Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450-1550 by Jonathan Green

Author:Jonathan Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

ARGUMENT AND SOCIAl FUNCTION OF THE PRACTICA TEÜTSCH

Prognostic booklets are sometimes considered to have provided their readers with knowledge of the future (albeit in vague terms, while carefully skirting political and religious controversy, particularly concerning God’s free will, and hedging their bets with respect to actual events in the upcoming year). Yet the pseudoscience of astrology is entirely incapable of making any meaningful statement about the future. Despite the impossibility of their alleged purpose, practicas remained popular well into the seventeenth century. If practicas could not provide knowledge of the future, what explains the perennial demand for them? The answer is that practicas responded to readers’ desires for knowledge of the future not by satisfying it but by giving readers ways to think about and things to do with their hopes and fears. If practicas could not actually say anything about the future, they could still channel readers’ anxieties in a socially useful fashion. William Bouwsma has identified early modernity as a period shaped by a pervasive Page 137 →anxiety that was rooted in changing social conditions, which in turn undermined medieval conceptual categories.21 The function of practicas in early modern German society was not only the stabilization of order by evoking cosmic orderliness. Practicas also confronted readers with the possibility of disruption and invited them to restore order by conforming to their place within existing hierarchies. What mattered was not the particular set of ruling planets (about which different astrologers might offer varying opinions in the same year) or even predictions of fortune or misfortune for a particular group or activity (in which a printer’s carelessness might lead to opposite predictions in different editions of a single practica).22 Rather, the practicas evangelized an orderliness in human affairs that persisted beyond the rise or fall of a particular class in a given year. Practicas promoted stability by instrumentalizing fear.

Observers from the early 1480s onward regularly accused the practicas of promoting and instilling fear, by only predicting disaster and never good fortune. In 1523, Middelburg, like Stöffler, emerged from retirement to write a tract against the popular predictions of an approaching deluge, which was reprinted in Augsburg in both Latin and German translation. Middelburg found little good to say of his former colleagues, complaining that they “never proclaim anything good for us, first the deluge, then war and pestilence, then famine, then uproar in cities, and other similar evils. Although such does not come to pass, for they fail quite obviously, yet the fearful anticipation torments us. Therefore there is nothing better than not desiring to know future things.”23 The pseudonymous Faithful Eckhart attacked the promotion of fear in his criticism of practicas: “It seems foolish to me that we should be so fearful when there is nothing to fear or be terrified of the things that the practicas show us.”24 Johannes Rasch also noted the predisposition to dire predictions.25 But Johannes Vögelin, author of practicas for the years 1531–35 as well as a comet tract, argued that dire predictions better

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.