Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt Matthew Wranovix LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. 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Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Map of the Diocese of Eichstätt in 1480 xix 1 Education 1 2 The Priest in the Parish, Diocese, and Territory 35 3 Parish Libraries and Personal Collections 67 4 A Professional Library 101 5 Reading Interests 131 Conclusion 167 Appendix A: Texts Appearing in Books Owned and/or Produced by Priests in the Diocese of Eichstätt 175 Appendix B: List of Works Appearing in Books Belonging to the Parish Library of Schwabach 183 Bibliography 189 Index 213 About the Author 221 v Acknowledgments In the course of this project I have accumulated numerous debts, both person- al and financial. I would like to thank both Yale University and the Fulbright Foundation for the monetary support that made my research possible. Anders Winroth, Bob Babcock, and especially my advisor Paul Freedman provided invaluable training and ready aid whenever I encountered problems. My research was aided greatly by the staffs of the libraries and archives in which I worked; in particular I would like to thank Bruno Lengenfelder in the Diözesanarchiv Eichstätt, Christian Büchele, Klaus Walter Littger, and Kon- rad Bauernfeind in the Universitätsbibliothek Eichstätt, and Thomas Engelke in the Staatsarchiv Nürnberg. Three scholars in Germany, Enno Bünz of the University of Leipzig, Sigrid Schmitt of the University of Mainz, and the late Harald Dickerhof of the University of Eichstätt, deserve special thanks both for the aid they offered my research and for the warm welcome they ex- tended to a scholar from abroad. I would also like to thank Brian Noell for his comments on the early drafts of several chapters, Bill Whobrey for his help with several translations, and Jamie Lynn Slenker for the map and mock-ups of several cover designs. My colleagues at the University of New Haven have offered me continuous encouragement, support, and fellowship and for that I am very grateful. Thanks also to the editors at Lexington and the anonymous peer reviewer who saved me from several embarrassing er- rors. Without my family I would never even have begun this project. I would like to thank my parents for the love of books that they instilled in me; Satoko, for her love and generosity; and Miya and Emi, for their patience with a father too often absorbed by his work. vii Introduction In 1460 Ulrich Pfeffel, the rector of the parish church in Preith, a village near Eichstätt, received a manuscript containing a biblical commentary by Mat- thias de Liegnitz along with the following note: Dear Sir Ulrich, I have often been given to understand how much you like the books. I am now sending them to you and will give you a better deal than I would give to others and ask if you could lend me four gulden, which I will repay you. It is not an issue if you do not have the money; keep the books anyway. When I am able to visit you, then we can come to an agreement. If you then must have the [four] gulden, then I do not wish to burden you about it. Karl von Seckendorf.1 Karl von Seckendorf was a former student in Heidelberg and future cathedral canon in Eichstätt. This study is motivated by a series of questions inspired by Karl’s note. What is a small-town rector doing corresponding with such an educated figure? How did he get a reputation as a bibliophile? Were there other parish priests who similarly “liked books”? To try to answer this question I have sought out books, both printed and hand-copied, that once lodged in parish libraries or belonged to members of the parish clergy in the diocese of Eichstätt, located in modern-day Bavaria. What priests read is a question of fundamental importance to our understand- ing of the late medieval parish and the role of the clergy as communicators and cultural mediators. Highly visible and vitally important, the parish clergy worked at the intersection of the institutional Church and the Christian popu- lation of Western Europe.2 Priests were entrusted with saying the Mass, preaching doctrine and repentance, honoring the saints, plumbing the con- science, and protecting the legal rights of the Church. They baptized chil- dren, blessed the fields, and prayed for the souls of the dead. What priests ix x Introduction read would have informed how they understood and how they performed their social and religious roles. Yet this might seem to be an inauspicious topic given the persistent doubts concerning the piety and intellectual attainment of priests expressed throughout the medieval period and into the sixteenth century (and beyond). If the image of the clergy found in the criticisms of churchmen and poets were true, then a study such as this one would be frustrating indeed. In the tense years leading up to the Act of Supremacy (1534), for example, Thomas Starkey held up the parish clergy of England for ridicule: There ys . a grete faute wych ys the ground of al other almost, and that ys concerning the educatyn of them wych appoint themselfe to be men of the Church. They are not brought up in virtu and lernyng as the schold be, nor wel approvyd therin before they be admitted to such hye dygnyte . for common- ly you schal fynd that they can no thing dow but pattyr up theyr matins and mas, mumblying up a certain number of wordys no thynge understoode.3 This is admittedly a piece of polemic, but the image of the medieval priest contained within it has proven remarkably persistent. Scurrilous depictions in goliardic poetry, in vernacular literature such as the Decameron, and in ser- mons and exempla were enough to create an enduring image of the venal, sensual, and ill-educated priest. 4 Visitation records do not survive in suffi- cient numbers to come to general conclusions regarding clerical education, but examples of ill-educated priests are easy to find in those that do. This kind of evidence led G. G. Coulton to declare in the early twentieth century that “the evidence of clerical ignorance all through the Middle Ages . is overwhelming.”5 In 1953, in what remains one of the most frequently cited studies on clerical education, Friedrich Wilhelm Oediger blamed clerical ignorance on a spirituality that emphasized simplicity of spirit over learning. 6 Some more regionally focused studies appeared to bear out this conclusion. 7 Indeed scholarly opinion of the parish clergy has been so low that its failings were often listed among the causes of the Reformation. Joseph Lortz, for example, argued that pluralism led to the creation of a clerical proletariat of such “terrifying size and declining quality” that it contributed to the failure of the Church to dislodge superstition from popular piety. 8 Jean Delumeau doubted that most Europeans were more than superficially Christian, so deep was the ignorance of the clergy. 9 Conclusions such as Delumeau’s have not gone unchallenged; since the 1970s scholars have used prosopographical analysis of university matricula- tion records, visitation protocols, and other administrative sources to call the image of the ignorant priest into question or at least soften the edges. 10 Whereas in 1964 A. G. Dickens described the late medieval English church as “an old, unseaworthy and ill-commanded galleon,” in the early 1990s R. N. Swanson described the late medieval English clergy as “forceful,” and Introduction xi Eamon Duffy defended medieval religion as “vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular” and claimed that the Church was “a highly success- ful educator.”11 Scholars have noted that laypersons rarely lodged complaints during visitations about the intellectual wherewithal of their priests, while others have estimated that as much as 40 to 50 percent of the parish clergy in some areas of Europe had, at least briefly, attended a university. 12 One analy- sis of the fifteenth-century records of the Apostolic Penitentiary and Apostol- ic Chamber concluded that the much derided ordination exam was taken more seriously than previous scholars have assumed. 13 Clerical ignorance has similarly lost favor as an explanation for the Reformation. 14 This modest rehabilitation of the image of the parish clergy is a part of a larger reinterpretation of the late Middle Ages. This period was long de- scribed as an age that careened from crisis to crisis, devastated by the Black Death, torn by the Great Schism, buffeted by the Hundred Years War and Hussite challenge, and finally capsized by the Reformation. 15 With such a backdrop, widespread clerical ignorance was to be expected, a sign of the times.