Hans Folz and Print Culture in Late Medieval Germany: The Creation of Popular Discourse by Caroline Huey (review)

The late fifteenth century can slip through the disciplinary cracks of German literary studies in North America. It is often too late to hold the attention of medievalists but too early to fit under the rubrics – Reformation, Renaissance, Baroque – most often used to categorize early modern German society. Thus the impact on German literature of Gutenberg’s world-changing invention becomes a footnote at the end of the medieval survey, or a fact of life that has seemingly always existed at the beginning of the baroque or Enlightenment survey. (The Reformation, the second of two world-altering events to take place in Germany within seventy years of each other, is liable to suffer a similar fate in German literary studies; colleagues in history or religious studies may teach courses on related topics, but students in German are largely insulated from direct exposure to it.)

Thus Caroline Huey’s work on Hans Folz is a welcome addition to the scholarship, particularly the infrequent work published in English, that addresses late fifteenth-century German literature. The title figure of Huey’s book, Hans Folz, was a barber and surgeon active in Nuremberg whose known literary output includes nearly one hundred strophic Meisterlieder and fifty verse works in rhymed couplets in addition to a few prose works and twelve carnival dramas. These literary works alone would make Folz worth studying, but Folz’s activity as a printer and publisher of his own work makes him nearly unique. While another Nuremberg printer, the astronomer Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller of Königsberg), anticipated Folz as the first self-publishing author of work in Latin or the vernacular by a few years (with five editions in 1472–75, tied for precedence with Johannes Philippus de Lignamine’s single edition, published in 1472 in Rome; see the British Library’s Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, items ir00100300 and il00214500), Folz’s enterprise of self-publication lasted much longer (1479–88) and, with forty-two editions, included far more works than the self-publishing careers of either predecessor. Even in the sixteenth century, Folz finds only one comparable self-publishing German author in Pamphilus Gengenbach of Basel, who published barely half the number of his own works between 1513 and 1523 as Folz had. Unlike Folz, who published very few works written by others, Gengenbach’s self-published work represents only a minor segment of his extensive publication program.

In light of his unparalleled accomplishments, Folz clearly needs to be studied as both a literary and a media phenomenon, and this is precisely what Huey has done. She makes extensive use of the fundamental work on Folz as a printer by Ursula Rautenberg, who for many years has been one of the scholars leading the development of German Buchwissenschaft (the disciplinary counterpart of book history but including allied and applied fields, such as the study of the modern publishing industry, that are not often found in its Anglo-American equivalent). Another welcome appearance in Hans Folz and Print Culture in Late Medieval Germany is the unambiguous designation of editions by using identification numbers from the relevant bibliographic databases (ISTC, GW, and VD16), which is still lamentably the exception in much humanistic scholarship that touches on early printing.

In the opening chapters, Huey addresses Folz’s life and professional activity in Nuremberg, including his roles as both a printer and a barber-surgeon. Rather than treating Folz’s medical profession as tangential, Huey places it firmly at the centre of his literary work and finds in it the source for the theme of bodiliness that can be found in all areas of his writing. Reconsidering Folz’s entire body of literary work in light of his ongoing professional concern for hygiene and healing is the common thread that runs throughout Huey’s book. Later chapters therefore consider how Folz treats the relationship between body and...