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The War Within: Private Interests and the Fiscal State in Early-Modern Europe 1st ed. Edition Joël Félix
Prophecy, Madness, and Holy War in Early Modern Europe
OXFORD STUDIES IN WESTERN ESOTERICISM
Series Editor
Henrik Bogdan, University of Gothenburg
EditorialBoard
Jean-Pierre Brach, École Pratique des Hautes Études
Carole Cusack, University of Sydney
Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling
Olav Hammer, University of Southern Denmark
Wouter Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam
Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol
Jeffrey Kripal, Rice University
James R. Lewis, University of Tromsø
Michael Stausberg, University of Bergen
Egil Asprem, University of Stockholm
Dylan Burns, Freie Universität Berlin
Gordan Djurdjevic, Simon Fraser University
Peter Forshaw, University of Amsterdam
Jesper Aa. Petersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
IMAGINING THE EAST
The Early TheosophicalSociety
Tim Rudbog and Erik Sand
MYSTIFYING KABBALAH
Academic Scholarship, NationalTheology, and New Age Spirituality
Boaz Huss
SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY
From JacobBoehme to Mary Anne Atwood, 1600–1910
Mike A. Zuber
OCCULT IMPERIUM
Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, andthe Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy
Christian Giudice
THE SUBTLE BODY
AGenealogy
Simon Cox
RETAINING THE OLD EPISCOPAL DIVINITY
John Edwards ofCambridge andReformedOrthodoxy in the Later StuartChurch
Jake Griesel
PROPHECY, MADNESS, AND HOLY WAR IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
ALife ofLudwig FriedrichGifftheil
Leigh T.I. Penman
Prophecy, Madness, and Holy War in Early Modern Europe
ALife ofLudwig FriedrichGifftheil
LEIGH T.I. PENMAN
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
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Abraham Gifftheil, ‘Crypto Calvinismus Wirtembergicorum’ (1622), title page
Johann Arndt, portrait (ca. 1625)
Abraham von Franckenberg, engraved portrait (1725)
Gifftheil, StimmedurchwelchederHErrZebaothaußZionalso brüllet(1629, reprint of ca. 1637)
Lucas Osiander Jr., oil on wood, Conrad Mehlberger (1619)
Johann Permeier, engraved portrait by Sebastian Furck (ca. 1640)
Letter of Gifftheil to Nicolaus Pfaff (20 January 1638)
Gifftheil, Kriegs=Gebeth(1640), title page
Christian Hoburg, engraved portrait (undated)
Gifftheil, DieFürstenundRichter...betreffend(1648), title page
Joachim Betke, engraved portrait (undated)
Friedrich Breckling, fictitious portrait (1692)
Quirinus Kuhlmann, engraved portrait (1679)
Johannes Rothé’s standard and army, engraving (1673)
Acknowledgements
The extraordinary story of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil, the main subject of this book, first came to my attention during a research trip to Wolfenbüttel many years ago. For years, as my work continued on other projects, I kept an eye out for mentions of this barber surgeon turned prophet and his strange adventures, but it was not until 2012, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, that research for this book could begin in earnest. Initially I intended to use Gifftheil and his correspondence to sketch an intellectual geography of religious dissent in early modern Europe. But as the laborious task of identifying and collecting sources began, the study transformed into something very different, particularly as biographical details emerged which shed a new and personal light on the prophet and his story. My former colleague at UQ, Mike Zuber, read all or part of this work in draft on several occasions and offered valuable comments. Others, including Phil Almond, Peter Cryle, Simon During, Peter Harrison, Nicholas Heron, Ian Hesketh, Ian Hunter, Gary Ianziti, Anna Johnston, Simon Kennedy, Henry James Meiring, Tim Mehigan, Daniel Midena, Charlotte Rose Millar, Knox Peden, Lucia Pozzi, Trish Ross, and Ryan Walter read and discussed aspects of the work with me at some point, and offered stimulating feedback. Many times during this project I benefited from wisdom, advice, criticism, and information from Jill Bepler, Jürgen Beyer, Henrik Bogdan, Erik-Jan Bos, Michael Driedger, Peter Forshaw, Carlos Gilly, Ariel Hessayon, Gizella Hoffmann, Howard Hotson, Tünde Beatrix Karnitscher, Vera Keller, Hartmut Lehmann, Benjamin Marschke, Lucinda Martin, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Martin Mulsow, Kathrin Pfister, Larry Principe, Günter Schmeisky, Douglas Shantz, Jonathan Strom, Márton Szentpéteri, Vladimír Urbánek, Allen Viehmeyer,
Noémi Viskolcz, and Andrew Weeks. My colleagues at the Monash Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Lily Yulanti Farid, David Haworth, Lynette Russell, and Leonie Stevens, gave me the time necessary to complete this study, and encouraged me to broaden its conclusions to extend to Gifftheil’s impact on missionary Christianity. Given that this work was researched and written (mostly) in Australia, it simply would not exist without the assistance of librarians and archivists in Europe, the United Kingdom, Israel, North America, and Australasia, who cheerfully and patiently fielded questions and supplied photos at every turn. I am grateful to them all, and must give extra special thanks to Verena Rothenbühler of the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, who kindly spent several days tracking down an errant Gifftheil manuscript that turned out to be of crucial importance.
Research for this project was supported by funding and opportunities offered by the University of Queensland, the ARCfunded Science and Secularization Project, Monash University, the Forschungszentrum Gotha of the Universität Erfurt, the Franckeschen Stiftungen in Halle, and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. It has been a special pleasure to complete this manuscript in Wolfenbüttel, where the idea behind the study was born, and to be able to write these very words in Amsterdam, where Gifftheil’s own adventures concluded.
Finally, I thank my family for the support and love they have offered throughout the course of this project, which has been completed amidst moves to places far away, the tumultuous upheavals and lockdowns of a global pandemic, and very trying circumstances.
July 2022
A Note on Conventions
Two calendars were used in Europe during Gifftheil’s lifetime, the ‘new style’ Gregorian calendar, dating to 1584, and the ‘old style’ Julian calendar. The adjusted Gregorian calendar was ten days ahead of the Julian. Because the Gregorian reform was promulgated by a pope, many Protestant states were reluctant to embrace it. As such, the Julian calendar continued to be used in Britain, Scandinavia, in most Protestant territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and in Switzerland. The Gregorian calendar, by contrast, was used in the United Provinces, some parts of the Duchy of Cleves, France, the Kingdom of Bohemia and its crownlands, the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, Ducal Prussia, Lusatia, and Silesia. Given that Gifftheil ranged across all of these territories at various points in his life, I give the dates as marked in the original documents. Where there is a conflict, or particular need for clarity about dating, both ‘old’ and ‘new’ style dates are given. The years are taken to begin on 1 January.
Transcriptions follow the original documents, including capitalisation and spelling, except in cases where punctuation has been changed for clarity. Editorial insertions are indicated by square brackets. Abbreviations have been silently expanded. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
1
An Unknown Prophet
Vengeance is mine; I will repay.
For by fire and by His sword will the Lord judge all flesh.
Deuteronomy 32:35
Isaiah 66:16
As the bells tolled in the morning fog on Sunday 19 October 1634, the streets of Tübingen slowly filled with townsfolk making their way to the church of St. George. The university town’s most recognisable landmark, St. George’s gothic belfry rose serenely above the rooftops overlooking the river Neckar, the lifeblood of this region of southwestern Germany. But the solemn tolling of the bells could not hide Tübingen’s misery. A month prior, the Thirty Years’ War had come to the staunchly Lutheran territory when Catholic troops commanded by the Duke of Lorraine entered the city. The meadows beyond the Neckar, once farmland, had been devoured by their encampments. With the troops came violence, plague, and resentment. The books of the town council, which registered the grievances of the populace, quickly became filled with complaints from townsfolk about the hardships occasioned by the soldiers. Yet there was a glimmer of hope. On this particular Sunday, Lucas Osiander Jr., the esteemed theologian and chancellor of Tübingen’s famous university, was to take to the church’s ornate pulpit to deliver a sermon. While some may have hoped to find solace in Osiander’s words on that day—during the sermon the preacher speaks God’s word, and becomes a true prophet—they were instead confronted by a blasphemous spectacle. Midway through Osiander’s sermon, a man
stirred from the pews and bellowed ‘why do you not preach God’s word?’ To the horror of onlookers, he drew a sword and stormed the pulpit, clearly intending to slay the churchman. Yet by God’s ‘miraculous intervention,’ a contemporary newspaper held, the stocky Osiander somehow deflected the blow even as the congregation raced to the preacher’s aid. The attacker was overpowered and brought into custody.
The shocking incident made news across Germany. Given the situation in Tübingen, these news bulletins all assumed that Osiander’s assailant was a ‘simple-minded imperial soldier’ from among Lorraine’s unruly Catholic troops, who had been upset by Lutheran doctrine.1 But the attacker was neither a Catholic nor a soldier. He was instead a native of Württemberg, who had been raised as a Lutheran—in the house of a pastor, no less. He was also one of the most notorious anti-war activists in the Holy Roman Empire. His name was Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil.
Rumour held that Gifftheil had been awoken to his divine mission by the blazing comet of 1618, an apocalyptic portent that coincided with the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War.2 Gifftheil was strikingly tall and powerfully built, wearing a long dark beard and long hair; those who encountered him were impressed by his imposing stature, his stentorian voice, his mastery of scripture, his fearlessness in the face of authority, and his striking resemblance to the Old Testament prophets. One of many lay prophets who emerged to preach God’s word during the 1620s, by the second half of the seventeenth century the mere mention of Gifftheil’s name was enough to instil contemporaries with fear, awe, or anger. For while many lay prophets urged the populace to repent or do penance in hope of avoiding war and its consequences, Gifftheil was different. Motivated by a conviction that ‘false prophets and Sadducees’—by which he meant Europe’s clerics—had goaded worldly rulers into the hellish conflict, and, animated by a compassion for the poor and downtrodden, from 1624 Gifftheil sought and won audiences with Europe’s kings, princes, dukes and emperors. He implored them to abjure the advice of their clerical advisors and institute a godly
peace according to biblical precepts, in which the wellbeing of the poor would be assured. But this compassionate goal was tinged by a dark fanaticism. Like the biblical Elijah, Gifftheil’s hopes were dimmed by blood, and he was fully prepared to ‘slaughter the priests of Baal’ (2 Kings 10)—to kill pastors and theologians—if Europe’s rulers refused to listen to his prophetic voice.
Lucas Osiander, an esteemed theologian, chancellor of a Lutheran university, and a leading figure in the state church of the duchy of Württemberg, might thus seem a natural target for Gifftheil’s murderous inclinations on that autumn day in 1634. But despite being widely reported in the press and retold by contemporaries— and in later centuries even providing the stuff of novels—there was more to this sensational incident than meets the eye.3 For Gifftheil’s attack on Osiander was not merely another of his violent confrontations with religious authority; it was rooted in a bitter personal history of familial enmity and lost honour reaching back generations. Furthermore, while the incident marked the end of Osiander’s public career, for Gifftheil it prompted a dramatic transformation. After languishing in prison for six long months before securing an unlikely release in 1635, he emerged from the womb of his prison cell reborn as God’s Warrior, a second King David, who had been chosen to wage an apocalyptic Holy War on Europe’s battlefields and to institute a divine peace by his sword. Following Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:34, Gifftheil would exact vengeance on God’s behalf, both for the fall of his family and for the sake of Christendom as a whole.
Although today Gifftheil has fallen into obscurity, an account of the prophet’s life and exploits has long been a desideratum. His contemporaries, fascinated by the divisive and tempestuous prophet, desired such an account as a proof—or refutation—of his godly bona fides. In the 1640s, one of Gifftheil’s long-time collaborators declared that ‘a whole Volume could bee written of his strange Life.’4 In the first decade of the eighteenth century, some forty years after the
prophet’s death, just such a manuscript vita circulated among Europe’s religious dissenters, which even interested those who were nominally opposed to his martial doctrines.5 Naturally, modern historians have seen a different utility in such an account. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have believed that a biographical portrait of Gifftheil could furnish ‘deep insight into the religious undercurrents’ of early modernity.6 In 1934, Ernst Benz, the doyen of German church historians, declared that a monograph on the prophet was ‘required urgently,’ both to inform scholarly debates on the origins of German Pietism and to address the seventeenthcentury legacies of the Radical Reformation.7
This book offers the first full-length account of Gifftheil’s life, thought, and exploits. From humble beginnings as the offspring of a pastor’s family in the mountain ranges of the Swabian Jura, Gifftheil earned his living as a barber surgeon before a succession of tragic incidents—among them his father’s expulsion from successive pastorates and his brother’s suicide—pushed him toward the fringes of society. From December 1624 until his death in Amsterdam in 1661, Gifftheil wandered Europe as a prophet, one who uttered divine speech. During this time he secured audiences with the great and the good, certainly. But he also attempted to murder at least two Lutheran pastors, demanded troops and gold bullion from diverse authorities to pay for an army of Holy Warriors, escaped from three prisons, and published at least 130 tracts and pamphlets in several European languages. After his death, Gifftheil’s writings were sent to leading Pietists such as Philip Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke, and were perused by Protestant missionaries before they embarked on journeys to the Americas, India, the East Indies, and Greenland. In the 1730s, Schwenckfelders fleeing persecution in Europe carried with them to Pennsylvania manuscript accounts of his adventures. Born from a family tragedy in rural southwestern Germany, fired by a strange religious and political zeal, Gifftheil’s ideas ultimately reached people across the world and played a role, albeit a minor one, in the rise of Lutheran missions and the story of global Christianity.
Biography and other contingent narratives are a fraught genre in historiography, especially since the emergence of the ‘biographical turn’ around 1980. According to critics, the narrative form of a biographical study lacks partiality; a subject can easily be divorced from their surroundings, and available evidence and knowledge of ‘what came next’ can be over-determinative. Questions have also been raised about how representative the lives of extraordinary individuals—like Gifftheil—can be.8 But the past is made up of a diversity of voices, all of whose stories are valuable in illuminating the conflicts and possibilities of the past.9 As a lay prophet, Gifftheil offers an exceptionally unusual point of departure, for his story casts new light on the murky underworld of seventeenth-century prophecy and religious dissent.
Recent studies on prophecy in Lutheran Europe have overturned prior scholarly opinion about the exceptionality of lay prophets in early modern confessional culture. Once considered anomalous and rare manifestations of ‘popular’ religious enthusiasm among the lower classes, Jürgen Beyer’s indispensable work, in particular, has demonstrated the seeming ubiquity of lay prophets and the diverse backgrounds from which they stemmed. They could be found in almost every territory, came from rural and urban areas, came from all walks of life, could be young or old, married or unmarried, men or women. Most were literate, some were educated, and many shared modes of speech and comportment, often developed by imitating local pastors.10 Despite their backgrounds, however, the vast majority of these lay prophets preached messages of repentance and penance, intended to increase piety within the territorial church. Most, furthermore, were inspired by visions of angelic intelligences to share their messages. Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil, however, was very different. He too was raised in the apocalyptic foment of Lutheran confessional culture, but ultimately rejected its tenets in favour of a heterodox spiritualist religiosity.11 He was one of a select group described by theological opponents as a ‘new prophet,’ a
person who, in the guise of legitimate prophecy, sought to challenge, not strengthen, the territorial churches.
The crucible of Gifftheil’s dissenting political and religious thought lay in what Antoine Faivre has called the ‘theosophical current,’ a central pillar of the esoteric tradition in Europe.12 As Carlos Gilly has shown, the term theosophia emerged in dissenting religious circles around 1570 to designate an unmediated godly knowledge, instead of a knowledge won through study or observation. It was first used to describe the teachings of the infamous Swiss physician Paracelsus, whose suppressed theological doctrines encouraged experimental wisdom and prophetic knowledge informed by the ‘lights of grace and nature.’ In 1580, Johann Arndt, who later became a Lutheran pastor and an influence on Gifftheil, described theosophia as the ‘true age-old philosophy,’ a ‘divine and natural wisdom of the ancients’ which trumped all ‘paper erudition.’13 In the seventeenth century the term was adopted by Protestant dissenters, Christian kabbalists, and lay prophets like Heinrich Khunrath, Jacob Böhme, Paul Nagel, Johann Valentin Andreae, and Abraham von Franckenberg, to represent a prophetic alternative, sometimes stridently anticlerical, to institutionalised religious, educational, and political authority.14
Faivre has identified three characteristics common to most early modern theosophical works. The first is speculation about the complex interrelations between God, humanity, and nature. The second is the primacy of the mythic and mytheme—like the story of the Fall—as foundations for this speculation; and the third is the belief that humanity, through creative imagination, can access higher supernatural worlds.15 Although the canon of theosophical literature has typically been limited to the works of a handful of well-known figures—Faivre himself names but eight German representatives— the reality is that the number of theosophers in early modern Germany was large, and the diversity of their teachings remarkable. Unmentioned by Faivre, Gifftheil was both a student and exponent of this tradition. His earliest tracts were influenced by Paracelsian and Arndtian thought, and featured sweeping speculations about the Fall,
about spiritual rebirth, and about the interconnectedness of the created world. Even as Gifftheil’s writings in later years inclined to more simplistic anti-war rebukes and apocalyptic tirades, his worldview remained theosophical. Theosophy provides a key to unlocking his approach to the world, how he understood its failings, and how he conceived of his own prophetic calling as a remedy to them.
Gifftheil’s place in this tradition is confirmed by his supporters, who, to a man, were supporters or exponents of theosophia. They included followers of Jacob Böhme, Arndtians, and Schwenckfelders. After his death, Gifftheil’s mission was taken up by figures like Friedrich Breckling, Johann Georg Gichtel, and Quirinus Kuhlmann, all of whom were deeply indebted to theosophical doctrines. As such, Gifftheil’s story sheds considerable light on German theosophical currents in the crucial period between Jacob Böhme’s death in 1624 and the rise of Pietism in the 1670s. It casts this current in a new and sometimes disturbing light. For while in modern scholarship theosophy is chiefly associated with a gentle introspective pacifism, Gifftheil’s story shows that several adherents flirted closely with militarism, and that the theosophical movement as a whole was forced to navigate a potential martial turn in the early 1640s.16
Traditionally, historians have struggled to make sense of Gifftheil. This is unsurprising for, even in the digital age, evidence concerning his life and work is difficult to identify and to access. Printed editions of his many writings, distributed in limited numbers in ephemeral formats, were and are rare. Given that virtually all were printed anonymously or pseudonymously, they are all but unidentifiable in library catalogues whether traditional or modern.17 Similarly, though manuscript material concerning Gifftheil’s life and writings can be found in numerous libraries and archives throughout Europe, they are often incompletely catalogued, or only identifiable by dogged research and good fortune.
The struggle for historians to find contexts for Gifftheil has resulted in two distinct historiographical traditions concerning the prophet. The first of these represents Gifftheil as a preternaturally well-travelled and influential religious adventurer, typically described as a pacifist, whose writings and agitations in England and elsewhere were an inspiration for English Fifth Monarchism and Quakerism.18 These remarkable claims, however, have their origins not in statements made by any of the key figures, but are instead repetitions and variations of the alarmist heresiographical ‘lumping’ undertaken by some of Gifftheil’s polemical detractors.19 Repeated by multiple authorities, the prophet’s links to these movements have assumed a patina of historical verity merely by dint of their repetition. The result of the cross-pollination of Gifftheil’s obscurity with associations inherited from early modern religious polemic is nowhere better demonstrated than in the bizarre tale of Gifftheil’s supposed audience with a sultan of the Ottoman Empire as a Quaker missionary. As far as I can determine, this first appeared in a Dutch scholarly work of 1902, which informed us that:
Gifftheil was so confident in his prophetic mission that he visited the Sultan. The Sultan willingly listened to him, albeit with bemusement and good humour, and, thanking him for his words, assured him in the manner of Alexander’s testimony to Diogenes that he would be delighted to become a Quaker, if he were not already a Muslim.20
Needless to say, this incident never occurred. While the prophet sent at least one letter to ‘the Turks’ during his lifetime, the only other indication that Gifftheil or his exhortations ever reached the Sublime Porte comes, fittingly, in the pages of a 1691 novel.21 The story is almost certainly the result of a confusion of Gifftheil with the Quaker missionary Mary Fisher, who visited Sultan Mehmed IV at Adrianople in 1658.22 Whether the interpolation of the German prophet into the tale was the historian’s error, or appeared in an as-yet unidentified anti-Quaker polemic of early modernity, is less important than the circumstance that, although not corroborated by a skerrick of primary evidence, it has been repeated several times, and its echoes
have even found their way into at least one standard reference work.23
The second historiographical tradition emerged in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century and was grounded in archival research in Gifftheil’s home territory of Württemberg. Between 1894 and 1916, the ordained Lutheran ministers Gustav Bossert, Christoph Kolb, and Richard Stein all published articles in an obscure local church history journal which sketched Gifftheil’s first faltering steps from barber surgeon to prophet, a transformation shaped by a familial history of heretical accusations and antiauthoritarian embitterment.24 While based on substantial primary sources, these articles minimised evidence that Gifftheil’s ideas were grounded in writings by Paracelsus and Johann Arndt—one author confidently declared that Gifftheil had ‘clearly never read a word by Arndt’—and considered him, at best, a local ‘character’ (Original) emblematic of less enlightened times. The only utility these historians identified for Gifftheil was as an entry point to the murky pre-history of Württemberg’s mystical, separatist, and Pietist religious movements.25
Nevertheless, these tentative first brushstrokes soon found a broader canvas. In 1922, Ernst Eylenstein published a lengthy study on Gifftheil in the flagship German journal Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte.26 Eylenstein was the first to analyse Gifftheil’s thought based on extensive study of the prophet’s writings held in the library and archive of the Franckeschen Stiftungen in Halle an der Saale, linking them to the earlier scholarship from Württemberg. But Eylenstein’s theological focus—the article originated as his dissertation for the degree of licentiate in theology—meant that his treatment of the prophet’s life was summary.27 Even as his detective work revealed Gifftheil’s influence on figures like Quirinus Kuhlmann and Johannes Rothé, Eylenstein repeated older scholarly canards, including Gifftheil’s influence on the Quakers and Fifth Monarchists. Concluding that Gifftheil was best understood in the context of mystical separatist Protestantism, Eylenstein’s greatest service was
in setting Gifftheil in a pan-European context and enticing others to continue his work.28
Eylenstein’s scholarship had the desired effect. In 1934 Ernst Benz devoted some space to Gifftheil’s apocalypticism in a study of second adventism in Lutheranism.29 Around the same time, the indefatigable pastor Theodor Wotschke reprinted many letters from, to, and about Gifftheil in an impressive string of articles, which linked the prophet firmly to the theosophical milieu of seventeenthcentury Europe. The pastor’s genius for discovery was, however, rivalled only by his unwillingness to document his finds so that others could follow in his footsteps.30 Nevertheless, Wotschke was the first to remark on the militarist change in Gifftheil’s worldview of 1635, a change he cannily, though mistakenly, attributed to the Peace of Prague.31 In Württemberg, too, Friedrich Fritz returned to the archives, finding documents that further filled out our picture of Gifftheil’s early years.32 But while this scholarship was rich in documentary discoveries, all of it had been undertaken by ordained Lutheran ministers working as church historians and rarely recognised the significance of Gifftheil’s life and doctrines for fields beyond their area of study.
This picture began to change with the cultural turn of the mid1960s, when scholars from disciplines like history, literature, the social sciences, and politics also discovered Gifftheil. In 1965, the German historians Martin Schmidt and Gerhard Schilfert—one from each side of the Iron Curtain—contested the entrenched narrative that Gifftheil had a wide-ranging influence on English religious movements.33 Shortly thereafter, the cultural historian Richard van Dülmen opened up new avenues to understanding Gifftheil and other so-called ‘lone prophets’ (Einzelgänger) in a series of studies dedicated to tracing the social and cultural history of Weigelianism. Dülmen’s works drew attention to social dimensions of heresy and the importance of lived contexts in shaping relations to authority, communication, and networking.34 Meanwhile, in 1976 Horst Weigelt argued that the prophet’s writings could contribute to the flourishing
scholarship on early modern peace initiatives, a focus of Cold War–era academia.35
In the 1980s, further contexts emerged. The American historian Robin Bruce Barnes showed that, in addition to apocalyptic visions, Gifftheil was deeply influenced by ‘the teaching and practice of a personal, everyday piety’ inspired by Arndt. This inclination was documented by, among other things, Gifftheil’s authorship of at least one prayer book, and his consistent advocacy of penance and practical Christianity to his readers.36 Barnes’s findings nuanced prior opinion and tied Gifftheil more concretely to the increasingly fraught ‘pre-history’ of German Pietism, which was being interrogated by scholars with ever greater perspicuity. A year after Barnes, the literary historian Günter Berghaus argued that Gifftheil’s writings, which mostly comprised scriptural excerpts weaved into new sentences, were a kind of text that ‘resists categorisation within traditional literary genres.’37 Gifftheil, in other words, could also be approached as a pathbreaking literary figure. Nevertheless, just as these new historiographical perspectives opened other fields of investigation, they simultaneously underlined Horst Weigelt’s complaint that not even the most basic research tasks—such as a bibliographical survey of Gifftheil’s many works—had been undertaken. This meant that, despite the rich body of evidence and opinion available to scholars, research on the prophet remained, in Weigelt’s eyes, ‘faulty and fragmentary.’38
This book returns to the sources to find new contexts for understanding and telling the story of the life of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil. The cornerstone is provided by Gifftheil’s own writings. His more than 130 printed works, issued in German, Dutch, English, Latin, and French, have been studied alongside the several hundred manuscript epistles sent by him and his followers to authorities, friends, and enemies throughout Europe between 1624 and 1661. This material, located in more than forty different libraries and archives across the world, has been consulted alongside writings by
Gifftheil’s contemporaries, including personal correspondence, administrative and judicial protocols, and testamentary and legal records. This study provides a narrative of Gifftheil’s life that is informed by concerns cultural, social, intellectual, and, of course, religious. It seeks to embed Gifftheil in the circumstances of his times, and, along the way, to shed light on some of the stranger backwaters of European culture through which Gifftheil moved.
Unlike other once-maligned European occupations and trades— such as the skinner, the executioner, the folk healer, the grave digger, or the bandit—Gifftheil’s calling, that of a lay prophet, has never transcended its historical odium.39 Indeed, Gifftheil’s brand of prophetic conviction, one tinctured by violence and an unshakable faith in his own righteousness, is now even more dubious than it was to many of his contemporaries, evoking associations with political terrorism and religious extremism. But Gifftheil’s time was very different to our own. As such, to understand Gifftheil’s life we need to engage with his prophetic claims earnestly. By this I do not mean evaluating the truth of his claims, but treating his prophetic identity and statements seriously, and without undue cynicism, as social and cultural artefacts. As Willem Frijhoff has shown, prophets capitalised ‘on the current affairs of their religious and secular audiences.’40 In a Europe upended by religious war, with strange portents appearing in the sky, audiences were predisposed to hearing the words of prophets, like Gifftheil, who claimed insight into divine plans for the future and whose utterances promised the ultimate victory of the righteous.
Gifftheil’s adoption of a prophetic identity—he once called prophecy his office (Amt) or occupation—allowed him to transcend his lowly social rank and to have his message heard by kings and emperors.41 But to be recognised as a prophet by others, he had to behave like a prophet. Gifftheil went to great lengths to hone aspects of his appearance, comportment, and speech to convince contemporaries that he spoke and acted in accordance with God’s will. Fulfilling the role of prophet often involved, in the words of 1 Corinthians 4:10, becoming ‘a spectacle to the whole world’ and a
‘fool for Christ.’ Or, in Gifftheil’s own words, ‘a fool sent by God.’42 The result, both to many contemporary observers as well as later scholars, is a life that seems haunted or even defined by madness. Madness, real or alleged, plays several roles in Gifftheil’s story. At times Gifftheil himself admitted to suffering from melancholy, that condition memorably described by one contemporary as the ‘devil’s sweat bath.’43 But references to his potential madness occur most commonly when contemporaries engaged with his claims to prophecy and impugned his pretence to speak on God’s behalf. As such, an earnest engagement with Gifftheil’s prophetic claims, and how they were evaluated by others, allows glimpses into a society that produced, challenged, and sometimes encouraged the emergence of figures like Gifftheil.
Despite all this, Gifftheil’s story, at its most basic level, is that of a man’s attempt to redeem his family’s lost honour. Following a meteoric rise from menial labourers in Bohemia to clerical stalwarts in the wealthy Duchy of Württemberg within the space of a few decades, the honour of the Gifftheil family was squandered in a harrowing succession of religious scandals at the beginning of the seventeenth century. While Gifftheil’s attempts to restore the honour of his family ended in imprisonment and charges of heresy, these experiences prompted his spiritual rebirth as a divine prophet, the ultimate confirmation not only of his own rectitude but also a godly restoration of the status of his maligned family. Even as the horizon of Gifftheil’s ambitions expanded to encompass holy war in a violent quest for godly peace, his compassion for the suffering of the downtrodden never wavered, a circumstance which may well be rooted in his own experiences of poverty and social rejection. Gifftheil crossed and re-crossed a continent in a Quixotic and futile pursuit of inherently unattainable goals. His story casts a dramatic new light on the culture and society of early modern Germany and Europe, the theosophical current, the origins of Pietism, and, through the evangelism of his ‘spiritual sons,’ the stranger apocalyptic roots of global Christianity.
2
The Sins of the Fathers
For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation.
Exodus 20:5
Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.
Deuteronomy 24:16
Where does the story of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil begin? When the prophet’s disciples and contemporaries gave their accounts of Gifftheil’s life, they were concerned not with his worldly origins, but with the origins of his divine calling. For them, Gifftheil’s story begins in 1618, when the prophet was supposedly ‘awoken to his godly purpose’ by the Thirty Years’ War.1 As for Gifftheil himself, who was also concerned with curating his prophetic identity, he wrote that his spiritual rebirth was initiated in the 1620s, when Württemberg’s Lutheran ministers had scorned the doctrines of Johann Arndt in open print.2 For modern readers, his tale might reasonably start with the circumstances of his birth. Called Fritz by his family, he was baptised on 18 October 1595 in the village of Böhringen in the Swabian Alps, the third son of the local pastor Johann and Anna Maria Gifftheil.3 But the true roots of our tale, I contend, lie well before any of these episodes, in the history of the Gifftheil family. From their modest beginnings in Bohemia through their rise to prominence in Württemberg, the changing fortunes of this family set the stage for the tragic and strange story of Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil to be played out.
Every summer, on the slopes of the Fichtelberg mountains in the west of the Czech Republic, there flowers a striking plant once believed to possess healing properties. Known to botanists as aconitum anthora, it is distinguished by its yellow flowers which resemble, with some imagination, a monk’s hood. Since antiquity, preparations made from the volatile salts and alkaloids in its tuberous roots were considered a nostrum against a variety of toxic flora, like the lethal wolfsbane or the dreaded widow killer. Among German speakers, these qualities lent the plant its popular name, variously spelt ‘Giftheil’ or ‘Gifftheil,’ which means ‘antidote.’ At the foot of the Fichtelberg mountains lies Cheb, today a picturesque city of some 30,000 inhabitants. Once, Cheb was known as Eger, a Germanic trading town at the western edge of the Kingdom of Bohemia. It is here, in the late fifteenth century, that the family Gifftheil is documented for the first time. Local records show that, as the years progressed, branches of the family spread throughout the Egerland and as far north as the Erzgebirge, the ore-rich mountain range on the border with Electoral Saxony. Although the surname appears in contemporary documents in a variety of exotic spelling variations, August Vilmar has plausibly suggested its origin is adjectival, and perhaps lies in an occupation.4 Thus, the patriarch of the Gifftheil family, whenever he emerged, was perhaps commonly known within his community as Gifftheiler—the antidotist, or healer. Perhaps he earned this name because of his use of aconitum anthora.
In 1516 the discovery of silver in the valley of St. Joachim, on the southern slopes of the Erzgebirge mountain range, transformed the economy of the region. Within a few years, an enterprising branch of the Gifftheil family had relocated to the village of Joachimsthal in search of their fortune. The settlement—some sixty kilometres east of Eger—soon grew into a town of several thousand inhabitants. ‘ To the valley, to the valley, with mother, with all’ (InsThal,insThal,mit Mutter , mit All) went a contemporary saying, as the roads into Joachimsthal became jammed by would-be miners and craftsmen
from across Europe in search of their fortunes.5 Europe’s first thalers —predecessors of the modern dollar—were minted there in 1518, their name deriving from the argentine valley. In due course, with the establishment of schools and churches, Joachimsthal attracted learned humanists and natural philosophers, among them the mineralogist Georg Agricola, author of De re metallica (On the Substance of Metals, 1556), who was appointed town physician in 1527.6 But life in the town was hardly paradisiacal. Mine pits and foundries devoured the countryside, leaving few pastures for grazing animals. Crops refused to grow in the poor soil. The work was backbreaking, the conditions were deplorable, and the rights of the miners were at the whim of the local lord. As such, when the Peasants’ War erupted in 1524—a series of rebellions across Germany in which disaffected peasants sought to win rights and freedoms through conflict—unrest also visited Joachimsthal. The leader of the local uprising was Wolf Gyftel, who led a platoon of miner-soldiers against local aristocracy in 1525 when his forces sacked the town hall.7 Gyftel was captured and executed in Saxony later in the same year. His is the earliest example we possess of a member of the Gifftheil family using violence in a compassionate quest for justice; he would not be the last.
The unrest in Joachimsthal was compounded by the town’s unstable religious atmosphere. The Reformation came in the 1520s, after which Catholics, Lutherans, and radical preachers all vied for Joachimsthal’s souls. The settlement’s first Protestant pastor, Johann Sylvius Egranus, was a former colleague of Thomas Müntzer—one of the firebrand leaders of the Peasants’ War—and devotee of the humanistic teachings of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was ejected from his pastorate after a series of polemical battles with Martin Luther himself. Between 1520 and 1524, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, later famed as a spiritualist and radical reformer, attempted to win support and adherents in Joachimsthal.8 The confessional situation would not be settled until the 1530s, with the arrival of Johann Mathesius, one of Luther’s chief disciples and a co-compiler of the Reformer’s influential Table Talk. Under his careful ministry,
Lutheranism gained ascendency in Joachimsthal, giving rise to the aphorism ‘behold! Joachimsthal prospers with the gospels!’ (ecce florentvallescumevangelio).9 Significantly, Mathesius also expanded the local Latin school.
Accordingly, the reputation of the Joachimsthal Gifftheils was forged not in its mines and foundries but in its schools. The humanist education received by the family’s children allowed them to transcend their lowly social status. We know the stories of two; the brothers Joachim and Zacharias. Their acuity and zeal for the Lutheran faith were noticed and fostered by Mathesius, and through him, the brothers Gifftheil could claim a direct connection to the founding father of their faith. The eldest, Joachim, was named after the township’s patron saint.10 Born in the mid-1530s, he studied liberal arts and theology in Wittenberg from 1551. After being ordained as a Lutheran minister, he occupied a series of pastorates in Saxony and Thuringia.11 Although learned, the ‘strong willed’ pastor was a stickler for church discipline and often ran afoul of authorities. For instance, in Schmalkalden in 1556, he refused to take a wife, which was otherwise a requirement for the office. In 1574 Joachim was invited to Pforzheim to become court preacher to Karl II, Margrave of Baden-Durlach.12 There he authored books on a variety of religious subjects in Latin and German, several of which appeared on the papal index.13 He died in 1585. The motifs on his gravestone in St. Martin’s Church in Pforzheim (Fig. 2.1), which unite the miner’s pickaxe and hammer with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin encomia, emblematise the improbable, rapid ascent of the Gifftheil family from menial Bohemian labourers to clerical elite.
