopher Job Fincel pronounced his own world a “godless” Sodom, filled with “arid, heathen ways” and disgraceful sins. Repeating a by then time-worn Protestant piety, Fincel identified the source of such wickedness in the papal Antichrist, an array of forces centered in the church at Rome that had long hidden the Gospel’s truth. Only recently had Luther’s Reformation shone light into the world for what was presumed to be a brief moment in the eleventh hour of human history. Soon human wrongdoing would be expunged by the punishments God was preparing in the form of the Turks, as well as his more traditional methods of exacting justice “through wars, storms, and so forth.”1 Fincel’s grim pronouncements were broadcast in his widely disseminated Wonder Signs,2 a work that since the sixteenth century has been almost totally forgotten but which in its own day proved to be a powerful influence on later Lutheran authors. Wonder Signs stands as the first in a long line of Lutheran wonder books that continued to appear in Protestant Germany until the later seventeenth century. Unlike other imposing Latin texts that treated prodigious events in nature at the time,3 Fincel’s Wonder Signs was aimed not at illuminati and theologians but “middle-brow” pastoral and bourgeois readers who were anxious to understand the meaning of the seemingly calamitous events they saw unfolding around them. Into his encompassing envelope of eschatology and apocalypticism, Fincel poured hundreds of accounts of earthquakes, fires, floods, storms, monstrous births, and celestial signs that had occurred in the world since the fateful year of the Indulgence Controversy, 1517. His rhetorical verve, which aimed to establish with certainty the nearness of the end, cited example upon example in which God seemed to be knocking at the door of human history, reminding the faithful of the necessity of diligent self-examination and spurring the wicked to repentance with the rod of his anger.

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Perhaps because of the success of his book and his own lingering unease that the world was in its death throes, Fincel published a second volume of Wonder Signs in 15594 and a third in 1562.5 At the end of this massive venture, he had compiled over twelve hundred pages of printed testimony he believed announced the nearness of the end. The popularity of his efforts can be seen in the number of printings these works underwent, their sales figures, and the frequency with which Fincel’s miracles were quoted by later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors. At least twelve printings of the three volumes of Wonder Signs were undertaken between 1556 and 1567 at Jena, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Ursel, and Frankfurt am Main.6 If each of these print runs numbered around the normal size of 2,000 copies, almost 25,000 versions of Fincel’s Wonder Signs would have been in circulation in late sixteenth-century German Protestant cities. It may be, though, that some reprintings of Fincel’s texts were considerably larger than the conventional size, since the surviving sales figures point to bestsellers. At the Frankfurt book fair during Lent of 1569, for instance, bookseller Michel Harder sold 171 copies of all volumes of Fincel’s Wonder Signs, more than the most popular arithmetic text of the time, Adam Rieses’ Rechenbuch (only 150 copies), and the wildly popular fable Melusine by Thüring von Ringoltingen (158 copies).7 Surviving data from other Frankfurt and Leipzig book dealers point to similarly brisk sales of Fincel’s works by other printers and book handlers.8 Sales may be one gauge of popularity, but Fincel’s texts were also an enduring favorite among the wonder book compilers and moralistic authors who followed him. At least twenty-four authors drew upon the Wonder Signs in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; in many cases, these later texts merely reproduced large portions of the wonders and signs in Fincel’s original collections.9 Clearly, the frequent use of the text as a source for other works and the repetition of Fincel’s apocalyptic arguments in these texts points to the widespread resonance his ideas had with many late Reformation authors and readers. Scholars have puzzled over how to read texts like Fincel’s, and a variety of explanations have been put forward to explain his brand of prophecy. Much of the social history that has flourished since the 1970s, for instance, has interpreted the fascination of early modern people with signs, wonders, and prophecies of the end as a response to a grim environment.10 Certainly, surges in apocalyptic sentiment did accompany the rise and spread of new epidemic diseases like syphilis or the English sweating sickness, and these new epidemics often combined with astrological

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predictions, like that for the flood of 1524, to produce fears in some quarters about the imminence of the end. Yet Lutheranism’s sixteenth-century history was rarely punctuated by sudden panics like these. Instead, a sustained expectancy, which continually intoned the nearness of the Last Judgment, was the order of the day; thus, this anticipation cannot be explained by short-term material or epidemiological crises alone. Consequently, religious historians have pointed to a number of other factors beyond the ever-present specter of disease or hard times to explain the longevity of this eschatological speculation. Among the first to note the vast output of apocalyptic and prophetic texts in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany, Robin Barnes has argued that “waiting for the end” came to be elevated in these years to something akin to a doctrinal principle. Barnes located the causes for the great florescence of Lutheran apocalypticism in the eradication of long-standing religious and disciplinary practices, a general questioning of religious authority, and the rise of internal divisions within Lutheranism in the decades following the Schmalkaldic War of 1546.11 These dovetailing problems prompted later sixteenth-century evangelicals to depart significantly from the more restrained eschatological theorizing of Luther and other early reformers, and to entertain “a level of apocalyptic expectation that finds few parallels in Western history.”12 In these years, Barnes argued that the fascination with the Apocalypse among Lutherans helped to forestall the great disciplinary revolution that was beginning to gather steam in Calvinist and Catholic churches at the same time.13 While Barnes’s analysis stressed the peculiarities of evangelical apocalypticism compared to developments elsewhere, Jean Delumeau saw eschatological prophesying as a more general, northern European phenomenon in the sixteenth century, most pronounced among Protestants, but which could—as in the French Wars of Religion—play an important role among Catholics, too. Delumeau identified the appeal of such prophesying in a steadily deepening culture of guilt and anxiety on the one hand and in the increasing competition between religious confessions on the other. These forces gave birth to a siege mentality among many sixteenth-century groups, as a tense anticipation encouraged both doctrinal purity and perfection of life.14 Fincel’s own brand of apocalyptic thinking reveals characteristics emphasized by both social and religious historians.15 A trained natural philosopher, Fincel found the frequent outbreak of disease and the multiplication of new epidemics to be potent proofs for the nearness of the end, for these revealed a decay of nature that was preparing the way for final

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judgment. Other events, though, were also compelling confirmations that contemporary times were among the last days. The series of recent political and military maneuvers between imperial forces and Protestants touched off by the start of the First Schmalkaldic War in 1546 was certainly the most important among these, but Fincel also saw the hand of God directing political events everywhere in Europe toward an ultimate conclusion. This specter of a coming dramatic punishment presupposed a rising tide of immorality, and so Fincel did not neglect to draw together the most spectacular accounts of recent murders, gross sexual improprieties, and other fantastic wrongdoings in his attempt to prove the rank wickedness of his contemporaries. At times, too, he stressed the heroic acts of those who were standing firm for the faith against the unregenerate, but anxiousness mingled uneasily in Wonder Signs with the confidence that the enemies of the evangel would ultimately be expunged. The defensive bulwark that Fincel constructed with his eschatological warnings, then, points to the “siege mentality” that Jean Delumeau noted was an important feature of sixteenth-century apocalypticism. But while such a wall may have served to guard the purity of the faith, Fincel’s apocalyptic thinking betrays other features, too. Writing largely before the great disciplinary revolution in the early modern state church had gotten under way, Fincel used the corrective tool he sensed lay in anticipation. In short, he constantly aimed to evoke for his readers the drastically foreshortened nature of their days in the hopes of cultivating constant self-examination and perfection of life among his readers. Despite the nerve that Fincel touched within the late sixteenth-century audience and the obvious popularity his books attained, little is known about the life of this precocious natural philosopher and physician.16 He was born in Thuringia, perhaps in or near the city of Weimar, sometime between 1526 and 1530. He studied at the University of Erfurt briefly before moving on to Wittenberg, then the undisputed center of Protestant higher education. In his student years there, the poet laureate and Latin professor Johannes Stigel befriended him, and association with Stigel brought Fincel into the elevated circle that surrounded Philip Melanchthon in the 1540s. Eventually, ties of marriage would link Stigel and Fincel as well, since Fincel was to wed Stigel’s niece.17 During the Schmalkaldic War, Stigel fled Wittenberg for Jena and there he helped to set up a new academy in 1547.18 When Fincel completed the master’s degree at Wittenberg in 1549, he joined Stigel at Jena, where he studied medicine during the 1550s and early 1560s. For his part, Stigel

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eventually rose to the position of rector at Jena when the young institution was elevated to the status of a university in 1558.19 A year later, Fincel, too, was named professor of philosophy there and charged with teaching the physics course, although the local duke’s reorganization of the faculty soon deprived him of that post. By February 1562, Fincel had completed the medical degree and a year later he assumed the post of assessor of the medical faculty at Jena, which he held for three years before accepting the call to serve as city physician at Weimar. Although he returned to the University of Jena to serve as assessor for another two years in 1567, Fincel was eventually named city physician at Zwickau, where he spent the last two decades of his life, dying there on July 1, 1589.20 Fincel’s formative years as a scholar had thus coincided with a series of momentous events: the outbreak of the First Schmalkaldic War (1546–47); the imperially imposed Augsburg Interim and its Saxon cousin the Leipzig Interim, two political maneuvers intended to accomplish Catholic–Protestant reunion; the backlash against these measures that resulted in the exile of scores of Protestant academics and pastors from their posts; the flight of many of these figures to Magdeburg and the imperial siege of that city; the brief Second Schmalkaldic War (1552) that followed Magdeburg’s liberation and ensured evangelicals the freedom to practice their religion; the foundation of the academy and later university at Jena as a counter to the University of Wittenberg; and the bitter legacy of religious controversies within Lutheranism that all these developments inspired. These events left their mark on the young Fincel. Although his friend Stigel was a Philippist and, as rector of the fledgling University of Jena, tried to play a moderating influence in the theological disputes of these years, Fincel’s own brand of religious rhetoric was charged with the sense of Old Testament prophetic mission typical of the emerging party of Gnesio-Lutherans. In the years that Fincel studied medicine at Jena, the university developed into the most important center for that party, as its theologians continually monitored and attacked the Melanchthoninspired innovations they sensed among the Philippists, the Praeceptor’s followers at the universities in Wittenberg and Leipzig.21 In his Wonder Signs, Fincel did not deal in theological disputes and controversies, since he was addressing many who were not theologians and his primary aim was to convince his readers of the coming judgment. But although he never mentioned Lutheranism’s worsening climate of theological disputes in these texts, an underlying fear is still present in all three volumes, the fear that the Evangel was in danger, its truths about

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to be obscured by Catholic resurgence, by the deceptions of the devil, by sexual depravity, and by the impiety and inconstancy of those working from within the evangelical church itself. Such radical Protestant sentiments point to Fincel’s amenability to the Gnesio-Lutheran program that was emerging as a faction within Saxon Lutheranism at Jena in these years. So, too, does Fincel’s appointment as a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena in 1559, a point at which the influence of Matthias Flacius, then the chief early leader of the Gnesio-Lutheran party, was at its height. Although Fincel soon lost that post in an administrative reshuffling, his appointment at this particular juncture likely points to his essential agreement with the ideas of Matthias Flacius and other Gnesio-Lutherans active there in these years. Their aims included protecting their understanding of Luther’s teachings concerning total depravity and alien righteousness as well as maintaining the developing evangelical churches in the empire free from all thoughts of reunion with the Catholic Church.22 An account in his third volume of Wonder Signs (published in 1562) supports these conclusions as well. In his recounting of a vision seen in May 1548 during the meetings of the imperial diet at Augsburg that promulgated the Interim, Fincel found a divine warning that the pure “light” of the Gospel was in danger of being dimmed by that measure’s deceit. He had witnessed the heavenly apparition at Jena on a bright day, when two additional orbs had appeared in the sky on either side of the sun, phenomena known as parhelia that are caused by the sun’s reflections on upper atmospheric ice particles. In Fincel’s account of the vision, though, another black sphere soon arrived to cover and dim the sun, recalling for him Christian interpretations of the Old Testament prophecy of Malachi 3:20, which likened Christ to the heavenly star: “But for you who fear my name, there will arise the sun of justice with its healing rays.”23 The sun, Fincel reminded his readers, has often stood as a symbol for Christ, and through this sign, God was warning Christians that the “true teaching of justification was about to be eclipsed” through the Interim’s measures and dimmed in the way in which the black ball had darkened the sun at Jena in 1548.”24 Another hint in the final 1562 volume of Wonder Signs points to Fincel’s underlying opposition to Melanchthon and Philippism as well. In that work, Fincel places his own interpretation of a heavenly vision squarely in opposition to one he alleged Melanchthon had promoted. That apparition, in which five rods appeared in the sky, took place eight days before the Praeceptor’s death in 1560. Three of these were visible for quite a long

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time and were seen from great distances, while two of the rods disappeared rather quickly. Melanchthon, Fincel alleged, had thanked God for the sign, interpreting it as a positive omen since the vision had contained only rods—signs of God’s momentary, fatherly chastening—rather than swords or other implements of destruction. Fincel dismissed the Praeceptor’s reading of the vision as sentimentality and instead insisted that grave, momentous changes often followed the deaths of “important people,” although he refused to theorize about just what those changes might be. In this discussion, Fincel never referred to the by-then deceased Melanchthon with the customary address “of blessed memory” or “venerable” typically reserved to refer to departed persons of the Praeceptor’s stature. Instead he identified Melanchthon only as “highly learned,” a backhanded compliment often reserved for theological opponents—and here deployed ironically, since Fincel was promoting his own reading of the vision as superior to Melanchthon’s.25 If the Wonder Signs often betray the uncompromising sense of prophetic mission typical of the Gnesio-Lutheran party, Fincel’s works also show that he could never completely escape the early influences of having been trained in Melanchthon’s Wittenberg. Although Luther had detested traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy, with its dangerous notions of the eternality of the world and the mortality of the soul, Philip Melanchthon soon reformed Wittenberg’s curriculum in ways that made the discipline an important cornerstone of the arts curriculum.26 Mindful of Luther’s objections, Melanchthon fashioned natural philosophical studies at Wittenberg so that they might demonstrate God’s control and ordering of creation rather than Aristotelian materialistic principles. Students may have read such ancient standards as Aristotle’s De anima, a work that outlined the philosopher’s belief in the mortality of the soul, but they also studied many other texts, which argued that an underlying telos was evident in the world. Through reading works like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, for instance, Wittenberg’s arts students learned of the natural processes that governed the heavens and the earth, but they were also taught to decode the seeming deviations of those patterns as signs, omens, and portents that revealed the divine will.27 In this way Melanchthon tried to bring natural philosophy into conformity with evangelical doctrine, even as he cultivated a generally more open and accepting attitude than Luther’s to the book of nature as a source for theology. Still, the discrimination of fine points of doctrine or natural philosophical teaching was not Fincel’s aim. Rather, the Wonder Signs was intended

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to be a sustained jeremiad, but one that was different from many of the pastoral and theological screeds of the later Reformation. As a trained natural philosopher and a student of medicine, Fincel employed the cloak of contemporary scientific and medical knowledge to add luster to his predictions. He did not admit all examples of signs treated in the cheap and sensationalistic broadside press of his day. He excluded some, like simple eclipses of the moon and sun. Since they occurred with predictable regularity, he judged them natural phenomena different from extraordinary visions seen in the skies. Although he recounted the parhelia that had occurred around the time of formulation of the Augsburg Interim, he did so because of the other momentous, seemingly aberrant events that had accompanied them, such as the black orb that had obscured the sun at the same time. Fincel excluded most of the parhelia that were frequently being reported in the cheap, sensationalistic broadside press at the time.28 The celestial visions he related instead were almost always extraordinary events that defied all contemporary natural explanation. His books, in other words, are alive with images of massed wild animals; hordes of soldiers; and blood-red moons, suns, and other strange bodies seen in the skies. Fincel’s knowledge of medicine contributed to his eschatological certitude as well since he concentrated a great deal of his attention on recounting recent outbreaks of disease. The seeming intensification of disease was, as Luther had also argued in his Genesis Lectures,29 proof of God’s rising anger with the increasing tide of human sinfulness. For Fincel, both the multiplication of new diseases—like an outbreak of a new “warriors’ sickness” (Kriegerkrankheiten) noted throughout Germany in 154930 —and the frequency with which old sicknesses were recurring supported his contention of escalating divine anger. St. Vitus’ dance,31 rabies,32 and— most frequently—the plague were among the diseases he elevated to the role of signs in his collections. Here the plague took pride of place. It played a special role among the “signs of the end” primarily because of the enormous death tolls it exacted. As Fincel’s narratives stressed, it was the only illness capable of carrying off thousands within a relatively short period of time. Thus it was easy to imagine that it would serve as one of the forces of death that would be unleashed in the coming Apocalypse.33 Although Fincel related most of his wonders with little commentary, his accounts of contemporary plague were often filled with greater detail and more extensive moralizing. An outbreak of the disease in Rome in 1522, for instance, had been so severe that within a few days, the streets and alleyways had been completely fi lled with corpses. A Greek wizard

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appeared and offered to drive the pestilence away. To do so, he cut the horns of a bull in two and murmured magical formulas before sacrificing the animal to an idol in a local amphitheater. Such machinations did not dispel the epidemic but proved the dark character of Rome’s “sanctity,” since the Romans preferred to seek the help of the devil rather than the true God.34 In narrating most instances of the plague, Fincel was careful to stress that the disease did not appear without warnings, which most folk failed to heed. In the year 1547, for instance, crosses had mysteriously appeared on the clothes of many in Germany, and blood was seen on the walls of people’s parlors and bedchambers—forewarnings of the plague that would strike one year later.35 An epidemic at Siebenbürgen in 1554 had been heralded by the sickness and death of a young girl. In the three days following her death, she had constantly been heard repeating the words, “Oh dear neighbors, I beg you to do God’s Will. Repent and turn away from sin, since God the Almighty is very angry because of your transgressions.”36 The Siebenbürger failed to heed such warnings, and when the disease struck their town, the outbreak was so severe that the locals “fell upon one another in the streets and narrow alleys, biting and tearing each other apart like angry dogs.”37 Despite such hyperbole, Fincel’s work cannot be dismissed as a product of sensationalism. The author’s academic career in natural philosophy, a discipline usually more concerned with uncovering patterns in nature than proofs of the end times, would have granted his examination of natural wonders a degree of authority among many readers. Fincel, in other words, was not unlike the modern academic turned “public intellectual” who relies on scholarly reputation to bolster warnings made to a more general public about global warming, species extinction, or any of a number of issues illuminated by scientific research. The certainty of which the Jena natural philosopher was convinced, though, was the nearness of the Last Judgment.38 And the cacophony of disasters, oddities, and ominous events that Fincel retailed were intended to show that God was no longer chastening his subjects with “a father’s rod, but was instead about to visit Germany with an executioner’s sword.”39 To prove such a judgment, Fincel’s texts merely repeated numerous examples of the woes God was using to condemn sin in contemporary times. He did not arrange these wonders according to any typology; instead, each volume recounted the signs chronologically, beginning in the fateful year 1517 and concluding in the year in which the volume was published. While he did draw upon prominent theologians, astrologers,

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and other authorities in recounting some wonders, the majority of events he related appear to have been culled from the broadside press as well as from word of mouth. Fincel may have kept a collection of pamphlets and broadsides that he used as his source, while at the same time learning of other events from friends and associates in and around Jena. Often, an intricate web of correspondence kept those with an interest in natural wonders abreast of recent events, too.40 Beyond the importance that the plague and other diseases had in these compendia, Fincel also stressed the rising ferocity of storms, earthquakes, and other natural catastrophes as “signs of the end.” Famine, visions seen in the sky, and the monstrous births of humans and animals played a similarly large role in his works, while multiplying wars, the Turkish threat, and the mounting moral degeneracy of the church at Rome supported the author’s apocalyptic certainty as well. In short, in compiling and arranging his texts, Fincel seems to have had clearly in mind Christ’s words in the synoptic apocalypse, particularly that of Luke 21:10–11: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.” While insisting that the punishments being meted out in his own days were qualitatively more catastrophic than those of previous epochs, Fincel nonetheless observed that God had always used signs to proclaim the transformations he was about to make in human history.41 Knowledge of previously recorded wonders, then, could help reveal the precise nature of the changes that were to occur in the present day. For even if the full complement of signs being revealed in Fincel’s time pointed to the imminence of the Last Judgment, these events could also be read for the clues they offered to things that might occur along the road to that great culmination. Accordingly, Fincel tried to demonstrate in each of his collections that signs always pointed to other catastrophes and that unusual events in nature revealed other misfortunes yet to come. His strain of argument thus linked eschatology to his own natural philosophical and historical knowledge. Like the teleological commentators on natural philosophy he had studied, he warned that every action in the natural world provoked other reactions. Comets and other visions seen in the skies often announced the coming of wars, the death of kings, and the fall of empires, but earthquakes, floods, deformed births—indeed, any kind of irregularity—might be a harbinger of another ill to come. A massive flood had brought an epidemic of snakes and worms to Venice, Genoa,

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and Rome in 587, but those trials had left behind fouled air that soon brought an even more trying plague in its wake.42 A blood rain in 1539 in the Netherlands presaged the city of Ghent’s downfall for its resistance to the tax policies of Charles V, just as a similar “three-day” bloody downpour at Brixen in the South Tirol in 874 had foretold troubles, not for subject populations, but for the ineffectual Carolingian emperor Charles the Fat, warning of the imminent breakup of his kingdom.43 Using these techniques, Fincel relied upon his knowledge of natural philosophy, history, and the Bible to compare the events he saw occurring in the present with similar events that had transpired in the past. His collections often traced detailed, convoluted paths that led from one troubling omen to still greater catastrophes, while at the same time they reminded readers that the entire scope of human history was moving inexorably toward the Last Judgment, a coming scourge for the wicked but a blessed culmination for the repentant. Although generously peppered with quotes from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and other distinguished natural philosophers and historians,44 Fincel’s method of presenting his wonders reveals at least some familiarity with the traditions of miracle recording that had flourished in late-medieval Europe.45 In the miracle books that were kept at late-medieval shrines, scribes recorded saintly intercessions in a kind of running chronicle, usually arranged by the year in which they had been reported. Such accounts almost always included the name and residence of those who had been healed or aided by the saint, even as these narratives recounted many details intended to lend veracity to the testimonies. The purpose of these accounts may have been to popularize cults, yet only a small fraction of the millions of pilgrims who journeyed to Europe’s shrines ever testified to having experienced a miracle. The oral proclamation of these testimonies and, somewhat later, their printed promulgation aimed to prove that at a particular place and particular time God had, in fact, been present and had shown signs of his favor. Fincel similarly intended his work to prove to readers God’s continuing intimacy with human affairs, yet rather than signs of mercy like the many intercessory miracles recorded at late-medieval shrines, he found everywhere evidence of divine displeasure. To underscore the immediacy of the events he narrated, he relied on the traditional rhetorical techniques that had often been used in recounting miracles in the Middle Ages: narrative, repetition, and amplification. By relating specific instances, times, and places, as well as witnesses who had seen these events, he labored

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to lend veracity to his claims. “At this particular time” and “at this particular place,” such detailed pronouncements warned, the “hand of God had been seen” producing an undeniable visual spectacle. Through the repetition of similar accounts as well as the reiteration of phrases and their subtle modulations—“The end is nigh,” “The ax is at the tree”—he amplified such claims, but also increased such stories’ aural impact. Just as the miracles of the saints had long been recorded so that they might be re-read aloud, Fincel, too, seems to have intended his readers to delve into his stories and use them as a constant audible spur to repentance. The Wonder Signs were, like other printed devotional works at the time in both Catholicism and the Protestant confessions, products of an intensified “technology of guilt,” to draw upon the phrase that John Bossy once coined to describe innovations in the practice of early modern penance.46 Fincel seems to have imagined, in other words, that the owners of his collection would pick his works up and read them whenever they felt threatened by sin or doubtful about the ultimate purpose of the “troubles” they saw occurring around them.47 Here the looming specter of the Last Judgment was intended to prompt readers to a constant amendment of life. The books’ physical characteristics also support such intentions. Each of the three volumes of Wonder Signs was published in a cheap octavo format, the sixteenth- century equivalent of the modern “pocketbook.” As such, they were relatively affordable and portable commodities, intended for avid and frequent consumption. Thus Fincel perceived the Wonder Signs as edifying texts that might stir personal piety, self-examination, and repentance. A comparison of his works with the most prominent humanist inspired collection of the period, Conrad Lycosthenes’s A Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents, reveals a number of important differences. Lycosthenes’s collection was printed one year after Fincel’s in simultaneous Latin and German editions, each in a luxurious folio format that was almost seven hundred pages long.48 Heinrich Petri, the famous Basel printer who had previously published handsome illustrated editions of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia,49 spared no expense on the Chronicle’s publication, creating a veritable visual feast for scholars interested in prodigies and curiosities that included more than seven hundred woodcut illustrations of the more than fifteen hundred anomalous events the author recounted. In the years that followed, Lycosthenes’s text helped define the ways in which such catastrophes and misfortunes were visualized throughout northern Europe, where the volume took on a role among printers as a kind of pattern book for depicting

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ominous events in nature.50 Just as Fincel stressed both the horror and predictive nature of the events he recounted, so Lycosthenes emphasized the role that such phenomena played in announcing the great transformations God was about to make in human history. Lycosthenes proved a critic of human sinfulness as well, pointing out that human disobedience was the ultimate source of such disruptions in the natural order of things, as God fashioned displays of his anger to fit the particular errors and faults of his children at a given place and time. At the same time, Lycosthenes was not a natural philosopher or theologian but a teacher of grammar and dialectic in his adopted Basel, and his interest in his own disciplines shines through in his treatment of the events. Where Fincel immediately turned in his volumes to recounting a host of violations of nature’s seeming patterns, Lycosthenes’s text first delved into the philological problems that surrounded the terms omens, portents, prodigies, and wonders. As a philologist and grammarian, he was convinced that the fine distinctions in terminologies long recorded in human language revealed important underlying differences in how God acted in nature. While he freely admitted that many of the events he was going to recount had natural causes, he cautioned that it was often difficult for human eyes to ascertain their precise rationale. It was the effects such ominous events produced that were important and not their precise causes; therefore, such signs and portents were spectacles contrived by God to astonish human eyes. And thus, in the long and learned introduction to his encyclopedic collection, Lycosthenes carefully recounted the many shades of meaning that distinguished the Latin terms ostentum, omen, portentum, prodigium, and so forth.51 After he delineated their differences with a hairsplitting accuracy, his subsequent recounting of the wonders rendered such distinctions of little importance, for as his title page had announced, the purpose of retelling prodigies, portents, and omens was threefold. God intended such events to announce his splendor and majesty, to strike fear into the hearts of sinners, and to be a source of pious meditation for Christians. Everywhere, Lycosthenes’s subsequent collection intoned, nature presented evidence of God’s intimate familiarity with human events, signs of the transformations that had and would continue to occur in human history, even though—as the work’s title page warned—these events ultimately pointed to the nearness of the end. The methods with which Lycosthenes’s text communicated the urgency of that warning, however, differed markedly from Fincel’s Wonder Signs, and as one moved from the front matter of Lycosthenes’s

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work to the actual meat of his encyclopedic collection, thoughts of a looming Apocalypse quickly disappeared. Perhaps those who turned the pages may have continued to consume these tales in the way that author and printer recommended at the outset—as signs of God’s anger and of the imminent transformation of history—but the memory of such warnings would likely have faded as the reader progressed through the visual panorama that followed (figure 3.1) For in perusing Lycosthenes’s Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents, the reader was not taken on a pilgrimage in which continual repentance and self-denial were extolled. Instead, he or she was presented with a phantasmagoria of some fifteen hundred weird, bizarre, troubling, and merely strange events and phenomena that had been observed in the world. Lycosthenes’s collection, moreover, aimed to treat the entire sweep of human history, recounting prodigies, portents, and omens that had occurred since the beginning of recorded history. Only one-tenth of the stories that Lycosthenes related had taken place in the years between 1500 and 1557, and many of these had been drawn directly from Fincel’s first volume of Wonder Signs published one year earlier.52 As a result, after spending much time reading that work, it might have been difficult to presume that any order was present in nature at all, even an eschatological one, for Lycosthenes’s collection seemed to warn over and over, much like a Flemish vanitas, that all categories of created things were unstable and transitory and that any order in nature was illusory. Alternatively, in a more positive vein, a reader of Lycosthenes might conclude, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that there were “more things in heaven and earth than . . . are dreamt of in . . . philosophy.”53 If Lycosthenes’s text gave a preliminary bow to the reigning theological fascination with eschatology and the Apocalypse, other impulses were at work that likely undergirded its popularity. The oddities and strange possibilities that it presented satisfied an undeniable inquisitiveness among the sixteenth-century learned, who were eager to find out about and visualize nature’s deviances and to understand earthly “secrets.” Most likely they used the knowledge they acquired from Lycosthenes of previous natural deviations and their consequences to conduct a little armchair divination of their own.54 What events were to follow the seemingly momentous portents that were occurring in contemporary times? Lycosthenes’s collection gave a host of clues from the past for those who were eager to answer this question in the present. The desire to unlock those secrets, when it veered into realms touched by base and cupid human desires, had long been excoriated as empty curiositas or dangerous soothsaying.

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figure 3.1 A typical page from Conrad Lycosthenes’ 1557 Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon. Under the umbrella of warnings of an imminent Last Judgment, Lycosthenes actually presented much historical material suitable for readers interested in divining the future (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: 39 Phys. 2°).

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But Lycosthenes’s text provided its readers with a way to tour those dark alleyways while paying lip service to the larger creedal truths of sin and the coming Last Judgment.55 Thus, despite its high-stated moral purposes, the popularity of Lycosthenes’s collection was likely sustained largely by those seeking to satisfy their curiosity about nature’s macabre possibilities and violent deviations than by public demand to understand nature’s sympathies to human sinfulness. Fincel’s Wonder Signs, on the other hand, addressed its audience in a quite different manner. In contrast to the lavishly illustrated folios of Lycosthenes, Fincel’s books were cheaply produced in pocketbook format and originally published without illustration. Only a subsequent edition of the first volume, published one year after the original at Leipzig in 1557, included illustrations that depicted fifty-three of the wonders narrated in the text. The printer Jacob Berwald may have thought the illustrations necessary for his edition of the book to compete against versions of Wonder Signs that were appearing at the same time in other German cities. His illustrations were chosen to depict some of the most spectacular accounts in Fincel’s collection (figure 3.2). But other printers did not rush to illustrate their versions in the wake of Berwald’s decision.56 Indeed, no other German wonder books were to appear with copious illustrations during the late sixteenth century, while similar texts published elsewhere in Europe were often, like Lycosthenes’s work, illustrated.57 It might be tempting to conclude that this absence of illustrations was the result of a conscious choice on the part of wonder book authors and their printers, for the matter of how best to represent nature—either through depictions that appealed to the eyes or through verbal descriptions that spoke to the ear—was a subject vigorously debated among sixteenthcentury natural philosophers. The innovative botanist Leonhart Fuchs, for instance, had shocked some traditionalist natural philosophers in 1542 with his claim that his pictures could represent the flora more accurately than the received texts of ancients like Dioscorides.58 His illustrated botany manual, Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants,59 was a first, though some quarters roundly rejected it despite its handsome cache of some five hundred botanical illustrations. The absence of illustrations from sixteenth- century German wonder books was more likely the result of commercial necessities, for nowhere in any of these books do their authors criticize the contemporary proliferation of illustrated broadsides advertising signs and prodigies. Both the publishers and authors of wonder books like Fincel’s seem to have concluded that the expense

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figure 3.2 An illustration from Jacob Berwald’s edition of Job Fincel’s Wonder Signs, depicting the birth of monstrous triplets at Augsburg in 1531, a sign of divine dissatisfaction with the settlement of the recent Diet of Augsburg. The children were described as a disembodied head, a snakelike creature with a pike’s face, and a suckling pig. Berwald’s version of Fincel’s signs was the only German wonder book to appear in the sixteenth century with significant illustrations (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: T 397.8° Helmst).

of pictures was not necessary to attract buyers to their works, since most readers’ curiosity had already been piqued by having seen the illustrations of such events in penny press accounts. The absence of pictures in Fincel’s Wonder Signs tended all the same to heighten the effect of the author’s often brilliant “word” pictures. Although his recounting of many kinds of natural disasters like floods and storms were usually related straightforwardly without commentary, Fincel at other times drew upon his skills as a poet and storyteller in relating incidents in which human beings were participants. In recounting these incidents, Fincel fashioned his retelling in ways that heightened their verisimilitude and drama. In an account of a group death that had occurred on the Bohemian border in 1551, for example, Fincel described in vivid detail how six drunken friends wiled away the hours until the “third

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and fourth hour of the night” in an orgy of drinking, gorging, gambling, and singing. Carried away by their inebriation, the men toasted and sang lusty songs to an image of the devil that was on the wall in the room in which they drank. In the morning one of the men’s wives discovered them scattered about “like cattle,” her own husband lying “like a sow in filth.” The men had drunk themselves to death, and Fincel intoned the case as a divine condemnation of both intemperance and careless blasphemy.60 At other times, the moral significance of such tales was not so clear cut. Fincel reported the case of the sleeping sickness of a servant girl who had begun her slumber on St. Martin’s Day (November 11) 1551 and had slept until the following June. Her sleep, in other words, had begun at the point traditionally marking the close of the northern European autumn and the onset of winter and had continued until the quickening of the following year’s growing season, a chronology that inscribed a “Lazarus-like” death and resurrection, but which readers may have also seen as evocative of an animal’s winter hibernation. Here, instead of moralizing about the causes or reasons behind such a sign, Fincel concentrated on the strangeness of the details of the young woman’s slumbers. During her sleep, she had not eaten nor even awakened, and her body had become the destination for sightseers anxious to behold such a wondrous event. Fincel’s examination of the circumstances surrounding the woman’s sleep did not end here, though, for he noted that despite her malady, she had retained a “fine red mouth” and an active pulse, and that she had often blinked. Every attempt to wake her had failed, although in the evenings she was observed rolling around on her bed. In concluding his account, he gave extremely precise directions to the woman’s village, which lay, as he observed, near Schartefeld behind the Harz, a half-mile from Harzberg on the road to Duderstadt. Both cases—the band of drunkards and the slumbering maid— display the opposing poles of human culpability and innocence through which Fincel’s tales march. On the one hand, the blaspheming, intemperate men—like Lot’s wife turned to salt or the proverbial blasphemer struck by a thunderbolt—fully deserved their punishment, and their cases were both parabolic testimony to divine justice as well as evidence for the mounting tide of human transgression that, as Fincel frequently reminded, was soon to be expunged. On the other, the sleeping maid appeared no more blameworthy than any other human being, and her malady belied all explanation. Thus Fincel concentrated on relating the very strange, inexplicable dimensions of her sickness, even as he emphasized to his

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largely Saxon readership their own close proximity to the case. The event, he reminded, had occurred “just off the Duderstadt road,” an important byway along the trade routes between his own native Thuringia and Lower Saxon towns and villages to the north. Rather than indicting the young woman for any sin as the cause of her illness, he intoned the case as proof of divine benevolence. For though the sign worked on her body may have been yet another signpost of the end, the woman, like Lazarus, eventually did rise from her slumbers. The trail to the Last Judgment, usually intoned in Fincel’s books as a road of tears, could also involve experiences of God’s continuing goodness toward the faithful. A similar tendency to suspend moral judgment, and even to exonerate the subjects of signs and wonders, can be seen in Fincel’s sustained attention to bizarre and monstrously deformed births. In sum, Fincel’s three collections of Wonder Signs treated 744 signs.61 More than onesixth of these wonders (128 cases) involved instances of deformed human births.62 He also reported a number of cases in which strange circumstances surrounded particular births, including four cases of unborn children who were heard crying in their mother’s wombs63 and a woman whose tenth pregnancy was accompanied by the growth of an enormous fibrous tumor, which necessitated a fatal caesarean section.64 When the instances of deformed animal births like Luther’s famous Monk Calf are also figured into this category of abnormal births, a quite high proportion of Fincel’s tales treat reproductive anomalies. Unlike his terse treatment of many stories about floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, his accounts of monstrous births are sometimes quite detailed, often relying on the patterns of allegorical interpretation made famous on the German scene through Luther’s and Melanchthon’s famous tracts on the Monk Calf and the Papal Ass. Fincel’s description of the birth of the Monster of Cracow, born in 1547, is typical of the attention he showered on the most spectacular of monsters.65 He overlooked no deformity, often comparing the child’s abnormalities to features in the animal kingdom or to similar births that have occurred throughout history. The Cracow infant, we are told, was born with round and fiery eyes and a long nose on the chest; where the child should have had breasts, there were instead two monkey’s heads, while at the knees and elbows, the infant had hounds’ heads rather than joints. Despite normal arms, hands, and feet, the child’s fingers were abnormally long, and its back was sooty and black colored like a dog’s skin. At the lower back, the child had a long tail that stretched to a point above his

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head and ended in a spike like a scorpion’s. Although the infant lived for only three hours, it delivered a message intelligible to those in attendance: “Wake up. Your God is at the door.”66 In Fincel’s treatment, this sign was a proof of divine majesty and omnipotence. He reminded his readers that no child was ever born in which God himself did not serve as midwife, an observation Fincel proved by making reference to the many passages in the Psalms that praise the divinity’s ability to shape the unborn and to draw them out of their mother’s womb.67 Such an event was a warning of great change, even as it allowed Fincel to extol a peculiarly evangelical attitude toward monstrosities, an attitude that distinguishes his own treatment of the Monster of Cracow from other interpretations current in northern Europe at the same time. Most sixteenth-century commentators treated that famous monster not as divinely produced but as demonically generated.68 In his nearly contemporaneous and influential Histoires prodigieuses, for example, the French humanist Pierre Boaistuau had used the case of the Cracow monster to prove that demons might produce offspring. Boaistuau’s ideas circulated in the most elevated circles of Europe, since he presented a special manuscript edition of the Histoire prodigieuses to Queen Elizabeth I in 1559 to commemorate her ascension to the English throne, one year before his book was printed in Paris.69 But Fincel was convinced that the Cracow monster’s birth was a work of God, intended as a direct warning. To prove that claim, he examined the events that had followed the birth of another similar human-animal hybrid, the even more famous hermaphrodite known as the Monster of Ravenna, born in that Italian city in 1512. That child had appeared in the days before the decisive military showdown between King Louis XII of France and Pope Julius II outside Ravenna.70 By 1556, when Fincel wrote his own account of the monster, there were already a number of conflicting interpretations of the infant both in Italy and throughout Europe, and Fincel aimed to sanction his own evangelical interpretation. He ignored the consequences of this decisive period in the Italian Wars, for although the French had been victorious at Ravenna in April of 1512 they had to withdraw completely from Northern Italy and admit defeat to papal forces by August of the same year.71 Like French commentators who interpreted the event in the days after the birth occurred, Fincel transformed the Monster of Ravenna into a foreshadowing of the ultimate downfall of both the papacy and Italy. The infant at Ravenna was born with a horn at the head and had wings rather than arms, an eye at the knee, and a single claw-like foot that resembled a hawk’s. A cross was emblazoned on its

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chest. As he read these symbols, Fincel drew upon preexisting northern European commentaries, which had associated each deformity with specific sins alleged to be particularly acute among Italians. The details of his interpretation were little different from that of the French chronicler Johannes Multivallis, who in 1512 had related each of the infant’s abnormalities to certain sins in the following way: The horn [indicates] pride; the wings, mental frivolity and inconstancy; the lack of arms, a lack of good works; the raptor’s foot, rapaciousness, usury and every sort of avarice, the eye on the knee, a mental orientation solely toward earthly things, the double sex, sodomy.72 For Fincel, too, the horn represented pride; the wings, inconstancy and frivolity; the lack of arms, the absence of charity; the eye at the knee, concupiscence and lust for earthly things; and the hawk’s foot, the rapaciousness and usury practiced by the popes.73 Further, the child’s hermaphroditic status was a condemnation of the sodomy often practiced by the Italians, a charge that Fincel—ever the avid anti- Catholic polemicist—made elsewhere throughout his collections in relation to the Roman priesthood.74 Yet while the deity may have been using the infant in this way to condemn a broad basket of sins, Fincel reasoned all the same that the cross emblazoned on the child’s chest held out the evangelical promise that all those who turned to Christ would receive forgiveness and eternal life.75 Thus, to the strains of his argument that described the child’s birth as a revelation of the full extent, variety, and complexity of human failings, Fincel also wed the possibility of a salvation freely granted through grace. His account intoned faith in Christ as the only exit from the dismal cycle of sin that was inscribed on the infant’s body, and his retelling of the event aimed to mold that birth into a proof not just of human wickedness but also of the evangelical truth that was the antidote to such bleak failings. Through such methods, Fincel claimed the Monster of Ravenna as a proof of Protestant truth, because the event could be interpreted as both a condemnation of the papacy and a confirmation of the Protestant message of justification by faith. The use of this and other monstrous births throughout Fincel’s collections thus extolled God’s control over everything in creation and credited him, rather than the devil or natural causes, as the ultimate cause of deformities. Fincel’s commentaries did not link any lapses of parental

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morality to a particular deformity. He did not concentrate on what were, by his own day, venerable natural philosophical explanations for such abnormalities—like the power of maternal impressions or weaknesses in the seeds—although he did insist that some abnormalities—like the presence of malformed limbs or excessive digits—occurred through natural causes. Nor did he relate his ever-widening circle of monstrosities to the then-popular prophecy contained in 2 Esdras 5:8: “There shall be a confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstrual women shall bring forth monsters.” 76 That prophecy, with its singling out of women who impiously conceived children during their menses, had provided Lycosthenes with his most prominent explanation for the rise in monstrosities he alleged was occurring in the foreword to his Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents.77 Fincel’s accounts counseled instead that the lineage of misshapen infants and animals to which God seemed yearly to be adding new cases was testimony not to individual acts of wrongdoing but to a generally rising tide of sin. This “monstrous wave,” in other words, was the consequence of a communal problem, rather than a specifically personal indictment of individual wrongdoing. Just as Martin Luther had warned that the increasingly rebellious spirit of humankind was causing God to fashion new, more extreme diseases, punishments that “cursed” the earth, Fincel linked a seeming rise in reproductive abnormality to increasing human wickedness. Here and elsewhere his selection of events frequently evidenced a fondness for cases of abnormalities in which human monsters appeared with the features of animals. The Cracow monster had a scorpion’s tale; the Monster of Ravenna, a raven’s claw-like foot and wings. As Fincel related the birth of human triplets at Augsburg in 1531 78 he noted that one child was a mere disembodied head without torso or limbs attached. At its birth it was placed in a hat rather than a cradle. The second infant he described as a “froglike” creature with a lizard’s tale, and the third, a suckling pig.79 If malformed human births often seemed to involve a crossing over of the lines dividing animals and humans, human features were often being discovered on the beasts of the field as well, Fincel reminded his readers. Luther’s Monk Calf—a bovine found wearing the cowl and tonsure of a monk—was only the most famous case in point,80 but a fish caught at Copenhagen in 1550 had also appeared with a man’s face and similar monkish attributes,81 while a strange animal found in the bishop of Salzburg’s forest in 1531 had a man’s face and a long beard

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besides numerous other deformities.82 Thus human beings were more and more frequently coming to resemble the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air, while animals were assuming human physiognomy. Fincel relied on these accounts of bizarrely hybridized infants and animals as more than a device to spark fear and wonder in his readers. He was convinced by their increasing frequency that such events were, like plagues and diseases, obvious proof of the degrading effects of sin on humankind and of the utterly futile condition of human beings outside the Gospel’s grace. If monsters and diseases revealed something essential about the human estate, the dramas of the stars and heavens, which accounted for almost half the events Fincel related,83 more often pointed to the certainty of imminent punishment. Such signs, he incessantly reminded his readers, inevitably meant warfare or other events that were to result in the death of important persons or in huge increases in mortality. Here the Jena natural philosopher’s descriptions distinguished carefully between the size, shape, and precise vision that had been observed in the skies. Yet the messages he discerned in such events pointed singularly to misfortune and death. In his first volume alone, Fincel related forty examples in which dramatic visions had been observed around the sun and in the heavens, a fact that points to the influence of the synoptic apocalypse’s prophecies on his compilation (“There will be terrors and great signs from heaven,” Luke 21:11), but which also reveals Fincel’s close reading of the Apocalypse of St. John. In the eighth chapter of Revelation, the opening of the seventh seal is followed by a host of signs in the heavens, including falling stars, and an angelic “smiting” of a “third part” of the sun, the moon, and the stars. But while such celestial signs were easily fit into Fincel’s apocalyptic mindset, his inclusion of comets within this panoply of disorders required more explanation. Such events, he freely admitted, had natural causes and could be predicted by the astrological sciences. In his third volume, though, he defended himself against eventual critics for including comets within his collections. To do so, he put forward a theory of “natural” and “supernatural” miracles. “There are two kinds of miracles,” he observed, some that happen without any natural causes, such as wondrous, odd sights and the like. But there are also miracles, which although they have their cause in nature . . . one must not reckon according to their efficient or material cause, but according to their effects.84

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Those effects, God had ordained through his dominion over nature, were to point to future punishments and bad fortune, a claim Fincel bolstered by quoting the ancient natural philosopher Pliny the Elder.85 In this way, comets bespoke of both God’s justice and goodness, for although his punishment was certain, his mercy was evident in his forewarnings.86 The hermeneutic that Fincel thus provided to readers anxious to understand the ultimate meanings behind the seemingly inexplicable and tragic events they saw occurring around them, then, was a sober and somber one. At the same time, that interpretive schema was not untouched by optimism, although Fincel’s optimism is often difficult for disenchanted twenty-first-century scholars to fathom. On the one hand, this conservative and radically devoted Protestant may have presented an image to his readers of a universe that quaked and pullulated with evidence of human misdeeds; on the other, his notions of natural order counseled that the same universe was created with human beings in mind—with them, in fact, at its very center. God himself was preaching to humankind, chiding and prodding them with the undeniable power of the thunderbolt, the flood, and the earthquake. Such arguments aimed to address the impoverishment that some, like Fincel, sensed lay in a natural philosophy that concentrated too rigorously on processes and mechanics rather than on the creator who had set such processes in motion and imbued them with the sufficient causes to demonstrate each and every dimension of his will in history. Such a vision had other sources of appeal as well, for although Fincel counseled that sin would soon work its fatal effects on the world, that culmination would result in an end to all suffering, a blessed conclusion that would also be a beginning in which God himself would “wipe away all tears” from the faithful’s eyes. Yet in a work devoted to demonstrating the enormity of human shortcoming and eliciting remorse for those failings, it is curious that Fincel devoted no space to all the usual Protestant questions concerning election and predestination. Although his aims were those of a conservative Lutheran, one who believed he was preserving the Reformer’s legacy, an inherently voluntaristic assumption underpinned his project, an assumption that was as simple as the apostolic admonition contained in Acts 3:19 to “Repent . . . and be converted.” How then did Fincel’s audience interpret and consume his works? Certainly, tender consciences predisposed to think in terms of coming catastrophes may have found these volumes a source of fear and anxiety, and after reading these books, these readers may themselves have daily added new signs predicting a prompt end to human history to Fincel’s

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list. But although his work soon became one of the most frequently cited wonder books of the later German Reformation and new texts constantly flowed from its wellspring,87 it produced no revolutionary “apocalyptic” moment; its evangelical readers did not sell their possessions, give to the poor, and isolate themselves to create a perfect society in preparation for the Last Judgment. There were, in other words, no Münster prophets among Fincel’s readers, and such plans would have been futile for the author himself and like-minded evangelicals. Although the signs they watched so intently were interpreted as communal warnings, the repentance they imagined was a personal, not a social, event. Millennial perfection, improvement, and more perfect communities were not possible in a world that had been so inexorably damaged by sin. Such sentiments may help to explain, as Robin Barnes has argued,88 the relative absence of programs of social and moral disciplining in late sixteenthcentury Lutheranism when compared to the fertility of those efforts in areas touched by the reformed Christian teachings that emanated from Geneva, Basel, Zurich, and elsewhere. However, the absence of such programs cannot in and of itself be credited solely to the fertility of apocalyptic mentalities in German Protestantism, but may largely derive instead from Lutheranism’s thorough dismissal of all notions of sanctification, even for those who have been justified through faith. The Lutheran concept simul justus et peccator, in other words, may go further than the popularity of eschatology to explain the contours of late sixteenth-century moral disciplining in evangelical regions. For in examining Fincel’s own life and literary activity in the years following the completion of his wonder book project, we find evidence of the ways in which many evangelicals may have consumed such eschatology. By the mid-1560s, Job Fincel seems to have been tiring of his position as assessor of the medical faculty at the University at Jena, and in 1566, he became city physician at Weimar. Although he returned one year later to the university, he soon left Jena again to take up a similar municipal office at Zwickau in 1568, a position in which he remained until his death in 1589. During his final years at Jena, Fincel completed an advice manual on the plague. First published in 1564, that text, On the Principal Disease and Plague, may have in fact recommended him for the positions of city physician at Weimar and Zwickau. And that text, too, reveals something of his own disposition to the eschatological signs he had to this point so vigorously purveyed. By 1582, Fincel had expanded his manual fourfold and secured an imperial privilege for its publication at Leipzig.

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Now entitled simply On the Plague, his book began with a dedication to his temporal overlords, the town councilors of Zwickau. In it, he advised that the plague was a judgment of God and that disease was one of the ways in which he worked his providential designs in history. Comets, eclipses, fiery signs in the heavens, and evil constellations of the planets were others foreordained in God’s wisdom—although they were also secondary causes of the plague. Such fatalism did not prevent Fincel from observing that the disease was not universally deadly and that it might be effectively combated. In the chapters that followed, he recommended quarantine above all as an antidote to massive mortalities, even as he provided prescriptions for purifying the air and gauging its quality, and for eating, drinking, sleeping, and exercising during an outbreak. Thus in Fincel’s career we witness those curious cognitive dissonances—of attachment to and detachment from earthly realities, of love for earthly life and yet longing for heavenly perfection, and of mundane daily realities vigorously tended against the stated certainty that everything might soon dissolve— that are still observed among apocalyptically minded evangelicals today. As the Jena natural philosopher’s apocalyptic message made its way from humble pocketbooks to its audience, the Lutheran devout, it found a reception among people similarly conditioned to entertain such doublethink. On the one hand, these evangelicals had been taught to think of their movement as fulfilling a singularly important role in the unfolding of world history. Their church was the light that was shining forth at the end of time to prepare the world for coming judgment. On the other hand, these evangelicals were not members of a gathered body that had been “called out” to search for millennial perfection, but instead they had been warned that all thoughts of improving society were futile in a world so heavily freighted with sin. As parishioners, members of one of the church’s most venerable but multifarious of institutions, they were also kept anchored in the mundane cares of their cities, territories, families, and communities. Thus, like Fincel, they likely kept one eye focused on the heavens, even as they trained the other on the things of this world.

4

Caspar Goltwurm on the Rhetoric of Natural Wonders in the years following publication of Job Fincel’s Wonder Signs, the subject of miracles quickly grew to become a staple of evangelical theological speculation. Fincel addressed his cheap, dramatic books to literate evangelicals, both lay and clerical, but since he believed the world to be perched on the edge of a great transformation, he wrote them not as works of systematic or controversial theology but as warnings. Trained as a natural philosopher and medic, he largely steered around the intensifying theological disputes of the time, instead concentrating his attentions on cautioning and admonishing his readers. However, other forces at work in the 1550s and 1560s encouraged Lutheran theologians and pastors to return time and again to consider miracles and to treat them in a more systematic fashion. The fascination that wonders came to exercise upon the evangelical theological and pastoral elite in these years presents us at once with a seeming irony. Although Luther had maintained that God worked signs as a warning to the pious and a chastening to the wicked, he had consistently downplayed the authority of miracles when compared to the clear reliability and enduring testimony of the Word. In the young church he left behind, such cautions were quickly disregarded, and the age-old power of miracles to defend a certain vision of Christian truth, to support specific theological positions, and to discern God’s approval or disapproval soon came to play a vital role. Throughout the later sixteenth century, apocalyptic expectation often overlaid much of this discussion of wonders, as the political and theological climate of Lutheranism in these years—rocked from within by vicious wrangling and from without by the resurgence of Catholicism and the appearance of Calvinism—helped to sustain that expectancy. Although many who commented upon miracles in these years agreed that a rising tide of signs revealed the coming Last Judgment, no single

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set of protocols emerged to examine nature’s seeming deviations, nor were evangelical divines of one mind concerning the precise meanings that reposed in specific kinds of wonders. A rich discussion thus flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century among those who interpreted signs of God’s continuing intimacy with human affairs. One of the most influential works to appear in these years was Caspar Goltwurm’s Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles (Wunderwerck und Wunderzeichen Buch), published in 1557 one year after Fincel’s first volume of eschatological signs.1 Whereas Fincel had concentrated his attentions on recounting only signs and wonders that had occurred only since the 1517 Indulgence Controversy, Goltwurm lengthened his view and undertook the ambitious goal of treating all the miracles recorded since the beginning of history. Goltwurm often concurred with Fincel’s judgment; he perceived, in other words, a steadily intensifying drumbeat of wonders as an announcement of the coming Last Judgment and he gave frequent nods to the apocalyptic hopes and fears common among his generation of Lutherans. At the same time, his collection roamed over the great feats God had performed at Creation and in the Garden of Eden; the inexplicable violations of nature’s patterns that had punctuated the stories of the patriarchs, the Exodus, and the period of the Judges and Kings; and the marvelous acts Christ and the Apostles had performed that flowed with such profusion in the New Testament. Relying on by-then classic Melanchthonian Loci Communes methods, Goltwurm sorted his miracles into one of six categories based upon their type, their cause, and the realm in which they had occurred, before further subdividing them into a series of commonplaces. Throughout the text he insisted that miracles formed an alternative language God had always used to communicate with his people, and thus Goltwurm envisioned his Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles as a handbook for learned readers anxious to understand the precise rhetorical tropes through which the Creator spoke when he intervened in the natural order.2 Like Fincel’s Wonder Signs, Goltwurm’s wonder book was also widely quoted in the years to come. His insistence that wonders were another form of divine communication, a corollary to the revealed knowledge of the scriptures, was certainly among the most extravagant Protestant endorsements for the study of miracles to appear in the sixteenth century. Both his wonder book and oeuvre in general came to celebrate wonders as a pillar of truth, one that could be examined to support theological principles, to deepen piety and a sense of God’s presence, and to teach evangelical principles concerning

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depravity, grace, and salvation—ideas that resonated with many evangelical divines in the decades that followed. Although Goltwurm, like Fincel, remains little known today outside a small circle of German literary and historical specialists, he was in his own day a vital force whose works encouraged the intensification of evangelical attention to miracles and the supernatural. Known to his scholarly associates as “Athesinus” because of his roots in the Alpine Etschland, Caspar Goltwurm was born at Sterzing (now Vipiteno) in South Tyrol in 1524.3 After initially enrolling in university in Italy, he moved to Wittenberg in 1539, where he completed his studies within two years. Returning to his homeland, he eventually embarked on a period of prolonged travel. In 1545 he was appointed court preacher at Marburg in Hessen and a year later took up a similar post in the neighboring county of Nassau-Weilburg, a small territory that had tolerated evangelical teaching for two decades but which enacted its first Lutheran church ordinance in May of 1546. Nassau-Weilburg’s prince, Philip III or Philip of Hanau, soon entrusted Goltwurm with supervising a visitation of the territory’s churches, and by 1548 he promoted the young cleric to the office of superintendent. Goltwurm assumed that office at roughly the same time the Augsburg Interim stipulated a re-adoption of Catholic religious practices in Protestant territories. At first, Goltwurm resisted the new regulations and he tried to rally Nassau-Weilburg’s pastors to oppose the imperial measures; he also fought a plan launched by the bishop of Trier and the archbishop of Mainz to replace evangelical pastors in the region with Catholic priests, a scheme that eventually foundered because of a shortage of eligible candidates. By 1550, Goltwurm’s opposition to the emperor’s reunification efforts had made him a marked man; bowing to outside pressure, Philip III furloughed the reformer and forced him to leave Nassau-Weilburg. During the wandering months that followed, Goltwurm visited Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg. He was recalled to Nassau-Weilburg in 1552, when political circumstances permitted his reappointment. From this point until his death seven years later, his influence in the territory’s religious life grew, as did his literary activity. In 1553, for instance, Goltwurm fashioned a new evangelical church ordinance for Nassau-Weilburg, even as he was serving as an advisor to the neighboring duke William I of Nassau-Dillenburg in matters connected to the reform of the church in that territory. Six of the eight books that Goltwurm wrote appeared during his second period of residency in Nassau-Weilburg.4

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These works expanded upon interests that Goltwurm had pursued from the time of the publication of his first book, the Schemata Rhetorica of 1545.5 At this young age, his scholarship displayed a keen interest in history, rhetoric, nature, and the supernatural. In the Schemata Rhetorica, Goltwurm fashioned an essentially traditional manual for preachers in which he insisted, in timeworn fashion, that rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic were essential to the pastor’s toolkit. Yet while he drew on the traditional antique and contemporary Christian sources for such a handbook—from Cicero and Quintillian to the sixteenth- century Erasmus— Goltwurm was ultimately skeptical about eloquence’s ability to convince the masses of evangelical truth. Unlike Erasmus and other humanists, who expressed a deeper faith in rhetoric’s ability to sway simple Christians to the good, Goltwurm insisted in the Schemata Rhetorica that most men and women were too blinded by sin to be convinced by rhetoric’s powers, so that even if they heard the preaching of Christ or St. Paul, they would not be moved to righteousness.6 Despite this underlying pessimism, the young court preacher moved through the various figural techniques of speech, demonstrating each through reference to antique and biblical texts as well as his own examples. In discussing subjectio—the anticipation of one’s opponents’ objections—Goltwurm turned to Christ’s own sermons in the New Testament and the letters of St. Paul to the Romans and the Galatians.7 And in his treatment of complexio—the strategic repetition of words and phrases—his illustrations of the tactic became a prolonged polemic against the papacy that constantly reiterated the words pope and papists at every turn and which contrasted the false beliefs of Romanists against those of the “pious, true savior.”8 Much of the slight manual, like these examples, is an essentially conservative rehashing of themes and techniques that had long played an important role in similar rhetorical manuals, although here they were wedded to the purposes of evangelical polemic. Goltwurm’s treatment of two figures of speech—exemplum and similitudines—is noteworthy for the subsequent role these tropes play in the development of his ideas about wonders. Goltwurm praises similitude—the encapsulation of complex theological ideas into symbols, similes, and parables—as the technique best suited to drive home difficult ideas among the “common folk.”9 And while his treatment of the uses for exemplum is comparatively briefer, he nonetheless insists that illustrative stories drawn from the animal kingdom, or those that involved flora and other natural events, provide the most compelling ways to teach Christian principles to parishioners, advice that was certainly not out of place in the

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mostly agricultural communities in which the Lutheran pastorate lived and worked.10 As Goltwurm’s ideas developed over the coming decade, his reliance on the demonstrative power of nature deepened and often took an allegorical turn. In two biblical commentaries—The Beautiful and Comforting Story of Joseph (1551)11 and The Fine, Beautiful, and Comforting Allegory and Spiritual Meaning of the First Book of Moses (1552)12—the Nassau reformer examined the natural symbols and spiritual and allegorical meanings that lay hidden in Genesis. Here his reliance on allegory ran counter to much Protestant biblical interpretation of the previous decades. As Martin Luther worked out the implications of his evangelical ideas throughout the 1520s, he increasingly criticized and discarded allegory as an exegetical technique,13 although he relied on its usefulness as a homiletic device.14 Other Protestant theologians increasingly depended—as Valla, Erasmus, and many early sixteenth-century humanists had before them—on historical and contextual modes of examining the scriptures at the expense of traditional allegorical interpretation. Even Philip Melanchthon, who often proved intellectually omnivorous and was a friend and correspondent of Caspar Goltwurm, was generally restrained in applying allegorical and spiritualized interpretations to the Old Testament histories.15 In no small measure, the discounting of such traditional techniques arose from distaste for the ways in which medieval theologians had relied on allegory. In their insistence that much of the subsequent apparatus of the church was anticipated in the symbols and characters of the Old Testament stories, these figures had labored to enhance Rome’s prestige. Goltwurm criticized, to be sure, the use of such “popish allegories,” noting the ways in which traditional commentators had pointed to mentions of the sun and moon in the scriptures as prefigurations of the medieval offices of pope and emperor, or the use of Noah’s Ark as a symbolic reference to the Roman church.16 And in a special chapter near the beginning of his treatment of the allegories in Genesis, “A Short Investigation of How One Should Treat Allegories or Spiritual Meanings,” Goltwurm also attacked the Anabaptists and other “erring, proud spirits” for setting out interpretations that were not rooted in the scriptures’ historical meanings. Commentators like these, Goltwurm charged, frequently expressed a fondness for weaving complex fables from the letters and words out of which the scriptures were constructed.17 But while he rejected medieval uses of allegory that supported the papacy, as well as some radical Protestants readings, he salvaged as much of the traditional uses of

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allegory as he could to defend his notions of theological truth. In The Story of Joseph, a text for which his friend Melanchthon wrote an approving foreword, Goltwurm praised the importance of the allegorical and spiritual meanings in the Genesis story, arguing that the entire history of Christ and his church was encoded in the Genesis narrative, an interpretation that had long flourished in medieval exegesis. Goltwurm’s defense of traditional allegory did not stop here, for in his text he aimed to show how deeply embedded spiritualized and symbolic meanings were in the scriptures. He pointed to texts like 1 Peter 3, which compared the Genesis Flood to baptism, and John 3:14, in which Jesus presented his own “lifting up” on the cross as an event foreshadowed in Moses’s elevation of the serpent in the wilderness.18 Beyond pointing to such spiritual parallels between Old and New Testaments, he seems to have enjoyed the complexities of allegorical interpretation as an intellectual habitus. For in his subsequent commentaries on the patriarchal episodes, he compared the heavenly translations of Enoch and Elijah to the Incarnation and Ascension of Christ, and found in the tale of Esau and Jacob’s struggling within Rebecca’s womb a prefiguration of the Christian church’s many battles between “unsavory” heretics and the orthodox.19 Subjected to Goltwurm’s style of allegorical analysis, the scriptures were made to reveal rich, hidden patterns and correspondences in the contours of salvation’s history, patterns and correspondences that were often signaled through signs and wonders. In the years that followed The Story of Joseph, Goltwurm’s attention to these supernatural markers intensified, first with the publication of his A New and Entertaining Historical Calendar (1553)20 and somewhat later with his wonder book. The attention Goltwurm devoted to the deployment of history, both as a spur to piety and as a proof for his systematic theology, was shared by many later Reformation pastors and theologians trained in Melanchthon’s curriculum at Wittenberg. In that system, history had many uses, some of the effects of which can be seen in Goltwurm’s mature works. In compiling his Historical Calendar, for instance, the examples of both Luther and Melanchthon guided Goltwurm. In 1541, Luther had published his Calculation of the Years of this Earth, a work he envisioned would help readers to understand “biblical and secular history by providing an orientation within the framework of the six ages of human history.”21 The Calculation was not a history in the normal sense of the word, but a tabular accounting of significant events and turning points that had occurred in each of the six ages of history. To complete these tables, which ran in

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decades from Creation to the year 1540, Luther drew events from historical chronicles and the Bible. Importantly, he also associated the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse with the historical development of the papacy. Adopting a venerable historiography, he reckoned the approximate age of the world at 5,500 years in 1540, although he noted that the sixth millennium of human history was likely to end before its thousand years had run its course.22 If Luther understood that history might provide a source of consolation to those who thought they were living perched on the edge of its culmination, Philip Melanchthon proved throughout his career to be an even more discerning user of the past. From the 1530s onward, he devoted his lectures to a reworking of the universal chronicle of world history that the Magdeburg astrologer and mathematician, Johannes Carion (1490–1537/38), had supplied him in manuscript form in 1532. Eventually, Melanchthon published his massively edited and reworked version of that manuscript under the title Carion’s Chronicle, a work that came to serve as a textbook in the German Protestant universities for years to come and which had a major influence on crafting a Lutheran interpretation of history that mingled easily with eschatology.23 In these the last days, Melanchthon’s Carion’s Chronicle observed, God had allowed the Evangel to be revealed once again and its truths to be recovered from centuries of human obfuscation. Thus Melanchthon, like Luther, saw history as marching inexorably to its conclusion, but he also concentrated to a greater extent on showing that God’s providential hand guided its processes. Into the traditional theoretical framework of the Four Kingdoms that had long been extrapolated from the prophecies of Daniel, Melanchthon poured the events that he culled from Carion and he insisted that Germany had a special place in the last of these empires (Rome) because contemporary events had raised it above other powers.24 The inspiration that Melanchthon’s scholarly emphasis on the study of history gave to the many Protestant historiographical monuments of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is well known. Inspired by Melanchthon, the generation of theologians that came of age in Wittenberg in the mid-sixteenth century became some of the era’s most avid devotees of the study of history, and their efforts touched off a quest by several generations of Protestant historians to uncover the misrepresentations and forgeries that had long lain hidden in the medieval church’s documents. Melanchthon’s championship of history left its imprint not only on the so-called Philippists who remained his dedicated disciples in later decades.

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The call to unearth the precise nature of the past and rely on history to prove evangelical claims was embraced just as enthusiastically and polemically by the Gnesio-Lutheran party that opposed Melanchthon and his disciples from the 1550s onward. Matthias Flacius, Cyriacus Spangenberg,25 and the one-time Melanchthon “favorite” David Chytraeus (who later departed the Philippist fold)26 were just a few of the many Gnesio-Lutherans who devoted significant attention in their careers to the study of history in the vein recommended by the Praeceptor Germaniae. Certainly, Flacius’s massive project, the Centuries, is today the best known of these undertakings. That work had first been envisioned in the days when the theologian’s own part in the 1551 siege of Magdeburg was still fresh in mind. The task came to be carried out over the next quarter century by a legion of scholars, some of whom even engaged spies to copy documents in Catholic archives or enlisted literary allies in Roman centers to send along documentary proof for their debunking claims.27 Flacius’s vision of Christian history was certainly not Melanchthon’s. Melanchthon had argued that the effects of a corrupt Rome had eaten away at the truth quite early in the history of the church, leaving only a small remnant to profess the true faith over the centuries. For his part, Flacius saw corruption in the church as far slower to develop, and he placed the Romanists largely on the defensive against an ever-present body of those who defended truth in every age.28 Yet despite differences of historical judgment, it is doubtful that Flacius would have identified church history as the discipline through which to make his doctrinal and polemical claims without this early study within the Melanchthon circle at Wittenberg. There history had been identified as a purposeful mirror for understanding the workings of God’s providence. Works like Flacius’s Centuries, together with a chorus of texts with less ambitious aims, created a vital sense of mission for learned Protestants in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This emphasis on history proved to be one of the most important components in fashioning an identity for the Protestant cause that long outlived its origins in sixteenth-century polemics. The grand efforts of historians like Flacius or Chytraeus were only the most visible dimension of the later Reformation’s embrace of history. Beneath these massive projects, others—like Goltwurm—were working to fashion a usable past of memorials and meditations for lay people.29 Such efforts can also be traced to the inspiration of Philip Melanchthon, for the Praeceptor Germaniae may have encouraged academic study of history as an accompaniment to theology, but he also perceived of the

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discipline as a necessary aid to personal piety. Throughout his life, Melanchthon prepared collections of daily meditations for the year that frequently took historical events and persons as their subject.30 The purpose of these devotions was to call the faithful to recollect great deeds and momentous occasions from the past that displayed the hand of God at work in the world and thus provided the devout with daily reassurances of God’s continuing presence in human affairs. Such devotions also aimed to substitute for the deeply popular medieval saints’ calendars and breviaries, with their collections of propitious intercessors marking off the days of the year. Melanchthon recommended that Protestants meditate not on the great wonder-working of the historical saints, as medieval people had, but on the events that revealed God’s administration of history. By the 1550s, the impetus that Melanchthon had given to this kind of reformed personal religiosity was bearing fruit in the preparation of a number of Protestant historical calendars, of which Paul Eber’s 1550 Latin Historical Calendar was the first31 and Caspar Goltwurm’s 1553 German work, The New Attractive Historical Calendar, the second.32 Eber’s historical calendar proved to be quite popular; numerous editions of it appeared, even into the early seventeenth century. Goltwurm’s vernacular calendars were also widely used, for the first edition’s fifteen hundred copies soon sold out, and a second printing of an additional three thousand copies appeared the following year.33 Five years later, Goltwurm prepared a second work, the Church Calendar, which proved to have even longer life than the first; it was reprinted at least eleven times between 1559 and 1600.34 Both Goltwurm’s calendars freely mixed accounts of signs and natural wonders with stories about saints and martyrs who demonstrated extraordinary feats of faith rather than supernatural athleticism or thaumaturgy. In the 1553 calendar, for instance, Goltwurm called attention at several points to the recent dramatic events that had transpired at Magdeburg’s siege, an event resulting from the city’s refusal to adopt the Interim in the years after 1548.35 The city’s ultimate success in resisting imperial authority thus became an example of God’s providence for those who held firm to the Evangel. Yet the criteria that Goltwurm used elsewhere to select his material did not necessarily serve such obvious confessional aims and instead pointed to the compiler’s humanistic training. Entries for some days, for instance, marked the lives of figures like Cicero, Lucretius, and even the anti- Christian Roman emperor Hadrian, all of whom he saw as instruments of divine providence.36 Goltwurm gave little guidance to his readers about how he envisioned them using these almanacs. Instead, in

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the introduction to the contents of the 1553 calendar, Goltwurm merely observed that he had brought together many old, notable stories . . . from old and new historians and from daily experience, which are not only entertaining but also necessary to read and to know so that one can recognize God’s wondrous counsel and governance in this miserable life.37 Besides recommending recollection of events for their ability to inspire such forbearance, Goltwurm’s calendars also encouraged consumers to interpret nature’s inexplicable wonders as portents. In the 1553 Historical Calendar, the entry for January 12 memorialized the death of the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I in 1519.38 In recounting that event, Goltwurm also called attention to a “terrifying eclipse” the previous July that had prefigured the emperor’s demise and heralded a period of great civil unrest. An entry for October 11 similarly told of the appearance of a comet, a sign that had warned of subsequent bloody Turkish victories against Christian forces. And on September 7, Goltwurm connected a scourge of locusts with an outbreak of plague that soon followed.39 In this way Goltwurm mined events not only for the moral lessons they offered but also for their ability to warn of the far greater trials that were to follow. At the same time, he evidenced a macabre taste for the singularly dramatic, gruesome yarn—a trait that would be even more amply demonstrated in his later wonder book. The Historical Calendar’s entry for October 26 recounted the 1533 case of a pregnant woman who slit her husband’s throat and whiled away the night eating his limbs; after her trial and sentencing to death, she gave birth to triplets before her execution.40 While Goltwurm may have certainly intended an extraordinary crime like this to remind readers of the full extent of human depravity, such a tale may have appealed less to high moral sentiments than to calendar users’ morbid desire for sensationalism. In the Church Calendar published several years later, Goltwurm narrowed his focus to create a collection of exemplary saints’ lives that might assume the role that popular medieval cults had long played in daily religious life. For each day, Goltwurm recommended one or several saints to the recollection of his evangelical parishioners, and his choices sometimes revealed a surprising catholicity. Although he insisted that many spurious legends had grown up in the medieval church about the saints as a result of the “devil’s tyranny” and a general taste for “old wive’s tales,”

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he cautioned that not every story told about these figures was untrue.41 The purpose of remembering these legends, he advised, was not to memorialize the wonders of the saints as acts they themselves had performed, nor to sponsor outpourings of idolatrous devotion. Instead, such stories should remind their readers of the great deeds God performed through historical persons. In its attempts to reform saintly devotion, Goltwurm’s Church Calendar shows the influence of the Strasbourg theologian, Ludwig Rabus, and his massive evangelical martyrology, Histories of the Chosen Saints, Witnesses, Confessors, and Martyrs of God, the first volume of which had appeared in 1552.42 Rabus had addressed that voluminous collection to a primarily clerical readership and had concentrated his attentions largely on the saints of the early church. The obvious confessional tone of such a collection may have served evangelical intentions, even as it condemned Rabus’s volumes to a limited audience. For unlike the great patriotic monuments of the English martyrologist John Foxe or the French Calvinist Jean Crespin, Rabus did not include stories of recent native martyrs or confessors who had been active in the German Reformation, beyond the obvious example of Luther. Rabus celebrated the Saxon Reformer not for his sanctified life but for the dogged determination with which he preached the Word. While the editorializing of Goltwurm’s calendars followed a similar vein— celebrating purity of faith and belief above wonder-working—the saints he chose to recall to his broad, lay readership were a surprisingly diverse and catholic group. In contrast to Rabus’s martyrology, which generally avoided medieval German saints, Goltwurm’s Church Calendar recommended a number of such figures to its users, including the Emperor Charlemagne; the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen; and St. Ulrich, the tenth- century bishop of Augsburg. And while Ludwig Rabus generally shied away from memorializing the sacrifices of his German contemporaries for fear of inspiring cults, Goltwurm included the names of fifty martyrs from his own era.43 Although both Goltwurm’s calendars were intended primarily for devotional purposes and were relatively cheaply produced documents with less editorializing than a grand collection like Rabus’s, they revealed all the same something of his attitudes toward history. Perhaps most importantly, he, like Melanchthon, saw the pages of the past fi lled with events that provided moral lessons for the present and proved God’s ordering of events. His calendars also made frequent reference to the signs and portents that had announced other subsequent and momentous events.

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To Goltwurm, then, history was didactic in at least two ways. First, it provided edifying lessons to the pious observer, throwing light upon the ways in which God guided the unfolding of events and reminding the faithful of divine immanence in all affairs. Secondly, the observation of the past displayed the ways in which God used natural signs and wonders to pronounce impending change. Goltwurm’s most influential work, The Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles, aimed to demonstrate these purposes as well, but that text was also a work of systematic theology designed to catalogue, classify, and comment upon all signs and wonders. In contrast to Fincel’s more broadly addressed jeremiad, then, Goltwurm’s Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles addressed a primarily clerical leadership. In its dedication to his territorial overlord Philip III,44 Goltwurm explained his intentions: miracles were but another language through which God preached sermons to those who were not receptive to the Word. Thus, the purpose of his work was to decode that language and make it intelligible to those anxious to understand the deeper patterns of God’s communication with humankind through supernatural events. The work that followed was more than six hundred pages long in quarto format and arranged into six parts: parts one and two treated godly and spiritual miracles; parts three and four, miracles of the heavens and the elements; and parts five and six, earthly and demonic wonders. While Goltwurm insisted that all six types of miracles have always been present in human history, the arrangement of his typology seems to derive from the history inscribed in the Genesis narrative between the Creation and the Fall of man. Goltwurm begins by considering miracles worked directly by God before examining those engendered by false spiritual worship of him, a reference to the rebellion of Satan and the fallen angels that had occurred before creation. Goltwurm then proceeds to recount those wonders worked in the heavens and the firmament, the realms created by the work of the first through the third days. The fourth and fifth categories of Goltwurm’s wonders—those performed on earth and those worked in the elements of water, wind, and fire—evoke God’s handiwork on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days of the Genesis narrative. The final category, demonic wonders, completes Goltwurm’s progression through the major waypoints of the story by making reference to the temptation and Fall of humankind. It is not always easy to follow the logic that results from this somewhat forced typology. Category two, for instance, treats of miracles engendered by the false spiritual worship of God and takes readers on a tour through the errors of the Jews, Muslims, and Romanists. Goltwurm

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locates the ultimate cause of these errors in the devil and his rebellious spirit and recounts many wonders here that are virtually indistinguishable from the “demonic” miracles in the sixth section. At other points, the theologian’s desire for completeness tends to cloud the precision of the Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles’ arguments. Like Fincel’s Wonder Signs, Goltwurm’s wonder book is often explicitly apocalyptic; he frequently assures his readers that a recent increase in signs and wonders was pronouncing God’s intentions “to make an end to this decrepit world.”45 At the same time, he concentrates not only on understanding the most recent of these momentous events that seemed to point to the coming Apocalypse but on presenting his readers with a series of strategies for comprehending the various modalities through which supernatural events have always occurred throughout history. As a result, the hundreds of wonders that he presents from ancient and medieval times, as well as his frequent observation that God has always made use of the supernatural in certain and predictable ways, tend to undercut the clarity and urgency of his apocalyptic pronouncements. Goltwurm’s theology, moreover, does not permit an easy identification with either the Philippist or the Gnesio-Lutheran parties. While his humanistic learning, emphasis on rhetoric, and friendship with Melanchthon seem to mark him as someone amenable to the Philippist positions that were developing in these years, other dimensions of his work point to Gnesio-Lutheran influences, including his intense concern with diabolism and his anti- Catholicism. In the years of his enforced wandering, Goltwurm had spent time in the developing Gnesio-Lutheran center Jena, besides Wittenberg and Leipzig, and he published an anonymous poem defending the Magdeburg rebels and their opposition to the Interim.46 His calendars and wonder book written in the years after his return to Nassau-Weilburg also valorized the Magdeburgers’ efforts. It is impossible to know where Goltwurm’s position would have come to rest had he lived to experience the increasingly intense disputes that developed between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists during the 1560s and 1570s. His premature death in 1559 occurred before the bitterest of these controversies developed. Then, too, as a theologian living at a distance from these disputes in Hessen, he may never have been forced to formalize his association with one party or another. Yet his Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles shows that he was eclectic in constructing his theology of miracles. Throughout the work he freely mixes fears about the devil and demons, a sense of prophetic urgency, and the bleak view of human

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nature typical of the developing Gnesio-Lutheran party with the emphasis on history, astrology, and divination favored by the Saxon Philippists. In short, his ideas break the mold of our modern conceptions, even as they point to the complexity of the many different shades of opinion that existed among evangelical pastors and theologians in the generation or two following Luther’s death. These complexities are amply displayed in the first section of Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck, where the author treats miracles performed directly by God. Here he concentrates on the wonders recorded in the Pentateuch, in the ministry of Christ and the apostles, and among the early Christian martyrs. His prologue sets the stage for a bleak retelling of those momentous events. In it, he quotes Psalm 92 (“O Lord, how great are thy works! and thy thoughts are very deep. A brutish man knoweth not; neither doth a fool understand this.”) In addition, he freely paraphrases Moses’s frequent exhortations to the Jews in Exodus and Deuteronomy to “love and fear the Lord” because of the great feats he had performed for them: “Your eyes have seen all the great acts of the Lord which he did and by which he proved himself. Therefore, you shall fear him and heed his commandments.”47 These two themes—the incapacity of the foolish to comprehend God’s wonders and the duty that such spectacular interventions necessitate among his chosen people—figure prominently as subjects in the subsequent recounting of divinely worked miracles that follows. This first section is among the longest in the book, accounting for approximately a quarter of the work’s total length.48 To initiate his readers into the deeper meanings revealed through the record of these “godly” miracles, Goltwurm sketches the first events in the Genesis narrative— the creation of heaven, earth, the firmament, sun and moon, creatures, and the human race in Adam and Eve.49 After recounting the momentous events in the Garden of Eden and granting special emphasis to the first couple’s being deceived by the “devilish serpent,” the remainder of this section of the book follows as a series of short episodic chapters, roaming from the patriarchs and the history of Israel to the ministry of Jesus, the apostles, and martyrs. As in his earlier biblical commentaries, Goltwurm sometimes turns in these chapters to illuminate the allegorical meanings hidden in the Old Testament accounts. He notes, for instance, how the godly patriarch Melchizedek’s saving of Abraham from the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah prefigured the later sacrifice and atonement of Christ.50 And in his treatment of Moses’s erection of a bronze serpent to

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combat a plague of snakes among the Israelites in the desert, Goltwurm again draws attention to the event’s importance as a foreshadowing of the Crucifi xion and its offer of salvation to a suffering humanity.51 While crediting God as the author of all the events recorded in this section—from the prevention of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to the great signs worked at the death of the martyrs—Goltwurm nonetheless argues that the divinity often operates through the agency of the angels, the elements, and human beings. Thus his comprehension of the ways in which God’s miraculous interventions in human affairs occurred differed only slightly from the tack that Catholic commentators would take in the years ahead as they moved to defend the cult of the saints and other Catholic practices from Protestant attacks. In their offensive, Catholic apologists frequently reminded their readers that the true God operated through media like the cult of the saints, the Mass, and churchly ritual.52 Goltwurm’s collection may have denounced the thaumaturgy of traditional saints and Catholic “idolatries” and “superstitions” as delusions, or deceits encouraged by the devil, yet at the same time, his exempla included numerous stories of angels who prophesied, appeared in dreams and visions, and were able to rain down pestilence on the impious.53 Goltwurm’s patriarchs, apostles, and early Christian saints frequently performed similar feats as well. And importantly, his accounts of confessing and martyr saints carried the legacy of this tradition of wonder-working and spiritual derring-do into his own times, for Goltwurm concludes his section on godly miracles with a series of recent accounts aimed at proving the continuing reality of God’s work through the agency of the faithful. Among these saints of recent days, Goltwurm includes the late fifteenth-century hermit Nicholas of Flüe, reputed to have survived twenty-two years without food while preaching a message of repentance and peace to his fellow Swiss.54 Several Protestant martyrs figure prominently in the accounts here as well, including the Saxon preacher Georg Schoerer who was martyred for his evangelical faith near Salzburg in 1528, and two noble girls burned for their convictions near Deventer in 1545.55 On the way to his execution, Schoerer promised that a sign would be worked after his death. As the executioner’s ax severed his head, his body fell on its stomach, lying there “long enough so that one would have had time to eat an egg,” before turning over on its back and crossing its legs. Convinced by this sign of Schoerer’s piety, the authorities granted him Christian burial rather than burning his body. By contrast, the young female Dutch martyrs’ bodies resisted the flames, and although they died because of such an ordeal,

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their unburned flesh was respectfully covered up by “pious Christians” the evening following their execution. Such events were little different, Goltwurm intoned, than the mercies that had often been shown throughout history through the pious deaths of the righteous. With echoes of his humanistic training, the theologian turned immediately following these accounts of the miraculous signs that attended recent Protestant deaths to consider the forced suicide of Socrates, an event he reminded his readers the ancient Greek teacher bore with equanimity and detachment. When his wife Xanthippe lamented the injustice of his impending death, Socrates’ merely answered in resignation, “Now I give my soul over to the judge of all souls.”56 Thus, like Erasmus who proclaimed, “St. Socrates, pray for us,” in “The Godly Feast,” Goltwurm claimed the simple surrendering faith of the ancient philosopher as an exemplary Christian virtue, the product of a prisca theologia that was still relevant for the moral lessons it provided for his own contemporaries. His emphasis in this section on the persistence of such divinely effected displays of faith, as well as the miraculous signs that accompanied them, cautions us against overemphasizing the darker side of Goltwurm’s supernatural vision. In a recent study of early modern demonology, for instance, Stuart Clark argues that the structure of Goltwurm’s work reveals the increasingly despairing, devilish tone of late-Reformation eschatology.57 In contrast to previous commentators on Goltwurm’s work who have treated it as a disorganized jumble,58 Clark points to an important facet of Goltwurm’s wonder book’s structure: the book begins with godly miracles and concludes with those worked by the devil. Underlying such a scheme was the insight that in this the final hour before the Last Judgment, the devil was redoubling his efforts, sending forth a steadily intensifying drumbeat of catastrophes. As Goltwurm observes in his prologue to the sixth section of the text treating “false” demonic miracles, In the twentieth chapter of his Revelation, St. John reports that the devil and Satan will be set free from his bindings and allowed to perpetrate all manner of murder and misery on the human race, such is his pernicious mischief and tyranny, which can be felt and apprehended particularly in these last topsy-turvy times. For yes, it has been made visible and obvious that Satan and his companions are now completely free, and are no more in the sow as Mark reports in the fifth chapter of his Gospel, but are now traveling in

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human beings, driving and luring them to commit all sorts of sin, disgrace, murder, and misery.59 Such rhetoric is typical of Goltwurm’s fears of demons and points, as Clark suggests, to the importance that the notion of increasing diabolic activity in the world had as an explanation for many of the grim signs and catastrophes he related. Goltwurm imagined history, in part, as a visible testimony to the steadily devolving character of human nature, much as Luther had in his late Genesis Lectures. As time was moving to its ultimate conclusion, the devil was being given unprecedented freedom to coax and cajole human beings into an ever-expanding malaise of sin, a Slough of Despond from which most were incapable of extricating themselves. Such bleak strains are certainly persistent in the work. Yet at the same time, other nonlinear, more optimistic attitudes toward historical processes are evident. Goltwurm, for instance, was careful to include recent wonders worked among contemporary saints alongside the ancient exploits of the patriarchs, apostles, and early Christian martyrs. His inclusion of prodigies, portents, and miracles that had occurred among the ancient pagans, not just among Christians and Jews, was intended to console his readers with the knowledge that God was tending everywhere and at all times to both the reprobate and the redeemed. If the intensity of the devil’s onslaughts might now be more conspicuous, frequent, and venomous than previously, these attacks still occurred with God’s permission. And finally, through his persistent counsel that God’s timeless supernatural language could be readily comprehended, Goltwurm expressed a serene confidence in both the wisdom and intelligibility of divine providence that overshadowed the darker dimensions of his warnings about demons. This tendency to treat history not just as a march to some conclusion but as a space in which certain eternal truths can be seen frequently recurring is evident in the central portions of the text, sections two through five.60 These four sections, dismissed by Clark as the typical “stock in trade of the prodigy anthologists,”61 are in fact the very heart of the collection and include rich accounts of wonders recorded in many different times and places. These events, Goltwurm counseled, reveal the normative patterns by which God has used wonders to speak to humankind. The first of the sections, part two of the book, treats what the author terms “spiritual” (geistliche) miracles, which are here understood as historical events in which heresy in all forms and guises is ultimately destroyed by the onward march of divine truth. In the prologue to this section,

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Goltwurm reveals a less apocalyptically urgent, more polemical tone than is to be found in his discussions of diabolic miracles, characterized by a triumphant and ultimately consoling rhetoric: It has been God’s gracious will, from the beginning of the world’s Creation until its end, that he desires and commands a true public worship from among his Chosen People (although the devil and godless tyranny outrageously rage and rampage against this). And it has been the selfsame will that against all opposition from the godless devil and worldly tyranny He has miraculously protected and preserved this worship until the end of the world, [and allowed] it to spread and expand.62 The chapters that follow detail a constant procession of idolatry and unbelief that is here and there punctuated by brief triumphs of the truth. Although this list of heresies and errors begins in the Old Testament with the faithlessness of the Jews during the Exodus,63 the largest portion of this section describes the corruptions of Christian truth in the centuries following the fathers.64 Here Goltwurm’s understanding of church history conforms closely to the interpretations of Philip Melanchthon rather than to the historiography Matthias Flacius was at the time developing.65 In his works touching on church history, Melanchthon had stressed that human innovation had corrupted Christian teaching quite early in the young institution’s history, while Flacius’s Catalogvs testivm veritatis, published one year before Goltwurm’s wonder book, had turned that characterization on its head. Throughout his Catalogvs, Flacius presented a series of cogent arguments designed to illustrate that Protestantism, rather than the Roman church, was the true heir to the teachings of the Apostolic Age.66 While Goltwurm does mention a certain number of “holy” bishops and medieval clerics who held fast to true teaching in the medieval church,67 he concentrates in Melanchthonian fashion on retelling that history primarily as one composed of corruption upon corruption. Thus, a large part of this recounting of “errors” reads with the typically polemical tone of late-Reformation propaganda. Still, as he draws this laundry list to a close, Goltwurm observes that in these “last times . . . God has awakened admirable, learned Christian men.” Chief among these was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who led a revival of the liberal arts and learning that “drove the barbarians out of Germany” and prepared the way for religious renewal.68 Others he cites

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as instrumental in this revival—a revival Goltwurm stressed resulted in a deepened understanding of ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin— include Johannes Reuchlin, the Leipzig humanist Peter Molesanus, Jacob Wimpheling, Rudolf Agricola, and Beatus Rhenanus. In their attention to the study of the ancient languages, these figures provided the foundation upon which Martin Luther and other reformers were able to “restore the temple.”69 In concluding this section Goltwurm’s rhetoric thus celebrates the Reformation as a miracle, but one that was creditable to the recovery of an ancient knowledge of the biblical languages. His treatment here underscores the work’s central argument—that wonders are part of the supernatural language God uses to communicate with his people. Yet in making these connections, the humanist linguist Goltwurm linked the Reformation’s ultimate successes to the ground prepared by an accurate knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. In the sections that follow, Goltwurm turns from examining the spiritual dimension of miracles to treating their celestial, elemental, and earthly occurrences. Here he relies on what seem, to modern observers, to be contradictory assumptions. On the one hand, his text often recalls the prophecies of Joel 1–2 as well as the words of Christ in the synoptic apocalypse that signs in the heavens, “at the sun, moon, and stars,” will precede the final days. On the other, his stories, drawn from the sweep of recorded history available to him in ancient and medieval texts as well as the scriptures, reveal that wonders have been a constant of the human story, performed from time immemorial by a divinity who uses the heavens, storms, earthquakes, floods, monstrous births, and the rise and fall of empires to chasten the wicked, demonstrate his power over creation, and instill proper fear in the faithful. One judgment was thus linear and counseled readers that the clock was ticking faster now, moving steadily toward time’s conclusion. The other insisted that the strange, inexplicable, and even merely momentous events of the past and present are evidence of God’s constant numinous direction of the stars, the elements, human institutions, and even childbirth. For Goltwurm, these observations were not contradictory but complementary, and by categorizing the record of nature’s catastrophes and aberrations and observing the events that had followed them, he aimed to crack the code of God’s communication through nature. The tendency to treat wonders as portents that signaled even greater changes to come is most pronounced in these sections. The third part of the Wunderwerck (on heavenly wonders), for instance, concentrates

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especially on eclipses; apparitions seen on the faces of the sun and moon and in the skies; occurrences of multiple suns, or parhelia; unusual rainbows; the appearance of new stars; and comets.70 “Unnatural” eclipses were among the prominent categories of celestial wonders Goltwurm treated, and among these he gave special emphasis to the incident that had occurred at the Crucifi xion. Dionysius the Areopagite, he recalled, had long ago treated the eclipse that accompanied that event as extraordinary, beyond all natural explanation, proof that Christ was the Lord of nature. The sun could “no longer endure to shine” on the scene of Christ’s pain and had withdrawn its rays in a “terrifying eclipse” until the Crucifi xion was complete.71 Here Goltwurm may have advanced the notion of a natural sympathy between Savior and creation, but more often his accounts of celestial wonders, comets, and other sidereal events were less poetic and more formulaic; as a compiler, Goltwurm displayed a taste for variety and quantity over lengthy exposition. Under chapter headings like “On wondrous comets and what they mean” 72 or “Of wondrous, terrifying sights which have been seen in the heavens in our own times,” 73 he produced hundreds of dated events drawn from antiquity to the present. While he assured his readers that these events were “unnatural” or “extraordinary,” he did not deny that “physicists” might be able to explain some of them on natural grounds. They were wonders, though, because of their portentous character—their propensity to announce coming catastrophes and transformations—and not because of their violation of the laws of nature.74 The messages Goltwurm found in most of the eclipses, parhelia, comets, rainbows, new stars, and celestial apparitions were often surprisingly similar. Adopting a stance as old as Pliny the Elder, he warned that disturbances in the heavens were harbingers of the deaths of kings, wars, plagues, and famines; his collection piled example upon example of the dismal events that had long been observed to follow these starry messengers.75 Consequently, the tone he adopted when considering these heavenly wonders was almost always unrelievedly bleak. Even the rainbow, the sign of God’s permanent renunciation of the penalty of the deluge, became for Goltwurm a sign with two meanings. While he assured his audience that its occurrence was a reminder of God’s promise to Noah, such a display was almost always a precursor of other strong storms and floods to come.76 The heavens were a realm separate, foreign, and uninhabited by humankind; their strange and seemingly aberrant ministrations may

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have been caused by the forces of physics, yet the importance of these displays lay in the forewarnings they provided men and women. Wonders produced through the elements of earth, fire, water, and air—the subject of the Wunderwerck’s fourth section77—might be warnings of greater disasters to come as well. But their consequences—witnessed in storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes—were also very real problems in the here and now. Unlike sidereal messages witnessed in the heavens, disasters worked through the elements possessed the powers of immediacy and propinquity. With power that was little more than an intensification of forces that in more moderate forms were necessary for life, they could chasten and destroy entire communities and regions. Raging storms and floods, for instance, were merely nourishing rain showers carried to extremes; consuming conflagrations, the uncontrollable breakout of a force necessary for sustaining daily life; and earthquakes and landslides, the setting in motion of matter normally held in place by the preserving finger of God. To explain these trials, Goltwurm turned to the just but unforgiving God of Deuteronomy, reminding readers of God’s promise of sufficient rainfall for Israel in exchange for the nation’s faithfulness. When the Israelites fell into disobedience, God punished the land with droughts and floods. That Law had always operated throughout history, and Goltwurm concluded as he surveyed his own time—in a manner echoing the Luther of the Lectures on Genesis—that the cause for a seeming rise in natural disasters lay in the increasingly rampant sinfulness of men and women.78 God, in other words, fashioned his punishments to fit the tenor of the times. Fierce storms, raging waters, and shifting soils of earthquakes or landslides possessed an extraordinary power to jolt men and women to amend their lives. Nature unsheathed in these ways, he observed, might bring the proud and stiff-necked to repentance more surely than reasoned logic, for in coming face to face with these forces, the unregenerate glimpsed the divinity’s enormous power over all creation. When treating these kinds of signs, Goltwurm freighted his rhetoric with picturesque images, which linked these earthly catastrophes to the eschatological and the eternal. The consuming and ever-present specter of fire, a fearsome foe in every early modern town, was a reminder to flee sin and the flames of eternal perdition, while the thunder clap recalled the consigning divine judgment meted out upon the damned.79 In this way, Goltwurm evoked a natural world that was alive with transparent evidence of the truths of Christian soteriology.

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If the elements of air, water, and fire often spoke with voices that decried depravity and predicted future gloom, the stories that Goltwurm included in his fifth section treating “earthly” wonders were more varied and subtle in their meanings. Here Goltwurm adopts the term irdische Wunderwerk to describe the section’s contents, a term he used because of its dual meaning as both “earthly” and “fleshly.” The section consequently recounts wonders and signs worked in the human and animal estates, including an eclectic mix of events including the Christian persecutions; the tyrannies of kings, wives, and the animals; the strange customs of foreign “islands and countries” as well as the monstrous races; deformed births of humans and animals; and the “gruesome” punishments of God for infamous sins and blasphemy.80 It is perhaps because of its predominantly human focus that this fifth section displays some of Goltwurm’s clearest and most forceful moral reasoning. He begins, for instance, by recounting fourteen persecutions of the Christian church, events that qualify as wondrous works because of the ways in which truth triumphed over tribulation.81 These chapters hearken back to Goltwurm’s “spiritual miracles” treated in section two, although here, in setting forth his own interpretation of the persecutions, he draws upon Augustine’s Exposition on the Psalms.82 He identifies in Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 9 three types of historical persecution suffered by the church.83 The first form, violentam, signified the physical tortures of Christians in the Roman Empire, including the gruesome spectacles of the arena. The second was fraudulentam, the tribulations caused by the proliferation of false teachings and heresies among the sects in the early Christian church. Finally, the third form of persecution, the reign of Antichrist in Goltwurm’s own day, displayed elements of both these types of persecution, for violence against the godly and pious had once again surged, even as the falling away of sects, false teachers, and heretics had increased.84 Among those martyred by the forces of Antichrist in recent times, Goltwurm lists John Huss, Girolamo Savonarola, and many of those who had professed the truth in France, England, Brabant, Bavaria, and other parts of Germany since 1517.85 Immediately following these trials, though, Goltwurm’s next chapter examines the gruesome divine punishments exacted upon those Old Testament figures and Roman emperors who had tortured the faithful, observations intended to offer hope to readers that ultimate justice would prevail in the tangled web of imperial religious politics that characterized their own times, too. The recent Schmalkaldic wars and the ongoing controversies between

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Protestants and Catholics in the empire, however, stand mutely in the background, since imperial edicts forbade criticism of the contemporary religious settlement.86 In the remainder of this discussion of miracles worked in the human estate, Goltwurm evidences a taste for great variety, even as his categorization of wonders serves the purposes of a moral philosophy supported by natural proofs. Accounts of tyranny, gruesome murders, military carnage, and rebellion form one large focus of the section. As elsewhere, he piles case upon case, beginning in Old Testament times with the story of Cain and Abel before proceeding to the ancient Greeks and Romans and finally bringing his tally of tyrants, murderers, inept military generals, and political usurpers into contemporary times. Along the way he recounts the evil careers of not only such famous tyrants as the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, Darius the Persian, and Nero, but also more obscure figures like Abimelech,87 the ill-fated usurping son of Gideon in Judges 8, and Ezzelino da Romano, the marauding thirteenth- century Veronese podestà.88 Instances of idolatry, effeminacy, sexual depravity, and bestial barbarism abound in this cavalcade. The late second-century Emperor Commodus, for instance, executed his allies and shamed his own lineage by denying his father’s name and styling himself Hercules, a son of Jove, and raising that hero to the highest rank in the pantheon. The true God, Goltwurm counseled, did not leave such evil indiscipline unpunished. First, Commodus’s wife Marcia tried to poison him, but when her efforts proved unsuccessful, the bold youth Narcissus killed the emperor in his chamber.89 If that emperor’s sins consisted of murder, idolatry, and the denial of his father’s name, his early third-century successor Elagabalus displayed even more wicked vices. A godless, whoring effeminate, he prostituted himself, dressed as the goddess Venus, and took a man as his wife. Soon, he and his tyrannical mother were murdered, their corpses dragged through the streets.90 The Canaanite king Adoni-Bezek was only slightly more fortunate. His gruesome tyranny consisted in enslaving seventy kings and amputating their hands and feet so that they were forced to scrounge like dogs for morsels under his table. But after his defeat in battle against Judea, Adoni-Bezek was given a taste of his own medicine before being taken to Jerusalem to die.91 For each and every despotic crime, Goltwurm warned, God fashioned a special retribution. The long story of the tyrannies of the popes, evidenced in “stinking crimes” as “unspeakable” as those committed by the

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Turks, prompted the divine judgment of the 1527 Sack of Rome.92 And because women had a propensity to anger, their tyrannies and insurgencies were particularly virulent and subject to special punishments: “I would rather live among dragons and lions, than with evil women when they become angry. Every other malice is small in comparison to the malice of women.”93 In ticking off the unnatural military exploits of the Amazons or the sexual depravity evidenced by rebellious, Roman matrons,94 Goltwurm took care to point out that, like these, each violation of the laws of nature elicited equally dramatic divine counter-reactions. In a way approaching a Hindu’s faith in karmic retribution, or an ancient Greek’s belief in the unstoppable power of the three sisters of Moirae, Goltwurm warned that tyranny, particularly feminine tyranny, always stirred divine, dramatic acts of justice. Such tales of grim reckoning addressed several intertwined issues in the world of the later Reformation. On the one hand, they offered pastoral comfort to an audience that was fearful about the very survival of religious reform in the wake of the Schmalkaldic wars, the Augsburg and Leipzig Interims, and the other trials the Protestant cause was enduring in many places throughout Europe in the 1550s—events that prompted inevitable comparison to the imposition of the worship of Baal or of deified Roman emperors. On the other hand, Goltwurm’s legalism served as an antidote to anarchic tendencies he sensed lay at the heart of Reformation theology. To satisfy the first desire—hope of triumph against magisterial plans to impose Catholicism—his tales of punished tyrants assured readers that ultimate justice was a certainty. That certainty, however, lay in higher hands and operated according to a divine rather than human schedule. His inclusion of numerous cases of impious ancient emperors slain by their subjects may have bolstered the observation that God always punishes tyrants, but as he approached examples in his own days, Goltwurm grew invariably more cautious. He saw in his own time clear limits to the questioning of state power. In relating Lady Jane Grey’s usurpation of the English throne in 1553, for instance, he sided with the Catholic Mary Tudor and blamed the Protestant Duke of Northumberland, as well as Henry VIII’s tyrannical treatment of his wives, for inspiring this shortlived rebellion.95 Thus his work upheld the by-then long-standing evangelical distinction between the relative spheres of spiritual and magisterial authority as well as the indissolubility of marriage, even when evidence of Mary’s persecution of Protestants might have emboldened him to more far-reaching conclusions.

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Goltwurm’s caution derived not only from a German evangelical propensity to “render under Caesar” but also from the second underlying fear evident in his extensive discussion of tyrants and tyrannicides. Goltwurm perceived the subject of tyranny in religious not political terms, that is, as a crime primarily committed against God and his ordering of worldly governments. The attacks on tyranny provided not so much a rallying point for evangelicals interested in opposing the state but an ideal way to drive home the inevitable links between human sin and divine punishment. In tyranny, Goltwurm maintained, the very evils evidenced at the Fall were committed once again. In seeking to become godlike in the manner of a Commodus, setting aside one’s manly nature in the way of an Elagabalus, or assuming the rightful position of men like an Amazon warrior, the tyrant circumvented natural law and—like Adam and Eve—usurped the very position of God by elevating human desires above divine wisdom. A similar act of presumption had in the Garden of Eden served as progenitor of all the wrongdoings to follow. At the same time, the evangelical promise of salvation offered a seemingly anarchic antidote to such ills through its promise of redemption rooted in a simple act of faith, an act that was not the product of human will or amendment of life but of divine grace. On closer inspection, then, Goltwurm’s guarantees of punishment for tyrants, patricides, and rebellious women were inspired, in no small part, by the nagging fear that the assurance of sola fides might always be interpreted as antinomian license to sin. Such fears had long accompanied evangelical reform, and thus the constant repetition of crime and punishment in these tales was intended as a spur to moral discipline. Certainly, not every incident that Goltwurm recorded in this section treating wonders of the human estate was subject to such grim workings. In the wake of narrating numerous instances of imperious, grasping women, Goltwurm cast off a number of stories in which women—stalwart Spartans, devoted Roman matrons, and courageous Bavarian noblewomen—displayed extraordinary faithfulness to their husbands.96 But the effect of such cases, sandwiched as they were between accounts of tyrannical Amazons on one hand and nature gone awry with packing wolves and marauding flocks of birds on the other,97 was merely to reiterate traditional pieties that bifurcated women’s potentialities into saint or whore, Griselda or Messalina. The work’s collection of monstrous births further underscored these associations of women with the demons of disorder. In treating deformities in his Wonder Signs, Job Fincel had insisted that these events happened

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through the ministration of God. Goltwurm, by contrast, at once alleged their diabolic associations: at Creation, humankind had been formed “fair and perfect, without blemish or affliction,” yet the Fall irreparably damaged both its interior and exterior nature. Deformities thus reveal the kinship the human race now shares with Satan, even as such distortions should prompt those formed whole to thankfulness for their own physical perfection.98 Yet these were not the only truths that Goltwurm argued lay in the occurrence of monstrous births. Even in Genesis in the story of the births of the twins Jacob and Esau, God announced his propensity to use deformities of birth to display his truths in allegorical fashion. In that famous birth, he revealed the differences that would one day separate “righteous, believing Christians” from “godless, tyrannical peoples,” showing that no peace or commonality could ever exist between the two.99 Numerous “wondrous births” have proclaimed the divine will since that day, although they have done so with different messages in different times and places. As elsewhere throughout his collection, Goltwurm here values the virtues of quantity and repetition more than measured analysis, although at various points of scrutiny along the way, he does explain the meanings he sees hidden in deformity. Sometimes, his conclusions are anti- Catholic and antipapal, as he interprets a number of births as allegories concerning the Roman church.100 Here, as in the case of Esau’s birth, these accounts are used to reveal allegories about the “false” nature of the papacy and the Catholic religion. At other times, particularly in the ancient cases but at times in contemporary ones as well, monstrous births are intended to be read as portents. At the time of Scipio and Norbanus in Republican Rome, for example, a woman bore a snake that when thrown into water swam against the current, a sign of the gruesome slaughter that was soon to ensue among the followers of Marius and Sulla.101 Such foreshadowing continued to occur, even in Goltwurm’s day. In 1553, for instance, a child was born in England with two heads, an obvious reference to the Lady Jane’s usurpation of the throne.102 In other cases Goltwurm argues that God uses monstrous births as an after-the-fact critique of human acts and failings. This message was clear in the case of three deformed triplets born at Augsburg in 1531, one year following the famous diet in that city in which Charles V tried to quash reading of the famous evangelical confession presented by his estates. Goltwurm drew the account of this woman’s strange birth from Fincel’s earlier Wonder Signs.103 The first of the triplets had arrived in the form of

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a head without body, while the second had the body of a snake, two feet, and the face of a pike. The third child was a suckling pig. Such an event was clear evidence of divine displeasure, Goltwurm reasoned. The truths of the evangelical confession had been ignored at the Augsburg diet, which confirmed the increasingly “poisonous” power of Satan in contemporary times.104 God may have used events like these to construct commentaries on recent events, to inscribe allegories, and to issue ominous warnings, but he also relied on these events to reveal some of the “wondrous” powers he had hidden in creation. Another category of Goltwurm’s monstrous births demonstrated the transforming potential that lay hidden in the female imagination. Citing an account of a birth that occurred in the time of the Bohemian king Charles IV (r. 1346–78), he tells of a woman who bore a child covered with fur-like hair like John the Baptist’s mantle after she had fi xated on an image of the saint that hung on her bedroom wall.105 This and a set of similar stories that followed were thus intended as counsel to mothers, warning women that they must redouble their efforts to control their thoughts, words, and deeds during their pregnancies. However, in most cases, Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck warns that deformed births were portents, warnings of misfortunes that were soon to come. According to his accounts, infants who cried in the womb, babies who emerged from their mothers clad in items of military dress, and other human infants and animals born with a variety of anomalies promised coming hardships and calamities.106 Wars, famines, revolts, the deaths of kings and potentates are suggested as the most likely scenarios to follow. In this way, Goltwurm, like many of the late sixteenth-century wonder book authors, steers clear of the dangers of political commentary and overt divination by offering dead certainties rather than specific prophesies. The overtones of calamity and adversity that resonate throughout these accounts continue to accrue in the work’s concluding section treating wonders worked by the devil’s inspiration. Here the topic of Satan, as well as the allegation of his rising influence in contemporary times, serves as the capstone to Goltwurm’s remarkable collection of miracles.107 Created in heavenly perfection, that angel had forsaken his celestial inheritance to play his antagonistic role in human events, enlisting ranks of fellow spirits as helpmates in his struggle. Goltwurm argues that Satan, as general of this army, had divided his minions into nine battalions and charged each with wreaking a different torment upon the human race. Idolatry, lies, iniquity, deceitful trickery—these were just a few of each of these ranks

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distinctive stocks-in-trade. Following Luther and other Protestant theologians, Goltwurm refuses throughout his work to adopt the traditional ordering of the “good” angels into nine celestial hierarchies. This was a Pseudo-Dionysian notion that had long played a vital role in medieval discussions of the angels.108 Goltwurm retains that ninefold scheme in treating the fallen angels, however, insisting that various ranks of demons flourished in the shadowy netherworld that surrounded the human race. From the first order of Pseudothei, whose spawn were false gods and idolatry, to the ninth group of Mammon and his companions, who engendered the vainglorious pursuit of worldly riches and fame, these battalions could thus be credited for all the trials, shortcomings, and iniquities that were the postlapsarian human inheritance.109 Goltwurm’s discussions of infernal splendor—like Dante’s—made for more provocative, titillating reading than did his considerations of beatific, heavenly perfection, even as his foreshortening of the ranks of celestial helpers into a single category heightened the drama of the combat their evil alter egos might work against them. As the Hessian theologian worked through the exploits of these dark castes—from the Garden’s temptations; to Job’s trials; to the present’s ills of unsolved murders, heresy, witchcraft, weather magic, and pestilential afflictions—he constructed a predictable jeremiad that warned that these spirits were engaged in a seamless, steadily intensifying conspiracy against the human race. Certainly, he shared this conspiratorial cast of thinking with many Lutheran divines at the time, particularly those who held the developing Gnesio-Lutheran perspective. These dark predictions reveal a degree of anxiety among the evangelical ministerial elite about the course of religious reform and contemporary events at mid- century. Yet Goltwurm’s apocalyptic mentality also derived from creedal realities that had long reminded men and women that the Last Judgment would witness Christ’s return “in glory,” that is, that the end would be a magnificent release from such age-old spiritual combat. Thus it comes as little surprise that Goltwurm’s wonder book concludes with no fiery, apocalyptic bombast or threatening warning, but instead a calm reassurance. In his concluding vignette, the theologian turns not to some story of Satanic trickery but to the popular, apocryphal tale of St. Bartholomew’s mission to the Indians.110 He does not end his narrative of that apostle’s efforts with the saint’s dramatic martyrdom, sometimes said to have occurred through flaying, an incident that Michelangelo had vividly memorialized with his own self-portrait in the Sistine Chapel’s The Last Judgment. Instead, like the Gospel of

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St. Mark, Goltwurm’s account stresses both the subtle and overt spiritual combat Bartholomew worked against the devil. Quoting almost verbatim from the early Christian “Martyrdom of the Holy and Glorious Apostle Bartholomew,”111 he relates Bartholomew’s suppression of the temple of Astaruth in India. In destroying that age-old religion, a cult seemingly confirmed by false cures the devil worked, Bartholomew demonstrated Christianity’s ultimate power over Satan. In banishing this long-standing idolatry, Bartholomew reminded his flock that whatever a Christian asked in faith would be granted. While the power of the devil might seem enormous to the observer, Satan’s force could be overcome by a simple, heartfelt prayer.112 Hearkening back to Luther’s own theology of miracles, Goltwurm thus insisted that faith possessed the power to move mountains of idolatry and transform hearts blinded by demons. Like this final vignette, Goltwurm’s Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles does not allow us to draw a single, simple set of conclusions or to argue easily about how this text was read in its late sixteenth- century environment. It certainly was an apocalyptic work, alleging that divine judgment would soon expunge the mounting influence of the devil in contemporary times. But the Wunderwerck also argued that God’s immanence in history was ancient, stable, and readily comprehensible to human observers, so long as they could decode the natural tropes through which he expressed his messages. Beyond its apocalypticism and frequent invocation of a powerful devil that was fully conversant and intimate with human affairs, Goltwurm’s wonder book constructed a kind of rhetorical manual for decoding God’s acts in the natural world. By carving up his events into commonplaces and placing them into his six-part scheme, Goltwurm aimed to make the divine language comprehensible to his readers. If he insisted that numerous ranks of unseen, evil spirits stood massed to tempt and afflict human society, few of his readers may have given that part of his message a second thought. For the Book of Wondrous Works and Miracles was, like a modern reference volume, primarily a book that was used, rather than savored in a cover-to-cover read. When the mostly clerical readers who took it off their shelves delved into its storehouse, they did so to search for exempla for use in sermons, to satisfy their own curiosity, or to unlock the secrets or future import of some recent inexplicable event. The multitude of strategies Goltwurm used to explain these events—methods that ranged from the allegorical to the portentous, from the apocalyptic and diabolic to the routine and the mundane—tended to disarm the most dramatic and fearsome elements of his work.

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If Goltwurm thus partially tamed the power of the supernatural by making it readily intelligible to his observers, he also suffused all creation with the divine presence, reminding his audience that they lived constantly in the shadow of God. This emphasis on praesentia was, to be sure, one example of the disciplining of the self that flourished in evangelicalism before the great revolution in social disciplining began to make its way into German territories at the end of the century. Like the quirky introspection recommended by the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Brethren of the Common Life, Goltwurm imagined that this constant reminder of God’s presence—even in the minutest of daily affairs—might help his readers to combat sin and doubt. Certain kinds of miracles, like the traditional thaumaturgy of the saints or events that had defended medieval cult, were here transmogrified into instances of diabolic sorcery, thus marking off confessional boundaries with the force of a taboo. Yet in scores of other ways, he moved to enchant the physical world with evidence that revealed the divine will, making the stars, the elements, and worldly flora and fauna speak messages that revealed God’s providence. Goltwurm’s understanding of that concept, though, was not of the “feel-good” variety but of an altogether more militant and just stamp. He did not embrace the Pauline principle inscribed in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good for those that love the Lord.” His God was, by contrast, a hoary and cranky personality, jealous of his proscriptions and anxious to punish their slightest infraction. Here and there this austere vision was punctuated with instances of human beings who did rise above the limitations imposed by their sinful natures and who consequently witnessed the sunnier side of God’s mercy and love. In the vast majority of cases, though, Goltwurm’s ambitious chronicle told a despairing story of human shortcoming and its consequences. Such bleakness was surely to be expected in a work that treated the spiritual and physical mechanics of the natural world rather than the promise of the Gospel, for the world was, to be sure, governed by the realities of the Law. Yet the absence of a fuller treatment of the evangelical principles of forgiveness and alien righteousness in a work of Goltwurm’s scope is a telling omission. That omission, prompted by the gnawing fear that the principle of sola fides proved inadequate as a pastoral and social policy, produced a supernatural theology that, above all, emphasized the Law over the promises of grace. Goltwurm’s sense of Old Testament-styled prophetic vocation, his intense diabolism, and his polemical anti- Catholicism certainly mark him

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among the hardliners who emerged in the wake of the troubles bred by the Schmalkaldic War and the Interims. Yet at the same time, Melanchthon’s spirit can be seen coursing just as vigorously through the Wunderwerck, giving life to the book’s frequent discussions of the Law. From the earliest years of the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon had labored to refine the theological relationships between Law and Gospel in order to combat the perception that a dangerous antinomianism laid at the heart of evangelical principles. For Melanchthon, the Law was not just a discarded covenant once established with the Jews. Nor was it a mere tool by which God convicted the human conscience of its wickedness. Instead, the Law was creative and dynamic, binding upon human societies so that they might maintain civic order on earth, even as it led men and women to salvation by faith. There was also a third and final use to the Law that Melanchthon identified in his maturity, as he continued his famous struggle against the antinomianism of figures like Johann Agricola. As he was drawn to conclude in those disputes, the experience of faith did not abolish the Law’s strictures, for those made righteous through God’s grace were still bound to obey the Law’s dictates. For the regenerate the Law was thus a perpetual discipline.113 Goltwurm’s chronicle of miracles also underscored these multiple purposes of the Law. For him, the Law’s mandates were part of the universal order of creation, binding upon Christian and nonChristian alike, and the continuing vitality of the Law and its relevance for the Christian could be witnessed in thousands of supernatural acts God performed in Creation. Thus, where Melanchthon had turned to the scriptures to prove these contentions, Goltwurm found them inscribed on every page of the book of nature.

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The Polemics of Depravity in the Wonder Books of Christoph Irenaeus if, as in some early modern prodigy tale, sixteenth- century stones and plaster could speak, they might reveal the tenor and intensity of the discussions that occurred about signs and wonders in Germany’s Protestant towns and territories during the 1560s and 1570s. Unfortunately, our knowledge of how people reacted to these reports is incomplete. It comes to us primarily from the letters, cheap pamphlets, broadsides, and thick wonder books that proliferated in these years, and not from the pensive, perhaps urgent oral discussions these reports inspired. We will never know the degree to which news of these events generated personal anxiety in some or indifference in others. In all times it seems that those whose antennae are especially sensitive to prognostications and jeremiads live side by side with those who pay little attention to prophecies of gloom and doom. Yet the survival of thousands of cheap broadsides and pamphlets as well as the voluminous collections of signs and wonders that appeared in these years testifies to the large audience that existed for these reports. Catholic observers at this time were wont to comment upon the Protestant fascination with nature’s disorders. In his oft-cited chronicle, the Hildesheim priest, Johann Oldecop (1494–1573) attacked the “rabbis and Pharisees of the Lutheran sect” for their propensity to divine meanings from the wonders they sensed in “figures of storm winds, thunderclaps, fiery clouds, three or four suns, or the form of a small child.”1 If Catholics issued these pronouncements they would be roundly condemned, but Protestants, Oldecop charged, felt free to say whatever came to mind about such events. If the Hildesheim chronicler attacked the credulity and incautiousness of his Protestant neighbors, the fascination of German Protestants with natural disorder could appear more menacing, even polluting from a distance. Arnaud Sorbin (1532–1606), the bishop of Nevers, France, drew a causal link between the “proliferation of countless

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monsters” in Saxony and “Luther’s perfidious fraud.” Before Luther, such hideously deformed births had been nonexistent; now the infection that had issued from Luther’s reform had tainted Germany and was spreading to France with a new, unparalleled force: each day, France was taking on more “the look of an African wilderness” with “some new aberration.”2 Protestantism’s denial of truth, Sorbin charged, possessed the power to work a monstrous devolution upon the very patterns of nature. From the distance of five hundred years we can see more clearly the sources of Sorbin’s and Oldecop’s fears and judgments. Throughout the later sixteenth century, German presses churned out a torrent of warnings about the woeful consequences that were to follow the appearance of comets, new stars, earthquakes, floods, signs seen in the nighttime skies, and monstrous births. Penny press texts described these wonders with adjectives like “terrifying,” “gruesome,” “horrifying,” “mournful,” and “highly unusual,” and they usually matched their verbal hyperbole with equally sensational illustrations. Recent research into these documents confirms what was recognized at the time: the vast majority of these texts were printed in Protestant rather than Catholic cities and territories.3 Once, these cheap broadsides and pamphlets were treated as an emerging medium of mass communication that spoke to a popular culture cut off from the elite theological and scientific discussions of the age. More recently, scholars have realized that it was not a downtrodden population divorced from intellectual exchange that consumed these texts but a literate audience that craved knowledge of and commentary upon the many strange and inexplicable events they saw occurring around them. When the authors of these texts can be identified, moreover, they often turn out to be local schoolmasters, pastors, and notables—people who were well connected to Germany’s publishing literati and who were often aware of the many different kinds of arguments that were being put forth in learned texts to explain these phenomena. In turn, the news spread in scores of cheap broadsides and pamphlets was also avidly consumed by pastors and theologians and redigested into the learned wonder books they published. One of the most visible and industrious examples of how a pastoral reader consumed these texts comes to us not from Germany but from the relatively independent and detached Reformed Zurich. There the pastor Johann Jakob Wick (1522–88) compiled an enormous collection of broadsides, pamphlets, and reports of natural wonders and divine providences he observed around him. Wick, an archdeacon in Zurich’s Großmünster, used his close proximity to Heinrich Bullinger and that

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reformer’s enormous trans-European correspondence to indulge and enlarge his knowledge of the most recent wonders and events that displayed the hand of God at work in his own times. Inspired by the great wonder compendia of writers like Fincel, Lycosthenes, and Goltwurm, he began to construct his own collection of events in 1560. From that date until his death in 1588, he completed twenty-four colorful volumes of wonder books. Consisting of an average of six hundred pages in each volume, Wick’s scrapbooks of the fantastic came to include a total of 499 pamphlets and more than 430 broadsides gathered from throughout the German-speaking world, many brought to him by locals who had traveled abroad. In addition, the pastor wrote and illustrated his own accounts of similar events, culled from his mentor Bullinger’s letters and his own communications with a circle of like-minded observers. Once dismissed as exotic, Wick was long seen to be the author of a collection that was little more than a mingle-mangle of popular superstitions, a window on a quickly vanishing world of immanental innocence.4 Yet Wick was a Tübingen- and Marburg-educated theologian, who served for a time as the second-ranking divine in Protestant Zurich’s church. His accounts of gruesome military events, celestial messages, and other strange and troubling incidents confirmed his notion that a chorus of disorders was revealing an impending divine transformation. Such ideas sprang from a high provenance; among his circle of friends and correspondents, Wick included the naturalist Konrad Gessner (1516–65), the theologian and fellow Zurich archdeacon Ludwig Lavater (1527–86), and the historian and theologian Josias Simler (1530–76).5 As Franz Mauelshagen has shown,6 Wick was neither a picturesque Dickensian hoarder nor some kind of late-Reformation eccentric. His ideas were not quaintly outdated but well within the mainstream of contemporary opinion, and thus his collection provides us with a lens to view Protestant reactions to the momentous events that were occurring in Europe in the later sixteenth century. Wick, for example, closely followed the martyrdom and persecution of Protestants in misfortunes like the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. He keenly observed the situation in England’s church, its religious settlement, and the issues leading up to its showdown with Spain in the 1580s. He included accounts of momentous battles like that at Lepanto in 1571, as well as engagements between Europeans and Muscovites and Turks. And he fi lled his volumes with detailed illustrations and descriptions of recent sightings of northern lights, comets, monstrous births, halos around the sun and moon, and

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other seemingly momentous celestial events. All these incidents were, as his volumes intoned, signs of a salvific history being worked out by a God who promised such events in the last days. Behind Wick’s apocalypticism, a serene confidence in the ultimate providence of God suff used the pages of his life’s work. Certainly, such sentiments are to be found in the Lutheran wonder books that appeared to the north at the same time. A triumphal rhetoric sometimes filled those pages, too, as evangelical writers assured their readers that the trials around them were but the birth pangs of a new, more perfect order. Yet what is so striking about the German texts that appeared in these years is the degree to which they concentrated not just on proclaiming apocalyptic warnings but on expressing deeply pessimistic assessments of human nature. In the years after Fincel’s and Goltwurm’s evangelical wonder books appeared, a growing number of Lutheran pastors and theologians published similar works. Most followed Goltwurm’s example. That is, instead of merely setting out a running chronicle of eschatological mileposts like Fincel’s Wonder Signs, they took up Goltwurm’s challenge to examine miracles rhetorically as an alternative language the deity used to communicate with humanity. Thus, increasing specialization became the norm, and books devoted to isolated kinds of wonders—floods, monstrous births, celestial apparitions, comets, and so forth—appeared alongside those intended for certain niche audiences.7 By 1600, the flurry of publishing that followed had produced an increasingly variegated market of wonder books: imposing, expensive volumes filled with exempla for preachers; collections intended for personal and family devotion; and thin, digestible pocketbooks filled with accounts of disasters, miracles, and believe-it-or-not stories. By that time, the wonder book had become a staple of early modern evangelical readers, a staple that would persist into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and eventually be transformed into a literature of curiosities. The forces that had initially produced this new genre were many and varied. Certainly, one of the underpinnings of this fascination with nature’s wonders was the abiding desire for assurance that God’s presence could be observed in the world. Some may have brushed aside that desire as irrelevant in a new order based upon the scriptures and the Gospel’s promise, yet many Lutheran divines and their parishioners aimed to satisfy it all the same. However, the search for signs of confirmation took evangelicals in a bleak direction, for the wonder book most often came to profess the dismal ethic that God punished every wrongdoing and that nature’s wonders were specifically

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tailored as chastisements for certain human shortcomings. In other words, the wonder book was perceived—at least among the pastoral authors who wrote these texts—as a remedy for the threat of antinomianism that most feared was never far from the heart of evangelical doctrines. These texts reinforced the vital role, identified by Melanchthon and other early evangelicals, of the Law as a set of proscriptions that not only convicted the unrighteous but also bound the justified. In contrast to the mercy and benevolence displayed in the saintly intercessions of the later Middle Ages, or those that were just beginning to be broadcast anew at early modern Catholic shrines, the miracles commemorated by evangelical divines in these late sixteenth-century wonder books were almost universally negative in tone. While here and there these texts sometimes included a tale of someone receiving aid in an otherwise hopeless situation or the exploits of those fueled by a divinely imputed faith, such episodes were little match for the unrelieved pessimism that ran through the new genre. The bleak vision of sin and inexorable punishment that is so often found in these texts was also sustained by the climate of theological dispute that reigned in these years. As disagreements between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics heated up in the empire in the second half of the sixteenth century, and as Lutheran theologians appeared perched on the abyss of internecine disputes, no commentator wanted to risk appearing “soft” on sin. Nature for these writers became not just a force sympathetic to human wrongdoing but also a secondary pillar of authority, complementary to the message of the scriptures. Or, adopting Caspar Goltwurm’s characterization, subsequent wonder book authors came to celebrate God’s acts in nature as an alternative language that spoke to those whose hearts were hardened to the message of the Gospel. Yet as they turned to decode the seemingly incontestable evidence the natural world offered, many authors found support for their own theological positions in the divine utterances they read in nature. Thus, the late sixteenth-century wonder book entered into the many controversies that were waged in these years about human nature, sin, and the precise mechanics of the process of salvation. Of these disputes, those that arose from the teachings of the Illyrian theologian Matthias Flacius (1520–75)8 proved to be among the bitterest and most enduring. Charismatic and impetuous, Flacius had first emerged as a Protestant leader during the controversies over the Augsburg and Leipzig Interims in 1548. In those dark days, he had decamped to Magdeburg, where he helped rally a small but determined group of evangelicals to resist imperial designs over religion. Eventually, this resistance would

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bear fruit in the Peace of Augsburg’s legal recognition of Lutheranism; in the wake of that momentous development, moral authority and renown continued to accrue to Flacius. By the mid-1550s, he had emerged as the leader of a group of hard-line theologians anxious to protect their vision of Luther’s legacy. Flacius and his fellow “Gnesio-“ or “genuine” Lutherans, as they have been known since the seventeenth century, most often faced off against supporters of Philip Melanchthon, the so-called Philippists, who continued to dominate the Saxon universities at Wittenberg and Leipzig. With his power reaching its height, Flacius was named professor of theology in 1557 at the upstart academy at Jena. He soon became embroiled in controversy when he tried to purge Viktorin Strigel, a mildly Philippist theologian who had helped to found Jena during the dark days of the Schmalkaldic Wars, from the university’s ranks. Questions about the human will and the extent to which it had been tarnished by original sin came to dominate the disputes that soon developed between Strigel and Flacius. From Flacius’s perspective, Luther had definitively resolved the issues surrounding the human will in texts like his famous 1525 rejoinder to Erasmus, The Bondage of the Will.9 In that work and in other places throughout his career, Luther had insisted that the will was utterly passive in the processes of salvation; human beings were either predestined to damnation or salvation, and their redemption was accomplished completely by God without any hint of human participation. Strigel, however, wished to join considerations of repentance and amendment of life to such a formula, insisting that salvation was the first step in a life of Christian responsibility. This position in some ways mirrored the teachings of the emerging party of Reformed theologians in Germany, Switzerland, and France at the time, and Flacius insisted that it opened up the possibilities of synergistic moral cooperation. In the battles that followed, Flacius at first gained the upper hand as he secured his opponent’s removal from the university and even a five-month imprisonment. Strigel survived to fight another day; rehabilitated, he engaged Flacius in a fateful disputation held at the ducal court in Weimar on August 2–8, 1560. This time, Flacius overplayed his hand.10 When pressed by Strigel on the character of human nature after the Fall, the Illyrian theologian insisted that sin was its very substance. Fallen human nature, to carry Flacius’s contentions to their logical conclusion, was thus indistinguishable from Satan’s, a conclusion that Strigel countered was an affront to the Genesis contention that humankind was created in the divine likeness. Although Flacius continued to refine and

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defend this position in the months that followed, the Manichean tilt of Flacius’s teachings caused Duke Johann Friedrich to withdraw his support from Flacius and cast his lot with Strigel. By late 1561, Flacius had left Jena for Regensburg, where he was offered a post as head of a new Lutheran academy in that city.11 For the remainder of a life that reads like Greek tragedy, the statements he had made that fateful day in Weimar dogged Flacius. His plans at Regensburg soon foundered, and pressure from Augustus, the elector of Saxony, eventually led to his expulsion from that city. By October 1566, he had moved on to minister to a Lutheran congregation at Antwerp, but he fled that place ahead of invading Spanish armies the following February. After being denied asylum in Frankfurt, he did find a home at Strasbourg, where the church superintendent Johannes Marbach welcomed him. But in 1569, Augustus sent emissaries to capture him, and Flacius was forced to flee to Basel. Although he later returned to Strasbourg, the locals eventually tired of his radical positions, and he was expelled in 1573. His final stop was Frankfurt, where the magistrates of the city forbade him to settle, but the local abbess of the White Ladies granted him and his large family sanctuary in her convent. Flacius died there in March 1575.12 His was a truly extraordinary sixteenth- century life. It led him from his Croatian homeland to Venice and then to studies in Basel, Tübingen, and Wittenberg, where—after a long period of spiritual trial—he attained certainty of his salvation through study of Luther’s works. Though nurtured by Melanchthon, Flacius eventually turned upon his mentor, and in his attempts to keep Luther’s legacy pristine, he offended Catholics, Calvinists, and evangelicals alike. Remembered today as the chief inspiration behind the great historical work of the Magdeburg Centuries, during his years in Strasbourg, Flacius was also author of a mountain of almost two hundred theological, polemical, and disputatious works. In the thick of this checkered career, he married twice and fathered eighteen children. Despite his extreme views and his eventual condemnation by both Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists, he continued to inspire a small group of devoted followers, some of whom trod the same path to alienation and exile that he did. Christoph Irenaeus (1522–95) was among these prolific disciples of Matthias Flacius.13 Like his second-century patristic namesake who had warred against Gnosticism, this latter-day Irenaeus also fashioned himself as a preserver of truth against heresy. Throughout his career, he often used wonders as a subject for fashioning a natural theological

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foundation for Flacius’s teachings concerning sin and human nature. Born at Schweidnitz in Silesia around 1522, he was educated at Wittenberg, where he received a masters of arts in 1549. Ordained as an archdeacon in 1552, he embarked upon his career as a theologian soon afterwards, and while serving as a pastor at Eisleben in the 1560s, he embraced Flacian doctrines concerning human nature. For a time he found a favorable ear, and he was called to serve as preacher at the Saxon court of Johann Wilhelm at Weimar in 1566. Initial welcome soon turned to disfavor, and in 1572, he was brought before the consistory in Saxe-Weimar. Thus began a long period of exile and wandering that would only end with his death in 1595. For brief periods he found pastoral posts, yet the radical nature of his teachings on the effects of original sin—that after the Fall, human nature’s essence became demonic—prompted his dismissal from many posts. Between 1584 and 1590 alone, Irenaeus was banished seven times, a dubious distinction that he, like Flacius, seemed to wear as a badge of honor rather than infamy.14 If Irenaeus’s views concerning human nature and the effects of the Fall were extreme, obliging him to stay one step ahead of persecuting magistrates and princes, his vagrant itinerancy did not prevent him from becoming a widely published theologian. In spite of his nomadic life, his bibliography includes more than forty theological works, most of which were controversial in nature and defend Flacian teachings, particularly those he held dear concerning original sin.15 Beyond such Streitschriften, Irenaeus wrote a number of devotional works and authored three wonder books as well. These texts display his considerable skills as a writer, for of all those who examined natural wonders at the time, Irenaeus surely ranked as the most vivid stylist. In his wonder books, as indeed in much of his theology, he displayed a fondness for coining inventive phrases and a rich vocabulary for describing natural disasters; a penchant for conducting a mildly ironic, yet ultimately good-natured argument with his readers; and a fluent, animated style that dispensed grim spiritual medicine while still managing to entertain. These qualities are richly evident in the first of Irenaeus’s wonder books, his Mirror of the Waters, published in 1566.16 In the dedication to Count Georg of the Thuringian court of Gleichen, Irenaeus displays his skill for enumerating sins colorfully with this opening flourish: Error, false teaching, and corruption slyly slink, one after the other, into the churches and schools. Blasphemy against God, disregard

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for Word and Sacrament, disobedience, pride, murder, anger, rage and hate, whoring, indiscipline, marital breakups, gorging, boozing, fine living and feasting, stealing, robbing, usury, dispossession, oppressing the poor, marling and sucking dry, feuding, grasping—these grow day to day without any restraint.17 In this list, wrong thinking—heretical error and corruption—begets other ideological crimes, including blasphemy and inattention to the Word, before producing a host of ills, ills that had long been ensconced in the system of the seven deadly sins and their many daughter vices. Yet as Irenaeus moves to conclude his list, the final waypoints on this tour of trespasses are invoked, not as mere personal shortcomings like gluttony and over-drinking, but as crimes that are violations of Christian charity: dispossession, oppression of the poor, and feuding. In a page that might have been drawn from the sermon of a late-medieval friar, in other words, wrong thinking and error ultimately lead to a failure of community. And as a final metaphorical capstone that emphasizes the magnitude of these failures, Irenaeus immediately follows his listing of these communal sins with “marling” (the grinding of limestone for fertilizer), “sucking dry,” and “grasping.” Such picturesque terms evoke tactile daily experiences that at first glance appear removed from the higher cerebral wickedness with which he began, but have here been linked in a single chain of causality. In this conservative social gospel, then, theological error has thus been transformed into the source of the dismal destructions of caritas the author witnessed around him. The remainder of Irenaeus’s wonder book displays an equally colorful, if sometimes darkly tinged, rhetoric. Throughout the text, he oscillates between a consideration of the specific disasters certain kinds of sins engender and a narrower, more focused exposition on the meanings of floods and watery destruction. In discussing water’s depredation, for instance, the theologian quotes from a 1536 commentary of Luther on Psalm 29, a psalm that presented “the waters” as the “voice of the Lord.”18 Irenaeus stresses that the divinity uses the medium of water to voice his anger, to work trials and tribulations, and to offer the faithful consolation. The angry voice of God upon the waters is not directed toward the elect but the reprobate, and through water God attempts to convince his “wicked and stiff-necked children” of the necessity of repentance. Thus Irenaeus insists—like Goltwurm before him, who sometimes argued that natural disasters were a scourge to the wicked but a consolation to the

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regenerate—that God’s angry displays in floods and storms are made only for those who live “in the old, godless skin.”19 To emphasize to his readers the enormous range of expressions the divinity makes in nature, Irenaeus usually alternated in his wonder books between passages of theological exposition and detailed catalogues of the signs and wonders witnessed throughout history and in more recent days. These excursions into the recounting of miracles often have about them a breathless quality, as Irenaeus attempts to evoke awe and wonder in his readers at the very multiplicity of ways God intervenes in the natural order to convince the godless of their error. In his Mirror of the Waters, for instance, several paragraphs that relate signs seen in his own times in the skies are typical of such passages: In the sky parhelia, many suns and moons at the same time, great eclipses and darkness, comets, thrashing brooms (Staupbesen), chasmata, burning heat or fissures, fiery flames, fiery rays, fireshooting, fire-tracks, fiery balls, fire and blood rains, fiery swords, fiery crosses and other fiery and bloody signs and the like. Further, war armor, military units, battles, running, slaughters of crowds, miserable cackling, rattling, crackling, threshing, turmoil, clamor, lamentations, shouting, whimpering, howling unto the sky as at a defeat or military slaughter. Some birds in large assemblages mingling like two armies meeting in battle utterly destroy and annihilate one another. Further, highly unusual, terrifying storms with thunder and lightning blasts, hail, rains of seeds, groats, and stones. And such rains then of frogs, toads, and larks and other refuse falling with them.20 This digression through the various natural irregularities recently witnessed in the heavens runs to six pages before the theologian returns to the core of his argument: that such signs are self-evident proof of God’s anger. These attempts to convince through enumeration are a typical feature of Irenaeus’s writing, as is his macaronic penchant for including both Latin and Germanic terms to describe the same phenomenon: “parhelia,” for instance, is immediately followed by “many suns and moons at the same time,” “eclipses” by “darkness” (Finsternis), and “chasmata”

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by “burning heat or fissures” (Feuerglut oder Kluff t). Irenaeus also further delimits “comet” by immediately including “thrashing brooms,” Staupbesen in early modern German, a word specifically used to describe a broom for thrashing convicted criminals in some German states.21 Such a word choice makes reference to the fact that in daily parlance the comet was frequently imagined as a broom (Besen or Besem) that moved through the heavens. Irenaeus’s inclusion of the nominative prefi x Staup (the equivalent of Staub in modern German or “dust”) thus leaves little doubt about his conclusions concerning the comet’s purpose. His usage, not just of the normative term Besen but of the more evocative Staupbesen, evokes the contemporary realities of punitive practice even as it calls to mind the broom’s role of sweeping away the pollution sin engenders. In this and many other passages, the author also makes masterful use of the rhetorical possibilities of early modern German as he weaves assonances, dissonances, consonances, and alliterations to create a colorful-sounding array that appeals to the ear. If the repetition of sounds and the multiplication of example proved to be among the most common tools in Irenaeus’s rhetorical arsenal, his discussions of the meaning behind specific kinds of wonders nonetheless display a wide reading in traditional biblical commentary. In examining the purposes behind floods and other watery disasters, for instance, Irenaeus draws upon many of the time-honored traditions of patristic and medieval exegesis concerning the biblical Flood. His observations thus are filled with the same allegories and typologies that had long provided grist for biblical commentators. The Deluge, in other words, was a prefiguration of the Christian sacrament of baptism, and Noah was a prototype of Christ. And just as in Noah’s day, the Flood’s waters washed away a rising tide of human wickedness, Irenaeus was quick to conclude that the similar rise in human degeneracy in his own day would precede the purification worked by the fiery Apocalypse heralding Christ’s return.22 Beyond such long-established interpretations, Irenaeus also delves into more obscure judgments about the Flood, even as he advances some ideas about that event’s meaning that were unusual by the standards of his time and place. One measure of his doggedness in trying to understand the “voice” of God in the waters can be seen in his contention that God sent the biblical Deluge as a punishment for the specific sins of “debauchery, drunkenness or over-drinking, and epicurean living.”23 In the long history of Christian discussions of the early catastrophes of the Genesis narrative, most commentators were quite specific about just which sins had

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engendered each punishment. Adam, it is true, was sometimes imagined as a glutton for eating of the forbidden fruit, as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the Pardoner delivers a sermon condemning his “excess and . . . gluttonies” as the cause of his “woes and pain.”24 But more often the first father’s shortcomings were seen as vainglorious pride, concupiscence, or disobedience. Most discussions of the Flood pointed to the marital irregularities and “wickedness of man” that Genesis 6 alleged were so richly evident among the antediluvian generation as that incident’s causes. In the fourth century, though, the Greek father John Chrysostom had linked all three of the early Genesis tragedies—the expulsion from Eden, the Flood, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—to a single chain of causality. In commenting upon Jesus’s temptation during the fast in the wilderness, Chrysostom had contrasted Christ’s triumph over Satan and the bodily desire for food with the fleshly capitulations of Adam, Noah’s generation, and the Sodomites: “For indeed Adam was cast out of paradise because of gluttony and gluttony, too, caused the Flood in Noah’s time, even as it brought down the thunders on Sodom.”25 Chrysostom, an avid supporter of fasting and ascetic discipline, may have been drawn to identify the Flood as one incident in this chain of overindulgence from reading the Olivet discourse recorded in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. In those passages Christ made brief reference to the disregard the antediluvian generation had had for their impending doom when he noted, “Before the flood . . . they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark” (Matthew 24:37). Although Jesus’s statements drew no causal connection between the overconsumption and the consequent punishing waters, Chrysostom was to conclude that gluttony stood at the heart of the sins punished in Noah’s age. In the centuries that followed, the links that Chrysostom had forged between overindulgence and the divine punishment of the Flood sometimes reappeared, particularly in the works of theologians anxious to condemn indulgence and overconsumption, or to advocate the values of restraint and fasting.26 But the charge that the generations before the Flood had suffered from drunkenness, the second vice in Irenaeus’s causal chain, did not figure in medieval commentaries on the Flood. Most often, authorities pointed to Genesis 9:20 (“And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard”) to prove that wine had appeared only after the Flood. As a consequence, medieval commentators usually argued that Noah had been the first human being to experience being drunk. That observation exonerated the patriarch from having sinned by

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overdrinking, even as it also protected Noah from the consequences of his indulgence in the famous episode that followed—his son Ham’s uncovering of his father’s nakedness. Sixteenth-century Protestants called into question those conclusions. For his part, Luther left open the possibility that wine may have predated the deluge, even as he expressed the opinion that Noah had long been familiar “with the nature of this juice” before his drunken escapade.27 For Luther, Noah’s drunkenness was evidence that even the pious patriarch had “sinned strongly.” Luther’s conclusion about the incident—that it proved the inexorability of sin even among the saints—was expressed straightforwardly and without great rhetorical flourishes that heaped blame on the Old Testament patriarch. At table on the evening before the Reformer gave his famous lecture on the subject, Luther had even lightheartedly observed that “he himself should get drunk, so that he could speak as an expert about this wickedness.”28 By contrast, Calvin’s treatment of Noah’s drunkenness was not so sanguine. The French reformer voiced even more skepticism than Luther had about Noah’s role as the creator of viticulture; he found it unlikely that the human race would have failed to realize the potential profit that reposed in the “fruit of the vine” before the patriarch’s time.29 Calvin concluded that Noah’s drunkenness was less the momentary lapse that Luther had imagined it, but instead “a filthy and detestable crime” causing the “holy patriarch to lose all selfpossession” and in a “base and shameful manner . . . to prostrate himself naked on the ground, so as to become a laughingstock to all.”30 In Protestant commentary, the Flood itself, rather than Noah’s drunkenness, usually loomed as the far larger punishment for depravity and wickedness. Irenaeus’s charge that it and subsequent floods were retributions for gluttony, intoxication, and “epicurean living” seems unique.31 In his Lectures on Genesis, Martin Luther had given an otherwise traditional interpretation of the Flood an evangelical slant by concluding that the sin of Noah’s time was that “they were men alienated from the Word and given over to their lusts and reprobate minds . . . ”32 Luther thus made the wicked lives of Noah’s fellows into an object lesson for every age of what human behavior was like outside the grace of God, even as he noted that the special sins of Noah’s time included a falling away from the truth: Hence we draw the universal conclusion that without the Holy Spirit and without grace man can do nothing but sin and so goes on endlessly from sin to sin. But when there is also this added element

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that he does not uphold sound doctrine, rejects the Word of salvation, and resists the Holy Spirit, then, with the support of his free will, he also becomes an enemy of God, blasphemes the Holy Spirit and completely follows the evil desires of his heart.33 It was this latter dimension of the sins of Noah’s age—willful apostasy, blasphemy, and crimes against the Holy Spirit—that Luther saw as the essential similarity between the pre-Flood era and the “last times” in which he believed he was living. For as he observed, the antediluvian world was like his own day, a topsy-turvy place in which Noah and his children, the “true sons of God,” were spurned and attacked as “heretics, children of the devil” by those of fine worldly reputation, while those in authority were actually godless and thoroughly wicked.34 While Calvin refused to draw eschatological conclusions from the Flood as Luther had done, he managed to speak with a similar voice: Noah’s generation proved the “atrocious wickedness” of which the human species was capable.35 While both Luther and Calvin found evidence in the Flood narrative for the key Protestant principle of total depravity, Irenaeus instead located the moral of the story in a traditional late-medieval ethic that decried overconsumption, indulgence, and hedonism. His conclusions thus present us with a dramatic shrinking of the theological focus away from the grand principles of the early Reformation to a concentration on a set of far more specific human shortcomings, a development that was typical of the ways in which Gnesio-Lutheran teaching was moving at the time.36 Even as these theologians moved to protect what they felt was the core of Luther’s early evangelical teaching, they promoted an often highly scholastic, hairsplitting morality. This trend is most visible in the widely distributed “devil books” that first began to appear in the 1550s in the wake of the Augsburg Interim and the controversies it engendered. By the time that Irenaeus was writing his Mirror of the Waters in the late 1560s, devil books were quickly becoming some of the most popular items at the annual Frankfurt book fair. On their surface, these texts identified specific human vices as cases of a kind of “demon possession” and provided advice to their readers on how to rid themselves of that specific sin.37 Such works, though, dabbled in often highly abstruse, complex moral discussions and finely discriminated parent sins from their daughter vices in ways similar to medieval scholastic methods. In his Pride’s Devil, for instance, the Gnesio-Lutheran pastor Joachim Westphal enlisted the aid of one of his fellow moral campaigners, the theologian

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and pastor Cyriacus Spangenberg, to write a foreword for his treatment of the “vanity of vanities.” In that text, Spangenberg included an extensive consideration of pride and its many daughter vices; his treatment numbers more than forty pages in a modern compressed edition.38 Like medieval authorities convinced that sins were connected in an intricate web of fi liations, Spangenberg attempted to trace the precise connections between pride and its many offspring. His efforts, just like those of Irenaeus, at once display unease with treating sin as a mere reflection of an abstract principle of total depravity. For both Spangenberg and Irenaeus, it was necessary to catalogue every vice that one shortcoming might produce, so that readers might become aware of the infernal complexities and slippery slopes that might connect one seemingly innocuous act to others of far greater consequence. In this way, both theologians aimed to deepen their audience’s awareness of the interconnections between every human desire, thought, and action—to consequently stir greater introspection and self- discipline. Such efforts were just one more dimension of the complex turn toward the greater disciplining of the self that scholars of religion in early modern Europe have long noted. Yet, more closely examined, the moral reasoning of these Gnesio-Lutheran theologians yields at least two other interesting insights. First, the survival of this brand of medieval scholastic morality in the works of late sixteenth-century Gnesio-Lutherans complicates our understanding of religious change in the sixteenth century. Historians of the Protestant Reformation have sometimes pointed to the role that Lutheranism played in solidifying a move that had begun in the later Middle Ages from a morality based in the traditional system of the seven deadly sins to one ordered around the uncompromising dictates of the Ten Commandments.39 This change possessed the power to alter moral reasoning, since the commandments did not engender a notion of a hierarchy of vices but instead inscribed a set of unyielding rules. But perhaps even more importantly, the shift in favor toward Ten Commandments morality could transform legal codes, too. As Lyndal Roper has shown, this shift could have important consequences in towns like Augsburg, where city councilors increasingly tried to ensure that their citizens’ private morality conformed to Reformation teaching.40 While late-medieval authorities had long tolerated prostitution as a necessary evil that prevented even greater transgressions like defloration and bestiality, sixteenth-century Protestant authorities set about warring against all sex outside marriage, seeing in prostitution only an extreme example of fornication and adultery. Yet if

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religious and secular officials longed to establish a single, uniform code that might treat the adulterer, the fornicator, and the prostitute roughly as equals, the lure of the older deadly sins morality remained strong. For moralists like Spangenberg and Irenaeus, that system—with its intricate webs spun of vices—might still offer greater opportunities for intensive self-examination and the excavation of specific personal sins than the uncompromising dictates of Ten Commandments morality. Secondly, these efforts to enumerate, classify, and link sins stand in distinct contrast to the changes in discipline that were underway at the same time among early modern Catholics and Calvinists. In these years, the Catholic sacrament of penance was undergoing a transformation that would eventually remold it into a more frequent and more routine technique of intensely private self-examination, yet one that was often undergirded by the compulsory mechanisms of both the early modern church and state. In Calvinism, the chief disciplinary agent—the consistory— was just beginning to subject its members to the extensive scrutiny of community and church leaders. Yet the morality these Gnesio-Lutheran divines advocated was not sanctioned by institutional mechanisms in the same way as these innovations. Instead, the program of self-disciplining that theologians like Spangenberg and Irenaeus advocated was intended to be a personal choice made by those devout who were anxious to dedicate their hours to scrutinizing their most inward thoughts and deeds. Although the sins that Irenaeus identified as the cause of the biblical Flood—drunkenness, debauchery, and gluttony—were caustic to communities, they were firmly personal shortcomings widely attacked in late sixteenth- century Germany as well. Thus it is hardly surprising that in the remainder of his wonder book, Irenaeus cites these same vices as the cause of all floods. The certainty with which he expressed this point may have ultimately derived less from the shift in Protestant interpretations (evident in Luther’s and Calvin’s commentaries) of the stories of Noah and the Flood than it did from his own natural observations, which, in turn, seemed to be rooted in folk notions of justice. Just as the early sixteenthcentury humanist Johannes Aventinus had once eagerly quoted the Bavarian Volksmund story of the watery punishments that had followed an impious bishop’s filling in of a sacred well,41 Irenaeus seems similarly convinced that when God fashioned punishments, he often adopted the natural element that was most similar to what was abused by a sin. A surfeit of water, in other words, resembled the overdrinking that produced intoxication, and by extension overindulgence in all things. He concluded

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that the frequent occurrence of major flooding in the Low Countries was a direct result of the high living of the Dutch and the Flemish: In the Netherlands (Holland, Brabant, Flanders) there are high spirits, luxury, and a sardanapolitan, Epicurean life, filled with feasting, fornication, and all forms of indulgence. For this the Lord God has often visited and punished them with terrifying floods.42 And while his wonder book often piled flood upon flood with little commentary in order to prove to readers the dangers of high living, gluttony, and drinking, some of his narratives were more detailed and provided him with greater inspiration for divining precise meanings in God’s punishments. One of these incidents was his reporting of a flood that had recently struck Thuringia on June 1, 1565. At nine o’clock that morning, the sun took on the shape of “a bright, wide ball” and was shrouded in fog. A six-hour downpour accompanied by deafening thunder soon began, and villages in the region southwest of Weimar were particularly hard hit; Tonndorff, Nauendorf, Meckefeld, and Klettbach all experienced serious damage. In the hills above these towns, flash flooding was especially acute, so that a widow was carried away in the waters while still in her house. At Hesselborn, the storm washed away all the recently planted grain, while at Nauendorf, the floods transported eight houses considerably downstream. A farmer and his wife were killed when an uprooted Linden tree fell on their house. Nearby, a local brewery was destroyed; its copper brewing pot was eventually found a mile and a half downstream. Everywhere, houses and farms were devastated, people were drowned, and graves were robbed of their dead. But Irenaeus found the most telling details in the devastation that occurred at one church. In the wake of the storms, the building was discovered with its stone walls breached and its door forced open by a torrent of manure and mud. This dreck had knocked over the pulpit, demonstrating God’s disfavor with the increasing impurity of evangelical teaching.43 In his conclusion to this description of the 1565 Thuringian flood, Irenaeus reminded his readers that water often played a dual role. While it was a scourge and punishment for the reprobate, it was often a warning to the elect as well. Irenaeus expanded upon this argument in the second of the work’s three sections. In this section, termed a Creutzspiegel (“mirror of tribulations”), the theologian argued that while floods were a chastening trial to the gluttonous and inebriated, they also warned God’s

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people of the rise of religious heresies and political tyrannies. Irenaeus’s conclusions here pointed to the long shadow cast by the Interim and the imperial politics of the late 1540s and early 1550s, as well as the disputes among evangelical theologians that had followed those events. Again, it was Irenaeus’s conviction that nature provided an iconic representation of the divine will, rather than traditional theological commentary, that seems to have shaped his interpretation of floods as they related to the elect. For it was the similarity between the muck and mire generated by floods and the metaphorical reality of heresy as a kind of ideological filth that prompted Irenaeus to conclude that God used floods to warn of rising heresies. The conquests of Islam in Europe, Irenaeus observed, had been preceded by flooding at Rome, but more generally, the constant overflowing of the Tiber near the great capital proved the city’s role as a longstanding center of heresy. There the devil, “with his poisonous snake’s smell,” had been able to fi ll the church with “frogs and toads . . . epicurean cardinals, spiritual-less bishops, and all sorts of orders of monks . . . ”44 This devilish offensive, Irenaeus warned, was continuing in his own day through the Jesuits, who, like heretics of old, were continuing to cultivate their “poisonous scum” to corrupt youth.45 Such polemics, directed both at his Catholic and Lutheran opponents, were typical throughout the author’s works, as was his concentration on filth and foul odors. Irenaeus shared the taste for scatology that was common in the works of late sixteenth-century polemicists, and which had also flowed richly from Luther’s own theology. When he searched for evidence of humankind’s essential kinship with Satan—the theological point he held as most vital—he usually searched no further than the putrid, foul-smelling odors of the human body. Just as a flood’s muck and slime revealed the onset of heresy, foul odors often served in his works as proof of humankind’s demonic kinship.46 At the same time, he combined such dismal pronouncements about fallen human nature with assurances of the Gospel’s promise of forgiveness. In his Mirror of the Waters, for instance, Irenaeus fashioned his final section as a consolatory epistle, a Trostspiegel, in which he told of many cases of people being saved from water’s terror by putting their trust in God. The Israelites were protected from a watery death in the Red Sea, just as there were many rescues in Irenaeus’s own time from imminent destruction by storms and floods. Here, the theologian argued that faith was the key to such rescues; to prove the power of faith to work these kinds of miracles, Irenaeus turned to the famous instance of Peter walking on water recorded in Matthew 14:29–31.

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Peter was able to walk upon the waters only so long as his faith endured; when the winds whipped and he doubted, he started to sink and had to be buoyed by Christ’s hand. Yet after extolling the wonder-working power of faith by reference to these episodic incidents in which God proved more than merciful, Irenaeus soon moved to a darker conclusion by reminding his readers that whatever salvation anyone experienced from the water was only a temporary reprieve. Death and judgment would come to all, and the purpose of the punishing hand God used in the waters was only to move people to repentance. Similar themes resonated in the second of Irenaeus’s wonder books, his Prognostication from God’s Word, first published in 1578.47 In it, the Flacian theologian examined a celestial rather than earthly subject, the Great Comet that had been seen throughout Europe between November 1577 and January 1578.48 Irenaeus’s contribution to the discussion that swirled around the comet in the months that followed was only one of hundreds of tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, and astronomical treatises. An unusually bright comet because of its proximity to earth, the event famously became the object of Danish astronomer Tyco Brahe’s observations and measurement. In the treatise he wrote about the comet, Brahe showed that comets were celestial bodies, not atmospheric phenomena, and that they moved through the heavens at a great distance from earth. His conclusions attacked both the belief that comets were displays in the upper atmosphere and the notion that the heavens were composed of stable, crystalline spheres. It was to take decades to assimilate those discoveries completely into early modern cosmology, but in many other ways Brahe’s assumptions about the Great Comet were little different from those of most sixteenth-century observers. Like many astronomers and divines at the time, he still believed that the comet’s appearance was purposeful. But in place of the pessimism repeated in most comet publications, the tone of Brahe’s pronouncements was cautiously optimistic. Although he admitted that warfare, epidemic, and climate changes might occur in the short term, he argued that the comet’s most important ramifications were likely in the sphere of religion, where the event’s occurrence pointed to some great transformation. He denied, however, that the event was a harbinger of the Apocalypse, predicting instead that it was more likely that “the eternal Sabbath of Creation is at hand.”49 Irenaeus, by contrast, made no reference to the burning discussions that were occurring among astronomers about comets at the time. Were these heavenly bodies or sublunary objects that flashed across earth’s

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atmosphere? Did the comet occur according to the normal pattern of nature or against its grain? He summarily dismissed such speculations at the outset, and in place of the cautious optimism of Brahe’s assessment, Irenaeus voiced a dimmer view: the event was beyond all natural explanation and consequently a sign of the last days.50 As he opened his discussion of the bright body that had been seen in the skies for almost three months during late 1577 and early 1578, Irenaeus warned of a number of other signs that had occurred in the months just preceding and following the comet’s appearance: eclipses of the moon had occurred on April 2 and September 27, 1577; lightning strikes in July had caused massive fires throughout Saxony; floods, earthquakes, and other meteorological irregularities had been noted throughout the year as well.51 Those events, Irenaeus warned, had neither happened by pure chance nor according to nature’s regular patterns as “the crazy and drunken world imagines.” Instead he observed such “wonders and signs actually occur miraculously through the special providence, ministration, advice, and contrivance of God.”52 As he did in his earlier Mirror of the Waters, the theologian here roamed widely, including a thirty-five-page catalogue of comets from antiquity to his own day that briefly recounted the misfortunes that had followed these events.53 Irenaeus was little concerned here with the finer points of discriminating a comet’s effects, as can be seen by comparing his chronicle with that of the near contemporaneous work of the Brandenburg pastor and astrologer Georg Caesius. In his A Chronicle or Catalogue and Orderly Description of all Comets since the Flood (1579),54 Caesius listed ten features natural philosophers typically examined when they aimed to understand the effects of an individual comet. Caesius detailed, in other words, how enlightened observers carefully calibrated a comet’s size, color, intensity, position, and movement across the skies, among other things.55 Further, he treated issues of astrological house and ruling planets. Comets governed by Saturn, for instance, produced melancholy, storms, hail, floods, and shipwrecks, besides being the harbinger of disease and famine, two outcomes also associated with comets ruled by Jupiter. Those starry messengers surrounded by a corolla like the sun, however, spelled disaster for ruling potentates.56 And those that traversed Gemini brought false prophets, sects, heresy, and monstrous births in their wake, events largely consonant with the effects of those that occurred in Virgo, where a comet’s appearance foretold civil conflict, pestilence, and misbirth as well.57 Such fine discrimination was absent from Irenaeus’s accounts, perhaps because he, like many observers both before and after him, was convinced

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that the comet’s appearance foreboded nothing good. Plague, war, political uproar, famine, epidemics, as well as major governmental and religious changes—these were the momentous, if unspecific kinds of events he observed usually followed a comet’s path. Rather than concentrate on specific consequences of the 1577 comet, Irenaeus saved his powder for constructing a “sermon of repentance” (Bußpredigt) from the event. The commonplaces he outlined at the outset of this second section of his tract—that Satan is the inspiration of all sin, that God hates sin and condemns it through the Law, and that God proclaims the penalties of sin through both the Law and wondrous signs—fit with his radical Flacian theology.58 Yet his observations merged here with a second catalogue of miracle stories more varied than his collection of comets that was intended to illustrate these principles of total depravity. He drew these signs from the Old and New Testaments, as well as from the most recent history of the evangelical church in Germany. His technique here owes much to that famous passage in the City of God, in which Augustine relied on recent miracles of the saints to prove the truth of the orthodox position against the Pelagians and to celebrate the benevolent mercy of God.59 Irenaeus’s catalogue of signs has, to be sure, a different aim. He desires to show the ways in which Satan has always aimed to trick humankind, enlisting the aid of humans in the form of peoples as different as the Canaanites, the Babylonians, and the leadership of the Catholic Church to do so. Yet, like Augustine, he realized that a miracle was one of the most potent defenses for theology, and so he came to argue that God continually used natural wonders to confirm truth and minister to the elect. This trait of the divinity could be seen in contemporary times with the increase in wonders in the skies and on earth: floods, earthquakes, storms, monstrous births, and so forth. The wonders he recounted in this book on comets are both varied and fantastic. Some he drew from the reports in Fincel’s and Goltwurm’s collections; others he redacted from recent broadsides and pamphlets; while still others likely came from letters and oral communication. Some seem purely evil omens of future misfortune, like battles between storks and crows,60 a child born with a knife in its body,61 or a child who cried while still in the womb.62 Others, though, are more explicitly doctrinal in tone. In 1547, on the day of Duke Johann Friedrich’s capture during the Schmalkaldic War, the sun turned blood-red.63 A year later, as the Interim was being promulgated at Augsburg, a “great black ball” obscured the sun at Jena, and in Provence a linx terrorized those traveling the Aurelian

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highway.64 As Irenaeus concluded the work’s second “wonder catalogue,” he reminded his readers that the full complement of recently observed signs was a divine warning about the course theological developments had taken since Luther’s death. In recent history, he warned, the desire for peace with “papists” had sullied the purity of the Reformer’s theology; a string of innovating theologians had clouded the clarity of Luther’s teachings. Yet God had constantly reminded the faithful of these evils by sending forth a series of signs. Even now, Irenaeus recalled, this merciful benevolence persisted. Recalling to reader’s the subject of his tract—the recent appearance of the comet in late 1577 and 1578—he also repeated the ten additional signs that had accompanied that great event.65 In sum, all these events showed that God was clearly condemning the Formula of Concord and warning of the dangers of subscribing to that text. For the remainder of this jeremiad, Irenaeus thus turned to denounce those who had instigated the program of the Formula. Adopting the tone of an Old Testament prophet, he lobbed his most virulent attacks against Jakob Andreae, the chief force behind that confession. Yet along the path of this screed, the theologians Nikolaus Selnecker, Martin Chemnitz, and Andreas Musculus, who were all involved in the Formula plan as well, were singled out for bitter recriminations.66 Each of these, he charged, was an Accidenzer, that is, someone who wished to reduce the profound substance-altering power of original sin over human nature to a mere Aristotelian accident. Contemporary times had seen an unprecedented outpouring of error and seduction, so that since Luther’s death, one part of his church—the “Adiaphorists, Maiorites, Synergists, and Accidentzer”—spoke “with popish, Pelagian, and Interimistic tongues,” while the other conversed in tones of “Zwinglianism or Calvinism.”67 Such inconstancy threatened everyone with divine punishment. As Irenaeus reminded in the final prophecies in his wonder book on comets, God was still the same God who had turned Lot’s wife to salt, who had sent fire and brimstone upon the stiff-necked Sodomites, and who had punished the Israelites with the conquests of the Assyrians. One day soon he would visit similar punishments on Germany with a final judgment that would put an end to such wickedness.68 Irenaeus continued to play Jeremiah in the years that followed and maintained an often-urgent defense of his Flacian principles until his death. Prompted by the relative success of the conciliating Formula of Concord, which definitively rejected the Flacian teaching concerning original sin, Irenaeus often railed in these years against Jakob Andreae,

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Martin Chemnitz and Nikolaus Selnecker—indeed, all those who supported the Formula’s plan to heal the many breaches that had appeared among Lutheranism’s divines over the previous generation. His increasingly feverish rhetoric, fueled by his dismal personal experiences of frequent banishment, demonstrates that he sensed correctly that the tide was moving against these teachings as a form of extremism. Nonetheless, he did manage to find supporters. In 1579, for instance, he found refuge for several years on the estates of the nobleman Eberhard von Stetten at Buchenbach in the German southwest. But when he was called to a disputation with Jakob Andreae in August 1581, Eberhard’s overlord, the Count of Hohenlohe, quickly banished him. The theologian’s response to these troubles, his Image and Mirror of Mankind, followed within a year from the temporary haven provided for him by the Nuremberg burgher Thomas Itzenberg.69 Although it was not a wonder book, Irenaeus used this text to condemn the Accidenzer, those (like Andreae) whom he charged were trying to limit the soul-transforming degradations worked by original sin to a mere natural philosophical accident. It became a polemic not only against certain later Reformation theologians but also—in a way that mirrored Luther’s railings about Aristotle—against the importation of the natural philosophical tradition into Christianity. As Irenaeus contended, “Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles” were a better guide to human nature than were Aristotle; the codices of the Jurists; and the aphorisms of Hippocrates, Galen, and the “learned doctors.”70 The teachings of the jurists, with their yardstick in the Law, reveal the truly terrifying nature of humankind before the rebirth. Lives conducted according to the standard of the Law, he reasoned, present a horrific spectacle to God, a spectacle far more terrifying than the most detestable monstrosities that appear on earth. Irenaeus’s text here makes use of judgments about nature similar to those often present in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis. In those commentaries, Luther had pointed to God’s propensity to condemn sin by “cursing the earth,” an observation that led him to treat thorns, thistles, and the dismal winnowing away caused by new diseases as proof of the steadily rising consequences wreaked on creation by the increasing degeneracy of human beings. Irenaeus was less concerned, like Luther before him, with charting this story of devolution, since he seemed convinced that the tolls of human wickedness were everywhere and at all times enormous and consequently self-evident. Yet, in his typical style, he argued that ample

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testimony to sin’s wages was to be found in the existence of such things as “lice, mice, rats, fleas, flies, bugs, snails, midges, caterpillars, beetles, wasps, bees, hornets, locusts, and other bugs, poisonous worms, frogs, toads, snakes, vipers, serpents, scorpions, wild raging animals, bears, wolves, lions . . . ”71 Thus, vermin, insects, reptiles, and ravenous beasts all expressed the Creator’s eternal distaste for sin and his ingenuity in crafting a panoply of punishments for it. Time and again the Image and Mirror of Mankind stressed two observations: that postlapsarian human nature was monstrous and that God sent monsters as testimony to this fact. These observations also lay at the heart of the last of the wonder books Irenaeus published in 1585, his De monstris. On Highly Unusual, Wondrous Births.72 That work expanded upon the observations of the Image and Mirror and, in addition, conducted a thorough theological and natural philosophical examination of the problem of monstrosity. In this seven-hundred-page text, Irenaeus developed his most radical case for Flacian teaching to date. In contrast to his previous accounts of floods and comets, Irenaeus was here less dismissive of the natural philosophical tradition. He relied upon natural philosophical teachings, in other words, to bolster his conclusions about monstrosity, although he insisted nonetheless that theology rather than physics held the keys to understanding the ultimate meaning of deformed births. These events presented evidence that was qualitatively different from comets. Unlike signs shown in the heavens, which merely signaled other larger misfortunes to come, deformed birth was not only perceived to prefigure future disasters but was also a moral problem in the here and now. Irenaeus thus constructed a twofold commentary. As in his previous wonder books, he warned about the consequences of unchecked sin for both the present and the future, even as he aimed to dispense with the existential problems attendant on these events in the present. Yet his central contention, as stated in the book’s foreword, was little modulated throughout the text that followed. The world was filled with monstrous peoples and horrific misbirths. Even the New World, teeming as it was with strangely terrifying tribes, did not present a spectacle that was so “loathsome and horrifying to God as the countenance of a man who lives with all his sins and blasphemies outside the fear of God.”73 The theologian’s De monstris thus entered into the millennium-long discussion of the physical consequences that had proceeded from the Fall, of which Augustine’s musings about willful human genitalia not obeying the human intellect were only the most famous. Unlike Augustine’s reflections upon the Garden of Eden, Irenaeus’s De monstris included no wistful

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considerations of the physical perfection that preceded Adam and Eve’s sin, or of the bodily perfection that would be restored to the race at the end of time.74 Nor was he much interested in charting a progressive devolution of the species, a steadily encompassing and sinking degradation, as Luther had often been in his Lectures on Genesis. Instead he concentrated his efforts on driving home monstrosity as a potent proof of a degeneracy that could everywhere and always be traced to the first couple’s Fall. Divided into seven sections, De monstris begins with a consideration of the meanings of the Latin word monstrum. Irenaeus defines that term as “an unnatural, highly unusual, abnormal, horrible and abhorrent wondrous birth that issues either from a human or an insensate animal through God’s punishment and permission.”75 In the catalogue of monstrosities that follows, Irenaeus expansively applies this definition, through hundreds of accounts of those born with strange features and infirmities, but also numerous cases of those he judged morally monstrous, including figures like the incestuous Roman emperor Caligula, the fifteenthcentury sodomitical Pope Sixtus IV, and the murderous Pope Alexander VI.76 Famous men like these provided him with a springboard to weave excursions that denounced the full splendor of human wickedness, although here as in his other catalogues of wonders on storms and comets, he usually confined himself to presenting straightforward accounts of monstrosities, without great editorializing or comment. Irenaeus largely drew these monsters and monstrous births from the already published texts of Fincel, Goltwurm, and Lycosthenes, as well as the 1553 divinatory guidebook of the evangelical historian Caspar Peucer.77 The result is an uneven collection of contemporary monsters. The text, in other words, is thick with accounts of monsters only up until 1562, the publication date of the third and last volume of Job Fincel’s Wonder Signs, the last of these major texts to appear. After that date, Irenaeus supplements his accounts of monsters with episodic cases drawn from his knowledge of broadsides, pamphlets, and oral lore, but the results are not as exhaustive or complete as his earlier works on floods and comets, perhaps a measure of the increasingly unsettled nature of his professional life in these years. Curiously, the absence of many examples from recent years tends to undercut the case that he tries to compile to prove that theological errors were one of the most prominent causes of monstrosities. Although De monstris argues that theologians in Germany had in recent years been descending into a maelstrom of error, its treatment of monsters tends to be more thorough and complete for past eras than for the recent days.

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Irenaeus’s conclusions concerning monsters in De monstris were essentially the same as those he had already presented in the Image and Mirror of Humankind, published three years earlier. Like the waters of storms and flood, which God used as a fitting symbol to expunge human gluttony and high living, monstrosity was also an iconic testament to God’s displeasure with certain kinds of wrongdoing. The divinity relied upon monstrous births to denounce heresies and to warn of imminent wars, political divisions, schisms, and thievery. It is the first of these charges— that monstrosity was a revelation of heretical teaching—upon which Irenaeus concentrates most of his attentions. In the latter part of the book, he includes a long list of Germany’s “slippery teachers” who had perverted the truth. Here he also evidences the same taste for weaving symbolic and allegorical interpretations from deformities as Luther and Melanchthon had in their famous treatises on the Monk Calf and Papal Ass. A recent spate of births of two-tongued monsters was a sure condemnation of the “two-tongued” errors of Philip Melanchthon, but also of the Philippist theologians Viktorin Strigel, Caspar Cruciger, Christoph Petzel, Jakob Andreae and a long line of supporters of the Formula.78 For good measure here, Irenaeus also includes in this list of contemporary heretics all Anabaptists, Calvinists, and Papists, singling out Tileman Hesshusius for special treatment, since Hesshusius’s patria of Cleves had seen the birth of many two- and three-tongued children.79 Leaving behind such births, the theologian turns to infants and animals born with more than one head, a symbol of strife, political division, and religious schism. The troubles of the Schmalkaldic War and the schism that it produced among evangelicals, Irenaeus maintains, had been preceded by a string of such births, as had Jakob Andreae’s scheme for the Formula of Concord in 1578.80 The shrilly defensive character of this diatribe betrays its role as a kind of last- ditch stand for the Flacian party and its teachings on human nature. In 1585, as Irenaeus was composing his attack, he was one leader within an increasingly embattled fringe group. In the years that followed, the increasing acceptance of the Formula of Concord, with its mediating positions concerning human nature, isolated figures like Irenaeus even further, denying them a voice in most urban and territorial churches. In addition, the defection of many Philippist theologians into the Calvinist fold allowed a tenuous harmony to emerge among evangelicals, a harmony that was to provide the foundation for the highly scholastic orthodoxy of the seventeenth century. But for Irenaeus, the notion that all creation had been depraved by the rebellion of Adam and Eve and that

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humankind’s divine likeness had been transmogrified into a demonic essence had still to be defended like a totem. That belief became, in other words, a highly charged emblem, pointing to the long series of tribal battles and skirmishes that had granted the Flacians their identity and raison d’être. But to defend these teachings, this late-Reformation theologian looked less to Luther, his writings, or the scriptures than to the book of nature, finding there a source of authority that supported his own reading of the Reformer’s legacy. Like Fincel and Goltwurm, he was convinced that the workings of nature’s book could be freely mined as proof of his theological judgments. He evidenced, in other words, little of Luther’s early Reformation reserve concerning the superiority of the Word over signs. Instead, he freely embraced the testimony of miracles as a source of natural theological truth. But while he shared the apocalyptic expectations of both Fincel and Goltwurm and incorporated their cataloguing impulses to portray a world that pulsed with evidence of God’s presence and disfavor, his approach was essentially different from either of these two earlier authors. Fincel had relied upon a technique that piled example upon example, aiming to convince his readers with the immediacy of a verbal testimony to the road that lay ahead. Goltwurm, on the other hand, had mined wonders in the hopes of revealing the hidden structures of a rhetoric by which the divinity spoke to humankind. Irenaeus instead treated wonders as iconic symbols or—perhaps more appropriately—emblems that the Creator intricately crafted to encode his views on the human species. In a pathbreaking article treating the German wonder book writers of the sixteenth century, the great literary scholar Rudolf Schenda once concluded that Christoph Irenaeus was the “German prodigy writer par excellence” of the Reformation era. Schenda pointed to Irenaeus’s great ability to attack his subject with charming rhetoric, to mingle his own literary creation with his fears of the end, and to channel all these forces through his anger about sin and his own alienation.81 Certainly, Irenaeus was aware that the medicine he was doling out was not being warmly accepted and that many were turning a deaf ear to his prophecies. Even in the first of his wonder books, for instance, he observed that “the mad and sated world of Hans Nonsense and Claus Carefree” cared little for his warnings.82 The sense of anomie evident in this early text only deepened in the years that followed, but despite his alienation, or perhaps because of it, Irenaeus came in De monstris to elevate the wonder book into a form of art, one which resembled in many ways the often strange and puzzling

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tastes that were so evident in the second half of the sixteenth century in painting and literary concoctions, too. When he first wrote about them in the 1960s, Schenda described Irenaeus’s wonder books with the telling term “mannerist.” Since that time, literary scholars have come to appreciate more fully the similarities that emerged in this period between the complex, puzzling, and morally ambiguous mannerist images of figures like those that issued from the studios of painters like Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the literary and dramatic creations of northern European authors like William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and John Donne. Christoph Irenaeus probably never saw the great works of late Renaissance mannerism, of which Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fantastical fruit portraits rank as prominent examples. He lived far from the cities, too, where a new commercial theatre was churning out morally complex and puzzling tales, like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. And his literary creations, although ingenious and charged with an imaginative rhetoric, will never stand alongside the abstruse dilemmas encapsulated by a metaphysical poet like John Donne. Yet the similarities between his wonder books and these artistic artifacts are nonetheless striking. In the more than thirty years that Irenaeus’s almost exact contemporary Giuseppe Arcimboldo worked in the Prague court of the melancholic Emperor Rudolf II, he painted a number of clever portraits that made use of flora and fauna as the building blocks of human physiognomy. Like the cultivated courtiers of Castiglione’s Urbino court who spent their evenings making sport of the decoding of emblems, Arcimboldo’s pictures of created monstrosities entertained a courtly culture deeply versed in a long and bookish tradition of iconography in which the elements of the world’s flora and fauna played a vital role in encapsulating literary motifs and often highly intricate moral meanings. Certainly, Irenaeus did not intend readers of his wonder books to engage in such pursuits. Instead, he hoped to inscribe meaning to the monstrous events he narrated. Yet the picture that his works painted of humankind was nonetheless as highly ambiguous, puzzling, and troubling as Arcimboldo’s fruit, root, and avian faces. For on the one hand, his commentary constantly berated human being’s shortcomings, even as he treated them as incapable of any improvement. On the other hand, his stories of monstrosities, towns destroyed by flood, and bloody events and heresies that followed the appearance of comets and other sidereal messengers nonetheless counseled his devout readers to adopt a diligent observance of the Law. Into this fatalistic mix, Irenaeus also injected

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a final despairing element in his Flacian insistence that humankind in its post-Edenic exile now resembled the fallen angels more closely than they did their divine Creator. His was a narrative of turmoil and desolation, but one in which there was still a final ray of hope: God still thought enough of his proud and stiff-necked children to compose a constant commentary on their wickedness in the stars, the elements, and the wombs within his creation.

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Enduring Models and Changing Tastes at Century’s End in his famous Union Theological Seminary lectures of 1953, the theologian Paul Tillich once compared the disputes that broke out between Gnesio-Lutheran and Philippist theologians in later sixteenth-century Lutheranism to the twentieth-century battles between neo-orthodox and liberal Protestants. In a world still living fresh with the memories of the Second World War, Tillich’s characterization was fraught with deeper meanings. In Tillich’s historical analogy, Matthias Flacius stood for Karl Barth, the great Swiss neo- orthodox theologian who had resisted Nazi encroachments on Christianity with his Barmen Declaration of 1934, while Melanchthon and the Philippists were likened to the distinguished group of liberal theologians that stretched from Schleiermacher to Tillich himself.1 Tillich’s association of Flacius and his fellow radical theologians with neo-orthodox figures like Barth was actually a generous compliment paid to figures with whom he had little in common. But in reducing the sixteenth- century efforts of Flacius and Gnesio-Lutheran theologians solely to their opposition to state power over religious teaching, Tillich’s characterization of the similarities between the two eras missed the mark. Theologians like Flacius and Irenaeus were not resisting the power of the state in order to, like Barth, defend a venerable, time-honored Christian orthodoxy. Instead, they were radicals who desired a definitive break from the past, while their Philippist opponents aimed to conserve more of the traditional church’s inheritance.2 The disagreements that plagued these two groups, while certainly not the only theological controversies to afflict the evangelical church in the second half of the sixteenth century, proved to be deeper and more definitive than others. They forced extremists like Christoph Irenaeus to go to extraordinary lengths to protect what they felt was Luther’s proper legacy and to search through the book of nature for evidence to defend

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these positions. Yet while the toll these disagreements exacted was great, generating a legacy of bitterness that came only gradually to be healed in the wake of the Formula of Concord, these disputes did not produce two different ways of viewing nature or two radically different approaches to understanding God’s use of wonders. Instead, the same variety and ferment evidenced in the works produced among natural philosophers and theologians working in Gnesio-Lutheran centers were also evident in the Electoral Saxon strongholds where Philippism held sway. The shift toward a moral legalism in which nature’s wonders were perceived primarily as punishments for breaches of divine Law was as pronounced among Saxon theologians, working in the shadow of Philippism, as it was elsewhere. The reliance on wonders as an alternative source of truth to defend a particular brand of evangelical teaching was as intense among the followers of Melanchthon as it was among the Flacians. In short, developments in Electoral Saxony reflected many of the same trends we have already observed in the works of Fincel, Goltwurm, and Irenaeus. There, authors embraced nature as a powerful prompt to moral discipline and expressed confidence that the intentions of God could be reliably read through the messages he inscribed in nature. Unlike Luther, who persistently used the conditional “perhaps” when he ventured an interpretation of a seeming sign, his Philippist disciples were convinced that the messages God displayed in nature were readily self-evident and decodable. Beyond these features, which they shared with their Flacian and Gnesio-Lutheran opponents, the Philippists aimed to foster a similar sense of awe and wonder at God’s immanent presence in creation, even as they also persistently condemned human depravity. Among the most visible of the works to appear among those authors who treated wonders in Electoral Saxony was Andreas Hondorff ’s Promptuarium Exemplorum.3 In its design and intentions, Hondorff ’s text was not a wonder book per se but a kind of universal collection of exempla. Hondorff, though, freely mingled accounts of prodigies, portents, misbirths, and other signs drawn from the earlier collections of Goltwurm, Fincel, and Lycosthenes with miracles from the lives of the saints, episodes from the Old and New Testaments, and events in the history of the church as well as ancient and contemporary history. The end result was thus little different from the collections of Irenaeus or Goltwurm. Hondorff ’s aim in publishing such a collection was to make available the stories he had found most useful as a preacher, so that future pastors might rely upon them.4 Books and publishing realities, though, often confound author’s intentions, and Hondorff ’s work was transformed

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in the years ahead, in large part because of its very success. Over time, it became more and more of a pious Hausbuch destined for the libraries of rich burghers in German towns and cities.5 At almost eight hundred handsomely produced folio pages, the Promptuarium Exemplorum was an expensive book, but despite its cost, its first 1568 edition quickly sold out. The original printing firm, the house of Jacob Berwald, issued a second edition in 1570 and then seven more printings to satisfy demand during the 1570s. The book was soon pirated, both at Leipzig and at Frankfurt am Main; to protect their investment, the Berwald house secured a Saxon privilege. Such legal protections were only enforceable within the boundaries of Saxony, and so printers elsewhere were still free to produce their own versions of the Leipzig text. Through its broad dissemination, Hondorff ’s work soon became a model for many subsequent wonder collectors, who eagerly relied upon it as a guide when compiling their own voluminous collections. Frequent copying and imitation, however, did little to stanch the demand for Hondorff ’s work, and despite an increasingly crowded market of such books, the Berwald firm continued to issue updated and expanded editions of the collection throughout the later sixteenth century. The firm also worked closely with the Sturm family, Hondorff ’s literary successors, to ensure that the collection remained competitive in the marketplace. When Andreas Hondorff died in 1572, Vincenz Sturm, a friend who married Hondorff ’s widow, assumed editorship of the collection. After his death about a decade later, Vincenz’s father took on the same role before finally entrusting the editing of the collection to another son during the late 1580s and 1590s. Each member of the Sturm family continued to expand the book, broadening its appeal with new wonders, poems, adages, historical lore, and parabolic wisdom. The family also increased the book’s usefulness as a reference, expanding its finding aids and indices, even as the Berwald printing house enhanced the work’s visual appeal through handsome illustrations. Thus by 1600, Andreas Hondorff ’s Promptuarium Exemplorum had become a permanent fi xture among early modern Protestant books, with new editions continuing to appear until as late as 1687. By that date, thirty printings had been undertaken of the text in German, twelve in Latin, and one in Dutch.6 Hondorff ’s voluminous collection of exempla thus entered the common literary inheritance of early modern Germany, its wonders, parables, and legends a trove for evangelical readers and writers alike. The work’s distribution was so broad by this time that even German Jesuit libraries

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sometimes owned the collection. Although Hondorff ’s name was often carefully defaced on these books’ title pages, his presence in enemy territory reveals that even devout Catholics were not immune to the charms of the Promptuarium.7 Who was Andreas Hondorff, this obscure pastor who helped inspire this early modern publishing phenomenon? Unlike most wonder book promoters in the later sixteenth-century evangelical church, Hondorff avoided controversy, living out a quiet life far from the limelight of dispute and polemics. Born in 1530 at Naumburg an der Saale about forty miles south of Leipzig, he spent most of his life as a pastor in three parishes, of which Droyβig was the last and most distant from his birthplace—only a dozen miles away. The eighty miles between Naumburg and Wittenberg, where Hondorff spent a year as a student in the mid-1540s, may have been the farthest he ever traveled.8 If most of the pastor’s existence was lived out in the relatively narrow confines of Saxon villages, he was nonetheless a voracious reader, for the Promptuarium and the other texts he published in the final years of his life reveal the urbane tastes of a scholar who consumed the outside world hungrily through the pages of books.9 Hondorff presumably assembled much of his trove of stories from notes he had kept since his student days; many accounts, though, were cited word for word from their original sources, suggesting that he may have also kept a large personal library besides maintaining his own commonplace books. The pastor brought all of these tales together under a title that recalled the identically named medieval collections of the Dominicans Martin Opava or Martin the Pole (d. 1278)10 and Johannes Herolt, also called Discipulus (d. 1468).11 This name choice was purposeful, for in assembling the Promptuarium, Hondorff aimed to breathe new life into the medieval tradition of collecting exempla by reviving and reforming that long-standing practice for an evangelical audience. Throughout the enormous collection he thus undertook to separate the wheat of stories that were suitable to new evangelical circumstances from the chaff of spurious legends that had long been used to defend certain traditional religious practices now judged “superstitions.” In contrast to the efforts of many polemicists in these years, though, Hondorff ’s tone and tactics were irenic, his tastes catholic in the original sense of that word. He strove, in other words, to rescue as many purposeful, edifying tales as he could, regardless of their origin. His collecting efforts stretched from the Old and New Testament and antiquity through the early history of the church and the Middle Ages to

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recent times. Besides the Bible, from which Hondorff drew the majority of his tales, he consulted a number of historians of the early church, ancient Roman authors, Italian and Northern Renaissance humanists, and medieval and contemporary historical chronicles.12 His work also included generous portions of material drawn from the church fathers and medieval and evangelical theologians.13 Among these, the eight-volume martyrology of Ludwig Rabus, published at Strasbourg between 1552 and 1558,14 served as the source for most of the material Hondorff included on the martyrs and confessing saints of the early church. Hondorff most frequently cited the Table Talk, a work he preferred for its perennial proverbial wisdom, vignettes, and saucy stories. For information on natural wonders and portents, he preferred to draw upon the previously published wonder books of Fincel, Goltwurm, and Lycosthenes rather than to delve into word-of-mouth accounts or those promoted by the cheap broadside press. He seems only rarely to have drawn contemporary stories from his own knowledge,15 although he did include tales of horrific recent crimes— macabre murders, daring thefts and robberies, and the gruesome punishments meted out for the same—that had recently been reported in and around Saxony.16 Hondorff ’s method for arranging these stories drew upon the bythen venerable theological tradition rooted in Melanchthon’s Loci Communes. That widely influential work had carved the major components of Luther’s evangelical theology into clear precepts, the progression of which attempted to render a system to the sometimes-unsystematic ideas of the Reformer. For organizing precepts, Hondorff chose the Ten Commandments, grouping his exempla into sixty- to one-hundred-page sections treating each of the Old Testament laws. The approach he took in the first section treating the commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” was typical. He grouped the exempla around a number of individually titled themes. In the case of the first commandment this included sections with accounts of the faithfulness of those who believed and held true to the holy scriptures; stories of the lives of the apostles, martyrs, and virginal saints of the early church,17 as well as more recent cases of those who—like Jan Huss, Martin Luther, or more minor figures—confessed the true faith in contemporary times.18 Following these accounts of heroic righteousness, Hondorff proceeded to present cases of idolatry, heresy, superstitious pilgrimages, false devotion, and misplaced faith in magic and astrology that were violations of the commandment’s precept.19 In this way, Hondorff ’s treatment of the first commandment,

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as well as his subsequent sections on the remaining precepts, underscores an overarching legalism that runs throughout the collection. Reward and punishment, in other words, continually march in progression in Hondorff ’s volume; dramatic and often gruesome instances of the consequences for those who flouted divine prescription always follow the far fewer, yet still dramatic instances in which extraordinary human beings had been aided by grace to keep the Law. This continual emphasis on the inexorability of God’s justice expresses much the same attitude toward nature as the wonder books of the same years. Hondorff ’s historical events, legends, wonders, and parabolic wisdom continually demonstrate evidence of God’s righteous anger and punishment in the natural world. “The Eternal God,” he counsels his readers in the foreword, “is a serious and swift judge toward men and no sin in any man, whether of high or low estate, goes unpunished.”20 Thunderbolts, hailstorms, fire, and raging waters thus testify throughout the work to a God who was king of the elements, who fashioned his punishments not just to condemn a general depravity but also to redress specific crimes. In this way, the Promptuarium entered into the lineage of later sixteenthcentury evangelical texts that promoted natural wonders and disasters as signs of God’s anger and a prompt to Christian discipline. If the continual offering of stories of sins inevitably punished seems despairing and pessimistic to modern eyes, such tales likely appeared in a different light to the Lutheran elite, for they probably served as a reminder of the safe harbor that existed within the boundaries of God’s alien righteousness. Those of either more tender or hardened consciences may have still enjoyed the collection’s many good yarns, but Hondorff ’s uncompromising legalistic vision likely won few converts for evangelicalism. Still, the Promptuarium was most likely a book that was never read cover to cover, but a text into which one delved selectively to justify positions and judgments that were already well developed. In the final decades of the sixteenth century, it found an ever-expanding audience among a learned caste of Lutherans eager for a digested wisdom drawn from the scriptures, history, and the natural world. Hondorff ’s collection delivered on this promise, even as it repeated many of the common Protestant polemics and prejudices of the age. The work took all the by-then expected jabs at “popish idolatries,” attacking the institution’s pilgrimages, its fondness for relics, and its misplaced faith in the intercessory power of the saints. Hondorff ’s tone, however, was lighter, less ponderous, and less urgent than contemporary confessional polemics. These beliefs, Hondorff

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argued, were deceptive misperceptions, no different than those of many ancient peoples. Once, the Troglodytes had revered sea snails as gods; the Romans had set up a goose as deity; and the Egyptians had directed their prayers to crocodiles, goats, cats, and dogs; now Catholics worshipped the saints instead of the true God.21 Such attacks on the “false” miracles and devotions of Catholicism were a common thread that ran throughout the Promptuarium. Still, Hondorff ’s world was not in the least disenchanted. Although he desired to keep his Lutheran readers free from the taint of false devotion, he actively promoted the many “wondrous” possibilities and potentialities he perceived reposed in creation. His supernatural theory, in other words, admitted a wide swath of events, and his belief in the immanence of God in daily events—both large and small—was little different from the most uncritically accepting of medieval commentators. For Hondorff, the world had been fashioned by a God who took an intimate interest in the training and education of his children, an attribute revealed in his molding of the flora and fauna. The collector’s view of nature was not so much governed by causes and effects, but instead populated with an age- old thicket of allegories and typologies. Adopting the moralizing tone of medieval zoology, Hondorff often treated the fauna as one proof of the totality of the Christian religion’s claims. In the supposed battles between crocodile and the fabled ichneumon, Hondorff theorized, were revealed the eternal struggles between good and evil, Christ and Satan. Reaching back to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,22 Hondorff argued that the imaginary Ichneumon, with its presumed ability to smear itself in the mud of the Nile—a type of the atonement— and then lash out at the crocodile, was an allegorical reminder of the victory of the cross and the triumph over Satan.23 By contrast, the messages the lion held for observers were more complex. Citing its use in scripture, Hondorff demonstrated that the lion could serve as a symbol of both the God-fearing man and the devil. Though the lion could adopt such radically different postures as a result of the vagaries of its mood, God had created other creatures with messages that were more constant.24 Hondorff reiterated the traditional medieval interpretation of the pelican as a type of the sacrificing Christ,25 while the peacock represented the human sins of hypocrisy, deceit, and debauchery.26 The apiary, with its monarch and submissive bees producing life-sustaining honey, revealed the benefits that flowed from the relationship between Christ and his church.27

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Such passages show that Hondorff ’s universe, and that of his readers, was in fact only subtly altered from the later Middle Ages. Despite the prohibition of venerating and asking the intercession of the saints, the Promptuarium still evoked a world filled with numerous ranks of spirits, which were perceived in the timeworn creedal formulation as both “seen and unseen.” Changelings, forest sprites, and the ghosts of the dead sometimes figure in the collection, but it was the angels that Hondorff celebrated as among the most powerful of otherworldly spiritual forces. Although the Promptuarium did not divide these spirits into the PseudoDionysian nine ranks, they were all the same envisioned as a vast army that tended to the needs, desires, and consciences of the human race. They were also among the most populous of the invisible spiritual populations that surrounded the human race, because as Hondorff ’s commentary counseled, each and every human being was assigned their own particular guardian, a guardian tasked with the daily protection of that individual against what were often battalions of counterpoised demons. Like the images of the late-medieval ars moriendi in which the death bed was imagined as a quarreling battleground, Hondorff ’s supernatural theory evinced a similar militant flavor, yet his accounts reminded readers that this combat only rarely bubbled to the surface of the visible world where human witnesses might observe its consequences. While Hondorff ’s angels retained many of the functions attributed to them in medieval angelology—serving as divine emissaries, as the protectors and destroyers of kingdoms, and as instruments through which the divine will was executed in the natural world—his stories emphasized that their most important role consisted in protecting individuals. For Hondorff and his audience, angels had thus assumed many of the protective roles that had been traditionally associated with the saints. In these capacities they were usually invisible, although they were perfectly capable of adopting human visage and appearing in country lanes or city streets, or of offering succor to the downtrodden in their homes.28 Such accounts, to be sure, defended the venerable charge to hospitality contained in Hebrews 13:2, in which St. Paul observed that the constant presence of angels in the world should be a prompt to charity and generosity: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unaware.” Yet Hondorff underscored that the angels’ ability to assume the human form, a form that was created in God’s likeness, was a potentiality unavailable to the demons. Those fallen spirits were instead wont to appear to human eyes in the guise of all kinds of animals,

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adopting the deceiving appearance of a raven, a rabbit, a fox, or a hound.29 The bipolarities between the demonic and angelic emphasized the opposition that underpinned the entire Promptuarium, for the collection’s purpose was to contrast the realms of Law and Gospel—that is, to stress the healthy servitude and discipline justification by faith produced compared to the miserable road to perdition that lay outside that realm—in a world governed only by the commandments. These opposing forces, while granting an underlying structure and logic to a disparate collection of parabolic wisdom, did not go so far as to promote a kind of Manichean dualism. To help humans negotiate the unseen spiritual forces afoot in the world, Hondorff asserted, God had thought it fit to award each and every person the protection of an angelic guardian, sufficient to ward off the power of entire battalions of demons.30 As the human race’s protectors, the angels possessed the power to assume the human form, a distinction that ennobled them because of humanity’s creation in the divine likeness. The demons, by contrast, were merely capable of imitating animal life or of stirring up temporary, deceiving phantasms that mimicked the human form. Thus, while the powers of the devil and his ranks of conspirators were great, the Promptuarium presented that power as distinctly inferior to that of angelic and divine forces.31 Elsewhere, Hondorff similarly stressed that human beings were ultimately culpable and responsible for the crime of witchcraft, a crime that the Promptuarium, with its uncompromising black-and-white morality, envisioned as yet another fruit of the original rebellion begun by Adam. It has long been noted that Hondorff ’s Promptuarium is one possible source for the dissemination of the Faust legend in late sixteenth-century Europe.32 Through the 1575 Philip Lonicer Latin translation of Hondorff ’s text, the Faust legend traveled as far as England, where ballads and other ephemera based upon the original were to inspire Christopher Marlowe’s 1590 masterpiece, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. While Luther apparently expressed doubts about the credibility of the Faust story—if it had been true, a conversation in the Table Talk records, Luther’s torments at the devil’s hands would have proved far more vexing than they had been33 —Philip Melanchthon apparently believed the story. One of his trusted students, Johannes Manlius, included the tale in a collection of Melanchthoniana he published in 1563 and noted that his teacher had known the real Faust.34 Hondorff drew upon Manlius’s account, exploiting the tale to convey his key teaching: the magician’s rebellion had been the result of an evil choice, a crime against the commandments that brought

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death and destruction in its wake. As such, it was a dramatic case, but the horrific punishment the magus suffered was nothing more than proof of the inexorability of divine justice and the constant righteousness of God. To be sure, the allure of hell and damnation inherent in such stories has always proven more dramatically satisfying, interesting, and seductive than heavenly perfection, and there were likely many readers—even among Hondorff ’s devout—who entertained thoughts about this tale and the book’s other diabolic musings that were more curious than pious. Faust may have been consigned to the torments of the damned, but he did have a good run along the way, satisfying his hedonistic desires for many years before final judgment, something brilliantly amplified by Marlowe’s own dramatic rendering of the tale. Hondorff, though, refused to entertain such alternative readings of the story and instead merely included it as one of many illustrative examples of those who came to suffer the true wages of their wrongdoing. Rather than focus on Faust’s pleasures, he confined his attentions to the period immediately preceding his divine punishment.35 Through tales like these, the Promptuarium expressed a sanitized morality, scrubbed clean of the fine casuistries of medieval scholastic logic and instead governed by the black-and-white oppositions of the commandments. Hondorff ’s view of time and history may have been providential, but his God did not operate according to the moral complexities of Augustinian notions of that concept. In the view of providence propounded in The City of God, for instance, the fourth-century bishop had argued only for a preponderant resemblance of God’s earthly justice to his heavenly justice. Certainly the similarities between the two spheres was sufficient for Augustine to conclude that God was the Lord of history and that he ordered events in the earthly city in ways that mirrored the heavenly perfection Christians would one day know. Yet Augustine also contended that the wicked did sometimes get ahead in the world, even as the devout suffered enormous wrongs. Hondorff ’s vision, by contrast, admitted no such gray areas, for in the tales he included in his collection, God operated according to moral absolutes essentially the same as those revealed in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. His control over historical processes, in other words, reflected little of the subtlety evidenced in Augustine’s great musings on history. And although Hondorff was a humanistically trained theologian in the Melanchthonian mold and he consequently combed both Christian and pagan wisdom, his notion of a prisca theologia (a God-given pre- Christian wisdom) was

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similarly purged of the ambiguities that had attached to that concept in the fifteenth-century writings of figures like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. While he quoted the typical instances of evil figures like Nero, Herod, and Nebuchadnezzar to drive home the full extent of human wickedness,36 he also chose many stories designed to show the righteousness of the ancient pagans.37 These good pagans’ wisdom did not derive from access to an underlying gnosis God had implanted in humanity as Ficino, Pico, and many Renaissance Platonists had argued. Instead, the wisdom of these pious ancients consisted in their adherence to the Ten Commandments, laws that were part of the fundamental order of creation. And if pagans might demonstrate faithfulness to God’s commands even without knowledge of the Christian or Hebrew scriptures, Hondorff ’s tales reasoned, should not Christians strive for even greater righteousness, since they possessed the totality of divine Law and revelation? Law and Gospel may thus have marched together in Hondorff ’s compendium, but over and over again it was the Law that clearly won out. Certainly sixteenth- and seventeenth- century readers practiced various reading strategies, which could often undermine the clarity of the compilers’ point of view. But the work’s enduring popularity and its transformation over time from a preacher’s manual into a Hausbuch testify to the enthusiasm with which Hondorff ’s message was received. Parents in search of the proper vehicle to aid them in teaching their young children the precepts of Christian morality anxiously embraced the work. The collection’s frequent imitation by other compilers might lead us to conclude that there were no limits to the later Reformation’s fondness for Law over the Gospel. In the years following the book’s appearance, Lutheran presses churned out a number of similar texts, but the reception of these reveals that it was the Promptuarium’s combination of an uncompromising moral theology with a folksy good-natured humor that captivated readers, not merely the work’s black-and-white morality. Although these subsequent works were also filled with natural wonders designed to prove the constant reality of an angry God who inevitably punished each and every sin, no other late sixteenth-century collection competed successfully against the enduring popularity of the Promptuarium. Hondorff ’s clear and forceful moral vision together with his irenic, non-polemical tone and his deeply enchanted notion of nature had captivated the minds of Lutheranism’s learned elite. His was to be the collection that would endure. Among the competing volumes that appeared in these years, Wolfgang Bütner’s Epitome Historiarium was the first to be printed.38

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Self-consciously modeled on the Promptuarium, Bütner’s work nonetheless tried to improve on Hondorff ’s scheme by ordering his exempla not only according to the prescriptions of the Ten Commandments, but according to the seven requests of the Lord’s Prayer (“Give us this day our daily bread,” “Lead us not into temptation,” etc.). Bütner, a pastor in Wolferstedt (not far from Weimar),39 made clear his intentions in the book’s foreword. He aimed to produce a book that was useful not only to preachers but also to those “lovers of virtue and honor in high offices” and those who were engaged in “household business,” so that they could be “illuminated” through examples and histories.40 In fulfilling these purposes, which were more expansive than those of the original 1568 edition of Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, Bütner drew upon the by-then common stock of legends and natural wonders that late Reformation theologians accepted as amenable to evangelical purposes. Despite the enlarged audience to which Bütner hoped to speak, his motives were essentially the same as Hondorff ’s. He wished to provide readers with “comforting examples” of the consequences for those who held fast to correct teaching and behavior, even as he hoped to contrast these pious stories against the “terrifying, accursed and wild” penalties for those who flouted God’s Law.41 Besides the typically edifying stories drawn from the scriptures, and prodigies and wonders culled from the works of Fincel, Goltwurm, and Irenaeus, Bütner included vignettes from ancients like Homer, Hesiod, Livy, Plutarch, and Plato; from the church fathers, the medieval chroniclers, and the Renaissance humanists; as well as from sixteenth- century Lutheran theologians.42 Handsomely produced in an expensive folio format, Bütner’s work sold slowly. A revised second edition was planned in 1587 but was not published until 1596, and a reprinting of that edition appeared only in 1615.43 In the final form given to the collection by Georg Steinhart, pastor of the Saxon parish of Dürweitzchen near Leipzig,44 the work came to be organized around the five major principles of Christian teaching summarized in Luther’s Shorter Catechism, the articles of the creed, and teachings concerning the two sacraments. Steinhart marshaled Bütner’s original stories and added generous portions of his own fables, legends, and wonders. Although later exempla and wonder book compilers sometimes consulted it, the book never gained the popularity that Hondorff ’s original collection continued to enjoy. The reason for this apparent failure: Bütner’s collection and Steinhart’s revision do not seem to read with the same lively style of Hondorff ’s Promptuarium. Moreover, as the Sturm family editors continued to revise Hondorff ’s work in the

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later sixteenth century, they adopted some of Bütner’s innovations, molding Hondorff ’s book to take on double duty as a collection of wisdom and miracles that might serve as a Hausbuch for an educated lay audience. Thus they stole much of Bütner’s original thunder. The collections of exempla and wonders Zacharias Rivander edited and published in Frankfurt am Main during the 1580s and 1590s shared a similar fate, even though Rivander tried to stick even more closely to the original Hondorff format. A prominent Lutheran theologian, church official, and author, Rivander was also a decided opponent of Calvinism, a fervent supporter of the Formula of Concord, and a persecutor of those pastors he suspected of Crypto- Calvinism.45 Best known today for his 1593 polemical play Lutherus Redivivus 46 and his 1581 Thuringian Chronicle.47 Rivander held two superintendent posts in territorial churches in eastern Germany during the 1580s and 1590s. At the first, at Forst in Niederlausitz, his attempts to weed out Crypto- Calvinists angered his overlord, who temporarily released Rivander from his duties in 1590 and dismissed him in 1592. At his second superintendency at Bischofswerda in Schlesien, his disagreements with the nearby superintendent of Sorau, Peter Streuber, proved catastrophic.48 In Lutherus Redivivus, Rivander’s 1593 polemical play, he attacked Streuber along with a number of other theologians as Crypto- Calvinists and evangelical innovators, a serious charge that at the time could result in investigation, banishment, or imprisonment. Streuber responded, however, by enlisting a tutor living in Rivander’s household to murder him. His accomplice poisoned the family’s dinner of carp in November 1594, killing the superintendent, his wife, and his son.49 Something of the impetuosity that caused Rivander to be detested by opponents like Streuber comes through in the theologian’s exempla and wonder collection. He titled his 1581 work merely The Second Part of the Promptuarium Exemplorum, insisting that he was carrying on the work begun by Hondorff in his first edition.50 Because the Berwald house in Leipzig continued to issue expanded and revised versions of the original in these years, Rivander published his sequel in Frankfurt am Main, where the Promptuarium itself was also frequently reprinted during the late sixteenth century.51 As early as 1571, the Frankfurt printer Peter Schmidt had pirated Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, and over the next twentyfive years, he produced an additional seven reprintings of the work.52 In 1575, Philip Lonicer’s translation of the Promptuarium also appeared at Frankfurt and was soon to become a staple for the eminent publisher Sigmund Feyerabend.53 Given the success that Hondorff ’s compendium

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had already enjoyed in Frankfurt, the Feyerabend firm likely concluded that Rivander’s 1581 sequel would be a worthy successor to the Promptuarium’s initial success. Such hopes, though, were not sustained by the Rivander collection’s subsequent reception. Although it sold more quickly than Bütner’s Epitome and a second printing was undertaken in 1587,54 the serial achieved only modest success in a field that Hondorff ’s original continued to dominate. The publication of Rivander’s work, though, may have prompted the Berwald firm, the original Leipzig printers of the Promptuarium, to issue their own enlarged and revised two-volume edition of Hondorff ’s compendium, which appeared between 1586 and 1588.55 In the end, however, Rivander’s edition did not present serious competition to Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, since after its 1587 reprinting, it was not reprinted again until 1607.56 Another sign of the cool reception that Rivander’s text received can be found in the 1587 edition. In that text, he promised to produce yet another voluminous sequel to Hondorff ’s work, but that book never appeared.57 Rivander persisted in his hopes of producing a best-selling collection of exempla, but he subsequently set his sights on a less-elevated audience. In 1592, for instance, he published his own digested version of his Second Part of the Promptuarium in a thin octavo format at Eisleben. His printer, Urban Gaubisch, sought and received a Saxon privilege to protect his investment, but such precautions did not prove necessary.58 The cheaply produced book was mostly filled with apocalyptic signs of God’s anger, which Rivander drew largely from Fincel’s Wonder Signs. The success of that collection was even more limited than Rivander’s massive folio compendium; only one printing of the book ever appeared. Why was Rivander’s text so modestly received in comparison to Hondorff ’s volume? In most respects, the two collections were quite similar. Rivander arranged his tales and wonders according to the commonplace scheme of the Ten Commandments, as did Hondorff. The aims that Rivander stated in the foreword (to prove that there was a “God in Heaven who was a judge on earth, who had a righteous eye . . . and let no good go unrewarded and no evil unpunished”) were also those of the original Promptuarium.59 And like Hondorff, Rivander drew his inspiration from the Bible, the church fathers, classical antiquity, contemporary humanism, evangelical authorities, as well as the wonder book authors Fincel, Goltwurm, Lycosthenes, and Irenaeus. Yet a spirit even more uncompromising and extreme than that of Hondorff breathed through this collection. Both Rivander’s massive folio continuation of the Promptuarium as

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well as his cheaper digested version were as urgently apocalyptic as Job Fincel’s Wonder Signs had been a generation before. And while all the wonder books and exempla compendia published in these years were convinced that the contemporary world was ablaze with signs of human sinfulness, Rivander’s notions about human nature and its failings were charged with rhetoric as grim as the Gnesio-Lutheran extremist Christoph Irenaeus. Just as Irenaeus’s interpretation of human depravity was being dismissed in these years as radical extremism, the evangelical audience seems to have been losing patience with Rivander’s dark conclusions as well.60 While Hondorff ’s text retained its popularity well into the seventeenth century—even among an increasingly crowded field of wonder books, exempla collections, and catalogues of curiosities61—the rigidity and radical extremism of Rivander’s text meant that it was to have far less influence in the years ahead. Hondorff ’s original Promptuarium continued to be prized by preachers, fathers, and heads of households—both for its uncompromising morality and its folksy, often genial retelling of miracles, fables, and legends—but Rivander’s influence grew fainter. Although his dark pronouncements on human nature were certainly part of the legacy late-Reformation Lutheranism bequeathed to the seventeenth century, Rivander’s sentiments were to grow less common as the shadow of the “angry God” that late-Reformation wonder book authors had cast over German evangelicalism began to recede around 1600. The gloom evident in the second half of the sixteenth century certainly did reappear from time to time in the years ahead. The maelstrom of the Thirty Years War, after all, lay only two decades in the future. The grim rhetoric of late-Reformation preachers, theologians, and exploiters of wonders remained a storehouse upon which later writers could draw whenever particularly grim circumstances, like that conflict, threatened. But in the early seventeenth century, the exploitation of such sentiments was clearly growing less common. The causes for the shift in the discussions of natural wonders were many. As theological disputes lessened in the years following the promulgation of the Formula of Concord, the boundaries of concepts about human nature and the servitude of the will were more firmly fi xed than before. As a result, evangelical theologians needed less and less to search the sky or comb the contours of natural disasters for evidence that supported their judgments; theology was now to be confined to an increasingly scholastic science. By the mid-seventeenth century, that science was to focus on an infinite defining and refining of positions that were, by and

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large, already agreed upon. In the new realities of theological discourse at Lutheran universities, the kind of prophetic inspiration once perceived to reside in the book of nature was increasingly proscribed in favor of rationalistic proofs rooted in the traditions of dialectical argument. But other factors helped to weaken the notion of an angry punishing God as well. The rising importance of the territorial church in the Germanspeaking world, with its enhanced mechanisms of discipline and control, now assumed many of the corrective and penal functions that Lutheran divines had once assigned primarily to the preaching of the Law. In the years following 1600, pastors and theologians were consequently more anxious to console their audiences when they suffered from the harsh effects of nature than they were to warn that those events were specific evidence of God’s anger over certain sins. While they continued to speak of floods, earthquakes, and fires as divine judgments, their pronouncements gradually came to stress a more distant, merely proximate relationship between human sinfulness writ large and the acts of God that punished those failings. The ways in which preachers and theologians crafted these new works of consolation and commemoration spoke to an audience in which the forces of curiosity and empirical observation were also playing a greater role than ever before. Curiosity had long lain just below the surface of all evangelical pronouncements concerning nature’s wonders, its force amply testified to in the many thousands of illustrated broadsides and cheap ephemera that poured from presses in Protestant Germany during the period. This curiosity, too, is also evident in the many displays of freaks and natural anomalies that had long flourished in German towns and cities. Since the first glimmer of macabre fascination they exerted on the period, the corpses of children and animals born monstrously deformed had been preserved, put on display for all to observe.62 Those unfortunates who survived to adulthood manipulated their deformities before gawking crowds, even selling souvenir handbills so that their audiences might recall their numerous abnormalities once they had gone. Beyond high streets and markets, natural curiosities were being collected, ensconced, and catalogued in the “wonder cabinets” maintained by sixteenth- century natural philosophers and rulers. In this and other ways, nature’s deviations could be possessed and compared, in order to disarm the anxious force that they exercised upon the mind. If curiosity had long been essential to the Lutheran enterprise of harnessing the didactic power of nature, a danger nevertheless lurked in the

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wide-eyed gaze that ministers recommended their audience train on the natural word: the faithful might become more captivated by the medium than the message. And as the bleakest assessments of human potentiality and failings promoted by the reformers began to evaporate, a space was opened up in which a new sensibility could emerge, one more probing and desirous of understanding the manifold complexities of nature’s sport. We see evidence of this essential transformation in the publicity given to promote the careers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century freaks. During the 1540s, the Flemish unfortunate Hans de Moer embarked on a career displaying himself before paying crowds. For more than twenty years he toured the continent, showing his deformity, a huge blue and red hemangioma that began at his ear and fell to his hips (figure 6.1). De Moer could make his deformity take on the appearance of a Spanish hood or even the dewlap of an American turkey. In a souvenir handbill sold at one of his showings in 1566, de Moer’s infirmities were intoned as a case of absolute incomprehensibility, a riddle whose “meaning is known only to God.”63 Less than a half century later, however, a completely different set of sensibilities is evident in the audience that consumed tales and pictures about the life and career of Magdalena Emohne, a young woman who had been born in Emden in East Frisia on September 12, 1596. She had been born without arms and ears and with only one leg (figure 6.2). Despite these enormous handicaps, Emohne survived to adulthood and managed to master four languages—French, German, Italian, and Dutch. She could, as the accounts of her life broadcast, sing passably well and managed to feed herself and even unlock trunks with her only foot.64 The fearsome incomprehensibility, so evident in the promotion of de Moer, played little role in the publicity accorded Emohne. Neither did the Reformation discourses on sin and its degenerative effects on nature exercise much influence. Instead, Emohne was presented as a cultivated lady, a woman of learning surrounded by books and ideas. The commentators who wrote the text for her broadsides concentrated not on her infirmities as signs of God’s punishment but on her achievements as signs of his mercy. Through “divine aid” she had managed to surmount her challenges and to live joyfully. The sensibilities evident in her case are more akin to the developing world of seventeenth-century German pietism than they are to the dismal pronouncements of late sixteenth-century reformers. The changes evident in the publicity granted this case can be seen elsewhere as well. Both the audience who hungered for tales of lives like Emohne and the writers who attempted to fill that demand were now

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figure 6.1 The display of freaks was common throughout sixteenth- century Europe. One such figure, Hans de Moer, traveled with his own souvenir handbills, which described his infirmity, a huge red and blue hemangioma, as an instance of natural incomprehensibility (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: 95.10 Quod. 2° [29]).

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figure 6.2 1615 souvenir print commemorating the life and works of the East Frisian woman, Magdalena Emohne, who was born on September 12, 1596. Despite her abnormalities—she had been born without arms and only one foot—she learned to speak numerous languages and sang in a pleasant voice (Walter L. Strauss and Dorothy Alexander, eds., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1600-1700 [New York: Abaris Books, 1977], 2:730).

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concerned with a broader array of issues, issues that impinged on the context and precise details of natural deviances. Emohne’s audience demanded to know how many languages she had mastered or how precisely she employed her surviving limb despite the presence of only four toes. In this way they looked past the Reformation discourses on sin to indulge an interest in nature’s infinite complexities and possibilities. While there continued to be accounts that viewed the natural order as a mirror of human degeneracy, the undeniable tendency in the early seventeenth century was for these elements to shrink in the minds of those who treated natural wonders so that they became increasingly formulaic. In a sermon delivered in 1619 at Ulm, the prominent Lutheran preacher Conrad Dieterich expressed the new attitude toward nature when he considered the case of a recent comet witnessed in Germany.65 He began not by decrying a specific set of sins that had presumably caused the display but by treating the physical mechanisms that produced these heavenly phenomena. The heating of ice produced steam and smoke in the heavens. From time immemorial, war, political instability, earthquakes, floods, and crop failures have been the observable offspring of comets. If these were observable, he reasoned, they were not to be feared. Comets were caused by a God who was king of the zodiac, and although they revealed that he would chasten human society for its wickedness, they were also a sign of his goodness. It is interesting to note that, as marginalia to the sermon, the printer included the pithy observation, “Our sins are but the comet’s fire wood,” a long-accepted linkage that Dieterich’s text had largely undermined by emphasizing natural mechanisms and God’s goodness in place of the once-reigning focus on divine wrath. The world of Fincel, Goltwurm, Irenaeus, and Hondorff was here quickly changing, so that age-old pieties of divine retribution were being confined only to the outer margins of the text. Elsewhere the probing eyes trained on disorder asked new questions and bespoke a new confidence in mastering nature’s secrets. If we reach as far forward as 1640, we can see more clearly the consequences of these changes. In that year a whale had beached on the Mediterranean coast near St. Tropez. While such events had long been broadcast as terrifying and purposeful signs of God’s anger and portents of even greater disasters to come, the broadsides that marked this particular event in German towns sang in a new key. Although the title of one of these warned of the discovery of a “terrifying sea monster” (figure 6.3), the author of the text was now more interested in the length of the animal’s tail, the number

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figure 6.3 Although the title and illustration of a print published in 1640 warned of the consequences that might follow the recent beaching of a whale at St. Tropez, the accompanying text was fi lled with largely empirical details. It told of the animal’s precise size, weight, and physical characteristics, and even estimated the monetary worth of the whale’s blubber (Walter L. Strauss and Dorothy Alexander, eds., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1600-1700 [New York: Abaris Books, 1977], 2:781).

of its teeth, and the weight of its blubber than in seeing the animal as a window into human shortcoming.66 Commerce, in other words, was now a lure as tempting as the pronouncement of sin had been to an earlier generation. The late-Reformation-era fascination with allegorical explanation has here evaporated. In concluding the account, the author merely observed that the animal’s significance might become obvious in time. Meaning, in other words, lay in a different sphere, not in relating the account to a cosmic drama of impiety and punishment, but to the thisworldly event that “more than a thousand” observers had witnessed on a Mediterranean beach some months before. The early seventeenth-century world, then, presents us with evidence of dramatic transformations that were not yet complete. For every observer who turned to an instance like the Provencale whale and insisted that its metaphysical meanings could not be construed, other commentators constructed intricate explanations that continued to derive prophetic and

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theological insight from natural deviation. The path of development was not strictly linear, and there were to be many fits and starts along the way. But in the years after 1600, a native human curiosity, in part nurtured by the Protestant Reformation’s embrace of the book of nature, was being set free to explore. And in the gradual evaporation of the notion that the natural world could only be understood through the lens of human sinfulness, new attitudes toward nature, which stressed disciplined observation and mastery of the physical environment, were just beginning to flourish. How, then, did Lutheran pastors respond to the rapidly changing tastes of their audience in this period? How did they fashion interpretations of nature’s wonders, caprices, and disasters to speak to the quickly altering realities of the age?67 For inspiration in addressing these issues, many pastors and theologians turned to another Lutheran staple of the period: the funeral sermon. With its origins in the mid-sixteenth century, these funeral orations had come by 1600 to play a major role in the life of the evangelical church. Delivered at the burial service, they were often printed and distributed to mourners in the weeks following the funeral and, like the modern prayer card, became an enduring memorial to the life of the departed. At their inception, eulogizing the life and deeds of the departed had been discouraged, but by the later sixteenth century, most of the surviving printed sermons included a Lebenslauf, a kind of commentary on the vita of the deceased that drew exemplary lessons from his or her conduct, both in life and in the act of dying. Certainly, other religious traditions relied on funeral sermons in the early modern period to console relatives and friends. But the florescence of the genre among German Lutherans was truly enormous: more than 220,000 such printed works survive from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.68 As one of the most visible icons of lay religion in the period, it is hardly surprising that the funeral sermon came to serve as one model for commemorating the death and destruction brought by natural disasters like fires, floods, and famines. In the years around 1600, collections of consolation sermons commemorating local catastrophes grew increasingly common. They reveal a new willingness on the part of the Lutheran clergy to engage with the psychological effects of great tragedies rather than to merely warn about their moral and eschatological significance. Observing the consequences of a recent fire at Zittau in 1592, Martin Raphelt repeated all the common stock-in-trade observations of the sixteenth- century repentance sermon. Fires would one day be the media by which God would work the great transformation of heaven and earth

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in the wake of the Last Judgment, even as they were a reminder of the punishments of the damned. They were a punishment for sin and never occurred by mere chance. Yet to these typical observations he also added reassuring arguments to help his readers dispense with the emotional effects of such destruction. Fire was also a refining agent, a reminder of the transitory character of all things earthly, a spur to righteousness, and a sign of the far greater wonders that would exist in heaven. If fire encouraged repentance, it was also a call to throw oneself completely on the mercy and goodness of God.69 If Raphelt’s assurances still appear spare and austere, others who followed him were to mold the art of evangelical consolation into a more satisfying brand. Observing the causes and consequences of a recent flood near the Goldberg in Silesia, the Lutheran pastor David Namsler bypassed apocalyptic and eschatological explanations altogether to explain the tragedy that killed 123 people in June 1608.70 Instead, he aimed to show that water was a grace from God and that its surfeit and absence were common and long-standing punishments. Beyond observing the numerous recurrences of floods and famine, Namsler also related in a more optimistic vein, stories of the many people who had been preserved from death in the recent catastrophe. Like Martin Luther, who had credited the preservation of all houses and hearths to the ministrations of the angels, Namsler too recommended his audience perceive of their glasses as half full. After all, many more people had been preserved in the recent tragedy than consumed by it. Such sentiments were mirrored in a number of similar commemorative books that appeared marking other tragedies around the same time.71 Yet enormous trials still afflicted the German world in the early seventeenth century, testing the resiliency of the newly developing strains of consoling theology. One of the greatest of these tests occurred in 1613 in an event that would eventually become known as the Thuringian Sintflut, a name that recalled the annihilation resulting from the biblical Flood. The responses to this tragedy demonstrate the robust character of the new attitudes toward nature and its “wondrous” uncertainties. This great climatic event began in the afternoon of May 29, 1613, when a raging storm began with an hour-long prelude of thunder, promising an end to a threeyear drought that had brought higher grain prices and inflation. When the clouds broke forth with the long-awaited rain, the force of the storm was of a scale that all observers agreed was unprecedented. Within a short time, the spring planting had been destroyed—washed away by the sheer force

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of the rains and the many microbursts that developed from the storms. Then the hail began, a phase of this cyclonic storm that reportedly lasted up to five hours in many places, bringing with it pellets the size of hen’s eggs that soon killed hundreds of head of livestock standing in the fields. All the while, the thunder and lightning persisted, refusing to let up until three o’clock the following morning. Although the rain and lightning did significant damage, destroying buildings and killing a shepherd and his dog caught unaware in the field, they were insignificant when compared to the flash flooding that soon broke out. Parched earth proved to be a poor sponge, and the River Ilm and all the other small tributary streams throughout the region soon overflowed their banks. At Zottelstadt near Apolda, a point significantly downstream, the normally bucolic Ilm was observed to have crested more than twenty-five feet above its banks, while many parts of the province’s largest and most important cities—Gotha, Weimar, Erfurt, and Jena—were soon under water described as being of “gable height.”72 Until ten in the evening on May 30, the waters continued to rise. Then they slowly began to recede, allowing the locals to begin to survey the damage. An area slightly larger than the modern state of Delaware had been laid waste. Splintered wood, masonry, felled trees, and boulders had rendered most roads impassable to carts that might have been used to import grain. But it was mud that was the most lamentable, irritating, and destructive reminder of the floods. Everywhere, mud had filled up grain cellars, barns, houses, and churches, so that it often took weeks to cart the soil away. There was other destruction, too. In the vicinity of Weimar, all the mills along the Ilm had been destroyed, while at Bad Sulza, a town at the juncture of the Ilm and Saale, the city’s recently reconstituted salt works had to be abandoned for several years until the surrounding soil could regain enough salinity to be processed. Few who travel through Thuringia today would suspect that the place could produce such a dramatic weather event, for it is the quintessential Germany of butter commercials and picture-postcard villages brimming with small toy manufactories. Yet climate is not always kind to Thuringia, for the structural dimensions of the region’s geography have long presented the place with significant challenges. To the north, west, and south, the Harz and Rhone mountains and the uplands of the Thuringian Forest provide natural boundaries, while in the east the countryside opens into the broad, flat expanses of the Northern European Plain. In between mountains and plain lies the Thuringian Basin, the area in which the 1613 flood worked its destruction. That region acts like a bowl to catch

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the runoff from the higher elevations that surround it. Over the past five hundred years, flooding in this basin has been primarily a problem in late winter or early spring, when melted snow on the surrounding mountains often inundates the region’s streams, which course through narrow valleys perfectly suited to channel destruction.73 Summertime floods are comparatively rare in Thuringia because the mountains that surround it normally act like a buffer to dampen the effect of the strongest cyclones that arrive from the west. The 1613 floods, though, were not a winter or an early spring event. They occurred, according to the Julian calendar in use in the province at the time, on May 29–31 (what would today be reckoned as June 8–10) and were preceded by a prolonged heat wave. The floods, in other words, were an extraordinary summer event, a phenomenon that can occur when a significant buildup of high pressure combines with cyclonic winds to produce the torrential rains necessary for a centennial or, in this case, millennial flood. In recent years, historical climatologists have come to classify this and similar events as incidents within the Second Little Ice Age, a global climatic phenomenon that occurred from roughly 1570 to 1635. That event produced relatively colder winter temperatures, a number of years without summer, and a generally wetter climate. However, this time was also punctuated by extremes of drought, hot summers, and flooding. Unlike the even more ominous weather disturbances of the Maunder Minimum that followed during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Second Little Ice Age was not caused by a decline in sunspots, but primarily from the aerosolizing effect of dust from several major volcanic eruptions that had occurred at roughly the same time in the late sixteenth century. For the historian, however, such macro-climatological explanations can only set the stage for understanding what people grappled with as the climate changed.74 Climatological explanations, in other words, speak only to environmental absolutes and tell us little about how people made sense out of those realities. Until relatively recently, historians have often stressed the dark side that climate change exercised over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mentalities. In the works of the French Annalistes, particularly in the famous studies of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,75 lack of mastery over a tough environment was perceived to sustain widespread ignorance and magic throughout the countryside, erecting barriers against modernization. In his study of religion in early modern England, Keith Thomas largely concurred with such judgments,76 even as the French religious historian Jean Delumeau has drawn upon the insights

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of social historians concerning weather, disease, and mortaility to insist that people’s inability to control the environment fostered a culture of doubt, anxiety, and fear.77 Gloom and doom, in other words, have long been invoked as the universal reaction of Europeans to an environment they could not control. Inherent in much of this scholarship is also the notion that premodern responses to the environment were always inherently archaic and unchanging. Yet an assessment of the reactions of Thuringian pastors to the great 1613 flood shows that there was a greater variety of responses to these challenges than is often imagined, even as it cautions us from drawing a strong relationship between climate, the emotions, and intellectual life. For in the days and weeks that followed this catastrophe, the most visible response to the flood was not an increase in dire prophecies about the coming end of the world. Nor did Thuringians attempt to insulate themselves from future weather catastrophes through the use of magic. Instead they turned to a sober accounting of the toll, and ducal officials and local pastors were transformed into agents charged with creating a tally of just how much had been destroyed. It was the small principality of Saxe-Weimar that had been most directly affected by the catastrophe, and there the local court preacher and church superintendent, Abraham Langen, played an important role in shaping the interpretation of the flood in much of the printed commentary that appeared in its wake. His observations on the catastrophe are notable for their measured and reasoned response. As flood reports streamed into the court at Weimar, Langen sat down to read them; within a few weeks, he had produced a book that memorialized the disaster. Langen knew that he was writing an “official” history, for he entitled the first edition of his flood book Historische Relation, a historical retelling of the momentous events that had transpired on the evening of May 29.78 Rather than concentrating on the great damage as a sign of God’s anger with the sins of Thuringians, he instead broke his text down into a town-by-town account of what had been washed away in the disaster. He subtitled his work “A Thorough and True Report of the Terrifying Storm and Gruesome Flood which Befell Weimar and Other Places in Thuringia on the Evening of May 29, 1613.” Quickly produced and sold in the months following the calamity, it became one of Europe’s first instant disaster books. Modern historians have often argued that impulses to memorialize disasters in this way were a product of nineteenth-century mass culture.79 In the United States, for instance, books like Langen’s did become an

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increasingly popular form of mass entertainment from the end of the nineteenth century onward, the most notable of them appearing to mark the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, and the Titanic Disaster of 1912. Such texts were hurriedly cobbled into print and, making good use of the obvious commercial possibilities that lay in the timely reporting of such tragedies, came to be sold in the American countryside through a network of colporteurs. To cite one example, the contents of the 1912 Titanic memorial book promised “soul-stirring” stories of “hundreds” consigned to “watery graves,” told by eyewitnesses to “this terrible horror of the briny deep.”80 One short anonymous pamphlet published at Erfurt to commemorate the 1613 flood relied on a similar kind of highly charged, dramatic rhetoric to tell “soul-stirring” stories of heroic rescues and grim horrors in a way similar to the modern disaster book. The text told of a Weimar woman in her lying-in who was carried away by the waters and later found dead downstream, still clutching her baby. In another Weimar incident, thirteen people had cowered for protection from the waters in two mills outside town. At two in the morning on May 30, a raging cloudburst suddenly swelled the river, and twelve were soon killed; the thirteenth, however, climbed onto the remnants of a pigpen that floated by and—although carried miles downstream—survived. Two babies from the town were not so lucky. Carried off while still in their crib, they were soon consigned to watery graves.81 By contrast, the style of the court preacher Abraham Langen’s history of the disaster was altogether more measured, less hyperbolic and dramatic than this penny press account. It was also considerably less sensationalistic than the work of Jay Henry Mowbray, the “doctor of laws” and “well-known” author who famously memorialized the Titanic’s sinking. Langen’s village-by-village account of lives lost, cattle perished, and houses and outbuildings destroyed reads as a sobering reminder of how fragile life could be without adequate dams and flood control. “Here today, gone tomorrow” was certainly one of the most prominent messages to be construed from Langen’s relating of the incidents that sprang from storm and flood, but there were other truths to be drawn from the catastrophe, too. As Langen totted up the damage done by wind and water, he left his readers with the unmistakable impression that the flood’s damage had been overwhelmingly economic; he carefully reproduced the estimates of damage that the Saxe-Weimar duke had solicited in the weeks before. The total estimated damage in the province—more than 2,200 head of

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livestock drowned and killed by lightning and hail, and more than a thousand houses, barns, churches, and other structures destroyed—was enormous by the standards of the day. Yet we might agree that the loss of life he recorded—while quite large at around 320 people—might have been considerably higher given the intensity of the storms and the height of the waters.82 In this way, his account partially dissolved the misfortune of the event, remaking the floods into a reminder of merciful preservation, since most people had come through the waters intact. Langen’s report on the floods may have been among the first to come into print in the weeks following the disaster, but a number of other sermon collections survive from 1613 that show us how the region’s pastors attempted to come to grips with the floods and console their congregations about the loss of life and property. Langen himself published his own collection of Two Weather Sermons, preached on Psalm 18, a text that spoke of hailstones, floods, and a God who “thundered” testimony to his anger in the heavens.83 Yet there was little fire and brimstone in Langen’s message; instead of pointing to human shortcoming as the flood’s cause, he focused on a more sober message, one as old as Ecclesiastes and Job. The event was a vanitas, a warning about the ephemeral nature of all created things. Others construed similar messages in the disaster as well. Following hard on Langen’s sermon collections, at least two other local pastors, Abraham Suarinus and Bernard Schilling, published their own works treating the great flood. In his An Angry God’s Sharp Wind and Water Rod, Suarinus first gave his congregation a lesson in the mechanics of the winds, a lesson that ran to almost forty pages in print.84 Relying on the knowledge of natural philosophy he picked up while a university student, Suarinus carefully catalogued how the winds made their daily, routine contributions to the weather and frequently reminded his listeners that the wind was God’s finger.85 But although he treated the storm as a testimony to the punishments God periodically worked through his “water and wind rods,” his excursion through the physics of the winds was intended all the same to allay the fears of his congregants, who knew that such violent storms did not normally arrive in their corner of the world at a summer’s twilight. The May floods, in other words, were the product of venti praeternaturale (preternatural winds).86 The disaster they brought may have warned that the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom, but it testified all the same that the Lord almost always displayed a benevolent mercy to his children. The very extraordinariness of the storms and

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the floods they produced, in other words, should remind everyone of the thousands of daily acts of preservation through which life was sustained on earth. Similarly, in his Four Sermons on Storms, Bernard Schilling spent a great deal of time denouncing the claims of “Epicureans” and “sophists” who saw the weather as nothing more than a series of chance events, even as he simultaneously excoriated astrologers who argued that the secret to such storms lay hidden in the stars.87 In contrast to Suarinus, Schilling stressed that God himself sent the great disasters on Thuringia, but not to prepare the province for some imminent Apocalypse or to chastise the region for the specific immoralities that many earlier sixteenth-century evangelicals freely argued could be seen in the face of such tragedies. Rather, the secrets of the floods lay in the ways in which they might teach true contrition and repentance, respect for God’s fatherly goodness, and awe before his wondrous works. Drawing upon arguments like these, Schilling and others attempted to alleviate grief and render it manageable for their parishioners. Such statements, while perhaps predictable given the intensity of the early modern discourses on sin and punishment, freely admitted all the same that the 1613 floods were a highly unusual event. Their occurrence was not perceived, in other words, as one more incident in a dismal chain of woes, as modern social and religious history has often conditioned us to conclude. Instead, Thuringians realized that what they had suffered on the night of May 29 and the days that followed had been truly extraordinary. That event had to be comprehended by a careful and sober marshalling of the best empirical evidence available, even as its occurrence cried out for memorializing with arguments drawn from a long and complex tradition of consolation. Even the most urgent proclamations about these floods contained in the cheap genres of “terrifying tidings” are not, as we might expect, filled with urgent jeremiads, or proclamations about the specific sins the deity was trying to expunge through the dramatic vehicle of the waters. To be sure, one of these texts does mention the floods as a harbinger of the Last Judgment, but that ultimate accounting for sin is kept faroff, at a distance from the contemporary realities of those suffering from the aftereffects of the waters.88 Thuringia’s inundation, in other words, is again intoned—much as in the pronouncements of Langen, Suarinus, and Schilling—as an event that taught in a particularly tangible way the principle “sic transit gloria mundi”—everything will one day end and death is a certainty for all.

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Two hundred years later, the ways in which Thuringia’s 1613 flood was remembered were quite different than the manner these texts presented. In place of these somber seventeenth- century assessments—which stressed the flood’s extraordinary character, but nonetheless counseled in a more optimistic vein that such disasters were momentary trials in a far greater story of humankind’s constant preservation—nineteenthcentury historians orientalized Thuringia’s early modern response to its night to remember. The 1613 floods, post-Enlightenment historians were wont to observe, had been greeted as Thuringia’s Sintflut, a terminology that recalled the Genesis deluge and its enormous punishments for the sins that had multiplied following the expulsion from Eden. In a jab at the “superstition” of seventeenth-century men and women, postEnlightenment rationalists pointed to the irrationalities attendant upon an earlier generation’s responses to the catastrophe, irrationalities that found no mention in the original accounts of the disaster. Just as signs of God’s rising anger toward humankind had preceded that great inundation of biblical times, so had portents and omens—unheeded by seventeenthcentury Thuringians—preceded their great flood. The Thuringians had even ignored an image of Luther that had wept three times on the eve of the incident.89 Nineteenth- century man now poked fun at seventeenthcentury religious inanity. “They had not understood,” such a history jabbed, “that the flood was a problem of meteorology and not of morality.” In this way, Enlightenment discontent with the moralism of pre-modern Europeans has persisted, casting its shadow over our own accounting of early modern responses to a worsening climate. For in reality, those responses display a greater vitality, resilience, and rationality than has often been imagined. In the long tradition of evangelical commentary on natural signs and wonders, the reaction of theologians like Langen may stand as a watershed, pointing in the direction of more reasoned “modern” responses. Yet in the history of religion and culture, there are no sudden changes, no revolutions that alter everything in their wake. Instead, the grim pronouncements of Lutheran pastors and theologians and links they had long drawn between human sinfulness and earthly suffering stood always as a reservoir upon which later generations could draw. Yet it is to be hoped that this study has struck a note of caution for those who seek to draw a too-close connection between the world of theological commentators and society writ large. The pessimism expressed in the works of late sixteenth-century figures like Fincel, Irenaeus, or Hondorff was

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not the universal experience of sixteenth-century men and women, but instead a theologically conditioned response designed to protect a theologian’s understanding of one of Luther’s most cherished insights: that humankind after the Fall was utterly wicked and consequently completely helpless in the working out of its salvation. As this study has shown, these theologians often went to enormous lengths to protect that doctrine, even as they often realized that many of their parishioners were not heeding their message. That in defending Luther’s teachings, these same figures often seemed to champion Law over the Gospel, discipline over forgiveness, speaks to the very uncertainty sola fides bred among Luther’s lateReformation followers. However, the pessimism evidenced in these texts was not universal or persistent, and as the seventeenth century dawned and the internal theological tensions within Lutheranism subsided, new attitudes characterized by a greater faith in the human ability to master, understand, and appreciate the environment were able to flourish. That those attitudes appeared at the time when the physical environment and climate were, in fact, growing more troubled than ever before is a testament to human adaptability and inventiveness.

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Notes

chap ter 1 1. Dieter Wuttke, “Sebastian Brant und Maximilian I. Eine Studie zu Brants Donnerstein-Flugblatt des Jahres 1492,” in Die Humanisten in ihrer politischen und sozialen Umwelt, ed. Otto Herding and Robert Stupperich (Boppard: Harald Boldt, 1976), 141–76. The St. George’s Confraternity of the Ensisheim Meteorite, an international society of meteorite experts and enthusiasts, has its own website: http://meteorite.ensisheim.free.fr/ 2. Caroline Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102 (1997), 1–17. Medieval scholars frequently studied the foreign “monstrous races” rather than turn to examine monstrous births that had occurred on the local scene. See John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 3. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Studies on the History of Society and Culture 20 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinets of Curiosities in Sixteenthand Seventeenth- Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Thomas Dacosta Kauff man, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 4. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 173–77. 5. Philip M. Soergel, “The Afterlives of Monstrous Infants in Reformation Germany,” in The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 288–309.

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6. Ottavia Niccoli, “The End of Prophecy,” The Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 667–82, here esp. 667, and Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 7. The early modern fascination with monstrous birth has now been studied in many national contexts. See Jean Céard, La Nature et les Prodiges: L’Insolite au XVIe siècle, en France (Geneva: E. Droz, 1977); Dudley Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1993); Irene Ewinkel, De Monstris: Deutung und Funktion von Wundergeburten auf Flugblättern im Deutschland des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1995); Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Julie Crawford, Monstrous Protestantism. Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Jennifer Spinks, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth- Century Germany (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009); Philip M. Soergel, “Portraying Monstrous Birth in Early Modern Germany,” in The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research, ed. Roger Dahood (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 129–50; Ronnie Po- chia Hsia, “A Time for Monsters: Monstrous Births, Propaganda, and the German Reformation,” in Monstrous Bodies/ Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 67–92; and Jennifer Spinks, “Wondrous Monsters: Representing Conjoined Twins in Early Sixteenth- Century German Broadsheets,” Parergon 22 (2005): 77–112. 8. Sebastian Brant, “De fulgetra anni xcii,” (n.p., 1492), Latin–German edition. The German poem is entitled “Vom Donnerstein des Jahres 1492.” 9. Lewis Spitz, “The Philosophy of Conrad Celtis, the German Arch-Humanist,” Studies in the Renaissance 1 (1954): 22–37, esp. 35–36; Spitz, Conrad Celtis: The German Arch-Humanist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); and Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963). 10. On the life and career of Brant, see Edwin H. Zeydel, Sebastian Brant (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967); Thomas Wilhelmi, ed., Sebastian Brant: Forschungsbeiträge zu seinem Leben, zum “Narrenschiff ” und zum übrigen Werk (Basel: Schwabe, 2002); Vera Sack, Sebastian Brant als politischer Publizist: zwei Flugblatt-Satiren aus den Folgejahren des sogenannten Reformreichstags von 1495 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Stadtarchiv, 1997); and John W. van Cleve, Sebastian Brant’s “The Ship of Fools” in Critical Perspective (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993). 11. See Dieter Wuttke, “Sebastian Brants Verhältnis zu Wunderdeutung und Astrologie,” in Studien zur deutschen Literatur und Sprache des Mittelalters. Festschrift für Hugo Moser zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Wolgang Besch et al. (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1974), 272–86. 12. A facsimile version of the broadside, (Sebastian Brant, “Von der erlichen schlacht der Tutschen by Salyn,” (Basel: Michael Furter für J[ohann] B[ergmann], 1493))

Notes

13.

14. 15.

16.

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appears in; Paul Heitz, ed., Flugblätter des Sebastian Brant, Jahresgaben der Gesellschaft für Elsässische Literatur III (Strasbourg: J.F.E Heitz und Mündel, 1915), Plate 5. Sebastian Brant, “Von dem donnerstein gefallen im xcii.iar: vor Ensisheim,” (Basel: Michael Furter für J[ohann] B[ergmann], 1492); Heitz, ed., Flugblätter des Sebastian Brant, Plate 2. Three further editions of the text appeared in 1492. Of the four total, two were published at Basel, one at Reutlingen, and the other in Strasbourg. See Wuttke “Sebastian Brant und Maximilian I,” 152, n. 17. Although Maximilian I had been elected King of the Romans in 1486, he did not assume that title officially until his father, Frederick III’s death in 1493. There were actually four versions of the text printed during 1492, all with the same title but with varying illustration. The woodcut illustrations to the subsequent versions were simpler and less decorated. See Ingrid D. Rowland, “A Contemporary Account of the Ensisheim Meteorite, 1492” Meteoritics 25 (1990): 19–22, here 21–22. The original text is as follows: So zich wundert mancher fremder gschicht: Der merck und leβ ouch diβ bericht. Es sint geschen wunder vil Im Luff t/comet und fueren pfil. Brunnend fackel/fl ammen und kron Wild kreiβ und zirckel umb den mon Am hymel. Blůt/vnd furen schilt Regen noch form der thier gebild. Stoβ- bruch des hymels vnd der erd/ Eind ander vil seltzen geberd Troetzlich zerstiessen sich zwen berg/ Grüβlich trumett/ vnd harnesch werck/ Ifen/milch/regen stahel korn Ziegel/fl eisch/woll von hymels zorn . . .

Brant, “Von dem donnerstein gefallen im xicii. Iar: vor Ensisheim,” facsimile reproduction in Wuttke, “Sebastian Brant und Maximilian I,” ill. 1, after 152. 17. Ibid: Dann by dem ersten Friderich Noch ert bydem und finsterniβ Sach man drej Sunn und mon gewiβ Und vnder keyser friderich Dem andern/ fiel ein stein grueβlich Sin Form was groβ/ ein cruetz dar jnn Und ander geschriff t vnd heimlich Syn Dy wil des dritten Friedrich Geboren herr von Osterich

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no t e s Regt har jn diβ sin eigen Landt/ Der stein der hie liegt an der wandt.

18. Wuttke, “Sebastian Brant und Maximilian I,” 151–52. 19. On Maximilian I’s troubles with the French king, as well as a review of the complexities of the Habsburg–Valois rivalry in these years, see Hermann Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I. Das Reich, Österreich, und Europa an der Wende der Neuzeit, 5 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1971–1986), 2:201–49 and 5:410–501. 20. Sebastian Brant, “Von der erlichen schlacht der Tutschen by Salyn.” 21. This poem, “Fulgetre inmanis Iam nuper Anno: xcij. Septimo idus nouembris,” was reprinted in Sebastian Brant, Varia Carmina (Basel: Johann Bergmann, 1498), E2v–F1v. It was apparently written as the text for a broadside since its contents and interpretation are mentioned in subsequent prints written by other authors. See Wuttke, “Sebastian Brant und Maximilian I,” 157–58. 22. Joseph Grünbeck, Prodigiorum interpretacio (Linz, 1502; Innsbruck, University Library HS314), 2v. 23. Hermann Wiesflecker, “Maximilians I. Türkenzug 1493/4,” Ostdeutsche Wissenschaft 5 (1958): 152–78 and Walter Winkelbauer, “Kaiser Maximilian I. und St. Georg,” Mittheilungen des österreichischen Staatsarchiv 7 (1954): 523–50. 24. Johannes Philippus Datt, Volumen Rerum Germanicorum Novum Sive De Pace Imperii Publica Libri V (Ulm: Kühnen, 1698), 217–21. Reproduced in Wuttke, “Sebastian Brant und Maximilian I,” 167–69. 25. Sebastian Brant, “ad clarissimum Rhomanorum Regis Cancellarium dominum Conradum Sturcel. Jurium interpretem prestantissimum. De monstruoso partu apud Wormatiam. Anno domini.M.cccclxxxxv. quoarto idus Septembris edito. Explanatio Sebastian Brant,” (Augsburg: Johann Froschauer, 1495; Strasbourg: Johann Prüβ, 1495; German version: Sebastian Brant, “An den allerdurchleichtigisten groβmechtigisten herrn Maximilianum Roemischen künig. Von der wunderbaren Geburt des kinds bey wurmβ Deβ jars M.CCCCXCV auff den X tag septembris geschehen. Ein Auβlegung. Sebastiani brand.” (Augsburg: Johann Schönsperger, 1495). On the Landser Sow, see Sebastian Brant, “Die Sau von Landser” (Basel: Michael Furter for Johann Bergmann, 1496); Paul Heitz, ed., Flugblätter, Plate 10. Brant’s interpretation of the sow is treated in Sack, Sebastian Brant als politischer Publizist, 66–114. Brant’s broadside treating the birth of conjoined geese and two “sixlegged” suckling pigs is reproduced in Paul Heitz, ed., Flugblätter, Plate 16. His pronouncement was published in both German and Latin. See Wuttke, “Wunderdeutung und Politik,” 227, n. 18. 26. R. D. Bucholz, K. W. Yoon, and R. E. Shively, “Temporoparietal craniopagus. Case Report and Review of the Literature,” Journal of Neurosurgery 66 (1987): 72–79 lists 79 surviving cases of craniopagus twins between 1495 and 1987, of which the Worms twins were the first.

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27. On imperial politics during this period, see Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I, 2:201–49. 28. Brant, “ad clarissimum Rhomanorum Regis Cancellarium dominum Conradum Sturcel . . . ” 29. See the works cited in n. 25. 30. For an insightful outline of Augustine’s views on nature and its display of God’s wonder-working power, see Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 3–21. 31. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 778. On the development of teachings on the resurrection of the body in the Middle Ages, see Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 32. On divination and prophecy in the Middle Ages, see Charles Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996) and Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). On the changes in these arts in the Renaissance, see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 135–214. 33. Jacob Mennel, De signis, portentis, atque prodigiis (Vienna, National Library ms. N.B. Cod, 4417) and Josef Grünpeck, Prodigiorum interpretacio, later translated and printed as Ein newe außlegung der seltzamen wundertzaichen und wunderpürden (n.p., 1515). 34. Quoted in Wuttke, “Wunderdeutung und Politik. Zu den Auslegung der sogenannten Wormser Zwillinge des Jahres 1495,” ed. Kaspar Elm, et al., Landesgeschichte und Geistesgeschichte. Festschrift für Otto Herding zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1977): 217-44, here 226, n. 17, “Finsternus, gstirn, all Himels gläntz Planeten, Zeichen, Influentz, So fast zu Unfall widermuth [,wirken so sehr feindlich’] Alsz unnszer eigen Boszheit thutt. Dann sünd bringt uns zu traurigkeit, Zu sterbet, trübsal, herzeleidt, Zu Pestilentz, Krieg, Hungersnoth. Zu Krankheit, schmertz undt gehin Todt. Wann wihr in Gottes huldt on sündt Lebten unndt hielten Gott zu fründt, So müest der Sternen Influs ligen, Kein Leid noch Kummer uns zuefüegen; So aber wihr want Narren sein, In Sünden leben für sich hin,

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no t e s Nit wunder, das die Gstirn uns rühren Unndt uns alls unglückh hint hut führen.”

35. Aby Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagungen in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1932), II:487–558. 36. “Anno domini M. xxxxx und xii uff den xx. Tag deβ Heumonets ist diβn wunderbarlich geburt geboren In namen dorff genant: ertingen by aidlingen . . . [incipit] (n.p., 1512), reprinted in Eugen Holländer, Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt in Einblattdrucken des fünftzehenten bis achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1921), 67, fig. 17. 37. “In obern schwaben ist ein monstrum in der statt Esslingen . . . ” [incipit] (n.p., 1512), reprinted in Holländer, Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt, 68, fig. 18. 38. “Zu wissen. Ein wunderbarlich und erschroeckenlich ding/ das in der zeyt Als man zalt nach Christi unsers herren gepurt/ . . . [incipit] (Nuremberg, 1511), reprinted in Holländer, Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt, 77, fig. 26. 39. Peter Parshall notes that this emphasis on the verifiability of depictions and their fidelity to real life observations was one defi ning feature of the northern European attention to natural wonders and prodigies. Images of natural wonders were often described as “counterfeits,” reproductions or replicas of the original. Such contentions protected artists and printers from censorship, even as they attempted to satisfy the audience’s taste for admiring and studying the natural event at a distance. Peter Parshall, “Imago contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,” Art History 16 (1993): 554–79, here 562–66. 40. “Disz künd ist geboren worden zu Tettnang,” [incipit] (Munich, 1516), reprinted in Max Geisberg, ed., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500–1550, ed. Walter L. Strauss, 4 vols. (New York: Hacker Art, 1974), 1:477; Park and Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 186, fig. 5.4. 41. Spinks, “Wondrous Monsters,” 111–12. Spinks argues that this Burgkmair print makes use of the Salvator Mundi style of depiction in the left-hand pose to underscore the birth’s role as a positive omen pointing to coming political good fortune for the local count, Ulrich VII. Yet sixteenth- century depictions of monsters often lavished great care on portraying deformed children, presenting them in many cases as if they were holy relics in order to underscore their divine authorship. While I agree that the poses shown in the Tettnang print emphasize the birth’s mysterious and pathetic character, I think the larger conclusion that such “misbirths could be welcomed by the societies in which they appeared” may go too far. 42. “Im M.CCCCC. unnd. XVII jar. Am xxv. Tag des Mayen . . . ” [incipit] (n.p., 1517), reprinted in Holländer, Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt, 65, fig. 15. The view that the liver was the “seat of the soul” was ancient.

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43. Robert W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1987) provides the best introduction to these beliefs. Concerning the rich market in prayers at the end of the Middle Ages, see Virginia Reinburg, “Popular Prayers in Late-Medieval and Reformation France,” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1985). 44. Peter Browe, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich: M. Hueber, 1933); Browe, Eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters (Breslau: Verlag Müller & Seifert, 1938); Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 45. Ernst Breest, “Das Wunderblut zu Wilsnack (1388–1552): quellenmässige Darstellung seiner Geschichte,” Märkische Forschungen 16 (1881): 242–301; Claudia Lichte, Die Inszenierung einer Wallfahrt: der Lettner im Havelberger Dom und das Wilsnacker Wunderblut (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990). 46. Johannes Thurmair gen. Aventinus, Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Munich: Kaiser, 1881–1906), 4:591. 47. Rudolf Kriss, Volkskundliches aus altbayrischen Gnadenstätten; Beiträge zur einer Geographie des Wallfahrtsbrauchtums (Baden b. Wien: Rohrer, 1931), 1:278–79. See slso William Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 19–22; Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth- Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 75–91; and Mary Lee Nolan and Sydney Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 257–66. 48. Anton L. Mayer, “Die heilbringende Schau in Sitte und Kult,” in Heilige Überlieferung: Ausschnitte aus der Geschichte des Mönchtums und des heiligens Kultes für Ildefons Herwegen (Münster: Aschendorff, 1938), 234–62. 49. Such is also the judgment of Jennifer Spinks in “Wondrous Monsters,” 81; Spinks, Monstrous Births, 131–33; and Daston and Park in their pathbreaking article, “Unnatural Conceptions: the Study of Monsters in Sixteenthand Seventeenth- Century France and England,” Past and Present, 92 (1981): 20–54. 50. Reprinted in Max Osborn, ed., Andreas Musculus, Vom Hosen Teuffel 1555 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1894), 21–22. 51. Anon., “Ein Erschoeckliche Geburt/und augenscheinlich Wunderzeichen Gottes so sich auff den iiii. Tag des Christmonds, Kurtz verlauffens M.d. LXIII” (Strasbourg, 1564; Schmalkalden, 1564), reprinted in Walter L. Strauss, ed., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut 1550–1600, 3 vols. (New York: Abaris Books, 1975), 1:111 and 3:916 (hereafter cited as Strauss 1550); a four-leaf pamphlet was also published with the same text under the same title in 1564. Bibliographic information from the catalogue of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, s.v., “Erschreckliche Geburt.”

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52. M. Christoff Vischer, “Ware Abcontrafactur einer missgeburt so zu Brott Roda den 8. Augusti dieses 1566 Jhars Tod auff diese Welt geboren ist” (Schmalkalden: Michael Schmuck, 1566), reprinted in Strauss 1550, 3:917. 53. Andreas Celichius, Historia von einer hesslichen Wunder und Miss Geburt in der alten Marcke Brandenburgk (Magdeburg: Kirchner, 1579), A4v. 54. Anon., “IN disem 1578. Jahre/Montages nach quasi modo geniti . . . ,” [incipit] (n.p., Friedrich Ortenbeck, 1578), reprinted in Strauss 1550, 2:824. 55. Eduard Hoff mann-Krayer und Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1927–42), s.v. “Krebs.” 56. Paul Eber, Beschreibung des schrecklichen zeichens so am 18. Tag Martij/fast die gantze nacht aber zu Wittenberg und an viel ander orten ist gesehen worden (Wittenberg: Jacob Lucius, 1562), A4r-v. 57. Anon., “Warhaff tige Beschreibunge des Gesichts/welchs zu Dessaw im Fuerstenthumb Anhalt/den xxiii. Julij. Dieses M.D.LXVI. Jahres/am hellen Himel gesehen worden ist” (Magdeburg: Joachim Walden, 1566), reprinted in Strauss 1550, 3:1102. 58. “Dieses erschreckliche Zeichen/ist am himel gegen auffgang der Sonnen/zu Marpurg in Hessen/den xvij. Octobris/dieses 1570. Jharß/gesehen worden” (Erfurt: Georg Baumann, 1571), reprinted in Wolfgang Harms, ed., Deutsche Illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, 7 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980–1997), I:376–77. 59. Otto Ulbricht, “Extreme Wetterlagen in Diarium Heinrich Bullingers (1504–74),” in Kulturelle Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit,” ed. Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005), 149–78. 60. Christian Pfister, “Weeping in the Snow: The Second Period of Little Ice Age Type Crises, 1570 to 1630,” in Kulturelle Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit,” 31–86. 61. The “grain” or “corn rain” is a long- observed phenomenon of central European weather in which grain is trapped in cyclonic winds in central Asia or Africa and subsequently dropped over Europe. The “grain rain” is similar to the “blood rain,” which consists of central Asian red soils that mingle with precipitation to produce a rain that appears like blood. But where the grain rain was usually interpreted as a sign of God’s munificence (though not universally so), the “blood rain” was always interpreted as an evil portent. The most prominent case of a “grain rain” in the late sixteenth century occurred in the Swabian villages of Zwiepalen and Ried on June 14, 1570. It was reported in broadsides published at Strasbourg, Augsburg, and Nuremberg; cf. Harms, Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter, I:374–75. Other “grain rains” occurred at Weimar and Auerstädt on June 25, 1550; at Klagenfurt in Carinthia on March 23, 1550; and in Brandenburg on April 28, 1580. See Strauss 1550, I:95, 395, and 397.

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62. A stalk of wheat with seventy-two ears of grain exploited in a 1563 Strasbourg broadsheet was just one of a number of late sixteenth- century prints commemorating extraordinary instances of fruitfulness; Strauss 1550, I:112; other examples can be found in Strauss 1550, I:113, 195; 2:858; 3:1207. 63. Reported in an Augsburg print as occurring in the village of Rada near Dinkelsbühl in 1580; Strauss 1550, 2:878. 64. Examples of bearded grapes were commonly exploited in prints throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and most often interpreted as divine signs calling for moderation. Strauss 1550, I:361; 3:1142; Harms, Deutsche Illustrierte Flublätter, I:452–55 and 462. The phenomenon was likely caused by grey rot, the malevolent form of the fungus that otherwise produces late harvest sweet wines. 65. A thesis argued most forcefully in Jean Delumeau, La Péché et la Peur. La culpabilisation en Occident, XIIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1983); English: Delumeau, Sin and Fear. The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990). 66. Job Fincel, Wunderzeichen (Jena: Rödinger, 1556); Fincel, Der ander Teil Wunderzeichen (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1559); Fincel, Wunderzeichen, der dritte Teil (Jena: Rödinger, 1562). 67. Caspar Goltwurm, Wunderwerck und Wunderzeichen Buch (Frankfurt am Main: Zephelius, 1557). 68. Christoph Irenaeus, Wasserspiegel (Eisleben: Petri, 1566); Irenaeus, Prognosticon aus Gottes Wort (n.p., 1578); Irenaeus, De Monstris (Ursel: Heinrich, 1584). 69. Andreas Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1568). 70. D. P. Walker, “The Cessation of Miracles,” in Hermeticism in the Renaissance, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen Debus (Washington: Folger, 1988), 111–24. 71. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

chap ter 2 1. Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 140–68 and Helga Hammerstein Robinson, “The Battle of the Booklets: Prognostic Tradition and the Proclamation of the Word in Early Sixteenth- Century Germany,” in Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time, ed. Paolo Zambelli (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 129–51. 2. Heike Talkenberger, Sintflut: Prophetie und Zeitgeschehen in Texte und Holzschnitten astrologischer Flugschriften, 1488–1528 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990).

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3. Ibid., 316. 4. Most notably, Heiko A. Oberman, Luther. Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), German original: Luther. Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel (Berlin: Severin und Seidler Verlag, 1982); and Richard Marius, Luther. The Christian between God and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 5. Richard W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970), 30. 6. Desiderius Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson, in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vols. 39–40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 40:619–74. 7. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, trans. James L. Schaaf, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1993), I:46–47. 8. Ibid., I:110–14. 9. D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1880-) Tischreden 4:4925 and 6:7005 (hereafter cited as WA). 10. Brecht, Martin Luther, 1:150. 11. WA, 56:290, 418; Martin Luther, Works, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–86) 25:277, 410 (hereafter cited as LW). 12. LW, 48:17–18. 13. WA, 1:79–81, here 80. 14. Published as Decem praecepta Wiitenbergensi praedicata populo (1518), reprinted in WA, 1:394–521. 15. WA, 1:411–425; LW 51:14–31. 16. WA, 1:418; Brecht, Martin Luther, 1:153. 17. WA, 2:685–98. 18. WA, 7:544–604, esp. 573–74. 19. “An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung” (1520), in WA, 6:404–69. 20. WA, 6:439. 21. WA, 6:448–9. 22. WA, 6:447. 23. WA, 6:414. 24. WA, 6:448. 25. WA, 6:484–573. 26. WA, 6:570. 27. Ibid. 28. See Chapter 5 of my Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 131–59. 29. LW, 52:191–2. The text of the original sermon appears in WA, 10, 1, 1:555–728, here 605.

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30. Brecht, Martin Luther, 2:36–37. 31. On Luther’s contested relationship with the sectarians, see Mark U. Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). 32. In Luther’s “Sermon Against the False Prophets” of 1525 (given on the eighth Sunday after Trinity), he called attention to the fact that the message of the sectarians was not “confirmed” by miraculous evidence and that they traveled from house to house without official sanction. See WA, 17:360. The most relevant part of that passage is as follows: “Erstlich ist das ein gewis zeichen des teuffels, das sie durch die heusser so schleichen und lauffen jm lande umb Und nicht offentlich auff tretten, wie die Apostel gethan und teglich alle ordenliche prediger thun, Sondern sind eitel meuchel prediger, komen auch jnn frembde heuser und ort, da hin sie niemand beruffen noch von jemand gesand sind, können auch solchs schleichens und lauffens keinen grund noch warzeichen bringen.” This prong in Luther’s offensive continued, particularly in his “Ein Brief D. Martin Luthers Von den Schleichern und Winkelprediger” (1532). See WA, 30, 3:510–17. The 1910 introduction to that work also includes a number of other citations in which Luther denounced the sectarians’ inability to work miracles as proof of the “falseness” of their message. 33. WA, 15:5ff. 34. WA, 30, 3:510–27, here 519. 35. WA, 37:29–30; LW, 16:325. 36. WA, 33:41–2; LW, 23:31. 37. LW, 21:270–75. 38. WA, 40:54–6; LW, 26:14–5. 39. WA Tischreden (hereafter TR), 1:1180. 40. WA, 41:18–23. 41. Ibid. 42. A typical passage appears in WA TR, 5:6008. 43. See WA TR, 6:6751. 44. Robin Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) and Oberman, Luther. 45. Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. 46. See Anthony Grafton, Giralamo Cardano: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 47. Paola Zambelli, ed., “Astrologi hallucinati” and “Der Himmel über Wittenberg: Luther, Melanchthon, und andere Beobachter von Cometen,” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo- Germanico in Trento 20 (1994): 39–62. 48. Brecht, Martin Luther, 2:193–94. 49. Michael Stifel, Ein Rechen-Büchlin vom Endchrist: Apocalypsis in Apocalypsim (Wittenberg: Rhau, 1532). On the career of this mathematician, see Joseph E. Hoffmann, Michael Stifel (1487–1567): Leben, Wirken, und Bedeutung für die Mathematiker seiner Zeit (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1968).

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Brecht, Martin Luther, 3:9. Ibid., 3:8–9. WA, 11:357–58. Konrad Lange, Der Papstesel. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte des Reformationszeitalters (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht’s Verlag, 1891). 54. “Deutung der zwo greulichen Figure, Bapstesel zu Rom und Mönchkalbs zu Freiberg in Meissen funden. Philippus Melanchthon. D. Martinus Luther” (Wittenberg, 1523) in WA, 11:357–85. 55. WA, 11:361–65. 56. See R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk. Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 129–31. 57. Luther, “Abbildung des Papsttum” (Wittenberg, 1545). 58. Lange, Der Papstesel, 92–93. 59. Ibid. 60. The early history of the Monk Calf is reviewed in WA, 11:357–61. 61. WA, 11:380: “Die Prophetische deuttung dises Munchkalbs wil ich dem geyst lassen, denn ich kein prophet binn, on das gewiß ist der gemeinen deuttung nach yn allen wunderzeichen, das da durch ein groß unfall und verenderung zukunff tig Gott zu verstehen gibt, der sich auch gewißlich deuttsch land versehen mag. Welche aber die selben sey und wie es zu gehen werde, gepurt den propheten zu sagen. Mein wundsch und hoffnung ist, das der Jungst tag sey. Denn der zeichen bißher vil auff einander fallen und gleych alle wellt in einer grossen woge steht, Die on grossen wandel nicht kan abgehn, Datzu das Euangelische liecht so helle auffgangen, welchem alle mal groß verenderung umb der ungleubigen willen gefolget hatt.” 62. See Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550, 71–72 and Gerhard Ebeling, “Die Anfänge von Luthers Hermeneutik,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 48 (1951): 172–330. 63. WA, 11:381: “Damit hatt er on zweyffel auff eym hauffen bedeut: das es bald offenbar werden muß, wie die gantze Muncherey und Nonnerey nichts anders sey denn ein falscher lugenhaff tiger schein und eußerlich gleyssen eyns geystlichen gottlichen lebens.” 64. WA, 11:382–83. 65. WA, 11:384. 66. WA Briefwechsel, 11:412–13. 67. WA TR, 1:134. 68. LW, 54:55–8; WA TR, 1:365. 69. Brecht, Martin Luther, 2:209. 70. WA TR, 5:6751. 71. See, in particular, chapter 1 of Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982). 72. William A. Christian, “Augustine on the Creation of the World,” Harvard Theological Review 46, 1 (Jan. 1953): 1–25. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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73. Jules M. Brady, The Function of the Seminal Reasons in St. Augustine’s Theory of Reality (St. Louis: St. Louis University Press, 1949); Michael J. McKeough, The Meaning of the Rationes Seminales in St. Augustine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1926); and Chris Gousmett, “Creation, Order and Miracle According to Augustine,” Evangelical Quarterly 60 (1988): 217–40. The idea of “seminal reasons” had its origins in the teachings of the fifth- century Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, but among the patristics who relied upon it before Augustine, Gousmett numbers Sts. Ambrose, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa as well as Ephrem of Syria (218–9). Charles Boyer, Étienne Gilson, and Pierre Duhem have all argued that Augustine’s use of “seminal reasons” derived from his knowledge of Plotinus. See Charles Boyer, L’idée de Vérité dans la Philosophie de Saint Augustin (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1920), 30; Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernie (Paris: Herman et Cie, 1954), Vol. 2:446; and Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine (London: V. Gollancz, 1961), 345, n. 35. Christopher John O’Toole, by contrast, has posited that the lineage derives either from Sts. Basil or Gregory of Nyssa. See O’Toole, The Philosophy of Creation in the Writings of St. Augustine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1944), 71. 74. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 21:8 75. Augustine, City of God, 21:7. 76. LW, 49:394. 77. Ibid., 396–7. 78. Ibid., 398. 79. Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Les anges et la philosophie: subjectivité et function cosmologique des substances séparées à la fin du XIIIème siècle (Paris: Vrin, 2002); Marcia Colish, “Early Scholastic Angelology,” Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale, 62 (1995): 80–109; Jean-Marie Vernier, Les anges chez saint Thomas d’Aquin: fondements historiques et principes philosophiques (Paris: Nouvelles Editions latines, 1986); Barbara Faes De Mottoni, San Bonaventura e la scala di Giacobbe: letture di angelologia (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995); and David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 80. In several classic articles, C. A. Patrides once argued that Valla’s and Erasmus’s later denunciations of Pseudo-Dionysius helped to sponsor a widespread disavowal of Dionysian angelology in the later Renaissance. See Patrides, “Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, 2 (April 1959): 155–66; Patrides, “Renaissance Views on the ‘Vnconfused Orders Angellick,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 265–7; and Patrides, “ ‘Quaterniond into their celestiall Princedomes’: The Order of the Angels,” in Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 1–30. Research since

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81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

no t e s the 1970s, initiated by Charles Trinkaus, D. P. Walker, Francis Yates, and others, however, has tended to confirm the ongoing vitality of this tradition until the early seventeenth century. A discussion of recent work on Renaissance angelology can be found in Feisal G. Mohamed, “Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 559–82. See WA TR, 4:4632. Philip M. Soergel, “Luther on the Angels,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 64–82, here 72–73. Ibid., 64–65. Ibid. As Luther summarized late in his life in the Lectures on Genesis: “For many fanatical spirits attacked me, one of whom boasted of dreams, another of visions, and another of revelations with which they were striving to instruct me. But I replied that I was not seeking such revelations and that if any were offered, I would put no trust in them. And I prayed ardently to God that He might give me the sure meaning and understanding of Holy Scripture. For if I have the Word, I know that I am proceeding on the right way and cannot easily be deceived or go wrong. Indeed I prefer the understanding of David to prophetic vision, which I do not think that David greatly desired.” LW, 7:119–20; WA, 44:387. WA, 30:113. WA, 30:120. Sermons on the Gospel of John in LW, 24:73; WA, 45:5. Ibid. Ibid., 73–74. An observation Peter Meinhold first made in Die Genesisvorlesung und ihre Herausgeber (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936). Meinhold’s study demonstrated that the printed versions of these texts had been freely redacted, largely by Veit Dietrich, who had recorded some of the lectures himself but had also relied upon transcriptions from others who had been in the audience. Dietrich was a supporter of Philip Melanchthon, who—like his mentor—had been battling against the antinomianism of Johann Agricola since the late 1520s. The Agricolan party argued that the Law had no place within the church and that its reign should be confined solely to the state. Meinhold demonstrated that these disputes found their way into the editing and preparation of Luther’s massive commentaries on Genesis, the largest lecture series he ever conducted during his term at the university in Wittenberg. Under the influence of the ideas of Melanchthon, Dietrich came eventually to interpolate many positions into the printed texts that were not Luther’s own. While some have downplayed the effect of this redaction (see Jaroslav Pelikan, “Introduction,” LW, 1:XI-XII), it cannot be denied that the Genesis commentaries are in many

Notes

91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

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ways compromised texts. In the largest sense, they often present many of the Reformer’s long-standing theological arguments, but they do so under the veneer of the scholastic Aristotelianism that Melanchthon advocated, which was often at odds with Luther’s own aims. There are also outright intrusions in the texts—defenses of astrology, rational arguments for the natural immortality of the soul, and traditional scholastic arguments for God’s existence— that ran counter to Luther’s own theological positions. The scholarly dispute over the authenticity of the Lectures is reviewed in James A. Nestingen, “Luther in Front of the Text: The Genesis Commentary,” Word and World 14/2 (1994): 186–94. Nestingen’s article includes citation to the relevant texts discussing the Lectures’ redaction. LW, 1:XI–XII. To avoid such pitfalls in interpreting Luther in the present discussion of the Genesis commentaries, I here confi ne the analysis to the first volume, which appeared during the Reformer’s life. LW, 1:35; WA, 42:26. LW, 1:13; WA, 42:10. See Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 131–59. LW, 1:99; WA, 42:76. LW, 1:206–9, here 208; WA, 42:153–56, here 155. LW, 1:208; WA, 42:156. See, in particular, the discussion of the creation of the firmament and its holding back the waters of the heavens, LW, 1:24–27; WA, 42:19–21. Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 13–15.

chap ter 3 1. Job Fincel, Wunderzeichen. Wahrhaff tige beschreibung und gruendlich verzeichnus schrecklicher Wunderzeichen und Geschichten die nach dem Jar an 1517 bis auff jtziges Jar 1556 geschehen und ergangen sind. Nach der Jarzal (Jena: Christian Roedinger, 1556), B4v-B5r, hereafter referred to as Fincel, Wunderzeichen I. Additional printings of the Wunderzeichen were undertaken at Nuremberg in 1556 and 1557; Ursel in 1557; Leipzig in 1557; and Frankfurt am Main in 1556. All editions of the work were produced in octavo format. 2. Fincel used the word Wunderzeichen to title these collections, which in modern German is translated into English merely as “miracles.” I have rendered Wunderzeichen here as “wonder signs” to capture the dual meaning that he found in wonders: they were meant both to amaze and startle their viewers, even as they were intended to be signs pointing to future changes. 3. In his Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Wittenberg, 1553), the famous Philippist professor at Wittenberg, Caspar Peucer, catalogued and interpreted a host of omens throughout history, expanding the humanistic patterns of interpretation first introduced into Germany by figures like

200

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

no t e s

Sebastian Brant and Jacob Mennel at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Erudite in the extreme, the text was concerned with establishing with certainty the precise dates of certain wonders and charting the disasters that had followed them. Similarly, one of the greatest publishing achievements anywhere in sixteenth- century Europe, Conrad Lycosthenes’s Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basel: Petri, 1557) was an imposing volume filled with more than seven hundred illustrations of omens and portents throughout history and was similarly intended for an elevated audience. It is discussed below. The learned traditions of commentary treating natural wonders are definitively discussed in Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au xvi- e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1977), 91–271. Fincel, Der ander Teil Wunderzeichen. Gründlich verzeuchnis schrecklicher Wunderzeichen unnd Geschichten, so innerhalb viertzig Jaren sich begeben haben (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1559; Frankfurt am Main: Rebart, 1566), hereafter referred to as Fincel, Wunderzeichen II. Fincel, Wunderzeichen, Der dritte Teil, so von der zeit an, da Gottes wort in Deudschland, Rein und lauter gepredigt worden geschehen, und ergangen sind (Jena: Donatus Richtzenhain and Rebart, 1562; Frankfurt am Main: Weigand Hans Erben, 1567), hereafter referred to as Fincel, Wunderzeichen III. I have compiled these figures with the aid of Heinz Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” Volkserzählung und Reformation. Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: Schmidt, 1972), 326–92, here 390–91. Schilling’s study lists the following ten editions of the three volumes: six printings of the first volume (Jena, 1556; Nuremberg, 1556 and 1557; Ursel, 1557; Leipzig, 1557; Frankfurt am Main, 1566), two of the second volume (Leipzig, 1559; Frankfurt am Main, 1566), and two of the third (Jena, 1562; Frankfurt, 1567). In addition, the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel owns two copies of a text published without printer’s marks and dates; the catalogue identifies one as published by the Rebart press, the other by the Han press (both located in Frankfurt am Main). There may be more printings, however, that remain undiscovered. Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 379. In 1564, the famous Frankfurt publisher, Sigmund Feyerabend, catalogued the inventory of books found in the print shop of David Zepffel after his death. Feyerabend found 470 copies of Fincel’s Wonder Signs in that shop. In 1566, moreover, the Frankfurt printer Rebart began publication of a collected edition of the three volumes (the third volume of which was published by the Han shop in 1567). Despite the considerable price that a more than 1,200-page printing would have commanded, Feyerabend’s register of sales at the Lenten and fall Frankfurt book fairs from 1568 shows that 69 copies of the collected work were sold in that year. In addition, 164 copies of individual volumes of

Notes

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

201

the Wonder Signs were dispatched from Frankfurt at that time, with 116 going to one retailer in Leipzig alone. Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 379–80. In the wonder book of the learned Conrad Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, all sixteenth- century miracles are drawn from Fincel’s collection. In his wonder book, Wasserspiegel (Eisleben: Petri, 1566), Christoph Ireneus took fifty-nine floods and other catastrophes from Fincel’s Wonder Signs, while in a later wonder book treating monsters, he drew eighty-nine accounts from Fincel (Irenaeus, De monstris [Ursel: Henricus, 1584]). Schilling finds that the last early modern moralistic authors to quote from Fincel’s text were in the 1690s. In the nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm relied upon his collection for its folkloric value. Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 379–88. In his Religion and the Decline of Magic (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Man and the Natural World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Keith Thomas argued that the ever-present specter of natural disaster helped to sustain astrology and divination on the one hand—forms of “magic” that seemed to offer a way of controlling the world—as well as a widespread apocalypticism as a religious response on the other. Thomas’s functionalism, though, has not worn well over time and since the publication of these works, social historians have worked to refi ne the interpretation of apocalypticism as a response to a grim environment. More recently, Hartmut Lehmann has pointed to the role of epidemics and climate in sustaining prophecy in “Endzeiterwartung im Luthertum im späten 16. und im frühen 17. Jahrhundert,” in Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus G. Möhn, 1992). A similar argument is to be found in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Religion, War, Famine, and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which points to the presence of an “early modern crisis” whose broader roots lay in epidemiological, climatological, and demographic problems. Grell and Cunningham locate the vast popularity of apocalyptic speculation, particularly among Protestants, in this nexus. Robin B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, 2–3. A point recently repeated and elaborated upon in Robin B. Barnes, “Varieties of Apocalyptic Experience in Reformation Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33 (2002): 261–74. This argument is especially pronounced in Jean Delumeau, Le Peur en occident. Une cité assiégée (XIVe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Hachette, 1978), but is also present in Delumeau’s somewhat later Le péché et la peur. La culpabilisation en

2 02

15.

16. 17. 18.

no t e s Occident (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayart, 1983); English: Sin and Fear. The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicolson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). I mention Barnes and Delumeau here only as the most relevant religious scholars whose work has direct bearing on the current discussion. Certainly, the last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning interest in apocalyptic mentalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of these studies point to an array of more specific causes underlying the pronouncements of certain prophets and prophecies. Irena Backus, for instance, in her Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), has confined her analysis to learned texts written by commentators in France, Geneva, Zurich, and the Lutheran territories of the empire. Backus’s work calls into question whether the sixteenth- century surge in apocalyptic speculation can be characterized as an “ism” at all, since her study reveals a diverse, often conflicting range of interpretations of the biblical book of Revelation among learned exegetes. In surveying two centrist Lutheran theologians’ discussions of the biblical Apocalypse, those of David Chytraeus and Nicolaus Selnecker, Backus importantly finds little anxiety or fear surrounding their conclusions that the biblical story was unfolding before their eyes. Instead their apocalyptic expectation was a “triumphal” doctrine that accorded Luther’s reforms a unique place in history. In his study of more than 120 apocalyptic texts published by Lutheran pastors, theologians, and prophets in the later sixteenth century, Volker Leppin has pointed as well to the varieties of prophecy that flourished at this time (Antichrist und Jüngster Tag. Das Profil apokaptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum, 1548–1618 [Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999]). Leppin sees two broad prophetic schools developing in the wake of the Schmalkaldic Wars and the Augsburg and Leipzig Interims. On the one hand, one group imagined themselves in a role similar to that of the Old Testament prophets and were intensely biblical, and frequently referred to the predictions contained in the synoptic apocalypses of the Gospels (Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21); Job Fincel would have fit in this school. On the other, those conditioned by the traditions of humanist philology developed their predictions in terms of the Four Kingdoms theory; the prophecies of Elijah (which set the extent of human history at six thousand years); and by extra-biblical historical, astrological, and occult traditions. Over time, it was the first of these outlooks that came to prevail, according to Leppin. The biographical details here are culled from Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 379–85. Ibid., 329, n. 26. Duke Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous, the ill-fated leader of the Schmalkaldic League, saw to the foundation of the new academy at Jena in

Notes

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

2 03

1547, even from his imprisonment following defeat by imperial forces. That institution’s early history is outlined in Volker Leppin, Georg Schmidt, and Sabine Wefers, eds., Johann Friederich I.—Der lutherische Kurfürst (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus G. Möhn, 2006). Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 329. Ibid., 329, 331–32. Robert Kolb stresses the sense of Old Testament, prophetic vocation as one of the identifying characteristics of the Gnesio-Lutherans in “Dynamics of Party Conflict in the Saxon Late Reformation: Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No. 3, On Demand Supplement (Sept. 1977), D1289–D1305, here esp. D1289–D1291. Kolb, “Dynamics of Party Conflict.” The King James and Douay versions of Malachi 3 end at verse 18. This translation is from the New American Bible. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, P7v. Fincel, Wunderzeichen III, Z1r-v. Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy. The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Rienk Vermij, “A Science of Signs: Aristotelian Meteorology in Reformation Germany,” Early Science and Medicine 15 (2010): 648–74, here 660–67. Fincel, Wunderzeichen II, B7r. Cf. Chapter Two of this work. Fincel, Wunderzeichen III, F2r. A particularly vivid account from the first volume of the Wonder Signs tells of an outbreak of St. Vitus’ dance among children at Reichenbach near Schweinitz in 1552. The five children of Jacob Vierscherig were afflicted and danced for seven to eight hours each day, first on their feet and then on their heads, before falling in to prolonged slumber. The ministrations of a priest were of no avail and the children suffered with the affliction for nine days (Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, O4 r-v). On St. Vitus’ dance, an illness largely unknown before the sixteenth century, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth- Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 25–79. In 1535, an innkeeper from the vicinity of Wittenberg infected his guests by serving them meat from a rabid animal; they “immediately” fell upon each other, tearing each other’s flesh like rabid dogs (Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, S2v). A total of 744 signs are treated in the three volumes (270 events in the first volume, 230 in the second, and 244 in the third), a significant portion of which involved the plague and other diseases. See Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 340–42 and 355. Fincel, Wunderzeichen II, C6v- C7r. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, I6r.

2 04

no t e s

36. Ibid., S1v. 37. Ibid., S8v-T1r. 38. A purpose outlined in the dedication and foreword to Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, A3r-B5v. 39. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, B4r. 40. Ottavia Niccoli examines the ways in which knowledge of portents and prodigies circulated in roughly contemporaneous Italy in Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, 3–25 and 35–37. In his monographic treatment of the Wonder Signs, Heinz Schilling has provided a detailed and exhaustive analysis of the texts that can be identified as sources for Fincel’s accounts. Schilling concludes that Fincel only identified the original authors of certain accounts when he was convinced that their authority might add luster to his narrative of the event. See Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 375–79. 41. An argument also set forth in the foreword to the first volume. See Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, B3v-B5r. 42. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, M7r. 43. Ibid., F5r. 44. Including Livy, Julius Obsequens, Caesar, Laertes, Plutarch, and the Arabic natural philosopher Albumazar. These sources are examined in Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 374. 45. On the tradition of miracle recording in the later Middle Ages, see Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977); Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind. Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Pierre-André Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale: XIe-XIIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1985); and Steven D. Sargent, “Miracle Books and Pilgrimage Shrines in Late Medieval Bavaria,” Historical Refl ections/Réfl exions historiques 13 (1986): 455–71. 46. John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 21–38. 47. The dedication to the first volume, for instance, includes the observation that he has collected these “signs of God’s power” so that they might be enjoyed by “good Christians.” Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, A4r. 48. Conrad Wohlfahrt or Lycosthenes, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon; German edition: Wunderwerck, oder Gottes unergründtliches vorbilden, trans. Johannes Herolt (Basel: Petri, 1557). 49. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia. Beschreibung aller Lender (Basel: Petri, 1544). 50. See Philip M. Soergel, “Agnes Bowker’s Cat, the Rabbit Woman of Godalming, and the Shifting Nature of Portents in Early Modern Europe,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, Ser. 3, Vol. 4 (2007): 265. 51. Conrad Lycosthenes, Wunderwerck, “Vorrede.” On the influence of Lycosthenes, see Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges, 161–62 and 186–91.

Notes

2 05

52. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 187. 53. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.V.168–69. 54. The conclusion that the book was likely used for divinatory purposes is also supported by the fact that Lycosthenes had just recently produced a popular edition of the ancient Roman divinatory manual of Julius Obsequens, published as Iulii Obsequentis Prodigiorvm Liber (Basel: Petri, 1552). At least five editions of the work appeared before 1590. 55. On the tradition of interpretation of curiositas as vanity, see Edward Peters, “The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 593–610 and William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early-Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 59–65. 56. Fincel, Wunderzeichen mit Figuren. Warhaff tige beschreibung vnd gruendliche verzeichnus schrecklicher Wunderzeichen und Geschichten die von dem Jar an 1517. Bis auff jtziges Jar 1556. Geschehen vnnd ergangen sind nach dem jarzal. Auffs new ubersehen vnd gebessert. (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1557). The Berwald firm added a total of fifty-three small woodcuts, an impressive number for an octavo volume, but still far behind the visual panorama on offer in Lycosthenes’s Basel editions. 57. As the Berwald publishing house began to transform its editions of Andreas Hondorff ’s Promptuarium exemplorum from miracle collections into Hausvaterbücher, works intended to provide heads of households with guides for moral instruction, a few handsome illustrations were added to these books and to those that imitated the popular work. See Chapter Six. 58. Kusukawa, “Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 403–27. 59. Leonhart Fuchs, De stirpium commentaria insignes (Basel: In officina Isingriana, 1542). 60. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, N3rff. 61. 270 in Fincel, Wunderzeichen I; 230 in Fincel, Wunderzeichen II; 244 in Fincel, Wunderzeichen III; Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 355. 62. Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 342. 63. At Kronberg in Hesse in 1530 (Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, B5v); in 1546 at Meissen (Fincel Wunderzeichen III, E5v); and to a woman named Leper and a pastor’s wife at Perga near Hof, both in 1557 (Fincel, Wunderzeichen III, I1r-v). 64. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, B8v- C2v. 65. Ibid., O5v- O6r. 66. Ibid., O5v. 67. Cf. Psalms 22:9–10; 71:6; 139:13 68. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 185. 69. Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuse (London, 1559), Wellcome MS 136; Printed edition: Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuse les plus mémorables qui ayent esté observées,

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70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

no t e s

depuis la Nativité de Iesus Christ, iusques à nostre siècle: Extraites de plusieurs fameux autheurs, Grecz, & Latins, sacrez & profanes (Paris: Groulleau, 1560). Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, 35–51 Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, O6v- O7r. Johannes Multivallis, Eusebii Caesariensis episcope chronicon (Paris, 1512), fol. 175r-v. Quoted in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 182. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, O6v- O7r. One prominent example occurs in the foreword to his first volume when Fincel draws attention to the praise of sodomy contained in the papal legate, Giovanni della Casa’s Capitolo, and uses that text to prove that sexual depravity was rampant in the contemporary Catholic Church as well as throughout the Italian peninsula generally; Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, B5v-B6r. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, O7r. Niccoli, “ ‘Menstruum Quasi Monstrum’: Monstrous Births and Menstrual Taboo in the Sixteenth Century” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, trans. Mary M. Gallucci and Carole C. Gallucci (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1–25. On the rising popularity of 2 Esdras in early modern Europe and its relation to the discourse on monstrosities, see Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapters 6 and 9. See Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 183 and 187. One of the illustrations in Berwald’s 1557, Wunderzeichen, depicted this strange birth. See figure 3.2. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, F6v-F7r. Fincel, Wunderzeichen I, E2. Ibid., R4v-R5r. Ibid., F6r-v. Schilling, “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 353. Fincel, Wunderzeichen III, M4v-M5r. Ibid., M5r. Ibid. Note Schilling’s discussion of the “afterlife” of Fincel’s text in “Job Fincel und die Zeichen der Endzeit,” 379–88. Barnes, “Varieties of Apocalyptic Experience in Reformation Europe.”

chap ter 4 1. Three editions of the text appeared in the later sixteenth century, each under slightly different titles: Caspar Goltwurm, Wunderwerck vnd Wunderzeichen Buch. Darinne alle fuernemste Goettliche/ Geistliche/ Himlische/Elementische/ Irdische vnd Teuflische wunderwerck/ so sich in solchem allem von anfang der

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

207

Welt-schoepfung biss auff vnser jetzige zeit/zugetragen vnd begeben haben/Kuertzlich vnnd ordentlich verfasset sein/Der gestalt vor nie gedruckt worden (Frankfurt am Main: David Zephelius, 1557), reprinted as Goltwurm, Wunderzeichen: Das ist, Warhaff tige Beschreibunge aller fürnemen, seltzamen, ungewöhnlichen, Göttlichen vnd Teuffelischen, guten vnd Bösen, heilsame vnd verführischen zeichen, gesichte vnnd mißgeburt, so von anfang der Welt im Himmel, Luff t, Wasser vnd Erden, wider den gemeinen lauff der Natur auß sonderlichem rath des Allmechtigen Gottes, zu warnung des Menschlichen Geschlechts geoffenbaret. (Frankfurt am Main: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1567) and Goltwurm, Warhaff tige beschreibung aller fürnemsten Götlichen, Geistlichen, Himmlischen, Elementischen, Irdischen vnd Teuflischen wunderwerck, so sich in solchem allem von anfang der Welt schöpfung biß auff vnser jetzige zeit zugetragen vnd begeben haben, kürtzlich vnd ordentlich beschrieben (Frankfurt am Main: Johannes Wolf, 1573). An aim outlined in the dedication to Philip of Hesse. As Goltwurm observes, the Almighty speaks “not only through his holy Word . . . which is proclaimed, sung and spoken . . . but He preaches through all Creatures and through all kinds of wondrous works and signs.” Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, iir-v. Biographical information about Goltwurm, particularly his formative years in South Tyrol, is scant. His time in Nassau-Weilburg is better documented. In constructing this portrait, I have relied upon Bernward Deneke, “Caspar Goltwurm. Ein lutherischer Kompilator zwischen Überlieferung und Glaube,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation: Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1972), 125–77, here 125–26. Some of the information there has been rendered out of date by more recent studies, including Otto Renkhoff, Nassauische Biographie. Kurzbiographien aus 13 Jahrhunderten (Wiesbaden: Historische Kommission für Nassau, 2nd ed., 1992), s.v. “Goltwurm, Caspar”; and Wolfgang Brückner, “Goltwurm, Caspar,” Enzyklopädie des Märchens, vol. 5 (Berlin and New York, 1987), 1394–96. Goltwurm’s works include Schemata Rhetorica (Marburg: Andreas Kolbe, 1545); Die Fürnemste, schöne vnd Tröstliche Allegorie vnnd Geystliche Bedeutunge, des Ersten Buochs Moysi, von allen fürnehmen Patriarchen vonn Adam an Biß auff Joseph . . . (Frankfurt am Main: Cyriacus Jacobs Erben, 1552); Ein Newes lustig Historisch Calendarium (n.p., 1553, 1554); Wunderwerck und Wunderzeichen Buch (Frankfurt am Main, 1557, 1567, and 1573); Biblische Chronica (Frankfurt am Main, 1558, 1564, and 1576); Kirchen Calendar (Frankfurt am Main, 1559, 1561, 1570, 1574, 1576, 1583, 1588, 1597, and 1600). Another work was a German translation of a prognostication by Anthony Torquato, Prognosticon, Weissagungen vn Urtheyl, von betrübungen vnnd grossen anfechtungen Europe . . . (Frankfurt am Main, 1558, 1561, and 1580). Goltwurm, Schemata Rhetorica, Teutsch. Das ist, Etliche nötige vnd nützliche stuck, so zuo zierlichen, förmlichen vnd artigen reden gehören, dardurch den

208

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

no t e s menschen lust, lieb vnd begird zuozuhören, auch die hertzen geriert vnd bewegt worden mögen (Marburg: Andreas Kolbe, 1545). Goltwurm, Schemata Rhetorica, A6r-v. Ibid., E4r. Ibid., H5r. Ibid., Q3r-v. Ibid., R1v-R3r. Goltwurm, Die schöne und Tröstliche Historia von Joseph (Wittenberg: Rhau, 1551). Goltwurm, Die Fürnemsten, schöne vnd Tröstliche Allegorie; similar themes were also treated in Goltwurm’s Biblische Chronica. The questions of just when, how, why, and if Luther actually discarded allegory are controversial ones. Gerhard Ebeling originally dated Luther’s jettisoning of medieval allegory to his 1519 edition of the Galatians and the Operationes in Psalmos completed between 1519 and 1521. See Ebeling, Evangelische Evangelienauslegung. Eine Untersuchung zu Luthers Hermeneutik (Munich, 1942; 3rd expanded edition, Tübingen: Mohr, 1991). Heinrich Bornkamm followed a similar logic in Luther und das Alte Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1948), see esp. 210–14. More recently, though, James Preus challenged Ebeling’s notion of a radical disjuncture between Luther and medieval exegesis in his From Shadow to Promise. Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), arguing instead that Luther’s pattern of Old Testament interpretation was much closer to the long medieval tradition than Ebeling’s or Bornkamm’s characterizations admitted. Preus’s notion of Luther as a biblical commentator who was consonant with the medieval “fourfold” sense has since acquired both admirers and critics, but one definitive response to Preus appears in Darrel Reinke’s, “From Allegory to Metaphor: More Notes on Luther’s Hermeneutical Shift,” The Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 386–95. Kenneth Hagen reviews more recent discussions of Luther’s attitude toward allegorical interpretation in Luther’s Approach to Scripture as Seen in his “Commentaries” on Galatians, 1519–1538 (Tubingen: Mohr, 1993), 13–16, esp. n. 53. An approachable treatment of Reformation attitudes toward the use of allegory as a homiletic technique is summarized in George L. Scheper, “Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 89 (1974): 551–62. Hans Jörg Sick, Melanchthon als Ausleger des Alten Testaments (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959). Goltwurm, Die Fürnemsten, schöne vnd Tröstliche Allegorie, 10r-v. Ibid., 6r-7v. Ibid., 9r-v. Ibid., 24v-26r and 65r-v.

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20. Goltwurm, Ein neu lustig Historisch Calendarium; Goltwurm, Calendarium Historicum. 21. Robert Kolb, For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987). 22. Robin B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis. Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 51; the Calculation is discussed on 50–53. 23. Kolb, For All the Saints, 25–27 and Gerald Strauss, “The Course of German History: The Lutheran Interpretation,” in Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John Tedeschi (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 678–86. 24. Kolb, For All the Saints, 19–27; on Melanchthon as a historian, see Wilhelm Maurer, Der junge Melanchthon I. Der Humanist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967), 99–128 and Peter Fraenkel, Testimonia patria, The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (Geneva: Droz, 1961), 52–60 and 326–29. 25. Miriam U. Chrisman, “Printing and the Evolution of Lay Culture in Strasbourg, 1480–1599,” in The German People and the Reformation, ed. R. Po- Chia Hsia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 74–100, here 97–98. 26. On the historiography of David Chytraeus and Matthias Flacius and its inspiration in Melanchthonian methods as well as divergences from the same, see Irene Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 338–54. 27. G. Kawerau, “Magdeburg Centuries,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and William Gilmore, 13 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1953), VII:123–24. 28. Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation, 345–46. 29. Euan Cameron, “One Reformation or Many? Protestant Identities in the Later Reformation in Germany,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and R. W. Scribner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 108–27. The historical introduction to Avihu Zakai’s Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), is also a particularly deft analysis of the changes that were occurring in Protestant notions of historiography at the time; see 12–57. 30. Martin Jung, Frömmigkeit und Theologie bei Philipp Melanchthon: Das Gebet im Leben und in der Lehre des Reformators (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 71–86. 31. Paul Eber, Calendarivm historicvm conscriptvm (Wittenberg: Rhau, 1550). 32. Goltwurm, Ein neu lustig Historisch Calendarium; Goltwurm, Calendarium Historicum.

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33. Kolb, For All the Saints, 30. 34. Goltwurm, Kirchen Calendar. Deneke lists nine printings of the text between 1559 and 1600. See Deneke, “Caspar Goltwurm. Ein lutherische Kompilator,” 174–76. The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel owns an additional two editions not cited in the Deneke article. There may, of course, be even more undiscovered printings. 35. Deneke, “Caspar Goltwurm. Ein lutherische Kompilator,” 131. 36. Goltwurm, Calendarium Historicum, 5 Januar and 4 März. 37. Ibid., unpaginated preamble. 38. Ibid., 12 Januar. 39. Ibid., 11 Oktober and 7 September. 40. Ibid., 26 Oktober. 41. Goltwurm, Kirchen Calendar, unpaginated foreword. 42. Ludwig Rabus, Historien der Heyligen außerwölten Zeugen Bekenern vnd Martyrern so in Angehnder ersten Kirchen Altes vne Neüwes Testament zu jeder zeit gewesen seind . . . 8 vols. (Strasbourg: Emmel, 1552–58). 43. Goltwurm, Kirchen Calendar and Frieder Schulz, “Das Gedächtnis der Zeugen: Vorgeschichte, Gestaltung, und Bedeutung des evangelischen Namenskalender,” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 19 (1975): 69–104. 44. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, iir-iiiiv. 45. Ibid., iiiv. 46. Max Ziemer, Nassovia: Zeitschrift für nassauische Geschichte und Heimatkunde 9 (1929): 97–100; 10 (1930): 113–15. 47. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, B1r-v. The relevant passage referred to here seems to be Deuteronomy 11:7–8, which actually reads: “But your eyes have seen all the great acts of the LORD which he did. Therefore shall ye keep all the commandments which I command you this day, that ye may be strong, and go in and possess the land, whither ye go to possess it . . . ” 48. Ibid., B1r-R1v. 49. Ibid., B1r-B4v. 50. Ibid., C4v. 51. Ibid., D4r-v. 52. See chapter five of my Wondrous in His Saints for a discussion of the importance that mediation played in the Catholic theology of saintly miracles. 53. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck. The section, “Von wunderbarlichen Erscheinung Gottes durch Engel . . . “ brings together the many angelic stories of the Old Testament, K1v-N1v. That section is followed by another recounting angelic apparitions and works in the New Testament: “Von wunderbarlichen erscheinung und offenbarung so im Newen Testament beschehen . . . ,” N2r- O4r. 54. Ibid., Q1v. 55. Ibid., Q3v- Q4r. 56. Ibid., Q4r-v.

Notes

211

57. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons. The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 373. 58. Such is largely the view to be found in Deneke’s “Caspar Goltwurm. Ein lutherische Kompilator.” Despite the problems of organization that he notes, Deneke finds the work’s chief value consisted in its compilation and transmission of hundreds of accounts of wonders. 59. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, T1v. 60. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, R2r-R3v. These conclusions are supported by a consideration of the length devoted to these sections. Some 380 pages are devoted to sections two through five (miracles worked because of false beliefs, signs and portents seen in the heavens, wonders worked through the elements and on earth) while the final section treating demonic wonders is only a little more than 80 pages in length. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, R2r-T1r. 61. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 372. 62. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, R2r-v. 63. Ibid., R2v-R3r. 64. Ibid., Y4r-Ee1r. 65. Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation. On Melanchthon, see especially 328–38; on Flacius, 343–50. 66. Matthias Flacius, Catalogus testivm veritatis, qvi ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae (Basel: Oporinus, 1556). 67. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, Ee4v- Gg4v. 68. Ibid., Gg3v. 69. Ibid., Gg4r-v. 70. Ibid., Hh1r- Oo3r. 71. Ibid., Hh2v-Hh3r. 72. Ibid., Ll2r-Mm1v. 73. Ibid., Nn4v- Oo3v. 74. Parhelia and comets were two prominent examples in which Goltwurm deployed this argument. While physicists could explain them naturally, they nonetheless pronounced God’s anger and announced coming times of trouble on earth. See Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, Hh4r and Ll2r. Concerning comets, for instance, Goltwurm remarks: “And although such appearances of many comets have their natural causes and effects, it cannot be denied that they have always meant at all times pestilence, inflation, war, the great shedding of blood, and danger, death, and decline to emperors, kings, and potentates.” “Und wiewol solche erscheinunge vielerei Cometen jren natürliche Ursprung und Wirckung haben. Jedoch sein solche nie vergeblich ohne besondere bedeutung erscheinen sondern haben allezeit Pestilentz Thewrung Krieg Blutvergiessen und grosser Kaiser Könige unnd Potentaten gefehrligkeit abnämung und sterben bedeutet.” Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, Ll2r. 75. Ibid.

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76. Ibid., Kk3r, an interpretation for which he cites Pliny the Elder. 77. Ibid., Oo1v-Xx1r. 78. Ibid., Q1r. He is here making reference to Deuteronomy 11:14: “That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.” 79. Ibid., Pp4v and Qq1r. 80. Ibid., Xx1v-T1r. 81. Ibid., Xx2r-Yy3v. 82. Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, 9:13–20; English edition: Augustine, Expositions on the Book of Psalms, 6 vols. (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1847–1857), here I, 9:13–20. 83. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, Xx2r-v. 84. Ibid., Yy2v-Yy3v. 85. Ibid., Yy4r. 86. Goltwurm does include a plea at the end of the section recounting recent persecutions of Christians throughout Europe that Germany be protected from tyranny and from the kinds of troubles common under the reign of Charles V. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, Yy3v. 87. Ibid., b1r. 88. Ibid., b2r. 89. Ibid., ci3v. 90. Ibid., c4r. 91. Ibid., a4v, citing Judges 1:5–7. 92. Ibid., d3v- d4v. 93. Ibid., g4r. 94. Ibid., g4r-h2v. 95. Ibid., e2v. 96. Ibid, h2v-h4r. 97. Ibid., h4v. 98. Ibid., k4r-v. 99. Ibid., k4v. 100. Ibid., l2v-m4v. 101. Ibid., l1r. 102. Ibid., fm3r. 103. Job Fincel, Wahrhaff tige beschreibung und gruendlich verzeichnus schrecklicher Wunderzeichen und Geschichten die nach dem Jar an 1517 bis auff jtziges Jar 1556 geschehen und ergangen sind. Nach der Jarzal (Jena: Christian Roedinger, 1556), F6r-F7r. The misbirth was also depicted in an illustration in Fincel, Wunderzeichen mit Figuren (Leipzig: Berwald, 1557), F8v. 104. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, l3r. 105. Ibid., l1v-l2r. 106. Ibid., l2r and l4v-m1r.

Notes

2 13

107. Ibid., t1v-Fff2r. 108. Philip M. Soergel, “Luther on the Angels,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 64–82. 109. Goltwurm, Wunderwercke, t2v-u2v. 110. Ibid., Eee2v-Fff2r. 111. Attributed spuriously to Bishop Abdias of Babylon, the text is reproduced in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to 325 A.D., trans. and ed. Alexander Roberts (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007). 112. Goltwurm, Wunderwerck, Fff2v. 113. Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1997) and Sachiko Kusukawa, “Melanchthon,” in Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David Steinmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57–67, here 60.

chap ter 5 1. Karl Euling, ed., Die Chronik des Johann Oldecops, in Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 190 (Tübingen: Literarischen Verein in Stuttgart, 1891), 474–75. 2. Arnaud Sorbin, Tractatus de Monstris (Paris: Jerome de Marnef and Guillaume de Cavellat, 1570), reprinted in Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires Prodigieuses (Paris: Hieronymus de Marnef and Guillaume de Cavellat, 1580), 628, quoted in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear. The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 139. 3. Research on these themes has exploded in the last two decades. On the popularity of monstrous birth tales among Protestants, see Philip M. Soergel, “Die Wahrnehmung der Endzeit in monströsen Anfängen,” in Im Zeichen der Krise. Religiösität im Europas des 17. Jahrhunderts, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 152, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and AnneCharlotte Trepp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 33–52. The two nodes of widespread late sixteenth- century fascination with these themes were to be found in Germany and England. Although French canards occasionally touched on these themes, attention to prodigies and portents in Catholic culture was largely the preserve of learned intellectuals anxious to place these discoveries within the developing sciences. See Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges. L’insolite au XVIe siècle, en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977). In England and Germany, by contrast, Protestant regions witnessed an explosion of cheap texts addressed to both learned and unlearned audiences, as well as proto-scientific and theological works intended to categorize

214

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

no t e s and digest what had been treated in the penny press. Significant works treating the broad fascination these themes acquired in England and Germany include Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Birth in PostReformation England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Irene Ewinkel, De monstris. Deutung und Funktion von Wundergeburten auf Flugblättern im Deutschland des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995); Jennifer Spinks, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth- Century Germany (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009); and Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The view presented in Matthias Senn, Johann Jakob Wick (1522–1588) und seine Sammlung von Nachrichten zur Zeitgeschichte (Zurich: Antiquariat Gesellschaft, 1974) and Bruno Weber, Wunderzeichen und Winkeldrucker. 1543–1586: Einblattdrucke aus der Sammlung Wickiana in der Zentralbibliothek Zürich (Zurich: Urs Graf Verlag, 1972). Franz Mauelshagen, “Wick, Johann Jakob,” Biographisches-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon XVII (Elster: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2000), 1536–40 (hereafter cited as BBK). Such is the perspective that Franz Mauelshagen develops in his “Wicks Wunderbücher: Entstehung, Überlieferung, Rezeption” (PhD diss., University of Bonn, 2000). A development noted already in Rudolf Schenda, “Die deutschen Prodigiensammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 4 (1963): 637–710. Biographical information concerning Matthias Flacius is here taken from Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, “Flacius, Matthias,” BBK II (1990), 43–48; Johann Wilhelm Preger, Matthias Flacius Illyricus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Erlangen: Theodor Biasing, 1859–61; repr., Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1964); and Oliver K. Olson, Matthias Flacius Illyricus and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002). Robert Kolb, Bound Choice, Election and Wittenberg Theological Method (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). An excellent summation of the proceedings in Weimar in the 1560s, as well as the disputes between Strigel and Flacius, is provided in Kolb, Bound Choice, 111–28. On Flacius’s residency in Regensburg, see Matthias Flacius Illyricus, 1520–1575, Schriftenreihe der Universität Regensburg 2 (Regensburg: Universitätsverlag Regensburg, 1975). These biographical details are taken from Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, “Flacius, Matthias,” BBK, II:43–48. Biographical details are here taken from Christina Lohrmann, “Irenaeus, Christoph” BBK, II:1327–28.

Notes

2 15

14. Biographical details from G. Bossert, “Irenaeus, Christoph,” The New SchaffHerzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 13 vols., ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and George William Gilmore (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing, 1953), VI:31. 15. Christina Lohrmann lists twenty-five major works in her short biography in BBK II, “Irenaeus, Christoph.” I have discovered another fifteen additional works by consulting the catalogue of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Irenaeus’s lifetime opus, though, may be considerably larger than these two sources suggest. 16. Christoph Irenaeus, Wasserspiegel. Ergiessung der Wasser sind anzusehen als ein 1. Zorn- 2. Creutz- 3. Trost Spiegel (Eisleben: Petri, 1566; Leipzig: Henning Grosse, 1595). 17. Ibid., A3v: “Irrthumb, falsche Lere, Corrupteiln schleichen one schew, eine nach der ander in Kirchen und Schulen, Gottes Lestung, verachtung deß worts und Sacrament, Ungehorsam, Mutwill, Mord, Zorn, Neid und Haß, Hurerey, Unzucht, ehebruch, fressen, sauffen, schelgen, pancketiren, stelen, rauben, wachern, stulrauben, arme Leut drucken mergeln und auß sauegen, liegen, kriegen wachsen von tag zu tag, haben jhrer freyen Paß.” 18. Ibid., A8r-v. The text here reproduces part of Luther’s exposition on Psalm 29 delivered as a lecture at Wittenberg allegedly in 1536. 19. Ibid., B2r. 20. Ibid., B2r-B3r. To illustrate the verve of Irenaeus’s prose, I include the original German here: “In der Luff t Parelia viel Sonnen und Monden zugleich, grosse Eclypses unnd Finsternis, Commeten, Staupbesen, chasmata, Fewer glut oder Kluff t, Fewer flamment, Fewer stralen, Fewer schissen, Fewer brunst, Fewrige Kugeln, Fewer und Blutregen, Feurige Schwert, Fewrige Creutz, und anderer Fewrige und Blutige Zeichen und dergleichen. Item Kriegsrüstung, Hereskraft, Feldschlachten, Rennen, Treffen, schlagen, Jemerlich krathen, Rasseln, Prasseln, Gederesch, Gedümmel, Geschrey, Weheklagen, ruffen, Winseln, Heulen in Luff ten als etwa in einer Niederlage oder Feldschlacht. Etliche Vogel grosse Versammlung die als zwey Heer wie in einer Feldschlacht ein treffen miteinander thun und einander allmachen oder ermorden. Item ungewohnliche schreckliche grausame, ungewitter mit Donner Plitzen, schlagen, Hageln, Schlossier graupen Steinregen etc. Item solchen regen da frosche, krotten oder larken und ander geschmeis mit fallen.” 21. J. G. Krünitz, Oeconomischen Encyclopädie, 242 vols. (Berlin: Pauli, 1773–1858), 171:74. 22. A succinct summary of these interpretations and their origins in patristic and early medieval Christian authorities is presented in Jack Lewis, “Noah and the Flood in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions,” Biblical Archeologist 47 (1984): 224–39.

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23. Irenaeus, Wasserspiegel, C8v.: “Schwelgerey, Seufferey oder Fullerey, unnd epikurisches Leben.” 24. Geoffrey Chaucer, “Pardoner’s Tale,” Canterbury Tales, lines 219–62. 25. John Chrysostom, “Homily XIII on the Gospel of Matthew,” in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff (New York, 1908), 10:80. 26. Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 33, 39. 27. Martin Luther, Works, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–1986), 2:166 (hereafter cited as LW); D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1880-), 42:378 (hereafter cited as WA). 28. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, 3 vols., trans. James L. Schaaf (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 3:138. 29. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, trans. John King (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996), I:294. 30. Ibid. 31. Of course, the charge that the Epicureans were practitioners of a hedonistic materialism, a misunderstanding of their subtle and restrained moral philosophy, had been common throughout the Middle Ages. Lucretius, a student of Epicurus, was widely excoriated for his observation that the soul was mortal. Irenaeus’s placement of “epicurean living” in his list of the vices that necessitated the Flood thus has resonance alongside the ancient tradition of attacking the Epicureans as pleasure-seeking materialists, but it also is likely a response to the resurgence in the popularity of studying Lucretius and Epicurus that was underway in fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Europe. 32. LW, 2:38; WA, 42:289. 33. LW, 2:40; WA, 42:290. 34. LW, 2:37; WA, 42:288. 35. Calvin, Commmentary on Genesis, 1:270. 36. See Philip Soergel, “Baggy Pants and Demons: Andreas Musculus’s Condemnation of the Evils of Sixteenth- Century Dress,” in Recht und Verhalten in vormodernen Gesellschaften. Festschrift für Neithard Bulst, ed. Andrea Bendlage, Andreas Priever, and Peter Schuster (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2008), 139–54, which examines Musculus’s condemnation of the then- contemporary style of wearing “Pluderhosen” along lines typical of late-medieval Franciscanism. 37. Kevin Roos, “The Devil Books of the Sixteenth Century, Their Sources and Their Significance during the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century,” (unpub. diss., Rice University, 1968). 38. Cyriacus Spangenberg, “Vorrede” to Joachim Westphal, in Wider den Hoffartsteufel (Frankfurt am Main: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1565), reprinted in Ria Stambaugh, Teufelbücher im Auswahl, 5 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter), 3:7–49.

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39. Steven Ozment has been among the most persistent of contemporary scholars to make this claim. See Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities. The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth- Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 17–46, esp. 17–21. 40. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household. Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89–131, esp. 98–101. 41. See Chapter 1 of this book. 42. Irenaeus, Wasserspiegel, D4r. Sardanapolis was the last King of the Assyrians said to have declined into an effeminate debauchery. After mounting a lastditch resistance against the invading Persians, he committed suicide. 43. Ibid., H6r-H8v. 44. Ibid., Q6v. 45. Ibid. 46. This idea, present in all of Irenaeus’s wonder books, is also common in his purely theological works as well. His discussion of the nature of man, Contrafet und Spiegel des menschen mit seinen eigentlichen Farben aus Gottes Wort illuminirt und ausgeschrieben (Ursel: N. Heinrich, 1586), is particularly thorough in developing scatological imagery and its proof of the demonic character of humankind. 47. Irenaeus, Prognosticon Aus Gottes Wort nötige Erinnerung (n.p., 1578). 48. Clarissa Doris Hellman, The Comet of 1577. Its Place in the History of Astronomy (New York: Columbia, 1944) provides an extensive bibliography of the many tracts published about the event. 49. J. R. Christianson, “Tyco Brahe’s German Treatise on the Comet of 1577: A Study in Science and Politics,” Isis 70 (1979): 110–40, here 130; Sara Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51–52. 50. Irenaeus, Prognosticon Aus Gottes Wort, A3r-v. 51. Ibid., A2r-A3r. 52. Ibid., A3v: “Sondern Wunder und Zeichen geschehen unnd begeben sich wunderbarlich aus sonderlicher providentz vorsorge rhat schickung oder ja zulassung und verhengnis Gottes . . . ” 53. Ibid. The comet catalogue runs to more than thirty-five pages and appears from B3r- G1r. 54. Georg Caesius, Chronick oder ordenliche verzeichnuß unnd beschreibung aller Cometen von der algemeinen Sundfluten (Nuremberg: Valentin Fuhrmann, 1579). 55. Irenaeus, Prognosticon Aus Gottes Wort, Q7r- Q8v. 56. Ibid., Q8v-R1v. 57. Ibid., S2r-S2v. 58. Ibid., G1r- G3v. 59. Augustine, City of God, 22:8. 60. Iranaeus, Prognosticon aus Gottes Wort, L2r.

218 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

no t e s Ibid., M1v. Ibid., N4v. Ibid., M2v. Ibid., M4r. Ibid., O4r-v. Ibid., R2v-Bb3v. Ibid., Dd1v. Ibid., Cc2r-Dd3v. Irenaeus, Contrafahet und Spiegel des Menschen (Ursel: N. Heinrich, 1582). Ibid., A3v-A4r. Ibid., C2v. Irenaeus, De monstris. Von seltzamen Wundergeburten (Oberursel: Nicolaus Henricus, 1585). Ibid., B2v. Augustine, City of God, 21:9; Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 95–98. Irenaeus, De monstris, A1r. Ibid., B1r-B2v. Caspar Peucer, Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Wittenberg: Crato, 1553). Irenaeus, De monstris, J1r -Tt3r. Ibid., T2r-v. Ibid. Rudolf Schenda, “Die deutschen Prodigiensammlung des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 4 (1963): 637–710, here 648. Irenaeus, Wasserspiegel, B4v-B5r.

chap ter 6 1. Published in Paul Tillich, History of Christian Thought (New York, 1956; 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 278. 2. Robert Kolb, “Dynamics of Party Conflict in the Saxon Late Reformation: Gnesio-Lutherans vs. Philippists,” Journal of Modern History 49, On Demand Supplement (1977), D1289-D1305. 3. Andreas Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum. Historienn vnd Exempelbuch. Aus heiliger Schriff t/ und vielen andern bewerten vnd beglaubten Geistlichen vnd Weltlichen Büchern vnd Schriff ten gezogen (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1568). 4. In Latin, the word promptuarium means literally “that which is made available for use,” underscoring the collection’s intention as a storehouse for the evangelical pastor. 5. Heidemarie Schade, “Andreas Hondorffs Promptuarium Exemplorum,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation: Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion

Notes

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

2 19

von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 646–703, here 658 and 691. Ibid., 693–99. Ibid., 657. Ibid. Hondorff ’s biographical details appear on 647–48. Hondorff ’s works included translations and several authored works. The first was a translation from Low German into High of a dialogue originally written by Johannes Frederus in defense of women and the marital estate entitled Lob vnd Vndschuldt der Ehefrawen (Leipzig, Jacob Berwald, 1568; Frankfurt am Main, 1569). The second translation was a rendering in High German of a Latin declamation written by the late-medieval Augustinian Zacharias Lillius, Declamatio Lilij Vincentini: von dem vergenglichen Elenden Menschlichen Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Anthony Corthoys, 1571). Besides the Promptuarium, Hondorff authored two additional works, an advice manual for parents entitled Der Eltern und Kinder Spiegel (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1568; Leipzig, 1569, 1596) and a historical and saints’ calendar, Calendarium sanctorum et historiarum (Leipzig: Jacob Berwald, 1573). Martin the Pole (Martin of Opava, or in Germany, Martin von Troppau) is better known for being the most prominent source of transmission for the “Pope Joan” legend, a story contained in his Chronicle of the Popes and Emperors. See “Martinus Polonius’ Chronicle of the Popes and Emperors. A Medieval Best-seller and its Neglected Influence on English Medieval Chroniclers,” The English Historical Review 116 (2001): 327–41. On the Promptuarium, see Anne-Élyse Lebourgeois, “Le Promptuarium Exemplorum de Martin le Polonais, O.P. (†1278). Édition critique et commentaire” (diss., École Nationale des Chartes, 2002). As Lebourgeois shows, there were two late fi fteenth- century printings of the Promptuarium published at Strasbourg in 1484 and 1488. Little is known about the life and career of Johannes Herolt, though C. C. Swinton Bland summarizes what is in his translation of Herolt’s Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary (London: Routledge, 1928; reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessenger Publishing, 2004), 1–8. He was a Dominican friar at Basel and his Promptuarium exemplorum was widely known through forty- eight manuscript examples in circulation before 1520. Hondorff included a table of sources in his book immediately after the dedication. Among the early church historians he lists as sources are Eusebius, Socrates Constantinopolus, Sozomenus Theodoretus, and Nikephoros. Roman authors include Livy, Pliny, Valerius Maximus, Flavius Josephus, Plutarch, Suetonius, Gellius, Aelius, Virgil, and Ovid. Humanist authorities include Petrarch, Aenius Sylvius, Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Münster, Lycosthenes, and Sebastian Franck. His work also included material drawn from the Polish Chronicle, Johannes Aventinus’s Bavarian Chronicle, and the Ursberger Chronicle.

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13. The church fathers quoted included Ambrose, Augustine, Bernard, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Gregory, Jerome, Maxentius, Origen, and Tertullian. The medieval theologians listed are Paul the Deacon, Johannes Herolt, the Saxo- Grammaticus, and the Hexenhammer of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Contemporary theological and religious works consulted include those of Luther, Melanchthon, Manlius, Sleidanus, Weller, Fincel, and Goltwurm. 14. Ludwig Rabus, Der Heiligen auβerwőhlten Gottes Zeugen, Bekennern und Martyren . . . warhaff te Historien, 8 vols. (Strasbourg: Samuel Emmel, 1552–58). 15. He did include a case from his time as minister at Naumburg in which a mother cursed her son, expressing the desire never to see him again. That very afternoon he fell into the Saale and drowned, a testimony to the wages of anger and misspoken words. See Promptuarium Exemplorum, 166r. Another account dated 1562 relates the tale of a woman at Droyβig in Hondorff ’s parish, whom he alleged had killed her husband and stewed his head, hands, and feet, while hanging the rest of his remains in the smokehouse. She was executed by being torn apart with hot pincers, and her body was broken on the wheel, an example of the convergence of divine and human law. Locals, Hondorff tells his readers, suspected she was a witch; see Promptuarium Exemplorum, 270r. He treats the case as a horrific crime against the sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”). 16. On the propensity to draw contemporary accounts of wonders from Fincel, Goltwurm, and Lycosthenes, see Schade, “Andreas Hondorff ’s Promptuarium Exemplorum,” 654, 675–77. The accounts included under the fourth commandment (“Honor thy father and mother”) and the fifth (“Thou shalt not kill”) recount most of these stories. Cf. especially, Promptuarium Exemplorum, 165v-169v, for cases of matricides and patricides and spectacularly rebellious children and their just desserts. 17. Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum, 1r-23v. 18. Ibid., 24r-35v. 19. Ibid., 35v-57v. 20. Ibid., “Vorrede an der Leser,” unpaginated. 21. Ibid., 36r. 22. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 8:35–36. 23. Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum, 128v-129r. 24. Ibid., 129r-v. 25. Ibid., 129v. 26. Ibid., 129v-130r. 27. Ibid., 107v-113r. 28. Ibid., see esp. 107v-113r, for a large collection of angelic stories and a discussion of the angels’ powers.

Notes

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29. Ibid., 73r- 82r treats the powers of the devil and demons. Here Hondorff stresses the power of the devil to adopt the human form and to rely on demons that often assume the appearance of animals. 30. Ibid. 31. Although numerous stories of the power and deceptions of the devil and demons occur throughout the collection, the conclusion of the section treating the fi rst commandment is, in particular, fi lled with these accounts. Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum, 37r- 57v. A complete catalogue of the diabolical motifs of the collection is included in Rainer Alsheimer, “II. Katalog protestantischer Teufelserzählungen des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation: Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoff en und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 417–519 (Numbers 278–435 in Alsheimer’s catalogue). There are 157 legends cited in the collection treating the devil. While that fi gure represents a considerable number, it is not an overwhelming proportion of a collection that includes thousands of exempla. 32. Clifford Davidson, “Dr. Faustus of Wittenberg,” Studies in Philology 59 (1963): 514–23; Frank Baron, Doctor Faustus: From History to Legend, Humanistische Reihe 1, Abhandlungen 27 (Munich: Fink, 1978); Frank Baron, “Which Faustus Died at Staufen? History and Legend in the Zimmersche Chronik,” German Studies Review 6 (1983): 85–94. 33. WA Tischreden, 3601. On Luther’s Relationship to the Faustus legend generally, see Erich Schmidt, “Faust und Luther,” Akademie der Wissenschaften Sitzungsberichte, Philosophische-Historische Klasse 25 (1896): 567–91; Eugen Wolf, Luther und Faust (Halle: Niemeyer, 1912); and Wolfgang Brückner and Rainer Alsheimer, “Forschungsprobleme der Satanologie und Teufelserzählungen,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation, Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 393–416. 34. Baron, “Which Faustus Died at Staufen?” 35. Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum, 83v. 36. Ibid., 155r-160v and 220r-225r include representative passage of such stories. 37. A discussion of the righteousness of ancient pagan kings under the eighth comandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness”) is typical of such passages. Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum, 299r-309v. 38. Bütner, Epitome Historiarum. Christlicher Ausgelesener Historien und Geschichten Aus alten und bewehrten Scribenten. Und die sich auch zu unsern zeiten zugetragen. Ordentlicher und kurtzer Auszug. In Fünff Bücher. Nach ordnung under der Lere in den zehen Geboten Gottes und der sieben Bitten in unserm heiligenvater unser Gerichtet (n.p., 1576).

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39. Ernst Heinrich Rehermann, “Die Protestantischen Exempelsammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Versuch eines Überblicks und einer Charakterisierung nach Auf bau und Inhalt,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation: Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 580–645, here 597. 40. Bütner, Epitome Historiarum, a4r. 41. Ibid. 42. The table of authorities that Bütner cites includes twenty-two ancient authors, eleven church fathers, four medieval chroniclers and exempla collectors, fifteen humanists, and sixteenth Lutheran theologians and wonder book authors. It is thus a less extensive list of authorities than is to be found in Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, and many of the texts appear to have been cited secondhand from other works. He does include miracles, natural wonders, and signs drawn from Job Fincel, Christoph Irenaeus, Caspar Goltwurm, and Andreas Hondorff, but makes no mention of the Basel portent collector Conrad Lycosthenes in his table of authorities. In the foreword, however, he mentions Lycothenes as one of the edifying contemporary authors of exempla. Bütner, Epitome Historiarum, a3r. 43. Georg Steinhart, Epitome Historiarum, das ist Christliche und kurtze beschreibung vieler denckwirdiger Historien und Exempel . . . Erstlich, durch M. Wolff gangum Bütnern, weyland Pfarherrn in der Graff schaff t Manβfeld, nach den heiligen Zehen Geboten und sieben Bitten Deβ Vaters unsers zusammen getragen. Jetzo aber auff s Newe ubersehen, mit vielen nützlichen Historien vermehrt, nach Ordnung der fünff Haupstück des Catechismi D. Luth. Und derselben nutzlichen Auβlegung gerichtet, und gebessert (Leipzig: Jacob Ärpel d. Ä., 1596 and 1615). 44. Heinrichrehermann, “Die Protestantischen Exempelsammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” 600. 45. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historische Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 56 vols. (Leipzig: Dunder & Humblot, 1875– 1912), 28:705–706 (hereafter cited as ADB). 46. Zacharias Rivander (b. Bachmann), Lutherus Redivivus: Eine newe Comoedia von der langen und ergerlichen Disputation bey der Lehre vom Abendmal, derer so man Lutherisch und Calvinisch, so wol der andern, die man Philippisch und Flacianisch heist (n.p., 1593). 47. Rivander, Düringische Chronica: Von Ursprung und Herkommen der Düringer, Auch allen jhren fürnembsten Geschichten und Thaten, so sich mit jhnen, vor und nach Christi Geburt, biß auff diese unsere zeit, begeben und zugetragen haben; Item, Von jren Königen, und wenn die Königliche Regierung bey jhnen auff gehört, . . . / Auß alten, . . . Chronicken, trewlich und fl eissig zusammen gezogen, und den beyden löblichen Nationen, Düringen und Hessen, zu ehren, . . . , in Druck verfertiget (Frankfurt am Main: Spieß, 1581 and 1596).

Notes

2 23

48. These biographical details are taken from Ernst Heinrich Rehermann, “Die Protestantischen Exempelsammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” 603. 49. ADB, 28:705–6. 50. Der Ander Theil Promptvarii Exemplorum. Darinnen viel Herrliche Schöne Historien Allerley Alten vnd neuwen Exempel / Auch viel nützliche / merckliche vnd denckwirdige Geschichten /von Tugendt vnd Untugendt / guten vnd bösen / löblichen vnd schändtlichen Wercken vnd Thaten / sampt derselbigen Straff e vnd Belohnung / in hohen vnd nidern Ständen / etc. verfasset sind / Dergleichen im vorigen vnd ersten Promptuario gar nicht gefunden warden / Alles nach den heyligen Zehen Gebotten Gottes fein ordentlich distribuirt vnd Auβgetheilt . . . Auβ den besten vnd gewissesten Griechischen Lateinischen vnd Teutschen Chronicken vnd Geschichtsbüchern treuwlich vnd fl eissig zusammen gezogen (Frankfurt am Main: Johann Spieβ for Sigmund Feyerabend, 1581). 51. The Berwald firm had originally secured a ten-year Saxon privilege in 1568 (Promptuarium Exemplorum, “Title Page,” 1568) suggesting that they recognized the commercial potential of the book at the outset. Such privileges, though, were not enforceable outside the boundaries of the duchy. 52. The Schmidt editions appeared under a simplified title as Andreas Hondorff, Promptuarium exemplorum das ist: Historien und Exempelbuch nach Ordnung der H.Zehen Gebott Gottes auβ H. Schriff t und anderen bewehrten Scribenten zusammen getragen (Frankfurt am Main: 1571 (2 printings), 1574, 1577, 1580, 1581, 1584, 1595, 1625). 53. Hondorff, Theatrvm Historicm illvstrivm exemplorum ad honeste, piet, beateqvu vivendvm mortale genvs informantivm, ex antiqvissimis simvi. Ac novissimis sacrarvm et prophanarvm historiarum monumentis constructum, & in decem Classes secundum Mosaicae legis Praecepta distinctum, trans. Philip Lonicer (Frankurt: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1575, 1577, 1579, 1580, 1586, 1590, 1598, 1598). The work was also reprinted in a 1604 Wittenberg edition and in three additional Frankfurt printings in the seventeenth century (1607, 1616, and 1633) by the printer Johann Saurius working for the publishers Rulandius & Rothius. Information concerning editions is drawn from Schade, “Andreas Hondorff ’s Promptuarium Exemplorum,” 697–99. 54. Bibliographical information from Ernst Heinrich Rehermann, “Die Protestantischen Exempelsammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” 634. 55. Ibid., 604. 56. Ibid., 634–35. 57. Ibid., 604. 58. Rivander, Promptuarium Exemplorum, Historien und New Exempelbuch (Eiβleben: Urban Gaubisch, 1592). The colophon includes the words “Cum privilegio.” 59. Rivander, Der Ander Theil, a3v.

224

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60. Rivander published a final two-volume folio of historical exempla and wonders entitled Fest Chronica Darinnen viel auβerlesene / denckwirdigen Historien oder Geschichte . . . (Leipzig: Henning Grosse, 1591), but it was even less successful than his continuation of Hondorff ’s Promptuarium. A second edition of the work appeared in 1602, but it was never republished after that date. See Ernst Heinrich Rehermann, “Die Protestantischen Exempelsammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” 605. 61. The Bütner/Steinhart and Rivander compendia were only the first of many works to imitate Hondorff ’s success. Ernst Heinrich Rehermann’s “Die Protestantischen Exempelsammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts” examines this literature through the end of the seventeenth century and includes bibliographical details about editions. Rehermann shows how the collections that appeared after 1600 came to concentrate less and less on wonders as signs of God’s anger. In place of the God of retribution that had flourished in the collections in the later sixteenth century, collectors stressed that wonders and oddities were proof of the infinite possibilities with which God had charged creation. By the mid-seventeenth century, the genre Hondorff had helped to create was becoming more and more a kind of literary Wunderschatzkammer, a collection of oddities and curiosities intended to strike awe in readers before the wonders of the natural world. 62. See Philip M. Soergel, “The Afterlives of Monstrous Infants,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 288–309. 63. Anon., “Hans de Moer geboren aus Brabant” [incipit] (n.p., 1566), Deutsche Illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Die Sammlung der HerzogAugust-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, ed. Wolfgang Harms (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), 1:230. 64. Anon., “Eine rechte warhaff te Abcontrofactur unnd wunderbarlichen Geschöpf von einer Jungfrawen welche in Ostfriessland dem 12. Novemb. 1596 geboren” (Prague: without publisher, 1616), reprinted in Dorothy Alexander and Walter L. Strauss, German Single-Leaf Woodcut 1600–1700 (New York: Abaris Books, 1978), II:730. 65. Conrad Dieterich, Ulmische Cometen Predigte, so nechst abgewichenen 1618. Jahrs (Ulm: Meder, 1619). 66. The text is reprinted in Alexander and Strauss, German Single-Leaf Woodcut 1600–1700, II:781. 67. Although a complete study of these themes awaits a fuller treatment, which I intend to address in a second volume on the enduring role of miracles and wonders in the seventeenth- century Lutheran world, some preliminary observations and judgments are warranted here by way of conclusion.

Notes

2 25

68. Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives. The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 111 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). 69. Martin Raphelt, Einfeltiger und kurtzer Unterricht /von den klaglichen Brandschänden (Leipzig: Börner, 1592). 70. David Namsler, Auβführlicher Bericht von Wassern und Wasserflutten (Liegnitz: Nicolaus Schneider, 1608). 71. Zacharias Wesemann, Christliche Wetterpredigt (Magdeburg: Kirchner, 1609), commenting on the disastrous consequences of a major August storm in the region certainly treated the event as a punishment for sin, but immediately called his readers’ attention to the fact that there was not greater suffering. The storm was a mirror of God’s mercy and not merely his anger. Johannes Risler, pastor at Horneburg near Hamburg, similarly remarked in his Himmels Predigen von Donner und Blitz (Hamburg: Wolder, 1615) that the preservation of many in a recent spate of evil weather was proof of God’s mercy and preservation. And although Reinhard Bake, a pastor at Magdeburg, warned that a recent catastrophic fire at Magdeburg was a divine punishment, he called attention to the fact that God had not allowed it to consume the entire city like the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah. More than two hundred houses may have been destroyed in the great conflagration, yet the preservation of the city was proof that Magdeburgers were a chosen people. They had merely been chastened, not extirpated by the fire. See Reinhard Bake, Tabeera Magdaburgensiam, Das ist: Drey christliche Fewr unnd Brand Predigten (Madeburg: Andreas Betzel, 1613 and 1614). 72. These and the following details about the flood are taken from Heinrich Döring’s nineteenth- century account in F. Sydow, Thüringen und der Harz: Mit ihren Merkwürdigkeiten, Volkssagen und Legenden (Sondershausen: Eupel, 1844), 208–11. 73. On flood risk in the region and an analysis of summer and winter flooding patterns over time, cf. M. Mudelsee, M. Deutsch, M. Börngen, and G. Tetzlaff, “Trends in Flood Risk of the River Werra (Germany) over the past 500 years,” Hydrological Sciences Journal 51 (2006): 818–33. 74. A summary of the changes brought by the Second Little Ice Age Event is found in Christian Pfister’s “Weeping in the Snow: The Second Period of Little Ice Age-type Impacts, 1570–1630,” in Kulturelle Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit” ed. Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Rupprecht, 2008), 32–86. 75. Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (Paris: Flammarion, 1967). 76. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York and London, 1971). 77. Jean Delumeau, La Péché et la Peur. La culpabilisation en Occident, XIIIeXVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1983); Delumeau, Sin and Fear. The Emergence

226

78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

no t e s of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990). Abraham Langen, Historische Relation: Das ist: Warhaff tiger Bericht unnd gruendliche Beschreibung von der grossen Wasserflut so sich hat begeben unnd zugetragen in diesen 1613 Jahre den 29. May in den Fuerstlichen Stadt Weimar im Land zu Thueringen (Erfurt and Hof: n.p., 1613). Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Disaster in America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–46. Jay Henry Mowbray, The Sinking of the Titanic (Harrisburg, PA: The Minter Company, 1912). Quotations taken from the title page. Anon., Warhaff tiger Bericht unnd grundliche Beschreibung von der grossen Wasserflut so sich hat begeben und zugetragen in disem 1613 Jahre (Erfurt: Martin Spangenberg, 1613), 4 unnumbered pages. Langen, Historische Relation, A2r-E1V, figures compiled by adding the mortalities recorded in the accounts of damage in each of the villages and towns. Langen, Zwo Wetterpredigten (Jena: Mattheus Pfeilschmidt, 1613). Abraham Suarinus, Des zornigen Gottes scharffe Wind- und Wasseruthe (Altenburg bei Meissen: Johann Meuschke, 1613). Ibid., 14. Ibid., 9. Bernhard Schilling, Vier Predigten von Gewittern (Erfurt: Mechler, 1613), 33–60, esp. 33–37. Anon., Warhaff tiger Bericht unnd grundliche Beschreibung von der grossen Wasserflut so sich hat begeben und zugetragen in disem 1613 Jahre. R. W. Scribner, “Incombustible Luther: The Image of the Reformer in Early Modern Germany,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1987), 338.

Index

Abimelech, son of Gideon, 115 Abraham, Hebrew Patriarch, 62, 106, 107 Accidenzer, 145–6 Adam and Eve: and disease, 21, 63; and gluttony, 135; physical perfection of, 148; rebellion of, 117, 149, 161 Adoni-Bezek, Cannanite king, 115 adultery, 138–9 Agricola, Johann, 123, 198n90 Agricola, Rudolf, 111 Albertus Magnus, 58 Alexander VI, Pope, 148 allegory: and Luther’s Monk Calf, 50–1, 85; attitude of Caspar Goltwurm to, 97–8, 106, 118–9, 121; in Irenaeus’s wonder books, 134, 149; in Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, 159; Protestant abandonment of, in biblical interpretation, 173, 208n13 Amazons, 116–7 Amsdorf, Nikolaus von, 43, 52 Anabaptists, 44, 97, 149 Andreae, Jakob, 145, 146, 149 angels: and angelology, 58, 59, 160, 197n80 in Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck, 104, 107, 120;

in Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, 160–1; In Namsler sermon, 175; Luther’s reform of belief in, 57–61; Anne, Saint, 35, 37 Antichrist, 39, 50, 67, 114 antinomianism, 43, 117, 123, 128, 198n90 apocalypticism: and Fincel, 64, 67, 68–70, 74, 76, 89–94; and Luther, 33, 41, 47–49, 50, 52; and Lycosthenes, 79–80 and Wick, 126–7; in Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck, 105, 111, 120–1; in Irenaeus’s wonder books, 134, 142, 150; in later Reformation, 68–9, 166–7, 175, 181, 201n10 late-medieval, 4, 32–3 apparitions: angelic, 59, celestial, 19, 23–24, 74, 76, 89, 112, 127 See also, visions Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 58 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 151 Aristotle, 73, 146 astrology, 5, 11, 62, 106, 157, 199n90, 201n10

228

inde x

Augsburg, birth of deformed triplets in (1531), 83, 88, 118; imperial diet at (1530), 56–7, 72, 83, 119; Peace of, 129; see also Interim Augustine, Saint: against divination, 10–11; on Adam and Eve, 147; on Creation and its wonders, 2, 54–6; on miracles as confirmation of Christian truth, 144; on providence, 162; on the persecution of the church, 114 Aventinus, Johannes, 18 Barnes, Robin, 69, 91 Barth, Karl, 153 Bartholomew, Saint, 37, 120–1; See also Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) bearded grapes, 25, 26 bees, 159 Berwald, Jacob, 82–3, 155 blood rain, 77, 133, 192n61 Boaistuau, Pierre, 86 Bonaventura, Saint, 58 book of nature: allegorical interpretation of, 51; and curiosity, 174; as authority for theology, 28, 73, 123, 150, 153; inferior to the scriptures and theology, 66, 168; Bossy, John, 78 Brahe, Tyco, 142 Brant, Sebastian, 3–7, 9–10, 12–13 Brecht, Martin, 36 Brethren of the Common Life, 122 broadsides, illustrated: after 1600, 168–72; and Hondorff ’s Promptuarium, 157; Brant and humanist circle, 4–6;

early sixteenth-century prints, 13–15; later sixteenth-century prints, 23–7, 72, 74; on monsters, 148; treating Great Comet of 1577, 142–44; Wickiana, 124–6 Brück, Gregory, 56–7 Bullinger, Heinrich, 24, 125–6 Burgkmair, Hans the Elder, 14 Bütner, Wolfgang, 163–6 Bynum, Caroline, 2 cabbala, 48 Caesius, Georg, 143 Cain and Abel, 115 calendars, 101–3 Caligula, Roman emperor, 148 Calvin, John, 59, 136–7, 139 Calvinism: as opponent of Lutheranism, 31, 59, 69, 93, 128, 149, 165; martyrologies in, 103; social disciplining in, 69, 139, Carion, Johannes 99, Catholicism: as opponent of Lutheranism, 49–50, 124–5 efforts at reunion with Protestants, 71; pilgrimage shrines, 31, 34–5, 128; Protestant polemics against, 49–50, 64, 100, 105, 115, 118, 122, 139, 144, 159, 206n74; re-adoption of Catholic rituals during Interim, 95, 116; resurgence of, in late sixteenth century, 72, 93; social disciplining, 69, 78, 139; theology of wonders and miracles, 31, 63, 107, 156, 213n13; Celichius, Andreas, 21 Celtis, Conrad, 5

Index cessation of miracles, doctrine of, 31, 41 changelings, 150 Charlemagne, German emperor, 103 Charles IV, king of Bohemia, 119 Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, 77, 118, Charles VIII, king of France, 6–7 Chemnitz, Martin, 145, 146 Chladni, Ernst, 2 church calendars, see calendars Chytraeus, David, 100, 202n15 Cicero, 96, 101, Clark, Stuart, 108–9 Comet of 1577, see Great Comet of 1577, comets: as denunciation of sin, 148, 151, 172; as portents, 6, 76, 102, 112, 133–4, 147; exploited in cheap print, 125–7; in Fincel’s and Goltwurm’s supernatural theory, 89–90, 92, 211n74 Commodus, Roman emperor, 115, 117 consistory, 131, 139 Copenhagen, 88 Cracow, Monster of, 85–6, 88 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 49, 50 Crespin, Jean, 103 crocodile, 159 Cruciger, Caspar, 149 Darius the Persian, 115 Delumeau, Jean, 69–70, 177, 202n15 devil: as author of monstrous births, 86–7, 118; as cause of human depravity, 21–3, 84; as deceiver, 39, 43–4, 72, 75, 102, 106–8, 141; greater power in the Last Days, 108–9, opponent of angels and the godly, 60–2, 107, 119–21, 137, 159, 161 devil books, 19, 137

2 29

Dieterich, Conrad, 172 Dionysius the Areopagite, 58, 122 see also Pseudo-Dionysius Discipulus, see “Herolt, Johannes” disease: as apocalyptic sign, 74–5, 77, 88–9, 91–2, 143, 146; caused by sin, 62–3, 68–9, 146; in modern social history, 61, 68, 178; occurs in God’s providence, 37, 53, 61; protective rituals against, 16 disenchantment of the world, 31 divination, 10–12, 80, 106, 119, 201n10 Donne, John, 151 Dürer, Albrecht, 10 Eber, Paul, 23, 101 eclipses, 6, 12, 72, 74, 92, 102, 112, 133, 143 Egypt, 159 Eisleben, 131, 166 Elagabalus, Roman emperor, 115, 117 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 86 Ensisheim, 1–9, 19 epicureanism, 54, 136, 140, 181, 216n31 Erasmus, Desiderius: and prisca theologia, 108; and Pseudo-Dionysius, 59; as critic of late-medieval piety, 4, 35, 37; as inspiration for the Reformation, 110; as opponent of Luther’s notion of the will, 129; as rhetorician, 96, 97; Esdras, Book of Second, 88 Eucharist, 16, 17–8, 36, 64–5 Ezzelino da Romano, 115 Faust legend, 161 Feyerabend, Sigmund, 165–6, 200n8 Ficino, Marsiglio, 58, 163

230

inde x

Fincel, Job, 27–9, 67–92; and Goltwurm, 93–95, 104–5, 117–8; and Irenaeus, 126–7, 144, 148–9, 150; as source in later Reformation, 154, 157, 164, 166–7, 172, 182 fires, 18, 113–4, 174, 175, 179 Flacius, Matthias, 29, 72, 100, 110, 128–31, 153 flood: as punishment for heresy and impiety, 18, 141–2; biblical, 24, 63, 98, 134–9; Thuringian (1565), 140–1; Thuringian Sintflut (1613), 175–83 Florence, Monster of, 47 Formula of Concord, 145–6, 149, 154, 165, 167 fornication, 138–9, 140 Foxe, John, 103 Frankfurt am Main: 130, 155, 165, 166; book fair in, 68, 137 freaks, 3, 168–72 Frederick III, Holy Roman emperor, 6, 7 Fuchs, Leonhart, 82 funeral sermons, 174 Galen, 146 Gaubisch, Urban, 166 George, Margrave of BrandenburgAnsbach, 49 Gessner, Konrad, 126 Gleichen, County of (Thuringia), 131 gluttony, 21, 132, 135–6, 139–40, 149, Gnesio-Lutherans, 29–30, 72–3, 100, 105–6, 120, 129–30, 137–39, 153–4, 167 Gölitz, Johann, 20–1 Goltwurm, Caspar, 29, 93–123, 126–8, 132, 144, 148 150, 154, 157, 164, 166, 172 grain rain, 25, 192n61 Great Comet of 1577, 23, 142–5,

Grey, Lady Jane, 116 Grimmental, 39 Grünpeck, Josef, 7–8 Hadrian, Roman emperor, 101 Henry VIII, king of England, 115 Herolt, Johannes, 156 Hesshusius, Tileman, 149 Hildegard of Bingen, 103 Hippocrates, 146 historical calendars, see calendars history, study of, 29, 76–77, 79, 94, 96–104, 106, 109–10, 121, 162 Höltzl, Blasius, 8 Holy Roman Empire, 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 114–5 Hondorff, Andreas, 30, 154–67 humanism: and angelology, 58, 202n15; and apocalypticism, 202n15; and biblical interpretation, 96–7; attention to signs and portents, 4–5, 13, 16, 18, 78–80, 86, 139, 199n3; attitude toward saints, 35, 37; in Goltwurm’s works, 101, 105, 108, 111 in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, 62; in later Reformation, 157, 162, 164, 166 Huss, John, 114, 157 ichneumon, 159 imperial diet, 10, 56–7. 72, 83, 118–9 Indulgence Controversy, 36, 37, 67, 94 indulgences, 35, 40 Interim (1548), 71–2, 74, 101, 105, 116, 123, 128, 137, 141, 144–5, 202n15 Irenaeus, Christoph, 29, 124–52, 153–4, 164, 166–7, 172, 182 Italian Wars, 3–4, 47 Jacob and Esau, 118 Jena, 68, 70–1, 76, 89, 91, 92, 95, 105, 129, 130, 144, 176

Index Jerome, Saint, 37 Jesuits, 155–6 Jesus Christ, 45, 98, 106, 135 Jews, 45, 58, 105, 106, 109, 58, 110, 123 Johann Friedrich I, Saxon Duke, 48, 130, 144, 202n18 John the Baptist, 119 Julius II, Pope, 86 Laaberberg, 18 Lamenit, Ursula, 36 Landser Sow, 9, 10 Landshut, deformed birth in, 15–6 Langen, Abraham, 178–80 Lavater, Ludwig, 126 Law and Gospel: as response to antinomianism, 30, 122–3; 198n90; in Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck 113, 122–3; in Irenaeus’s wonder book, 144, 146, 151, in Melanchthon’s theology, 123, 128; in later Reformation, 155, 158, 161, 163–4, 168, 183 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 177 Lefèvre, d’Étaples, Jacques, 56 Leipzig: 95, 111, 164, as center of Philippism, 71, 105, 129; Interim, 71, 116 128; printing in, 68, 82, 91, 155, 165, 166 Lichtenberger, Johannes, 33, 47 lion, 159 Loci Communes, 30, 94, 157 Lonicer, Philip, 161, 165 Lucretius, 54, 101, 216n31 Luther, Martin: 28, 33–68; Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, 39–40; and Augustine, 54–55; and St. Anne, 35–36, 37; Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 40–1;

23 1

in relationship to Melanchthon, 42–3, 49–50, 52–3, 73, 98–99; Lectures on Genesis, 62–64, 74, 109, 113, 136, 146, 148, 198n84, 198n90; on angels, 57–61; on the Monk Calf, 48–52; on the saints and their miracles, 34–46; on wonders as signs, 46–54; Table Talk, 45, 52, 53, 157; “weeping” image of, 182 Lycosthenes, Conrad, 78–82, 88, 126, 148, 154, 157, 166 Magdeburg: center of resistance, 71, 99, 100, 101, 105, 128; Centuries, 29, 130 manicheism, 29, 129–30, 161 Manlius, Johannes, 161 mannerism, 151–2 Marbach, Johannes, 130 Marius, Roman consul, 118 Marlowe, Christopher, 151, 161 Martin the Pole, 156 martyrdom: in Luther’s theology, 36, 37; in Protestant calendars, 101–2, 103; in wonder books, 106–7, 109, 114, 120–1, 126; in works of Ludwig Rabus, 103, 157; Mary Tudor, queen of England, 116 Mauelshagen, Franz, 126 Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor, 1, 4–5, 6–9, 102 Melanchthon, Philip: and Flacius, 130; and natural philosophy, 73; distaste for allegorical interpretation of the Bible, 97–8; friend of Goltwurm, 97, 98, 100, 105; friend of Luther, 53; Gnesio-Lutheran denunciation of, 72–73, 149;

23 2

inde x

Melanchthon (Cont.) leader of Philippists, 70–1, 72, 129, 153–4, 162; Loci Communes, 28, 94, 157; on the Papal Ass, 43, 49–50, 52, 85; study of history, 98–101, 103, 110; supporter of Müntzer and Zwickau Prophets, 43; See also, “Faust Legend” and “Law and Gospel” Michaelmas, Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, 57, 59–60 miracle: books, 31–2, 77–78; Fincel’s theory of, 89; medieval notion of, 2, 17–19, 34–35, 77; in Protestantism, 27–32, 39–42, 53–6, 62–5, 93–5, 104–6, 121 Molesanus, Peter, 111 Monk Calf of Freyberg, 34, 48–52, 149 monstrous births: Caspar Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck, 117–9, 125–7; display of, 3, 9, 19, 168–71; Fincel’s Wonder Signs 67, 76, 83, 85, 87–91; in early sixteenth-century broadsides, 4, 9–11, 13–16; in late sixteenth-century broadsides, 19–23; Irenaeus’s De monstris, 143–4, 147–8; Luther’s On the Monk Calf, 48–52; see also “Cracow, Monster of,” “Florence, Monster of,” “Ravenna, Monster of,” Moses, 46, 97–8, 106, 146 Multivallis, Johannes, 87 Müntzer, Thomas, 43 Musculus, Andreas, 19, 145 Namsler, David, 175 Nassau-Weilburg, county of, 95, 105

Natalibus, Peter de, 37 Naumburg an der Saale, 156 Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian emperor, 115 Nero, 115, 163 Netherlands, 140 Nicholas of Flüe, 107 Noah, 33, 97, 112, 134–7, 139 Norbanus, Roman statesmen, 118 Oldecop, Johann, 124, Opava, Martin, see “Martin the Pole” Papal Ass, 50, 85, 149 parhelia, 23, 72, 74, 112, 133, 211n74 peacock, 159 Peasants’ War, 43, 47 Pelagianism, 144, 145 pelican, 159 penance, sacrament of, 78, 139 Peter, Saint, 141–2 Petri, Heinrich, 78 Petzel, Christoph, 149 Peucer, Caspar, 148 Philippists, 30, 71–2, 99, 100, 105–6, 129–130, 149, 153–4, 199n3 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 58, 163 pilgrimage, 17–18, 34–6, 39, 157–8 plague, 37, 53, 74–7, 91–2, 102, 144 Platonism, Renaissance, 58 Pliny the Elder, 73, 77, 90, 112, 159 Pluderhosen, 19–21 pride, 21, 44, 87, 132, 135, 137–8 prisca theologia, 108, 162–3 prostitution, 138–9 Pseudo-Dionysius, 58–9, 120, 160 rabies, 74, 203n32 Rabus, Ludwig, 103, 157 rain, see “blood rain,” “grain rain,” and “flood” Raphelt, Martin, 174

Index Ravenna, Monster of, 47, 86–7, 88 Regensburg, 18, 39, 130 Reuchlin, Johannes, 111 Rhenanus, Beatus, 111 rhetoric, 94, 96–97, 105, 127 Rivander, Zacharias, 165–7 Rome: allegories, 97; ancient, 116–7, 118; Antichrist, 74–5, 76, 77, 141; Papal Ass, 49; pilgrimage goal, 35, 36; Protestant historiography concerning, 99–100 See also Sack of Rome (1527) Roper, Lyndal, 138–9 Rudolf II, Holy Roman emperor, 151 Sack of Rome (1527), 116 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), 126 salvific display (heilbringende Schau), 18–9 Savonarola, Girolamo, 114 Schenda, Rudolf, 150–1 Schilling, Bernhard, 181 Schoerer, Georg, 107 Schmalkaldic Wars, 69–71, 116, 123, 129, 144, 149, 202n15 seven deadly sins, 19, 21, 132, 138–9 Scipio, Roman general, 118 scriptures: 53, 63, 127, 157–8; allegorical interpretation of, 97–8; revelation of Law and Gospel, 163–4; superior to wonders, 38, 42–3, 51, 64, 66; wonders equal to, 94, 111, 123, 128, 150 Second Little Ice Age, 24, 177 Selnecker, Nikolaus, 145, 146 Shakespeare, William, 80, 151 Simler, Josias, 126 Sixtus IV, Pope, 148 sleeping sickness, 84–5

233

Socrates, 108 Sodom and Gomorrah, 24, 67, 135, 145, 225n71 sodomy, 87, 148, 206n74 sola fides, 38, 87, 117, 122, 183 Sorbin, Arnaud, bishop of Nevers, 124–5 Southern, Richard, 24 Spalatin, Georg, 37 Spangenberg, Cyriacus, 100, 138, 139, St. Tropez, 173 St. Vitus’s Dance, 74, 203n31 Stedersdorf, deformed birth in, 21–3 Steinhart, Georg, 164 Stifel, Michael, 48 Stigel, Johannes, 70–1 Strasbourg, 5, 9, 103, 130, 157 Streuber, Peter, 165 Strigel, Viktorin, 129–30, 149 Sturm, Vincenz, 155 Suarinus, Abraham, 180–1 Sulla, Roman general, 118 Supernova of 1572, 23 sweating sickness, 63, 68 syphilis, 8, 63, 68 Tannen, Eberhard von der, 44 Ten Commandments, 37, 138–9, 157, 163, 164, 166 Tettnang, deformed birth in, 14–16 Thomas, Keith, 177, 201n10 Thuringia: 70, 85, 131; flood (1565) 140; Rivander’s Thuringian Chronicle, 165; Sintflut (1613), 175–83 Tillich, Paul, 153 total depravity: and sexual sin, 72, 115–6, 206n74; as evangelical principle, 19, 21, 23, 27, 29; In Fincel’s Wonder Signs, 72;

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total depravity (Cont.) in Goltwurm’s Wunderwerck, 95, 102, 114; in Irenaeus’s works, 137, 138, 144, 154; in Luther’s theology, 38, 46, 64 Troglodytes, 159 Turks, 7–8, 9, 67, 76, 102, 116, 126 Ulrich, Saint, 103 Valla, Lorenzo, 58, 97, 197n80 visions, 43 See also apparitions Vischer, Christoph, 21 Voragine, Jacopo da, 37 Walker, D.P., 31 Warburg, Aby, 12 Warriors’ Sickness (Kriegerkrankenheiten (1549)), 74 Weimar: 164; consistory, 131; disputation at (1560), 129–30;

ducal court, 131, 179–80; Fincel in, 70, 71, 91; flood (1565) 140; grain rain in, 192n61; Thuringian Sintflut (1613), 176, 178, 179; Wick, Johann Jakob, 24, 125–7 Wilsnack, 17, 39 Wimpheling, Jacob, 111 Wittenberg: 23, 49, 53, 130, 156; center of Philippism, 71, 73, 105, 129; church in, 43, 48; University of, 29, 36, 44, 70, 71, 95, 98, 100–1, 131, women, 116–119 Worms, diet of 1495, 10; twins 9–10, 19 Zittau, 174 Zurich, 24, 91, 125, 126 Zwickau, 71, 91, 92; Prophets 43 Zwinglianism, 145