Guest blog by Carol Regulski on the launch of her transcription of Hieronymus Emser’s book Auß was grund vnnd vrsach Luthers dolmatschung / vber das nawe testament / dem gemeinē man billich vorbotten worden sey (Leipzig: Wolfgang Stöckel, 1523) https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/emser/
My attention was first drawn to Emser’s book in 2009, when Professor David Yeandle at King’s College London (KCL) offered me the opportunity to start transcribing this very interesting text, for which task he had obtained modest funding. At the time, there was no modern edition (a facsimile was subsequently published in 2012).
We had cooperated successfully together on the Parzival Stellenbibliographie http://lexcoll.uni-trier.de/, work on which could not be continued, owing to a lack of funding. We had hoped initially to publish a transcription and translation of Emser’s polemical book, criticism of whose Catholic Bible translation features prominently in Luther’s Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (1530) as being a plagiarized version of Luther’s own New Testament (1522). Luther refers to his rival translator as ‘der Sudler zu Dresen’ (‘the bungler of Dresden’) https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/sendbrief/ (a3r) and gives examples of Emser’s often clumsy or inaccurate translation, which was made from the Vulgate rather than from the original Greek text. In Emser’s Auß was grund vnnd vrsach he demonstrates what he considers to be 1,400 heretical errors and lies in Luther’s translation (‘viertzehenhundert ketzerlicher jrthumb vnd liegē’). In fact, these are mostly places where Luther had followed the Greek text, which differs from the Vulgate, or where he translated idiomatically. In others, Luther had interpreted in accordance with his own theology. Emser’s text would probably have been largely forgotten, had it not been for his attacks on Luther’s successful translation, which rendered sense for sense. Indeed, it received only scant attention from later scholars in brief quotations from the 1523 edition. As with many academic projects, this, too, had to be curtailed, owing to insufficient funds and changes in personal circumstances. Hence I was able to complete only about 70% of the transcription at that time, and the project was shelved.
The project came back to life during the pandemic in 2020, as I had retired slightly early from working in the KCL library and was looking for something that I could work on at home. With encouragement from Professor Yeandle and Dr Howard Jones, I started to revisit the transcription.
The first issue I faced was that all the 2009 work had been done using Windows XP and the old (doc) format of Word. This older technology offered a far more restricted extended character set and a much less comprehensive selection of fonts. After discussion with Professor Henrike Lähnemann and the Taylor Institution Library’s German specialist, Emma Huber, it was decided that the way forward would be to encode the text in xml to enable it to be uploaded to the Taylor Editions website.
The first task was to convert all the old documents to docx format, using a more suitable font (Cardo). This necessarily involved some careful proofreading. I then needed to transcribe and proofread the remaining chapters of the book. Emma Huber kindly granted me access to her online course in Creating Digital Editions (now freely available under a Creative Commons Licence) and this taught me how to convert the text to xml format. For this purpose, I used the free software Notepad++ to create the xml files and then used TEIGarage to convert the files to html for final proofreading.
It was interesting for me as a medievalist to see how the publisher responded to the challenge of printing the text using different fonts and also abbreviations used by manuscript scribes. There were also printing errors (noted in the transcription) – sometimes apparently manually corrected by the printer, sometimes evidently noted by a reader.
Much research remains to be done. The various quotations from the Bible and references to other authors need to be cross-checked (a few obvious errors are noted in the transcription). I also wonder whether a second edition of the book was printed at a later date. There is a very obvious error in the page-numbering on i34r, which is not found in at least one other edition that I have seen (see note 6 in my transcription).
More research into the publisher might also be rewarding. Wolfgang Stöckel began his printing career in Leipzig, but moved to Dresden within three years of publishing Emser’s book and founded a publishing house that survived in various guises until WW2. For further details see Denkschrift zum 150jähr. Bestehen der Firma C. C. Meinhold & Söhne G. M. B. H., Dresden, Nachfolgerin der 1526 von Wolfgang Stöckel errichteten Buchdruckerei. Im Auftrag der Firma bearbeitet von Dr. phil. Christoph Jobst. [With plates, including portraits and facsimiles.] MEINHOLD, C. C., UND SOEHNE.; Jobst, Christoph. 1927. The first chapter of this book deals with Stöckel.