The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess

In The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess, Jonathan Green traces the complex history of the popular prophetic pamphlets attributed to a name, the moniker Wilhlem Friess, which appeared in bursts of editions in the second half of the sixteenth-century in German cities. As well as being a detailed deconstruction of the history of the texts and their printing across various editions, Green uses the example of the Friess pamphlets to reveal how and why prophecies became popular, and the textual craft of creating prognostication narratives, which were malleable and could be adapted to suit new contexts of doubt and concern. ‘Friess I’ was printed in German cities in various editions, notably Nuremberg, from 1558, and the earliest High German editions reflected Gnesio-Lutheran sentiment; ‘Friess II’ first appeared in Strasbourg in 1574 and addressed the ‘theological and geopolitical concerns of Strasbourg’s Calvinist sympathizers’ (p. 94). These are different texts and different prophecies, but are connected by a common thread of the character of prognostication. Indeed, the fact that Friess was most likely a pseudonym for a collection of prophetic ideas only strengthens Green’s assertion that what is at stake is the question of the ways in which prophetic texts were adapted and reworked to appeal in different contexts, not the issue of authorship itself.

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