Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany

Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to his Time

Gerhild Scholz Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351873529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Gerhild Scholz Williams's Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time, reviews key discourses in eight of Praetorius's works. She introduces the modern reader to the kinds of subjects, the intellectual and spiritual approaches to them, and the genres that this educated and productive German scholar and polymath presented to his audience in the seventeenth century. By relating these individual works to a number of contemporaneous writings, Williams shows how Praetorius constructed a panorama in print in which wonders, the occult, the emerging scientific way of thinking, family and social mores are recurrent themes. Included in Praetorius's portrait of the mid-seventeenth-century are discussions of Paracelsus's scientific theories and practice; early modern German theories on witchcraft and demonology and their applications in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, we read about the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies. Moreover, throughout his work and certainly in those texts chosen for this study, Praetorius appears before us as an assiduous reporter of contemporary European and pan-European events and scientific discoveries, a critic of common superstitions, as much a believer in occult causes and signs and in God's communication with His people. In his writings, in his way of telling, he offers strategies by which to comprehend the political, social, and intellectual uncertainties of his century and, in so doing, identifies ways to confront the diverse interpretive authorities and the varieties of structures of knowledge that interacted and conflicted with each other in the public arena of knowing.

Chapter 1

Wondrous People: Early Modern Diversity (Anthropodemus Plutonic)

Throughout his works, Praetorius devotes a great deal of attention to the strange and unusual, to natural and preternatural creatures. In his efforts to demystify these wonders for his reading public, he holds them up as objects of observation, marvel, and occasionally derision in his two-volume work Anthropodemus plutonic: Eine Weltbeschreibung von allerley wunderbahren Menschen (1666–67), as well as in the three volumes on the giant Rübezahl, the Daemonologia Rubinzalii (1668–73) and in his work on witches, the Blockes-Berges Verrichtung (1668). In the Anthropodemus, the subject of this chapter, Praetorius gathers an amazingly rich and varied collection of wonders concerning humans and humanlike creatures.¹ Simultaneously raising and satisfying his readers’ curiosity, he introduces them to humanoids and monsters, to the realm that is located somewhere “between the limits of empirical knowledge and the territory of fantasy.”² Judging from the chronology of the Anthropodemus, two years elapsed between the publication of the first and second volumes. Several printings followed within another year.³ Beyond functioning as a medium for reader-friendly storytelling and scientific reporting, the duality that characterizes most of Praetorius’s writing, the work is also partly a critique of some widely known tenets of Paracelsian natural philosophy. Moreover, intermittently throughout the text but increasingly toward the end, Praetorius turns to social criticism and to apocalyptic warnings associated with the year 1666, identified as yet another date for the Second Coming. These warnings become a central theme in his chronicle writings, the Zodiacus tracts, which will be discussed later in this book.

Experiencing the Wondrous

Due to the polyhistorical character of his work and his method of compilation, Praetorius draws on a vast number of traditional as well as contemporary authorities. He gleans facts from many writers on geography, history, demonology, cosmology, and natural philosophy; little, if any, of the volumes’ substance is new or original. Hence the applicability of catchphrases we have already mentioned for this kind of writing: Buntschriftstellerei, Reihenwerke,⁴ polyhistorical writings, collectaneae, and commonplace books. Jan-Dirk Müller, speaking of Gesner, talks about “die sinnstiftenden and kontinuitätsverbürgenden Funktionen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses” [the function of the cultural memory to construct meaning and ensure continuity]. Müller notes that knowledge is arranged according to an ordering structure, but not according to a hierarchy of what is worth knowing [“Hierarchie des Wissenswerten”].⁵ This affirms Praetorius’s sense of wonder or awe, his confidence that the writerly authority to articulate experience best confirms wondrous phenomena. Many of his sources remain familiar to us today, and just as many have been almost forgotten.⁶ In addition to the works produced by past and present writers on wonder, he also employs periodical news reports, letters, and oral tales. On the whole, his sources are secular. While secure in the assumption that God was the creator of all things, however arcane, and that He always communicated with His people, Praetorius hardly ever relies on theological arguments in establishing the credibility of a given phenomenon. For example, commenting on his own doubts about giants that were said to have lived in Europe in the past, or about green children who reportedly appeared in England around the time of King Stephen (1136–55), he offers a clarification, if not an explication, that he will repeat many times throughout this and other tracts dealing with the preternatural: at first he too was suspicious of much of what he heard, but after a while the testimony of many a noble [vornehme] witness changed his mind.⁷

Seeing and touching remain important testimonials to the reality of wonders throughout Praetorius’s writings. For example, he testifies to having seen and touched a huge black boulder sitting beside the road from Leipzig to the village of Hohentiegel. Moreover, between Salzwedel and Tielsen, he had inspected a big rock that, according to legend, had been split in two by the sword of a mythical figure who had sworn to defeat the town and had lost (1.592–93).⁸ Insisting on the verifying effect of personal experience, “the mistress of all things,” Praetorius follows the ever-increasing acceptance since the mid-sixteenth century of the persuasive power of experience.⁹ Moreover, in spite of his aversion to the superstitious public, Praetorius occasionally acknowledges family members as eyewitness sources, including his father, grandfather, mother, wife [“mein Hauß-Ere”], sister-in-law, and uncle. They vouchsafe the truth of all kinds of preternatural occurrences.¹⁰ His mother and grandfather, for example, told him of a castle that had sunk to the bottom of a lake near Zethlingen, the little town where he grew up. His grandfather insisted, and the adult Praetorius does not seem to doubt the truth of the story, that he could still see the walls and rooftops of the submerged buildings when he went fishing on the lake. Praetorius’s wife reportedly saw a water sprite (1.386).

We also catch an occasional glimpse of Praetorius’s personal history, short autobiographical vignettes interspersed in the narrative. He tells of his fear of nightmares as a boy, of feeling as if something or someone were sitting on his chest, pressing against his throat and preventing him from screaming. He also recounts an experience during the [Thirty Years] War when, as a seven-year-old boy, he was forced to flee with his family from bands of marauding soldiers into the surrounding woods.¹¹ He tells of sleeping among trees, open-mouthed and on his back, exposing him to creatures such as lizards that were said to crawl through people’s mouths to make a home in their intestines (1.29). When he and his family moved back into town, an Eydexe [lizard] was apparently carried along, wrapped up with the kitchen utensils. During the night, the creature attempted to crawl into his mouth, attracted by the warm breath. Had his parents not chanced by and chased it away, the Eydexe might have reached his stomach, where it would have given birth to baby lizards [“sie in den Gedärmen / Junge hecken sollen”] (1.30).¹² The only remedy, he says, would have been warm milk, which entices the creature to crawl up out of the intestines. Conflating his fears of real lizards with those of imaginary Alps, Praetorius also describes a gray, furry creature that, as a young boy, he sometimes observed at night on the wall of his room or on his chest. Thankfully, later in life, education and knowledge of the world [“die freyen Künste / and Welt-Weißheit”] (1.31) led him to recognize that, while these fears resulted from natural phenomena, they were promoted by the idle talk of adults who told tales to entertain each other and to frighten children into obedience.¹³ By contrast, the ignorant [“die Ungelahrten”], whom he calls semihuman because their intelligence is ruled by superstition (1.32), never lose these fears. While the educated are occasionally gullible (1.34), the timid and ignorant are always in special need of reassurance. To make them feel more secure, they should carry with them fire stones, corals, or put peony root around their necks, or place anise root or a wolf’s skin under their pillows (1.39).

In the introduction to volume 1 of the Anthropodemus, Praetorius outlines the work’s organizing principles. His goal is to clarify topics whose opacity or strangeness makes them hard to understand. He wants to answer the question whether earth or water people, changelings or mountain sprites, giants, revenants, wooden creatures, and many other varieties of living but occult beings really exist and, if so, what their nature and their interactions with humans might be.¹⁴ To that end, the Anthropodemus, a substantial work even by seventeenth-century standards, presents a plethora of information that fits very well within the space where early modern science and wonders intersect and overlap, reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other. The Anthropodemus is an especially persuasive example of what we called in the introduction the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen [the simultaneity of things and events usually not simultaneous] in seventeenth-century knowledge production. The two volumes offer an enormous, often repetitive, amount of information, presenting the reader with a variety of knowledge touching on theories of natural philosophy, science, and the occult, which, while not generally grouped in the same era of knowing by those who studied them, were held viable simultaneously.¹⁵ The occult qualities believed to be hidden in many forms of life, the diversity of human, preterhuman, and nonhuman beings, were all waiting to be unlocked by the inquiring mind and, eventually, open to comprehension. If approached with the appropriate questions, natural and preternatural causes and explanatory patterns would be uncovered, laying open to the inquiring gaze what might have appeared irregular, unusual, and curious, and thus seemingly apart from the rational universe.¹⁶ Seventeenth-century intellectual history demonstrates that the learned drew no firm lines between the natural and preternatural, the occult and the scientific. Nor did they reliably distinguish between a purely scientific treatise and writing for a general audience. Neither did their audience. Discoveries did not merely open new geographic locales to the bedazzled European voyager; they revealed to the reader the diversity of human experiences and of human-like beings. While not interested in New World wonders, Praetorius insistently raises one important question, namely, what kind of creatures can be considered human or human-like in the first place.

Fig. 1.1 Anthropodemus plutonic (1666): title page

Praetorius was, of course, not alone in his quest to increase his and his readers’ understanding and appreciation of the amazing diversity found in nature and among humans. Similarly seeking to demystify wonder, one of his contemporaries, the Italian Fortunio Liceti, reviewing theories of procreation, arrived at a rational (that is, experiential) explanation of the preternatural, of monsters and wonders. His treatise De Monstrorum causis, natura, et differentiis (1616), one of the classics of early modern phenomenology of the wondrous, distinguishes three varieties of procreation that were known to produce wonders: the supernatural, infra-natural [sic], and natural.¹⁷ Liceti’s theories provide an analogue to Lorraine Daston’s proposition that the categories of the preternatural are never fixed; rather, they appear to be permeable and changeable: “All of the boundaries between the natural and the non-natural were morally electrified, and none of them was ever hard and fast.” In an effort to aid modern understanding of early modern notions of the wondrous, Daston identifies four categories of the wondrous: the supernatural, the preternatural, the artificial, and the unnatural.¹⁸ While overlapping and indeterminate, and certainly not those that Praetorius employs, these categories help to bring some order into the conceptual confusion about wonders and the preternatural. Truly supernatural is anything associated with the divine, while the preternatural refers to nature’s secrets, hidden but never completely forbidden to the inquiring gaze. Between these two categories of knowing are located mechanical and material marvels that constitute artificial wonders. Finally, unnatural wonders result from the demonic, from sins against nature.

Though no less real to the early modern imagination than the other three, this last category is the most threatening and most difficult to explain. Sins against nature are acts of unnatural, satanic procreation, which might produce the truly demonic: creatures such as changelings, freaks, or human-demon, or human-animal hybrids such as werewolves and vampires, the “undead.” Although not truly human, that is, possessing a soul, all wondrous or even monstrous creatures in early modem cosmology are part of nature, even if they seem far-fetched or to challenge the usual distinctions between divine wonders, satanic subterfuge, and natural marvels. While preternatural beings were also thought to be the result of unnatural sexual intercourse, they were considered part of nature. In such cases, conception was blamed on the mother’s overactive imagination; defects in the semen, damage to the fetus while still in utero, insufficient nourishment of the fetus, were reasoned to be occult though natural effects.¹⁹ Giving nature’s work a somewhat different spin, Paula Findlen describes the early modern fascination...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Titlepage
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Wondrous People: Early Modern Diversity (Anthropodemus Plutonic)
• 2 Demonology and Topography: Locating Giants and Witches
• 3 The Global and the Local: Wonders in the News
• 4 Gender and Class: The Woman’s Lot
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index