TY - JOUR
AU - Flood, John, L
AB - The Franconian city of Bamberg has a proud history. The cathedral dates from 1002 and the diocese was established in 1007. It was also one of the earliest cities to have a printing press—the 36‐line Bible (ISTC ib00527000) may have been produced there around 1460. So there is a rich heritage to celebrate, and it has been a splendid idea for the Bamberg State Library to mark the millennium of the diocese by encouraging publication of this magnificent book: a comprehensive study and richly illustrated catalogue of the library's impressive collection of printed broadside calendars associated with the diocese, the prince‐bishops, the cathedral chapter and other institutions in the city from the earliest times down to 1803 when the religious houses of Bavaria were secularized. Researching these calendars has been a preoccupation of Josef Biller since the mid‐1970s. Over the years he has published more than twenty studies of calendars from various ecclesiastical jurisdictions, including Augsburg, Eichstätt, Salzburg, Fulda, Kempten, Freising, Würzburg, and others, but this magisterial study of the collection held in Bamberg is a real triumph which will set new standards in the cataloguing and description of such neglected material. Biller describes his study as a Kalendariographie rather than as a bibliography for reasons which he sets out in the introduction. Essentially, the form the calendars took was determined by the body that authorized, commissioned, or designed them. Who the printers were or where they were printed was much less important. Biller's work fills two heavy, hard‐bound volumes running to a total of eight hundred pages. The study is divided into five parts, the first two of which are found in Volume 1. The first part, itself lavishly illustrated, comprises a wide‐ranging introduction to the subject. The focus is on broadside wall calendars adorned with the arms of the ecclesiastical, secular, patrician or other authority by which they were issued; they include such bodies as the prince‐bishoprics of Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Würzburg, Bamberg, Salzburg, and Freising, other church institutions, sovereign orders such as the Knights of Malta and the Teutonic Knights, municipal authorities such as those of the Free Cities of Augsburg or Frankfurt, Swiss Cantons, and various territorial institutions. Altogether Biller has identified official calendars issued by 115 different bodies located in the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, and Hungary. The purpose of such heraldic calendars was not only to provide useful information such as dates of church festivals and astronomical or astrological information but also to display the pomp and power of the body that issued them. Biller goes on to discuss the longevity of such calendars, the many terms that have been used to describe them (such as Stiftskalender, Hohe‐Domstifts‐Wappen ‐ kalender, Ordo divin orum, Heiligenordnung, Calendarium ecclesiasticum, Ephemerides, etc.), how they were produced (typography and woodcut, engraving or etching), print runs, distribution and sale, their structure, content and design, the designers, printers and other craftsmen involved. He also devotes an important section of his introduction to discussing the rarity of these calendars: he singles out the state libraries in Munich, Augsburg, and Bamberg, the Herzogin‐Anna‐Amalia‐ Bibliothek at Weimar, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library (with eleven, dating from 1684, 1697, 1699, 1733, 1747‐50, 1778, 1781, and 1786) as having notable holdings, whereas the great libraries in Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Leipzig hold very few examples, while the few that survive in private collections tend to be inaccessible, and whereas at one time examples would turn up in the book trade (Drugulin at Leipzig had nearly a hundred for sale in 1867, for instance, including sixteen from Bamberg) they are virtually never seen today. If they are seen, they tend to be expensive: Biller cites the example of a Passau calendar of 1687 fetching 24,000 DM in 2001. The next section of the introduction focuses specifically on those from the Hochstift Bamberg (that is, the territory ruled over by the prince‐bishop, as opposed to his diocese) and on previous scholarship relating to them. Their history is complex, but the earliest known examples date from the second decade of the sixteenth century. Biller distinguishes three phases: at first the calendars were produced on an unofficial basis by local printers or printers from nearby towns; then from 1543 they were produced on a semi‐official basis by the appointed Bamberg court printer but still on the latter's initiative, and finally, from at least 1589, they were produced on the specific authority of the prince‐bishop. The earliest known example of the first kind was a calendar prepared by Peter Burckhard, Doctor of Medicine, printed by Jobst Gutknecht at Nuremberg in 1517 and evidently prepared for Georg III Schenk von Limpurg who was prince‐bishop of Bamberg from 1505 to 1522; by a stroke of luck, even the woodcut block incorporating the prince‐bishop's arms, designed by Erhard Schön (c. 1491‐1542), still survives in Berlin. Similar calendars were produced by Jobst Gutknecht's son Christoph and by another Nuremberg printer, Valentin Neuber, and possibly (though none survives) by the Bamberg printer Georg Erlinger. A number of semi‐official calendars were printed by the Bamberg court printer Hans Hetzer, though the earliest to survive dates from 1570. From at least 1589 but perhaps from 1576 onwards, the prince‐bishop's accounts suggest that the calendars were now being commissioned by his authority and continued to be so until 1803. Biller distinguishes six different versions issued from 1576 to 1591, 1592 to 1599, 1599/1600 to 1609, 1610 to 1653, 1654 to 1683, and 1684 to 1803, with each of the first four versions published both in German and Latin. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw several other types of calendar, too. All this is spelt out in great detail and exemplary scholarship. There are 841 footnotes, 42 colour plates in the text, and 13 tables (mostly detailing the whereabouts and shelfmarks of surviving copies of the various calendars). Part II of the study (Vol. 1, pp. 211‐412) consists of photographic reproductions of all the calendars in the Bamberg State Library's collection. Though the page size of Biller's book measures 30 × 21cm, most of the calendars are unavoidably reproduced in greatly reduced size since many of the originals, especially the later ones, measure something in the order of 120 × 45 cm. This means that the majority of them are illegible but, happily, all the items, together with full technical descriptions, are freely accessible and enlargeable over the internet under www.bamberger‐ schaetze.de/wappenkalender. Each of the 189 calendars in the library's collection is then described in exhaustive detail in Part III of the study (vol. 2, pp. 3‐227); arranging the photographs in volume 1 and the descriptions in volume 2 is very convenient since it permits the user to have the reproduction and the description open at the same time. The calendars are arranged in the following groups: IK 1‐27 (incunable editions); PK 1‐15 (post‐incunabula and sixteenth‐century typographical almanacs); HS 1‐36 (wall calendars with the heraldic arms of the prince‐bishop in woodcut, dating from 1518 to 1803), KS 1‐38 (official wall calendars for the cathedral chapter, engraved or etched, dating from 1619 to 1802), RK 1‐15 (unofficial and official wall calendars for Bamberg city council, dating from 1676 to 1803). To these are added WK 1‐55 (wall calendars from other institutions, such as other cities, orders of chivalry, other dioceses and courts), and three examples of what Biller calls ‘historic‐allegorical and emblematic wall calendars’ issued on the personal initiative of publishers. The descriptions provide full details of the style of the calendar, its title, the printer and other persons involved in its preparation and design, the material, techniques involved, format, condition, print‐run, etc., etc. Part IV (pp. 231‐50) usefully presents the essential basic facts about the calendars in tabulated form, which enables the user quickly to gain an overview of such details as dates, printers, mathematicians, language (Latin or German), etc. Part V is an appendix with such things as a list of the Bamberg prince‐bishops from 1505 to 1808, chronological lists of the authors of calendars and of court printers, biographical sketches of the authors, printers, publishers, artists, and other persons involved in the production of the calendars, a very substantial bibliography (pp. 330‐56), an index of names, and a concordance of the Bamberg pressmarks, the numbers in Biller's catalogue and the Uniform Resource Name of the digitized calendars (urn:nbn:de:bvb:22‐dtl‐0000085918 onwards). The ‘biograms’ (Vol. 2, pp. 260‐326), biographical sketches of the enormous range of people involved in the preparation of calendars, whether as authors, printers, designers, doctors, mathematicians, etc. are very useful. The one on the physician Anton Brelochs (p. 261) could be augmented by a reference to pp. 129‐30 in my article ‘Englischer Schweiß und deutscher Fleiß. Ein Beitrag zur Buchhandelsgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in The German Book in Wolfenbüttel and Abroad: Studies Presented to Ulrich Kopp in his Retirement, ed. William A. Kelly and Jürgen Beyer (Tartu, 2014), pp. 119‐78. On Georg Tannstetter (p. 268) see my Poets Laure ‐ ate in the Holy Roman Empire (Berlin and New York, 2006), vol. iv, p. 2371. On pp. 271‐99 there are details of the careers of calendar printers and publishers, in some cases usefully supplementing the accounts given in Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet; unfortunately, however, Biller gives references to the edition of Reske's book issued at Wiesbaden in 2007, not to the revised and enlarged edition of 2015 (on these see the reviews in The Library, vii, 8 (2007), 453‐56, and 17 (2016), 188‐91, respectively). © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permission@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Calendaria Bambergensia. Bamberger Einblattkalender des 15. bis 19. Jahrhunderts von der Inkunabelzeit bis zur Säkularisation. By Josef H. Biller
JF - The Library
DO - 10.1093/library/21.3.393
DA - 2020-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/calendaria-bambergensia-bamberger-einblattkalender-des-15-bis-19-EuIfsV5c02
SP - 393
EP - 395
VL - 21
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -