In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Hans Folz and Print Culture in Late Medieval Germany: The Creation of Popular Discourse by Caroline Huey
  • Thierry Boucquey
Caroline Huey, Hans Folz and Print Culture in Late Medieval Germany: The Creation of Popular Discourse (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate 2012) xi + 166 pp.

Caroline Huey’s adroit examination of Hans Folz’s oeuvre constitutes a valuable and fresh contribution to Folz and late medieval German print culture scholarship. It provides students of Letters, Medieval Studies, Book and Manuscript Studies, as well as medical historians with functional and novel tools to access the realm of these printed works and their intended audiences in the late-medieval Regnum Germaniae, and the city of Nuremberg in particular. The subject matter of Huey’s book is Renaissance man-in-every-sense-of-the-word Hans Folz of Nuremberg (b. Worms 1435/40–d. 1513), “a barber-surgeon,” Meistersinger, printer, carnival playwright, and author of numerous Reimpaarsprüche” (1). The volume consists of six chapters, each illuminating a particular aspect of Folz’s opus, and tying together for the first time themes and topoi across the different genres of the late-medieval printer’s production, such as his master songs, stories in rhyme-pairs, medical tracts, and Shrovetide plays. It also includes a helpful appendix featuring figures representing the cover page of all forty-two of his extant prints, in addition to a bibliography and a handy index.

In the opening chapter, simply entitled “Hans Folz,” the author sketches a thorough image of the versatile early modern artisan whose print production encompassed all at once the esthetic, didactic, medieval, physical, humanistic, and religious registers. The main themes of his work are a perfidious world filled with disease, bad wives, dangerous Jews, and despotic clergy, and his characters act much like those of medieval French farce: they revel naked, eat excrement, beat each other, and offer displays of pranks, puns, mischief, gags, clowning, and jokes. Folz’s primary motivation for his printed oeuvre was a forceful quest for esteem and recognition in Nuremberg society where he was actively involved in public policy. Caroline Huey also adeptly reviews historical scholarship related to Hans Folz and his work and characterizes it as lacking in unifying vision due to its focus on rhetorical form and structure in individual works. His prints, brief didactic pamphlets or funny stories, came in a convenient format, six to eight pages long, and were readily available and affordable, and the ever-present accompanying woodcut illustrations provided the many who could not read with a means to grasp the essence of his narratives.

In chapter 2 the author cleverly portrays Hans Folz as a “crucial point in the transition between performance and print” (22). His Reimpaarsprüche, which represent the lion’s share of his oeuvre, show thematic and stylistic similarities with his carnival plays, and the ubiquitous illustrations in them reinforce his transition from the theatrical and visual to the printed text. Folz printed in the vernacular to stimulate the wide dissemination of this work. In fact, copies of it have been found from printers in Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Augsburg, Vienna, Leipzig, and Bamberg, and Folz’s print style would remain a model for print making and marketing for the next one hundred years.

Chapter 3 examines the relationship between Folz’s intensely physical imagery and dogmatic theology. As Meistersinger, Folz belonged to an elite auto-didactic group devoted to praising God, and his eighty-five Meisterlieder, which feature both the vernacular and Latin, are devoted to traditional orthodox [End Page 264] theology, and the Virgin Mary in particular. Two of them specifically depict the Mary-Eve dichotomy of the good and bad wife. While the evil spouse fights her husband for the right to wear a literal pair of pants and rule the household, the good wife is “the crown and scepter of all honors and can protect her husband form worry, wild animals, devilish magic, and sickness” (36). Others deal with the Trinity, the Virgin, and the Immaculate Conception.

In chapter 4 the author presents a more in-depth analysis of the transgressive carnilvalesque woman’s body as diametrically opposed to the immaculate body of the Virgin. In Die historien von...

pdf

Share