The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany

In the latter decades of the sixteenth century the Lower Saxon clergyman and historian Johannes Letzner (1531-1613) devoted himself to a projected history of the Welf lands, the Chronicle of Braunschweig-Lneburg-Gttingen. While preparing the Chronicle, however, he also wrote and published a series of smaller works, including genealogies, regional chronicles, histories of religious foundations, almanacs, and in the latter stages of his life the more ambitious studies of Ludwig the Pious, Charlemagne, and Boniface, apostle of the Germans. 1 Letzner often used parts of the Chronicle for these works, simply lifting the relevant histories from the manuscript narrative and publishing them as independent studies. Even his later studies of Charlemagne and Boniface had first been conceived as part of the opening chapter of the Chronicle before they became separate works. But this is not to suggest that his books had no life or shape of their own. Each had its own structure and provenance. Letzner wrote a genealogy of the house of Plesse specifically written as a short history of the line. His history of the Berlepsch nobles was an analogous work. In 1588, while in Leuthorst, Andreas Hantzsch of Mhlhausen published his history of the Cistercian monastery of Haina, and two years later a similar study appeared devoted to the imperial abbey of Corvey, a work which the historian Hieronymous Henniges saw through the press in Hamburg. Letzner later reworked this book and published it in a revised form in 1604 as a extended episode in the history of Ludwig the Pious. This turn towards more ambitious historical panoramas also resulted in histories of Charlemagne and Boniface, both of which went through two editions.

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