The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess: The Paths of Prophecy in Reformation Europe by Jonathan Green (review)

The late medieval world was fraught with anxiety. The pamphlets and broadsides that entered the marketplace through ambitious printers seeking to capture new audiences were replete with illustrations, prognostications, and prophecies of what the future would bring. Such writings presented practical information about harvests, floods, and droughts and alerted the public to impending political, social, and economic changes. More important, these widely popular anonymous works stoked hopes and fears about supernatural happenings and warned of battles presaging the arrival of the Antichrist and the final apocalypse, leading variously to spiritual renewal or the total annihilation of humankind.

Medieval and early modern German scholars have long known about the apocalypticism that permeated prophetic writings in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and Martin Luther himself wrote extensively about the last days. Historians such as Robin Barnes and Robert Lerner have mined these texts with much insight, illuminating the development of prophecy in the Middle Ages and its afterlife through the sixteenth century and beyond.^l Jonathan Green builds on these earlier achievements and offers a unique perspective by regarding prophecy as a media event whose transmission illuminates the ways early modern audiences read and interpreted such works.

Green’s latest book on the prophecies attributed to a certain Willem de Vriese (in German: Wilhelm Friess) of Maastricht elaborates on his earlier work Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450–1550²; the two books together are a learned diptych of early modern media studies. In his 2012 monograph, Green notably shifted the focus away from the conventional tropes of late medieval/early modern prophecy to explore the communicative framework through which such writings were conveyed. He further likened the printer to the prophet since both served as transmitters of messages emanating from higher authorities toward a broad audience. He also attributed the longevity of prophetic texts beyond the time span of the original prophecy to their ability to speak repeatedly to a jittery public longing for security and stability.

The current study builds an intricate narrative on these earlier conclusions and provides a detailed account of the dissemination of a single prophetic text from the 1550s into the early eighteenth century. This is a story of ambitious printers risking – and losing – their reputations and lives in an age of increased censorship and surveillance, and of reformers longing to change Church and Empire without diminishing the authority of the emperor. It is unclear whether Wilhelm Friess ever existed – Green suggests that the name was most likely a pseudonym – but the two distinct prophecies attributed to him established “Friess” as a prophetic brand that sold well as the message changed to suit a particular historical context.

The convoluted printing history of the “Friess” material may have deterred earlier scholars from investigating these works, but Green has boldly undertaken the time-consuming task of uncovering the sources and charting the lineage of its many versions in German, Low German, and Dutch. Matters are further complicated by the existence of two distinct “Friess” prophecies, the first arising in Antwerp in the 1550s, and the second originating in Basel in the 1570s. “Friess I” and “Friess II” were published under very different circumstances, and they contrast sharply in message and tone. “Friess I,” which was originally written to cover 1558–63, arose in the turbulent atmosphere of Antwerp in the 1550s as Protestant reformers challenged Catholic imperial authority. The prophecy itself contained several seditious ideas, some better disguised than others, about the need for clerical reform and the chastisement of ecclesiastical and imperial rulers. Humankind was to be cleansed of the rampant immorality into which it had fallen under the tyrannous rule of godless monarchs – a thinly veiled critique of Habsburg rule. War, hunger, and pestilence follow, but ultimately a new age of apostolic Christianity is born under the leadership of...