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The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess
The Paths of Prophecy in Reformation Europe
By Jonathan Green The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 Jonathan Green
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12007-9
CHAPTER 1
A Strange Prognostication
The prophecies of Wilhelm Friess, the most popular German prophetic pamphlets of the later sixteenth century, were the writings of a dead man: the title pages of these booklets insist that the prophecies were found with their ostensible author after his death. Their story begins, however, not in Germany but in the Low Countries, not in Friess's native Maastricht but in Antwerp, with Friess not yet dead, and with a printer being led to his execution.
On 28 November 1545, Jacob van Liesvelt was beheaded on the Great Market Square in Antwerp as the sudden conclusion to a lengthy and halting trial. He had been accused, not for the first time, of printing heretical works that had not received official approval and ecclesiastic endorsement, at a time when the Protestant Reformation was facing increasingly severe resistance. In some of the German principalities and imperial cities to the east, the Reformation had enjoyed decades of sovereign or civic support following its first stirrings in 1517, but in their hereditary lands in the Netherlands, the Habsburg rulers were vigorous and intolerant champions of orthodoxy.
At the time, Antwerp was approaching the height of its prosperity as the center of world trade, and with around one hundred thousand residents, it was second only to Paris among cities north of the Alps. Antwerp was home to around a thousand foreign merchants, with many more foreigners passing through the city at any given moment. Antwerp's economic preeminence was matched by its importance in printing and the book trade. The city was nominally subject to the dukes of Burgundy, but the dukes' other royal titles and more pressing matters elsewhere required the appointment of governors. Rule over the Netherlands remained a Habsburg family affair, however. Until 1556, the reigning Duke of Burgundy was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, succeeded on his abdication by his son Philip II, king of Spain. Until 1555, the Habsburg governor was Mary of Austria, the queen of Hungary and Charles's sister, followed by Emmanuel Philibert, the Duke of Savoy and Charles's nephew, who was, in turn, succeeded in 1559 by Margaret of Austria, the Duchess of Parma and Charles's illegitimate daughter. Antwerp's ruling magistrates took pains to preserve the city's privileges against the Habsburg royal court in Brussels, however. The struggle became more acute with the outbreak of the Reformation, as Antwerp's continued prosperity depended on the willingness of foreign merchants, including Protestants, to live and work in a Habsburg territory. Citizens of Antwerp who sympathized with the Reformation in the second half of the century were divided between Lutherans; adherents of various Anabaptist groups, who were subject to the most intense persecution; and, increasingly, Calvinists.
Jacob van Liesvelt, born into a family of printers around 1489 and with over three decades of his own experience in the profession by 1545, would have known where the boundaries of the unprintable lay in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Some of these boundaries were economic. The entrepreneurial nature of printing required van Liesvelt to produce books for which there was sufficient demand to justify the investment in paper, ink, and type, as well as the expertise of the laborers in his workshop. Politics also played a role, as state officials were wary of the press and its ability to quickly produce heretical or seditious works in hundreds or thousands of copies. As a medium for distributing texts, print was vulnerable to official sanctions at a number of pressure points. Unlike the slow and dispersed process of copying manuscripts, the printing of books was usually centralized in a single workshop, and many workshops were often located within the walls of a single city, so that all could be kept under the watchful eye of the local government. As the production of several hundred or a thousand copies of a given book required a great deal of specialized equipment and raw material, printers had a strong economic incentive to avoid official sanctions. Local and state governments could also offer rewards in the form of lucrative commissions for printing official proclamations, which prudent printers would not jeopardize. Jacob van Liesvelt was well aware that new regulations had stipulated the penalty of death for the unauthorized printing of religious works in 1540, as he had printed those regulations himself.
Yet the shifting demands for prepublication approval had caused legal troubles for van Liesvelt before and would be his eventual undoing. He had published the first complete Bible printed in Dutch in 1526, based in part on Martin Luther's translation, and some of van Liesvelt's later Bible editions included marginal notes and other material influenced by Luther. Van Liesvelt was denounced to local authorities in 1533 for printing a "very evil Bible" influenced by the German heresies; around the same time, the Antwerp executioner had burned a Bible and other books from van Liesvelt's workshop for promoting Lutheranism. In 1536, van Liesvelt was accused of printing a book that contained a false claim of official approval; in 1542, he was again charged with printing an unapproved and heretical work entitled Consolations of Divine Scripture. While another Antwerp printer, Adrian van Berghen, was executed in 1542, Jacob van Liesvelt was able to defend himself against the charges by arguing that the controversial work he had been accused of printing without approval was only a series of excerpts from other, previously approved books.
In late 1544, however, the edicts on printing began to be enforced with renewed harshness, and Jacob van Liesvelt again found himself in legal jeopardy for his edition of Consolations of Divine Scripture. Although Jacob van Liesvelt obtained the services of two professional advocates who made the same argument that had previously led to his exoneration, van Liesvelt's frequently postponed trial ended in November 1545 with his condemnation and execution.
The van Liesvelt family remained in Antwerp and continued printing, however. Jacob's widow, Maria Ancxt, published over eighty editions between 1546 and 1565, identifying herself both by her own name and as the widow of Jacob van Liesvelt. At first, Maria Ancxt printed primarily devotional works and portions of the Bible in Dutch and, to a lesser extent, in French, along with a few works of well-known humanists, including Erasmus and Sebastian Brant. In 1551, Maria Ancxt began printing secular popular literature. Hans van Liesvelt, the son of Jacob van Liesvelt and Maria Ancxt, also took up printing in that year, although on a smaller scale, with eighteen known editions until 1563. Mother and son cooperated on a number of projects, including the publication of Virgil's Aeneid in Dutch translation. The true sympathies of Maria Ancxt and Hans van Liesvelt may well have lain with the cause of Dutch Protestantism: literacy rates tended to be highest among the groups that were receptive to the Reformation, and printers were among the most literate of all professions. The conditions of the time made it impossible to express such views openly, however. Maria Ancxt and Hans van Liesvelt both understood only too well what the consequences were for appearing to flout the law at a time when persecution of religious dissent in the Netherlands had reached an unprecedented severity, and their editions were published with the required approval of local clergy and the countersignatures of government officials.
Protestant devotion in the Netherlands of the 1550s provides an example of what James C. Scott has termed a "hidden transcript," a discourse that must take place outside the view of those in power. That would seem to preclude the possibility of Protestant printing, as it would have been all but impossible to distribute books for sale to a dispersed audience and, at the same time, to avoid official scrutiny that could easily end in severe punishment. By their nature, printed books belong to the "public transcript," or the visible interactions of the subordinate and the dominating classes. One way out of this impasse lay in anonymous publication. As Scott notes, anonymity is a common strategy for stating prohibited opinions or taking forbidden actions, and some Dutch printers with a zeal for the new religion did choose to print Protestant works clandestinely under false names. Anonymous publication was specifically prohibited by the edicts on printing, however, and the risk of being caught was substantial. Other printers chose exile, attempting to export their forbidden books back into the Netherlands from Dutch émigré communities in England and Germany.
The difficulty of anonymous printing and the inefficiency of relying on imported books opened a gap between what Dutch readers wanted to read and what the book market offered. In 1562, a monk was said to have called for Antwerp to be burned, as the people were entirely Lutheran apart from the Italians and Spaniards living there. This overstated the case considerably: even more than twenty years later, Catholics remained the largest religious bloc in nearly all of the city's wards. Yet interest in the Reformation was quite substantial: Protestant and dissident works together constituted a quarter of all titles printed in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in 1566. For printers still under Habsburg rule, the considerable market opportunities presented by the popularity of these works could not be exploited without risking one's life and livelihood. In matters of religion, an immense distance lay between what many of their customers wanted to read and purchase and what printers were allowed to print and sell. Those who continued printing despite their Protestant affinities were forced to seek other strategies.
One such strategy, which Scott calls "euphemism," involved disguising prohibited expression just enough to avoid punishment. For Antwerp in the sixteenth century, this often entailed publishing ostensibly Catholic works with a hidden Protestant message. The combination of heightened devotion and an environment of intense persecution that existed in Antwerp and other Dutch printing centers in the mid-sixteenth century provides a classic example of communication under censorship, in which any message may be a multilayered statement meant both for its intended recipient and for the scrutinizing eye of the censor. One of the very few ways for printers to profit from public interest in the Reformation was to provide the Dutch reading public with doubled messages that were comprehensible to those sympathetic with the Reformation but that were opaque or unobjectionable to censors and civic authorities. The results of censorship include not only silencing or banality but also a redoubling of ingenuity. The full meaning of texts created under these conditions may not lie on the surface, but we can attempt to discover it through application of cultural knowledge and comparison with later, more open expressions of previously forbidden sentiments.
Read with an eye open for messages between the lines of type, some of Maria Ancxt's editions appear in a new light. In 1548, she published Savonarola's explications of Psalms 30 and 50 in a Dutch version based on a prohibited German translation. Savonarola had written these two commentaries while he was in prison awaiting execution. Around 1548 and again in 1555, Maria Ancxt published two editions of Histories and Prophecies from the Holy Scriptures Decorated with Pure Images and Devout Prayers, a devotional work consisting of prayers and Bible stories. An almanac was printed with both editions. The Bible stories would have been unobjectionable, but the prayers should have raised a few eyebrows by their exclusive focus on God's grace without mention of the church, by referring to clerical abuses, and by their decrying of the persecution that Christians were suffering. "Those who oppress Christ in his members are gaining the upper hand," one prayer complains, while another laments, "For now they persecute those who dare to tell people the truth and they cast them out and despise them where they can. Others they arrest and hang, and so much grief is done to them that almost no one dares to speak." Yet another prayer asks the Lord to witness how "no one dares risk his neck[!] for the glory of your name." Although the intent of these prayers should have been clear, the 1548 edition of the Histories and Prophecies was approved by Jan Goossens, parish priest of the Church of St. Jacob in Antwerp, and countersigned by Philips de Lens, secretary at the royal court of Brabant in Brussels. Maria Ancxt's second edition of the Histories and Prophecies, printed around 1555, was inspected and approved by Nicolaus Coppijn, dean of St. Peter's and chancellor of the university in Louvain.
Perhaps the censors willfully ignored the heretical religiosity of Maria Ancxt's edition of the Histories and Prophecies. While there is no evidence that Goossens secretly supported the Reformation, many of the clergy who declared for the new faith after 1566 (by which time Goossens had died) had no record of previous involvement. As for de Lens, later chroniclers report (without citing their evidence) that he was suspected of sympathizing with the Reformation as early as 1525. Franciscus van der Haer's 1623 annals of Brabant surmised that de Lens was the anonymous author of the "Compromise of the Nobility," a petition calling for the end of the Inquisition and the laws against heresy, which was issued by an alliance of Dutch noblemen in the winter of 1565–66, around the time of de Lens's death. The true allegiance of de Lens and Goossens may be beyond recovery, but they exemplify the environment of Antwerp in the 1550s, where not even priests and court officials were above suspicion, where a careless word might lead to denunciation and arrest, and where censorship, rather than simply preventing communication, was a constitutive element of a mode of reading and writing that was always alert for meanings below the surface. It was an environment where "fervent protestations of loyalty" — and, one might add, many other kinds of speech acts and written texts — "could not be taken at their face value." Despite the dual approbation, the heretical nature of the Histories and Prophecies was eventually recognized, and it was placed on the index of prohibited books in 1570. By then, however, Maria Ancxt was beyond the reach of any inquisitor.
In the 1550s, as Dutch Protestants were facing persecution of increasing severity, printers in the Low Countries began publishing astrological prognostications with increasing frequency, principally in Antwerp. Although Maria Ancxt was the earlier and more prolific printer of the two, her son, Hans van Liesvelt, was the first to print prophecies and prognostications. In fact, that type of literature comprises over half of his known output. For the years 1551 and 1552, Hans van Liesvelt printed three prognostications in French, two by Jacques Sauvages and one by Pierre de Goorle. Maria Ancxt took over the printing of de Goorle's prognostications by 1556, with six of his prognostications coming from her press by 1565. These short booklets containing astrological predictions for the upcoming year comprised an important and annually renewable market segment for early modern printers.
As much as astrological prognostications were marketed as learned experts' sober pronouncements based solely on careful observation of the planets and time-honored interpretive principles, the publication of astrological hocus-pocus gave authors broad leeway to comment on and critique the society in which they lived. The criticism was usually directed at any who might disrupt the established order, but times of upheaval also saw astrology enlisted in the cause of reform. The early days of the Reformation provide an example of astrological agitation — and also of its limits, even under a sympathetic sovereign. Johann Copp dedicated his prognostication for 1521 to Martin Luther and published another one a year later concerning the ominous planetary conjunctions of 1524. In this pamphlet, Copp, claiming to merely report what the stars ordained, predicted "much spilling of blood, burning, disunity and uproar between the common man and the clergy" and tried to sound sincere in expressing his fear of an "uprising against the bishops and all priests." Even though Copp insisted that the rebellion was unjust, this was more upheaval in an astrological prognostication than Prince-elector Frederick III of Saxony would tolerate, despite the prince's strong support for Martin Luther. The next year, Copp tried to walk back his prediction with a new pamphlet that examined the course of the heavens "more clearly than a year ago," but he soon found it advantageous to leave Saxony.
The Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands decreed punishments much worse than exile for supporting the Reformation, and yet Hans van Liesvelt published two annual prognostications, for 1555 and 1556, that are, in many ways, reminiscent of the anticlerical prognostications of Johann Copp. According to the title block on their first pages, they were the work of the "famous and highly learned Master Willem de Vriese, doctor of medicine and the liberal arts."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess by Jonathan Green. Copyright © 2014 Jonathan Green. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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