A diligent and impartial German bibliographer, Dr. John Geffcken, Protestant pastor of St. Michael’s, Hamburg, in his learned work on catechetical treatises of the fifteenth century, has pointed out the almost complete forgetfulness of present scholars of a branch of literature important in the theological and controversial history of Germany before the Reformation. He says of his own researches in this field:
“There was a lost, or at any rate a forgotten, literature to be discovered step by step, and its spirit grasped in all the branches thus brought together and compared. The following information will show how little light the fragmentary notices of Langemack in his Historia Catechetica (vol. i.), or of Köcher, in his Catechetical History of the Papal Church, threw upon the times to which I have devoted my attention. The worst, however, was that even these scanty notices were often false or misleading, and that, instead of pointing out the right track, they not seldom led into error. They consist mostly of lists of titles of books, without a hint of the contents of such books, and not seldom an uncertain or fanciful title is interpreted as denoting contents utterly different from the reality. The spirit of controversial prejudice in which these works were written impelled the authors, whenever they had to deal with ante-Reformation times, to paint the historical background in the darkest possible colors, in order to bring out in corresponding relief the brightness of the new dawn of the sixteenth century.”
If this is true of such works as those to which Geffcken refers, it is equally so of the German Plenarii, or glossaries, commentaries, homilies, and various devotional manuals in the vulgar tongue published in the last half of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth. The inquiry into the publication, contents, and diffusion of these books is as interesting from an antiquarian as from a theological point of view. They are little known even to cataloguists of acknowledged merit. Brunet, in his Manuel du Libraire,[[61]] etc., under the heading Plenarium, vol. iv., mentions only one, as the Plenarium, or Book of the Gospels, printed at Basle by Peter von Langendorff in 1514; while under the heading of Gospels (vol. ii.) he mentions in general terms several “Evangelia.” Hain, in his Repertorium Bibliographicum (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1826-1828), in which he claims to have collected the names of all the books printed from the time of the discovery of printing to the year 1500, is a little more explicit as to the gospels and epistles under the heading of that name, but has nothing to say of any Plenarium; although the name stands as a separate heading, it is followed by no details or examples. Graesse, in his Trésor de livres rares et précieux, ou nouveau dictionnaire bibliographique (Dresden, 1859-1869), mentions only five of these works, giving the dates and presses but no hint of the contents of the books. Earlier scholars, however, had not so wholly lost the tradition of the existence of these manuals; for instance, Nicholas Weislinger, in his Armamentarium Catholicum Argent., 1749 fol. sub anno 1488 (pp. 412-415), and Panzer, in his Annals of Ancient German Literature; or, notices and descriptions of those books which, since the invention of printing till the year 1520, were printed in the German tongue (Nuremberg, 1788), mentions a fact which Dr. Alzog says he has not yet found proved by other documents—the existence of similar manuals in other countries than Germany. The French have Les Postilles et Expositions des Epistres et Evangiles Dominicales, etc. (Troyes, 1480 and 1492, and Paris, 1497), and the Italians the same in 1483, press and date not mentioned, and Epistole e Evangeli per tutto l’anno, per Annibale da Parma (Venice, 1487). No doubt research among the libraries of ancient Italian cities, colleges, and monasteries would discover many copies of such manuals, and the same may be said of French glossaries. The fact that they have but recently come to light in Germany argues equally in favor of their being at some future time discovered in other countries, certainly not less enlightened at the time whence date the German manuals.
It seems that hitherto no satisfactory etymology of the name of this class of books has been found; the explanation of Du Cange[[62]] being rather bald, that the books “wholly contain the four gospels and the canonical epistles.” Whatever the origin of the title, the books themselves multiplied rapidly from 1470 to 1522. They were invariably in the vulgar tongue, often in dialect. They were meant as emphatically popular hand-books, guides to the liturgy, and interpreters of the Latin offices of the church, while they also supplied the place of sermons, homilies, and meditations by their glossaries and explanations of the gospels, lessons, and epistles. Some of these are much in the style of the commentaries of the early Fathers on Scriptural subjects. The translations from the Vulgate are generally original, and do not follow strictly any of the authorized versions of the day. In some of the later Plenarii the Collects and Prefaces are given, in others the Graduals and Communions; in a few the whole liturgy is translated and the ceremonies explained. None of these books was ever published in Latin, and, unlike our modern missals, they very seldom, and then sparingly, included the Latin text with that in the vulgar tongue. Hymns and sequences were also often printed. Dr. Alzog was drawn to the study of this branch of church literature by his researches for a hand-book of universal church history, and by his opportunities in the University Library of Freiburg in Breisgau, which alone contains six editions of Plenarii of 1473, press unknown, five respectively of 1480 (Augsburg), of 1481 (Urach), of 1483 (Strassburg), of 1514 and 1522 (Basle), and several others without authors’ or publishers’ names, as well as the kindred works of a famous preacher of that time, Geiler von Keisersperg, printed at Strassburg. The reproach sometimes made to the fifteenth century, of being destitute of sufficient religious and moral instruction in printed form, is much neutralized by the opposite reproach of a contemporary whose name is famous in literature as that of the author of the Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brant. This powerful satire, the work of a priest, begins with these words in German rhyme:
“All the land is now full of holy writings
And of what touches the weal of souls,
Bibles, and the lore of holy fathers,
And many more such like,
In measure such that I much marvel
No one grows better on such cheer.”