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.1 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.²

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.³ 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.4

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.5 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.10 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.¹¹ 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.¹²

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.¹³ 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 1566.¹⁴ 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.15 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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷

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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ “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.”²⁰ 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.21 As for de Lens, later chroniclers report (without citing their evidence) that he was suspected of sympathizing with the Reformation as early as 1525.²² 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.²³ 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.”²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶

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.”27 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.²⁸

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.”²⁹

The pamphlet for 1555 opens with de Vriese’s statement that because astrology had fallen into such disrepute among theologians and the unlearned common people (to which he promised to soon publish a definitive rebuttal), he had intended to stop publishing annual prognostications, but some powerful noblemen and other good friends had convinced him to continue, as several of his predictions for the previous year had turned out to be accurate. No prognostication for 1554 by Willem de Vriese is known, but that does not mean that none ever existed. For a genre as ephemeral as astrological booklets, it is likely that many editions have entirely disappeared, and the careers of several practitioners are known today only from a single work or from the incomplete fragments of a few editions.

The organization of de Vriese’s prognostication for 1555 is quite conventional. Following the opening statement, de Vriese presented the astronomical facts for the year (including a lunar eclipse and various planetary conjunctions), determined the governing planets, and noted the days on which each season would begin. Subsequent sections also followed their conventional order in describing the influence of the heavens on agricultural fertility, disease, war, and human society (consisting of the clergy, nobility, and common people). The prognostication concluded with the fortunes of various nations, regions, and cities, which suggest the author’s political alignment: the planets conferred good fortune on the Habsburg emperor and the cities of the Netherlands, while the picture for other European nations was decidedly mixed, particularly for the king of France, who could expect setbacks at every turn.

De Vriese’s pronouncement concerning the common people comes as a surprise: “They will want to carry out amazing things against their rulers and regents. They will complain of burdens and troubles that they cannot bear. They will seek new policies and statutes according to their own will, indeed seek them by force. They will murmur, mumble, whisper, and talk back against their rulers and, if it were possible, eagerly bring them into hate and envy. So the lord regents and superiors of the lands and cities should use wise council and peaceably rule their communities, as they may justify it before God and the entire world.” As Hinke van Kampen has recognized, this was not a prediction but a threat.30

At a time when Emperor Charles V was determined not to permit the German heresies to take hold in the Netherlands, de Vriese’s prognostication for 1555 had a dangerous focus on Germany, which occupies nearly the entire chapter on war and peace: “Germany will not be at peace in any way, but rather armies, cavalry, and soldiers will be gathered here and there and no one will know where they should go. One army will not trust another, nor one city the other, but instead they will rise up against and destroy each other. In the same way there will be war and contention in all of Europe, for everyone will fear to be attacked and brought into greater subjection and servitude. Therefore everyone will try to defend their liberty and obtain freedom until at last they will entirely erupt and burn so violently that all of Europe will feel the sparks and also the coals.”³¹ Less than a decade earlier, the German princes had sought to assert their authority in matters of religion against the emperor in the Schmalkaldic War. The most recent violent confrontation had occurred just a few years prior, and the Peace of Augsburg was still months away. The inflaming of all of Europe by sparks from Germany was precisely what Charles V would do anything to prevent.

De Vriese’s predictions for the clergy, again focusing on Germany, dispel any remaining doubt about the intentions of his prognostication. The retrograde motion of Jupiter will not be able to protect the clergy from the furies of Saturn and Mars, de Vriese states, and so the clergy will experience a great humiliation: “Their prelates and greatest leaders will be renounced, chased away, and driven out in some lands toward the west. In Germany some bishops will give up and abandon secular rule on their own. Some clerics and religious men will leave and abandon their places and residences, not because they know of anyone who will persecute or threaten them, but only out of fear and doubt. Some will pretend that they are not clerics, disguising and changing their lives. The others will think that they have secure, free, and reliable places in some lands, but that will be far from the case. They will have to depart quickly from their anticipated places. In sum, great oppression, fear, and suffering will befall them.” De Vriese is careful to add that he does not know whether this will occur because of the evil of other people or because of the clergy’s own guilt, but he warns that, in any case, the clergy should be sure to lead exemplary lives and teach God’s word, so that God will turn away his wrath “from them and from us.”32

De Vriese’s predictions can be read as a comment on clerical poverty and usurpation of secular rule, two issues that had excited reformers for centuries prior to the Protestant Reformation. Claiming to make predictions based only on the motions of the planets was a form of euphemism that allowed—barely—for the expression of such sentiments at a time when similar thoughts could hardly be uttered without serious repercussions. Moreover, the genre of astrological prognostication already involved looking for arcane importance in readily apparent signs. The highly stereotyped and formulaic nature of astrological prognostications made it easy for a censor to quickly skim the surface without noticing anything disturbing, while the discerning reader under censorship would be alert for hidden messages. The prognostication for 1555 of Willem de Vriese stated as astrological prediction something that could not be expressed directly.

But the prediction of trouble for the clergy also raises doubts about whether the author was only consulting astronomical tables and astrological treatises, as the image of clerics scurrying in search of a safe corner had long been found in reform-minded prophecies about the clergy.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editions of the Onus mundi (Burden of the world), a fifteenth-century compilation of Birgitta of Sweden’s fourteenth-century revelations, supplemented with additional material, attribute a similar prophecy to the thirteenth-century Super Hieremiam in the tradition of Joachim of Fiore, as well as to the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen: “Also Abbot Joachim of Calabria, founder of a monastery in Florence, who lived around the same time, wrote in his gloss on Jeremiah the prophet that a great tribulation will come upon Christendom from the heretics, pagans, and evil Christians, and that the goods of the clerics will be taken away and many cities and castles destroyed, just as St. Hildegard predicted, and they will be hunted from one land into another. Because of this many of them will go into the wilderness and lead a life of poverty.”33 The prediction of a clergy purified by enforced exile and poverty is made even more clearly in the tract On the End of the World attributed to Vincent Ferrer, published fourteen times between 1475 and 1550, in Latin and four independent German translations.³⁴ In response to the third chapter of Daniel, the tract foresees a persecution of the clergy by the Antichrist, which will lead some priests to “flee to the wilderness and live in great misery and poverty. They will disguise their clerical robes, wear no tonsure, lead no clerical life, and conceal the fact that they can read. They will have no chapels, houses of prayer, or altars, but instead hurriedly read mass in the early morning upon a stone or stump.” According to pseudo-Vincent Ferrer, the persecution by the Antichrist would be imposed by God in order to purify the clergy from their sins.³⁵

Willem de Vriese’s prognostication for 1556 was, if anything, even more transparent in its calls for reform. For Antwerp, de Vriese predicted strife and discord among the citizens and inhabitants, sometimes because they desired new policies and sometimes “in the matter of religion.”³⁶ De Vriese foresaw rebellion among the common people concerning religion and dissatisfaction with their pastors (“perhaps not without cause or reason”) because the clergy did not give the people the “bread of the divine word.” The clergy’s sins would blind the people to their own shortcomings, and as punishment, they would have hypocrites as rulers and unlearned evil men as teachers.³⁷ Because of the clergy’s sins, the common people and the secular rulers would despise them. De Vriese called on the clergy to repent and foresaw a great reformation taking place among them. The clergy’s treasure and dominions are again predicted to pass into the hands of worldly princes, for the highest ruler does not wish to be served in the temple of Mammon.³⁸ The prognostication for the clergy ends on a strikingly unastrological note: “For many things that were prophesied long ago will be fulfilled this year.”39

Willem de Vriese’s prognostications employed several strategies to survive official scrutiny. Much of their discussion of ecclesiastic issues used double language that was liable to contrary interpretations depending on the position of the reader. The prognostication for 1556 claims that a secret conspiracy among the clergy was causing mutiny against the rulers and sowing enmity among Christian princes, an assertion that would have struck both orthodox and Protestant readers as all too true, as it could be read as a reference either to inquisitors or to reformers.⁴⁰ So, too, references to the “Apostolic church,” the Lord’s “elect little band,” or the Lord’s “chosen Bride,” were not on their face heretical, but these ecclesiological terms were widespread among Anabaptist and Reformed groups.⁴¹ Willem de Vriese’s prognostications pair religious agitation with unwavering loyalty to the emperor, and they are quick to flatter any Habsburg who might tolerate the Reformation. Shortly after the Peace of Augsburg had been negotiated, de Vriese predicted peace for Germany and prosperity for Ferdinand (the heir apparent to the Holy Roman Emperor as “King of the Romans” since 1531, later Emperor Ferdinand I from 1558–64), and he saw favorable prospects for a union between the house of Habsburg and the German nation. De Vriese likewise saw the planets aligning for Maximilian (Ferdinand’s son and king of Bohemia at the time, later reigning as Emperor Maximilian II from 1564–76) to “bring about reform and renovation in the Christian religion” and to make a great treaty with the German princes.⁴²

The Peace of Augsburg had no effect in the Habsburg hereditary lands in the Netherlands, however, where de Vriese’s prognostications appeared just as religious persecution, more severe in Antwerp than in other Dutch cities, was approaching a new peak of intensity.⁴³ To avoid criticizing the Habsburgs directly, de Vriese introduced a different bloodthirsty tyrant on which to project its disapproval, a “prince of the Slavs named Esau Pharmona,” who waged war against “Suleiman, Ottoman the Turkish emperor, the Great Khan, the Lord of Muscovy, and the Shah of Persia”; de Vriese had heard about him from Byelorussians and other Slavs when he had traveled with his lord to Poland.⁴⁴ In addition to usurping authority and territory and persecuting Christians for the sake of power and prestige, de Vriese’s particular accusation against “Esau Pharmona” was that he holds the people in such servitude “that no one in the land can speak against his tyranny without losing his life.”⁴⁵ De Vriese saw the planets working against “Esau Pharmona” in 1556 and hoped for the tyrant’s downfall, whereupon the treachery of evil Christians who had made secret alliances with him would be exposed. The figure of “Esau Pharmona” may be a distorted rendition of people and events among the khanates bordering Russia to the south, as there were contemporary Begs of the Nogai Horde with the names Ismael and Yusef— both names, like Esau, known from the book of Genesis. Like Esau, Ishmael fares rather better in the Koran than in the Hebrew scriptures.46 Whatever the historical basis of “Esau Pharmona” may be, he serves in de Vriese’s prognostications as a cruel and censorious tyrant in league with false Christians who can be safely criticized and whose downfall can be safely predicted, unlike the Habsburg oppressors closer to home.

While the pro-Reformation intent of the prognostications seems apparent, it remains unclear who—or what—Willem de Vriese was. Although the prognostications of Willem de Vriese call their author a famous and learned doctor of medicine and the liberal arts, no aspect of his life is attested outside of these two pamphlets. It is possible that de Vriese was a real human being whose biographical reality remains to be discovered, but there are also reasons to suspect that the name is nothing more than a pseudonym. I will return to the uncertain status of Willem de Vriese in the next chapter.

It does not seem difficult to detect pro-Reformation propaganda just barely concealed by the pretense of objective prognostication in de Vriese’s pamphlets, but censors approved Hans van Liesvelt’s printing of both editions. The censors of Willem de Vriese’s prognostication for 1555 are already familiar names: Jan Goossens and Philips de Lens. The prognostication for 1556 was approved by de Lens again and by a “Master Strick,” another secretary to the royal court.⁴⁷ How could a parish priest and an imperial official have overlooked such obvious sedition? To a modern observer, and perhaps to any careful contemporary as well, the censors’ work appears to be either incompetent or duplicitous. Whatever the case may be, many people associated with the Dutch publishing industry in the mid-1550s, by no means only the printers themselves, would have wanted to avoid close scrutiny of their work.

So it must have caused considerable consternation in several quarters in late 1557 when an anonymously printed “evil and seditious prognostication” by a “Master Willem de Vriese” appeared for sale.⁴⁸ An Antwerp printer was soon arrested, convicted, and executed on the Great Market Square of Antwerp for printing it and other seditious books. But the beheaded printer, the second in our story, was not Hans van Liesvelt.