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COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY The American Historical Review A NEW FRAGMENT ON LUTHER'S DEATH, WITH OTHER GLEANINGS FROM THE AGE OF W THE REFORMATION1 E Americans are wont to think of the materials for the firsthand study of Old-World history as to be found only on the far side of the Atlantic. So indeed in the main they are, and so they may well remain. Yet there exists among us at least one source of gleaning which is too much overlooked. I mean the manuscript jottings on the fly-leaves and margins of our old books. May I undertake from the shelves of a single university library to illustrate their worth even to the student of the age of the Reformation? When, a few months ago, I read with deep interest of the discovery, in an old book of the library of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, of an unprinted and hitherto unknown account of the death of Martin Luther, and of its recognition by the highest authorities as the work of a contemporary and an eye-witness, Hans Albrecht, the town clerk of Eisleben, in whose house Luther died, I was quickened to a fresh interest in these manu 1 The greater part of this paper was read before the American Society of Church History at its meeting in New York, December 30, 1910. 2 A full account of this discovery, with a facsimile of the manuscript, is given by Professor Spaeth, its finder (alas, since June, 1910, no longer living), in last year's April issue of The Lutheran Church Review (Philadelphia). An article upon it had already been published by an eminent German student of the Reformation, Professor Wilhelm Walther, in the Allgemeine Lutherische Kirchenzeitung of February 18, 1910, and his conclusions had been confirmed by such fellowauthorities upon Luther as Professors Buchwald and Kawerau. The manuscript, more than two folio pages in length, is written upon the final fly-leaf and the back cover of an old volume of Luther's Sommerpostille (Wittenberg, 1544), and narrates both the death of the Reformer and the funeral ceremonies at Eisleben. That it is Hans Albrecht's autograph has not yet been established, though the legal hand lends probability to that assumption. My inquiries regarding it found Professor Spaeth no longer living, and I am indebted to the courtesy of his colleague and fellow-historian Professor Jacobs for a copy of the facsimile. He AM. HIST. REV. VOL. XVI.-47- (723) script memoranda; but I little dreamed that so soon I could report a trifle of new evidence on precisely the same much-debated episode. Glancing the other day over a shelf of old Bibles in the Cornell University Library, my eye lighted on a bulky folio which had hitherto escaped my notice. Drawing it out I found it a copy of Luther's German version and printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft in 1546, the year of the translator's death. Its library marks showed me that it was one of those bought in 1895 by our department of German for its study of the growth of the German language; and, as these were long retained in its private keeping, I understood why the volume now first met my eye. It was an ancient tome, still in the stamped hogskin of the sixteenth century, with one clasp yet performing its office. It had clearly seen hard usage. The titlepage was missing-though carefully supplied in manuscript by some modern hand—and many of the leaves were patched or mounted. Moreover, all had evidently suffered from the binder's knife, and that before it gained its present binding; for the marginal annotations which abounded, all in sixteenth-century script, showed mutilation at top and bottom and fore-edge alike. It was these annotations which caught my interest, and that which first tempted my study gave me at once a date. It was on the leaf following the title-page, where thrones the portrait of John Frederick of Saxony in full electoral regalia, that I read the words, dim but legible, at the right of the Elector's face: "Ich hoff, O Herr von Sachsen, Der Rautte-Krantz wird wider wachsen. 1548." Or, in English rhyme as rude as the German, "I hope, O Lord of Saxony, The wreath of rue will grow again for thee. The last figure of the date was questionable; but the wish could have been uttered only after the rout of Mühlberg, in 1547, had cost the Elector his liberty and his "wreath of rue "-ornament of the Saxon arms and emblem of the Saxon land. I turned two or three pages to another picture—that of the Creation, facing the beginning of the book of Genesis-and beneath I read these words, written by informs me that another account of the manuscript by Professor Spaeth, with illustrative facsimiles, will be published (of course in German) in Professor Buchwald's Luther-Kalender for 1911. 3 A description of this edition may be found at p. 689 of Die Deutsche Bibel (in the Weimar edition of Luther's works), where this copy is duly registered as at "Ithaca, Neu York". |