A Heterodox Publishing Enterprise of the Thirty Years’ War. The Amsterdam Office of Hans Fabel (1616–after 1650)

The Thirty Years’ War was the most disruptive event of the seventeenth century, creating seismic shifts in matters political, economic, religious, and intellectual throughout central and northern Europe.¹

One of the most marked effects of the war was its creation of exiled communities. Previously tight-knit populations in areas affected by conflict — in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, the Palatinate, Prussia, Hessen, and else-where — were suddenly forced to flee their homes, on religious grounds or for self-preservation. The fragmentation of central European states and their populations did not, however, cause the sudden collapse of local exchanges, but exploded them across Europe, creating wide-reaching networks based on relationships economical, religious, diplomatic, intellectual, academic, and commercial.

Amsterdam became a particularly attractive destination for those exiles who sought to give literary expression to their discontent. The experience of war hardened the heterodox convictions of several authors appalled by its results, who in turn hoped that a period of worldy or spiritual peace would soon deliver them from the chaos and confusion of their times.² These convictions were expressed in tracts devotional, chiliastic, prophetic, alchemical, mystical, theosophical, and anticlerical in content. As János Bruckner’s pioneering bibliographical study has indicated, the history of German-language printing in the United Provinces during the seventeenth century was to a certain extent the history of German-language heterodox printing more generally.³ In the early 1620s, the previous centres of heterodox book production in Halle (Joachim Krusicke, Christoph Bißmarck), Magdeburg (Johann Francke), Frankfurt am Main (Lucas Jennis, Matthäus Merian senior), and Tübingen (Eberhard Wild) collapsed or contracted.⁴ The authors of heterodox works who used these presses found themselves in search of new printers and publishers. Largely through the efforts of displaced intermediaries, these were discovered in the United Provinces — more especially in Amsterdam — where Dutchmen like Abraham Willemsz. van Beyerland (1587–1648), Jan Jansson (1588–1664), and Nicolaes van Ravesteyn (d. 1676), and displaced Germans such as Benedikt Bahnsen (d. 1669) and Heinricus Betkius (also Beets, c. 1625–1708) served the market-place throughout Europe.⁵

Yet perhaps the most significant printer discovered by these authors is also simultaneously the least well known. Between 1645 and 1650, Hans Fabel printed or published at least sixty-two books by authors of heterodox religious works like Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), Paul Felgenhauer (1593–1661), Abraham von Franckenberg (1593–1652), Georg Hartlib (c. 1590–1651), Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil (1595–1661), and others. Indeed, Fabel’s business appears to have been the first commercial printing office in Europe devoted entirely to the production of heterodox books. This was an enterprise determined to offer an alternative to the moribund spirituality of the established churches of the period, the so-called Mauerkirchen, or churches of mere stone.⁶

It is somewhat surprising to note, then, that Fabel has been dismissed as fictive in modern literature on the European book trade. Given the abundance of false imprints in early modern Germany, and that the contemporary term Fabelhans denoted a teller of ‘tall stories’,⁷ one might expect that this scepticism has been long standing. In fact, it was first voiced by Isabella Henriette van Eeghen in 1978. While researching her standard work on the Amsterdam book trade, Eeghen searched for mention of Fabel in records of the printers and booksellers guilds, city burgher lists (poorterboeken), and baptismal, marriage, and burial registers of Amsterdam religious communities.⁸ Finding no trace of him, Eeghen concluded that the Fabel imprint was fictitious (een gefingeerde naam), and attributed his books to other Amsterdam firms, such as Jan Jansson. Eeghen’s conclusions have been widely accepted by specialists of Dutch and German book history, and have since found their way into the major bibliographical databases Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (VD17) and Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN).⁹ Eeghen’s conclusion has also been taken up in further scholarship on seventeenth-century literature, technology, and heterodoxy.¹⁰

However, there exists plentiful evidence...