The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess: The Paths of Prophecy in Reformation Europe

Chapter 4. From Protest to Propaganda

54 Chapter 4 From Protest to Propaganda  Establishing the relationship of one edition of “William Friess” to another is a slow and wearisome process in which slight and seemingly inconsequential variations are identified, compared, and categorized. I have reserved most of the details for the appendixes. Even for the brief summary presented here, it can be helpful to keep one eye on the schematic diagram of textual history in figure 1 (in chapter 3). The result of this effort is a view of how the text changed on a fine scale as it was transformed from political agitation, to sectarian polemic, to a commercial ware that could be openly printed and sold—and how it became, almost twenty years after its first printing, a prophecy that demanded a response. The Tangled History of N The most frequently reprinted version of “Wilhelm Friess,” the N redaction , split early on into two subfamilies. One of them, the “left branch,” is known only from the latest appearances of “Wilhelm Friess” in print at the end of the seventeenth century, which will be considered at somewhat greater length in chapter 7. Although these late editions altered the text substantially, they are similar in several places to the B version, which suggests that the exemplar for these editions of the 1680s and 1690s was a very early member of the N redaction. For example, where the conclusion of “Wilhelm Friess” warns that tribulation will quickly appear if people do not repent of their sins, both the latest editions and From Protest to Propaganda • 55 the B version add that the tribulation will quickly appear “upon you” (“über euch,” 483). Johannes Wolf’s excerpt from the prophecy of Wilhelm Friess in his Lectionum memorabililium, his monumental, two-volume collection of histories , prophecies, and curiosities published in 1600, appears to provide another witness of the same branch of the N version.1 Apart from a short excerpt concerning clerical poverty from the end of “Wilhelm Friess,” Wolf included only the prophecy of woe upon the clergy, rendering what is clearly the N version of the prophecy into Latin and one word of Greek (115). Curiously, Wolf gives the year of Friess’s prophecy not as 1560 but as 1360, and one wonders if Wolf might have been aware of the connection between “Wilhelm Friess” and Johannes de Rupescissa. Wolf’s translation of the prophecy into Latin obscured the features that would make it possible to place Wolf’s excerpt any more specifically within the N tradition—with one exception. According to the French redaction of the Vademecum, the chastised clergy will no longer wear “purple, scarlet , or any other rich apparel.” Wolf’s Latin extract follows this closely (“Praelati Ecclesiarum non serico, non purpura, coccino, bysso, aut aliis preciosis vestibus induentu”), as do the B and L versions of “Wilhelm Friess,” while the editions of the 1680s and 1690s unfortunately omit this passage. The other branch of the N version, however, changes the purple clothing or rich apparel to “velvet, scarlet, or colorful cloaks” (61–63). Wolf’s Latin rendition appears to reflect an older version of the N redaction and, one is tempted to conclude, the same left branch as the late editions, although conclusive proof is elusive. Curiously, a similar description of the clergy’s new clothes as colorful rather than purple appears in the genealogically distant D version. This and several other shared passages suggest that what distinguishes the two branches of the N family is not the age of the editions but, rather, contact between the “right branch” and the D redaction (or some precursor from the y side of the family; see figure 1) that resulted in the borrowing of several passages into the right branch but not the left. When “Wilhelm Friess” predicts that people will be troubled and frightened, versions D and L, from the y branch, add that the people’s sorrow will be due to “torments and deprivation” (“van der qualinge unde ungenochte” or “van wegen der groten quale unnd ungenöchte”), a phrase that is lacking in the French redaction, the B version, and the left-branch N editions of the late seventeenth century. The phrase has an equivalent, however, in the right branch of the N redaction, where it appears as “trials [literally, “crucifix ”] and suffering” (“des Creutzes und leidens halben,” 152). The similar 56 • the strange and terrible visions of wilhelm friess wording...