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

Chapter 7. The Last Emperor and the Beginning of Prophecy

113 Chapter 7 The Last Emperor and the Beginning of Prophecy  “Friess I” versus “Friess II” The previous chapters have allowed us to connect the numerous editions of “Friess I” printed in Nuremberg in 1558 with the appearance of “Friess II” in Basel beginning in 1577 by establishing a chain of textual and historical connections through Antwerp in the 1560s and Strasbourg in the 1570s. Rather than two isolated events twenty years apart that share only a name and a genre, “Friess I” led to the publication of “Friess II” through a sequence of cause and effect and a network of personal relationships . The first prognostication of Wilhelm Friess, printed by Frans Fraet in Antwerp, had mounted a critique from within the hegemony of Habsburg power, using the narrative elements of imperial prophecies to attack Habsburg rule over the Netherlands. In Nuremberg, however , “Friess I” appeared as a text that reiterated and stabilized narratives of the existing order of society at a time when their foundations had become uncertain. The L version of “Friess I” continued working out a specifically Lutheran loyalist position with respect to secular authority. Following the humiliating Calvinist surrender of 1567 in Antwerp, the second prophecy of Wilhelm Friess reacted to the galling accuracy of the Lutheran prophecy by turning the logic of “Friess I” on its head, much as Fischart did with Catholic saints’ lives in his Protestant polemics and with astrological argumentation in Aller Practick Großmutter. Some parts 114 • the strange and terrible visions of wilhelm friess of the web of connections between the two prophecies are clear and robust, while others are fainter or only partially visible. If one strand proves untenable—for example, if it could be definitively shown that Johann Fischart was never in Flanders during 1567—that connection could be replaced by a less visible alternative, such as the quite likely possibility that Fischart read about the tense standoff between Calvinists and Lutherans that had taken place in Antwerp. While “Friess I” and “Friess II” both claim to be prophecies found with Wilhelm Friess of Maastricht after his death, they had different religious contexts and therefore distinctive views of the future. Lutheran apocalypticism, as Barnes has shown, foresaw gloom and decay for Germany that would be repaired only by Christ’s Second Coming.1 Rather than undermining medieval fears of the world’s imminent end, the Reformation heightened them, leaving Lutherans looking in increasing anticipation for the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.2 Following this tradition of Lutheran apocalypticism, “Friess I” presented the traditional end-time drama as still valid in the religious and political context of the late 1550s, with a bishop and emperor playing their customary roles in the fulfillment of eschatological hopes. The L redaction, printed in 1566–68 in a time of hardening confessional boundaries, explicitly condemned Calvinism along with Catholics and Anabaptists. “Friess II,” in contrast, represented Reformed Protestantism of the late sixteenth century . Although Samuel Apiarius’s editions omitted the prophecy’s warning to the Lutheran clergy (the one overt reference to confessional strife in “Friess II”), the second prophecy was printed predominately in Basel, a center of Swiss Reformed Protestantism, and by a printer whose voluminous output included many works of Reformed theology and devotion . Where “Friess I” had recalled the Angelic Pope of pre-Reformation prophecies in the form of a highest bishop, the Reformed churches had eschewed the office of bishop, and the fine honorable man in “Friess II” holds no ecclesiastic office. After the Calvinists’ interests had been entirely ignored by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, emperors and bishops were figures not of hope but of oppression. Reformed apocalypticism in the later sixteenth century usually lacked the Lutheran sense of pessimism and expectation of decline, instead displaying, in most cases, a characteristic militant optimism and expectation of gradual improvement. There were notably few Calvinist counterparts to the many Lutheran apocalyptic pamphlets published at the time.3 One exception is found in the work of Wilhelm Misocacus, a Dutch Calvinist refugee living in Danzig, who disguised anti-Habsburg agitation as astrological prognostications from 1579 to 1591.4 Perhaps The Last Emperor and the Beginning of Prophecy • 115 due to the unique circumstances of Strasbourg in 1574, the bleak outlook of “Friess II” represents a departure from the Calvinist apocalypticism found in other sources of the same period. As a consequence of their allegiance to opposite sides of the...