Introduction

As I write this, several devout students of holy scripture have just seen their careful calculations for the date of the Rapture come to naught, while budget and debt projections for the next seventy-five years continue to dominate the headlines. No matter how unpredictable the future might be, we remain obsessed with what tomorrow holds. Whether full harvests or foul weather, the dawn of a golden age or the advent of the Antichrist, divining the future has been a feature of human civilization since the time of its earliest written records, when a few scratches on clay or tortoiseshell might record the sale of grain or reveal the will of the gods.

How a culture imagines its future reveals as much about it as how it memorializes its past. Methods change; once, the brightest lights and guiding minds of civilization parsed each letter of the Bible, pondered the worth of prophetic utterances, or charted the course of the planets in order to discern how the world would change and when it would end. Predicting the future based on fluctuations in the royal treasury or birthrates in the hinterlands would have been dismissed as quackery. Today, horoscopes are relegated to the back pages of newspapers, and foreseeing the world’s imminent end is consigned to the religious fringe, while economists, climate scientists, and other experts are the trusted oracles about the calamities that face us. As for tomorrow, I am reluctant to venture a prediction, but we can be confident that whatever human society exists centuries from now will still struggle over the meaning of the future.

To know the history of how the future has been imagined is to understand the course of human society. As Robin Barnes observes, “The history of eschatology lies at the heart of the history of culture and of civilization itself, for in beliefs concerning ends are reflected the most basic assumptions about meaning and purpose.”1 For many decades, scholars have studied the “powerful symbols in which apocalypticism has expressed its sense of the universal meaning of history,” to borrow a phrase from Bernard McGinn.² Studying apocalypticism, or how people have related their present moment to the world’s expected end, is a necessary part of investigating how people have understood themselves.

In the late Middle Ages, prophecies of the end of the world involved a cast of characters and a series of established scenes whose conventionality is reminiscent of the Commedia dell’Arte. Today, we are dimly aware that Harlequin, Columbine, and Scaramouche all inhabit the same fictional world and have various relationships with each other, although they would have been familiar to many Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the same way, by the late Middle Ages, over a thousand years of study and speculation had produced an elaborate end-time drama involving several stock figures, including false prophets and Angelic Popes or preachers, diabolical tyrants and a righteous Last Emperor, the invasion of the heathens and the conversion of the unbelievers, and, most prominently, the advent of the Antichrist.³ Thanks to periodic resurrections in popular culture, we have a vague notion even today that all these characters belong to the same story. The narrative was not fixed, however: as in the Commedia dell’Arte, different retellings might involve different members of the cast or emphasize different events. In the late Middle Ages, there were several points of controversy, such as whether the advent of the Antichrist could be determined by astrology or other natural means. Many theologians saw this as an illegitimate attempt to know the hour of the Second Coming, but others disagreed, such as Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly (ca. 1350–1420), who drew on the planetary conjunction theories of Arabic astronomers to predict the advent of the Antichrist for the year 1789.⁴ Other disputed points focused on the identities of the false tyrants and the pious Last Emperor: was the current Holy Roman Emperor the divinely appointed Last Emperor, with the king of France serving as Satan’s servant, or vice versa? Arguments for either side appeared frequently, such as the late fourteenth-century “Gamaleon” prophecy or Telesphorus of Cosenza’s commentary on the Cyrilline oracle.

In the history of prophetic texts and apocalyptic thought, the subsequent early modern period, extending roughly from 1500 to 1700, is a critical and complex time of transitions. It is neither satisfyingly medieval nor comfortably modern. This was the age of exploration that filled in most of the remaining blank places on the globe, but if we hope to discover an early blooming of enlightenment during these centuries, we will often find the embarrassing and tenacious grip of superstition instead. Just when one thinks that a medieval tradition has finally been extinguished, one often finds it rekindled a century or two later.

The end of history, whose rich religious narrative enjoyed considerable theological support, was not the only future that people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to know. The heritage of Greek and Arabic astrologers provided the most common theoretical framework for predicting the course of the next few years or decades. Although astrology was subject to suspicion from some scholars and theologians, there was also considerable overlap between the practitioners and concepts of astrology and religious eschatology.5 Just as meteorologists and climatologists both try to model weather patterns that differ only in time scale, and just as the opening prices on the New York Stock Exchange cannot entirely be separated from the expectations for a nation’s long-term financial health, there was constant interaction between astrological prognostication and eschatological expectation in the early modern period. A theologian describing the Antichrist’s career might point with concern to a recent comet or planetary conjunction, while an astrologer describing the ominous configuration of the heavens in the upcoming year might remind readers not to delay their repentance until it was too late.

The early modern period is also a time in which those who predicted the world’s end could see their predictions fulfilled without needing to cross their eyes more than a little. The early sixteenth century witnessed nearly everything that a medieval prophet of doom could hope for or fear, save only the Resurrection and Last Judgment. As Johannes Virdung, prince of the German astrologers, wrote around 1524, “Therefore when we see that these things occur, as many of them unfortunately do now, namely, with the Turks and the clergy and the sacraments and offices of the church and so on, then we know that the Antichrist and the Last Day is near.”⁶ Christian apocalypticism of the preceding thousand years had created an end-time drama featuring a cast of characters whose arrival was expected before long, and many of them seemed to be actually taking their turns on stage. The Turkish invasions that stopped only at the gates of Vienna could be seen as a sign that Gog and Magog had been unleashed on the world from their long captivity, while Martin Luther could easily serve as the false prophet of the Antichrist in the orthodox imagination (of course, the popes took on that role for many Protestants). Charles V, the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the pope, began his reign with the sack of Rome, just as many of those hoping for the arrival of the Last Emperor had predicted, and Charles even relinquished his crown in 1556, as the fabled emperor of the end-time was expected to do (although the true Last Emperor was supposed to reconquer the Holy Land first).

As tumultuous as these events were, slower developments and quieter changes spelled the true end for the order of the world that had prevailed during the Middle Ages. The religious contention and ensuing wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation were provisionally resolved in 1555, not with final victory for either side, but with the Peace of Augsburg, which established the principle that each principality would follow its sovereign’s faith (cuius regio, eius religio); the solidifying of confessional boundaries over the following decades put a final end to hopes for a united Christendom. Slowly but surely, the heliocentric model of Nicolas Copernicus, first published in the 1540s, displaced the cosmology that had prevailed since antiquity; eventually, a generation of astronomers came along who neither cast horoscopes nor dabbled in theology. The inferno of the Thirty Years’ War between 1618 and 1648 upended the political order of Central Europe and left the Holy Roman Empire a mere husk, hardly a vehicle for the fulfillment of eschatological hopes, to which Napoleon Bonaparte administered the coup de grâce in 1806.

If expectations of future progress or calamity reveal much about human culture, and if the early modern period is a critical transitional time in how the end of the world was viewed, then these centuries hold one additional advantage over earlier times for the study of popular imagination: the invention of the printing press. While printing with movable type did not immediately revolutionize all forms of literacy following its invention by Johannes Gutenberg and his associates in Mainz shortly after 1450, the printing press slowly but fundamentally changed reading and writing over the following decades and centuries. The press did not just make possible the distribution of inexpensive texts to new classes of readers: the economics of print required it, as Gutenberg had already learned before he undertook his monumental Bible edition. Before a single copy of a printed work could be sold, a printer had to invest substantial amounts of specialized labor and equipment in preparing the press and had to acquire paper and ink in considerable quantities. Printing only a few copies would not justify the expense. Selling only a few dozen copies of a large scholarly book was financially ruinous, as more than a few overambitious printers discovered after their distribution networks proved to be less capable than they had thought. Smaller printers and larger operations in search of a quick profit had to target the audiences they could reach with a product that was shorter and written in the vernacular and that addressed the concerns of urban readers outside the professional and clerical classes that had long dominated readership.

What printers required was the pamphlet. Small booklets of a few dozen leaves or less, which had been the earliest products of Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz, remained a popular format for the following decades and came into their own after 1517, during the early Reformation, as the leading medium for religious polemic. Along with broadsides, pamphlets were an ideal vehicle for quickly reproducing a text, distributing it widely, and selling it inexpensively. For individual study or reading aloud to others, pamphlets had the advantage over broadsides that they were easier to hold in the hand. In addition, they structured the text into pages. While a pamphlet required a few more steps in its production compared to a broadside, it was more economical in its use of paper (the single largest expense for printers), as the pages of a pamphlet could be printed on both sides.7

For the history of popular imagination, pamphlets offer rich and invaluable evidence. Any scribbler with a bit of spare parchment could jot down his or her own pronouncements on the end of the world or copy a prophecy that struck his or her fancy, but printers had to strike the nerve of hundreds or thousands of customers. This makes pamphlets—and printed works in general—a different kind of evidence than manuscripts. Only a small fraction of the manuscripts written during the Middle Ages have survived, and we can only speculate as to whether a text known today from a single manuscript copy ever circulated more widely among the intellectual elites that comprised the readers and writers of the Middle Ages. A single copy of a printed pamphlet, however, is strong evidence that someone intended to distribute the work to thousands of people among a much broader spectrum of society. While a work printed just once may well have failed to find customers, the appearance of further editions is a sure sign that a printer had hit on a formula for success.

Pamphlet editions tell us something that manuscripts and learned treatises do not about the tastes and imaginations of a broad reading public. For the discussion we are engaged in here, “history of popular imagination” is perhaps a better description than “Renaissance history,” “Reformation history,” or “literary history,” although we will engage with all of those fields. Few would confuse the texts printed in most pamphlets with great works of literature, which did not stop their production by some writers who are today acknowledged as the most important of their time. Most of the seminal works that propelled the Reformation or drove the Renaissance are lengthy treatises rather than short tracts, but when scholars and theologians engaged a wider public or when a broader audience grappled with their ideas, the pamphlet was often the preferred medium. Our focus will be fixed on the popular literature of urban readers in the later sixteenth century, but that, too, will illuminate the intellectual and religious currents of the time.

Printed works addressing the near or distant future for a popular audience in early modern Germany included astrological booklets (called “practicas”) that offered one astrologer’s prognostications for the following year or for longer periods. When practicas were at their height of popularity, editions from up to thirty different authors might appear each year. The Leipzig professor Wenzel Faber von Budweis, the teacher of Johannes Virdung, dominated the field before 1501. Virdung achieved even greater popularity through the late 1530s; a younger astrologer, Johann Carion, rose to a similar stature around the same time.8

Until recently, one could only give an impressionistic opinion about the relative popularity of early printed works. Only in the last twenty years, with the development of searchable databases of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century printing, has comparing the actual number of recorded editions become practical, and it remains a cumbersome process. Among the centers of early modern European printing in France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries, the state of bibliographic cataloging is still the most advanced in Germany (I will here use the name Germany as a shorthand designation for the politically fractured German-language region in the sixteenth century). Census projects of long standing, including the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD16, which does not include broadsides) and Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD17), provide access to reliable information about printed editions and are now available online. Projects underway elsewhere in Europe are quickly catching up, and continent-spanning projects will soon provide an even more comprehensive account of early printing, as seen in the recent appearance of the Universal Short Title Catalog (USTC).

Prophetic books and pamphlets were elements in a public conversation that included astrological, religious, political, and literary dialogues. Thanks to modern bibliographic databases, these conversations can now be reconstructed—if not completely, then with a previously unmatchable depth and specificity. Today, it is much easier not only to discover and count the editions of a given work but also to determine the textual environment within which that work was situated by identifying the texts that informed public debate in a particular city or region. Rather than tracing the influence of only one or a few major works, we can re-create much more of the discursive context in which a book was written and received.

Centuries before the establishment of legal copyright or of a unified nation-state to enforce it, competing printers in several cities rapidly reprinted any work that promised to be profitable. Consequently, the history of prognostication and prophecy in print consists of a series of eruptions of numerous editions of a single work within a few years. Johannes Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio, a prophetic compilation first printed in 1488, appeared in seven editions by 1497 and in sixteen in 1500–1501. The Extract of Various Prophecies, a pamphlet composed of selections from Lichtenberger and from his younger colleague Joseph Grünpeck, went through ten editions between 1516 and 1518. Several familiar names appear in the list of best-selling works that succeeded until midcentury: Johannes Virdung’s prognostication for 1524–63 (ten editions between 1521 and 1524); a resurgence of Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio (thirteen editions between 1525 and 1530); Johann Carion’s Interpretation and Revelation, with prognostications for the years to 1540 or 1550 (fourteen editions from 1526 to 1531 and eleven more from 1539 to 1543); the Practica for Europe of Paracelsus (eight editions of 1529–30); the Onus ecclesiae, a prophetic compilation attributed to Berthold Pürstinger (eight editions in 1531); Joseph Grünpeck’s Prognosticum (eleven editions in 1532); and, finally, the interpretation of Johann Carion’s “Hidden Prophecy” (fifteen editions in 1546–47).

The picture changes dramatically in the latter half of the century: Lichtenberger’s name was less frequently mentioned, and his work was rarely published.9 The most popular prophetic pamphlets in Germany during this time (apart from the posthumous compilations of Martin Luther’s sayings, which formed a whole industry unto itself), with over forty-five total editions between 1558 and 1590, were instead those attributed to Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht.10 These booklets first appeared in a burst of seventeen German editions in 1558–59, followed by a few more as late as 1568. Then the name of Wilhelm Friess reappeared in thirteen editions published between 1577 and 1580, with twelve more published by 1590. The editions of Wilhelm Friess were the first of several highly popular prophetic pamphlets that appeared in intermittent bursts over the rest of the century, none of which were quite able to match the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess in popularity.

While nearly all the popular prophetic works in the first half of the century were written by historical figures whose names were well known to their contemporaries, the most popular pamphlets that appeared after 1550 are mostly attributed to virtual unknowns or to long-dead authors. Prophetic books that followed in the wake of Wilhelm Friess included that of Paul Severus, with fifteen editions in 1560–63 and two more before 1570; Caspar Füger’s translation of an extract from Lactantius (a Roman writer of the third and fourth centuries), with fourteen editions of 1584–88 and a total of twenty-three between 1566 and 1591, including ten printed together with a prophecy attributed to Luther’s teacher Johann Hilten; and the compilation of prophecies by Gregor Jordan that appeared in fourteen editions in 1591–92.¹¹ Each of these take different approaches to describing the future: the prophecy attributed to Hilten is primarily an attempt to reckon the years of the end-time, the prophecy of Lactantius emphasizes sin and disorder, and that of Gregor Jordan is primarily concerned with the role of the Ottoman Turks as the Antichrist’s standard-bearers. The prophecy of Paul Severus touches on several different aspects of the near future, which is unsurprising for a work that is simply the conclusion of an astrological prognostication that was roughly separated from its astronomical foundations. The prophecies of Wilhelm Friess not only appeared in more editions but also present a more concise and coherent narrative of the last days than any of their rivals. If prophecies of the future provide insights about a culture, and if pamphlets provide a glimpse of the popular imagination, then the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess are singularly important evidence for a critical moment in European cultural history following the Peace of Augsburg.

Despite the manifest popularity of Friess’s pamphlets, his name is all but unknown today, even among specialists. While books and articles have been written about the lives and works of Grünpeck, Lichtenberger, Carion, Virdung, and Faber, the scholarly record on Friess is slight.¹² Pamphlets are easily overlooked, of course, and the sheer number of editions has only recently become discoverable. The pamphlets’ insistence that they contain prophecies found with Friess after his recent death moreover invites suspicion that we are dealing with a pseudonym rather than a historically tangible human being. Equally disconcerting is the discovery that, despite their common claim to be prophecies found with Friess, the booklets in fact represent two quite different texts, each attested in different versions.

While this may be disconcerting, it is also extraordinary. Among the prophetic best sellers of early modern Germany, the reappearance of Wilhelm Friess as the author of a second prophecy almost twenty years after the appearance of the first is without parallel. Johann Carion’s “Hidden Prophecy” was merely an excerpt of his first great success, the Interpretation and Revelation. Joseph Grünpeck’s brief Prognosticum enjoyed a burst of popularity at the end of his career (with nine editions in 1532) that his major work, the Speculum, had not enjoyed (with only two editions in 1508 and just four more between 1510 and 1540). Carion and Grünpeck were, moreover, well-known individuals quite capable of writing multiple works. For a pseudonym like “Wilhelm Friess,” there is no precedent for the name to be pressed into service decades after an initial success for an entirely different work. Wilhelm Friess’s appearance as the author of a second prophecy is a highly unusual event that requires explanation.

The popularity of Wilhelm Friess’s prophecies may have gone unrecognized because they ricocheted across national, religious, and linguistic boundaries, often in ways that run contrary to how we expect things to work in the sixteenth century. The pamphlets were published in leading centers of German printing, such as Nuremberg; in the far south of the German-speaking lands, in Basel; in Lübeck, in the far north; and in the Dutch-speaking Low Countries. Following their trail thus involves the bibliographies of several nations and languages. The pamphlets attributed to Wilhelm Friess also underwent a genre migration—from astrological prognostications, to a recapitulation of the medieval end-time drama, to a terrifying vision of future desolation. Over the decades of their greatest popularity, the pamphlets were found in contexts ranging from embattled Dutch Protestantism to German Lutheranism to Swiss and German Calvinism. More than mere products of various national and religious identities, the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess were among the narratives through which not only Lutherans and Calvinists but also German, Swiss, and Dutch citizens were coming to define themselves.

In the following chapters, I will argue that the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess, the most popular German prophetic pamphlets of the later sixteenth century, were a reworking of Johannes de Rupescissa’s Vademecum of 1356. While “Wilhelm Friess” was a pseudonym, the prophecies’ alleged origin in the Netherlands is authentic. (I will use the names Low Countries and Netherlands interchangeably here, keeping in mind the complicated and shifting circumstances of this region during the sixteenth century, rather than modern political boundaries.) The popular German prophecy of Wilhelm Friess began as a seditious anti-Habsburg tract disguised as prophecy that was printed by Frans Fraet, the most prolific publisher of forbidden Protestant literature in Antwerp. In Nuremberg, the prophecy came to be understood as supporting the Holy Roman Emperor, while the prophecy took on a distinctly Lutheran form in the Netherlands during the early years of the Dutch Revolt. The second version of the prophecy then arose as a Calvinist reaction to the Lutheran prophecy, appropriating the name but reversing the confessional polarity. It used the prophetic form to address events from the perspective of Strasbourg in the year 1574. A compelling candidate for the author of the second version is Johann Fischart, one of the most important German writers of the sixteenth century and the most accomplished satirist of that time.

The story of these strange and terrible prophecies might be said to start in 1545. In that year, a decade before the first booklet attributed to Friess appeared, a printer was beheaded on the market square in Antwerp. He was the first of two who would meet that fate in the print history of the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess, and it is with his story that I will begin in chapter 1.