German History Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 175–198
The Sense of the Past in Reformation
Germany: Part II
C. Scott Dixon
I: The Chronicle of Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Göttingen
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-Lüneburg-Göttingen. 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 Mühlhausen 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.
In the final years of his life Letzner published an almanac and the Wunderspiegel of
1604, a typical Lutheran sermon on the decline of faith and morality disguised as a
survey of the natural world. Originally conceived in four parts, beginning with a look at
comets, eclipses, unusual weather and earthquakes and ending with strange wonders
and misbirths, it never went beyond the first two books. Letzner’s most substantial
printed work, however, and something of a modest foreshadowing of what the Chronicle
could have been, was his Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica (1596), a genealogicalhistorical work that took in a large sweep of Lower Saxon history. According to Letzner,
1On his works, see Hans Klinge, ‘Johannes Letzner: Ein niedersächsischer Chronist des 16. Jahrhunderts’ (Dissertation,
Göttingen, 1950/51, hereafter Klinge, ‘Johannes Letzner’ (1950/51), pp. 83–103; Phlipp Julius Rehtmeier,
Braunschweig-Lüneburgische Chronica (Braunschweig, 1722), pp. 16–33; there is a list of his unpublished
manuscripts as ordered by later historians in Joachim Barward Lauenstein, Einleitung in die Scriptores Rerum
Hildesiensium (Brauschweig, 1736), pp. 58–76.
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghs020
176 C. Scott Dixon
the work was completed in 1589 but went through five redrafts before its eventual
publication.2
In order to find the means to research and publish their works, theologico-historici such as
Letzner looked for a patron or sought the support, financial or otherwise, of a sympathetic
party. While preparing his genealogy of Plesse, for instance, he received most of his
material from Dietrich IV, the last of the Plesse line, who invited Letzner into his home.
The history of the house of Berlepsch was overseen by Lucretia von Berlepsch, widow of
the recently deceased Erich Volckmer von Berlepsch. She too provided Letzner with
material.3 Though this is not proof of patronage per se, it is worth noting that the printing
costs of the second edition of the Corvey history (1604) were shared between the abbot
and the neighbouring city of Höxter, and Letzner occasionally dedicated his books to
important figures, which might suggest recognition of patronage (or perhaps a bid to
secure it). Much more significant was the support he received later in his career from
Dukes Julius and Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, for this provided access
to the riches of the ducal library and assistance from powerful figures such as the
chancellor Johann Jagemann. But there were negative implications as well, for patronage
of this kind came with a high level of expectation. It also meant that Letzner’s research
was subject to scrutiny, for now that he was engaged with the history of BraunschweigLüneburg there was the possibility he might get close to secrets of state. At the very least,
his histories were useful to the princes—or to neighbouring princes—as a species of
proof in legal quarrels over boundaries and rights.4 We know Letzner’s work was used in
this manner in a conflict with Mainz, for instance. Little wonder, then, that on his death
in 1613 his Strodthagen study was sealed off until the ducal assessors arrived and sifted
through his papers. Whatever they found to be of value was confiscated and later
deposited in the Wolfenbüttel archives.5
Despite the support Letzner received from Wolfenbüttel in the latter stages of his
career, the Chronicle failed to find a publisher in his lifetime or in the century following
when the antiquarian movement was in full bloom. And the same reason applied in both
2Hellmut Hainski, ‘400 Jahre: Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica des Johannes Letzner’, Einbecker Jahrbuch, 45
(1996), pp. 83–96.
3Klinge, ‘Johannes Letzner’ (1950/51), p. 81; F.L. Lutz, ‘Einige Nachrichten über das Leben und die Schriften des
gegen das Ende des 16. und Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts gelebt habenden Johannes Letzner’, Neues vaterländisches Archiv oder Beiträge zur allseitigen Kenntniß des Königreichs Hannover (1824), p. 130.
4In Oldenburg as well chronicles often had to double as a type of evidence in jurisdictional disputes. See Heinrich
Schmidt, ‘Dynastien, Länder und Geschichtsschreibung im nordwestlichen Deutschland vom 16. bis zum 19.
Jahrhundert’, Niedersächisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 68 (1996), pp. 1–18.
5In a letter to Heinrich Petreus (13 April 1613), Johannes Grotejan, Letzner’s successor in Iber, described the arrival of
the assessors and the opening of the ‘versigelte studier kamer’. HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fol. 69r; Klinge,
‘Johannes Letzner’ (1950/51), p. 44. It was a common practice for rulers to confiscate the papers of a historian in the
fear they might contain state secrets. On his death in 1680, for instance, the study of Johann Heinrich Hoffmann,
court historian of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, was sealed off and his papers assessed in order to prevent, as Duke Ernst
August put it, ‘dergleichen unseren fürstlichen Estate angehende Sachen in fremde Hände kommen zu lassen’. See
Werner Ohnsorge, Zweihundert Jahre Geschichte der königlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover (1665–1866) (Göttingen,
1962), p. 25. Similarly, when Christian Matheaus Knesebeck, the promising young historian and steward to
the Count of Wesel, took his own life in 1703 with a dagger while alone in a room in Celle, the Duke of Celle
quickly put out orders that his collectanea, recently shipped in a barrel from Rostock, was not to be opened or
consulted without his foreknowledge. Joachim Friedrich Feller, Monumentorum ineditorum variisque linguis
conscriptorum . . . Fasciculi XII (Jena, 1718), p. 39.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 177
instances: the expense.6 Had it been published, however—assuming the state of the
manuscript as described by subsequent historians was an accurate description of the
manuscript that Letzner left behind—it would not have been the work he first envisioned
or indeed the book he promised to readers in his 1601 chapter summary, for whole
sections remained incomplete. Granted, it is difficult to judge exactly what a complete
version would have looked like, for Letzner rethought the structure of the Chronicle as he
worked on it, moving sections, adding sections, even broadening the chronological
framework in order to find a place for universal history.7 But if we assume the vision he
described in his Summarischer Inhalt of 1601 was the final scheme, the Chronicle was to be
made up of eight books. It was to begin with a history of the world from the point of
origin to the age of the apostles and then turn to the history of Braunschweig-Lüneburg
with chapters on bishoprics and foundations, monasteries and churches, an alphabetically
arranged history of the territories, the princes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, the nobility,
cities and market towns, and finally natural phenomena such as mining works and salt
baths, springs and rivers, forests and hills. And each of these books was massive in scale.
Book two, for instance, comprised 233 chapters. (One of the manuscript versions of the
book on the princes totals 1,108 pages on its own.) And yet even late in life Letzner was
not daunted by the scale of the project, nor the reasons for writing it, as he advised the
reader in the preface to the Summarischer Inhalt:
To the glory of the one, eternal, true and omnipotent God and Father of all mercy and his only precious son
Jesus Christ together with the worthy Holy Ghost, in humble service and for the benefit of my gracious
patrimonial princely rule [Obrigkeit], for the renown and honour of the Fatherland, and in the best interests
of posterity—God as my witness, these are the reasons I have undertaken to write a chronicle of the lands of
Braunschweig, Lüneburg, and Göttingen. With God’s help and the support of many pious souls it has now
reached the stage that extracts from all sorts of letters, sources, contracts, charters, and other similar suitable
documents have been put into a judicious order and it stands ready to go to the printer.8
If Letzner was thinking along these lines in 1601, it would seem that he still had reason to
believe that the Chronicle would eventually see the light of day and bring honour to both
Braunschweig-Lüneburg and its Lutheran church. And he also believed it had an
important message to relate to later generations. The question to pursue now is what the
Chronicle actually had to say about the German past, whether it really did heap honour on
church and state, and whether its thousands of unpublished manuscript pages left any
lasting mark on posterity, as Letzner hoped it would.
II: The Vanishing Past
At some stage while writing a section on the city of Magdeburg, Letzner took the time to
draw a picture of four naked women on a cart being pulled by as many fowl.9 Aside from
the hand-drawn escutcheons that adorned his manuscripts, Letzner very rarely added an
image to the text, so this was something of a rarity. It purports to be a rendering of the
Venus of Magdeburg, and it seems that he based it, perhaps working from memory, on a
6Rehtmeier, Braunschweig-Lüneburgische Chronica, pp. 16–17.
7Klinge, ‘Johannes Letzner’ (1950/51), pp. 87–103.
8Johannes Letzner, Summarischer Inhalt, und kurtzer Bericht, aller Bücher, der Braunschweigischen, Lüneburgischen
und Göttingischen Chronica (Hildesheim, 1601), p. Aiir.
9The image is at HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., 298r.
178 C. Scott Dixon
Figure 1: The Venus of Magdeburg.
Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel: Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol. 298r. Used with permission.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 179
similar image in the work of Johannes Pomarius (Baumgart), though it was not strictly
faithful to the original—Letzner’s swans have more of the goose about them than
Baumgart’s, for instance, and the bagpipe-playing dwarf appears here for the first time.10
The story he is relating concerns the origins of the city and how its name was derived
from the Castellium Veneris established on the spot by the Roman general Nero Claudius
Drusus after his victory over the Germanic tribes. At this site on the Elbe he built a
temple to the goddess Venus with the figures depicted by Letzner. It remained standing,
and indeed was used as a place of worship by the Saxons, until Charlemagne replaced it
with a church. For Letzner, the story was useful in two senses: first by moving from
Castellium Veneris to Virginopolium to Venusburg and finally to Maegde-burg, it
provided an etymological theory of origins for the place name; and second, as it was a
striking example of the false faith and superstition once rampant in Saxony, it sat
perfectly within his narrative of the coming of Christianity during the age of
Charlemagne. Letzner’s reading of the image thus served his historiographical purposes,
though it was not the first time the image had been used in this way. Letzner claimed to
have taken it from the Cronecken der Sassen (1492), but he would have come across it in
other works as well, many with subtly different histories of the origins of the site and
slightly altered descriptions of the image. Albert Krantz, for instance, put the apples in
the left hand of Venus and the globe in her right, while other chroniclers traced the
foundations back to Julius Caesar rather than Claudius Drusus. But in its basic outlines it
remained a commonplace of Saxon history until the early eighteenth century, at which
stage historians of a more critical and ‘scientific’ cast of mind started to dismiss it as a
myth.11
What is interesting in this context is how Letzner interpreted the image. Convinced
that the ‘brutish unreason and blindness’ behind such a figure had little to offer a
Christian reader (or perhaps a little too much), he took up each one of the significant
objects and symbols in turn and invested it with Lutheran meaning.12 The garland of
myrtle, for instance, which was a healing plant, an aphrodisiac, and a mark of victory,
should be thought of as the symbol for a chaste and honourable wife, for this too denotes
victory, in this case victory over infidelity. The roses wound up in the garland remind us
of the mortality of our flesh. Beauty will fade. The smile on Venus’ face should be
understood by Christian wives as an admonition to treat their husbands with a pious,
cheerful disposition, the rose in her mouth as an emblem of discreet silence: do not speak
publicly of private affairs, nor let impatience gain the upper hand. The torch at her
breast (not really evident in Letzner’s sketch) should speak to all of us of the flaming dart
10Johann Baumgart, Summarischer Begriff Der Madgeburgische[n] Stadt Chronicken . . . (Magdeburg, 1587), p. Aivv,
with interpretation pp. Br-Biiir.
11Accounts of the Magdeburg Venus include: Albert Krantz, Saxonia (Leipzig, 1563), p. xxxir; Sebastian Münster,
Cosmographei (Basel, 1556), p. dccciiiiiv; Peter Albinus, Meißnische Land und Berg Chronica (Dresden, 1589),
pp. 153–4; see also the discussion in Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (Princeton, 1953), pp. 239–41;
examples of later criticism include: Caspar Calvör, Saxonia inferior antiqua gentilis et Christiana (Goslar, 1714),
p. 55; Samuel Walther, Monumentum Magdeburgicum (Magdeburg, 1725), pp. 38–48; on the etymology of
Magdeburg, see Thomas Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation: Magdeburg ‘Herrgotts Kanzlei’ 1548–1551/2
(Tübingen, 2003); Ulinka Rublack, ‘Metze und Magd: Frauen, Krieg und Bildfunktion des Weiblichen in deutschen
Städten der Frühen Neizeit’, Historische Anthropologie, 3 (1995), pp. 414, 416, 423.
12For what follows, see Johannes Letzner, Historia Caroli Magna (Hildesheim, 1602), pp. Vv-Xr;
180 C. Scott Dixon
of original sin embedded deep within the hearts of humankind and the need to turn to
‘the will and Word’ of God for strength. The orb of the world denotes the extent to
which we are slaves to lust and carnal pleasure, the three golden apples a reminder that
love, affection, and friendship, if they are to last, cannot be bought with wealth. This
message is then strengthened in the image of the three goddesses joined to one another
arm in arm. And so continued the interpretation, up to and including the yoked geese.
(There was no mention, however, of the bagpiping dwarf.)
Overwriting paganism with Christianity in this manner was common in the
confessionalized historiography of the early modern period. Like all pastor-historians,
Letzner held that the main message to take away from any reading of the past was the
Christian message, and above all the lessons learned through recognizing the workings
of God in the world. If the hand of God was not immediately apparent, as was the case
with the Venus of Magdeburg, some degree of analytical dexterity was required. Most
historians would have thought along these lines, although as a Lutheran pastor-historian,
Letzner had the added obligation of demonstrating the extent to which history, if viewed
in the proper light, was a vindication of the Lutheran church in particular. In doing this,
he was following in the footsteps of a tradition established by Philipp Melanchthon with
the publication of Carion’s Chronicle and ultimately raised after mid-century to the level of
a near-science by Matthias Flacius Illyricus and the centuriators of Magdeburg.
According to Flacius, the ultimate purpose of a Lutheran work of history was to
demonstrate
how the true church and its religion gradually fell off the track from that original purity and simplicity in the
apostolic time because of the negligence and ignorance of teachers, and also partly through the evil of the
godless. Then it must be shown that at times the church was restored by a few really faithful men, and why
the light of truth sometimes shone more clearly, and sometimes under the growing darkness of godless entity
it was again more or less darkened—until, finally at our time, when the truth was almost totally destroyed,
through God’s unbounded benefice, the true religion in its purity was again restored.13
Within such a scheme, all of Christian history since the age of the apostles is a tale of
unremitting decline. History reveals that there were inspired individuals (the so-called
testes veritatis, the witnesses to truth) who surfaced on occasion through the centuries and
testified to the eternal presence of the Word of God, even during the darkest days of the
papacy, but it was not until the gospel was liberated by Martin Luther and the
Reformation that the Church of Christ was reborn once again and the trajectory of
decline was reversed. And it was important that history bear out this fact: that after the
Reformation, with God’s Word preached as it had been preached in the days of Christ,
the world was being moved once again by the Spirit.14
In historiographical terms, this meant that Protestant scholarship of the confessional
age tended to let the message speak louder than the facts. As Geoffrey Dickens remarked,
the Reformation was viewed as ‘a supernatural act in the history of salvation, to which
they [Protestants] traced their religious roots, but which they viewed in a way that can
13Cited in Oliver K. Olson, Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (Wiesbaden, 2002), p. 219; Arno
Mentzel-Reuters and Martina Hartmann (eds), Catalogus und Centurien (Tübingen, 2008).
14On confessionalized historiography, see Matthias Pohlig, Zwischen Gelehrsamkeit und konfessioneller
Identitätsstiftung: lutherische Kirchen- und Universalgeschichtsschreibung 1546–1617 (Tübingen, 2007); Irena
Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden 2003);
Pontien Polman, L’élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du 16e siècle (Gembloux, 1932).
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 181
only be described as profoundly ahistorical’.15 Writing a work of history was necessarily
a tautological exercise, indeed a triumphal exercise, for the central purpose was to
legitimate the idea that the Reformation was an event inspired and directed by God and
that the Lutheran faith was the only true religion on earth. Small wonder modern
scholars have long claimed that church history during this period was little more than a
handmaid for dogma and polemic.16 Of course, the extent to which the narrative was
pulled by the gravity of religious convictions varied from author to author. With
Melanchthon, for instance, the confessional bias was not as explicit as with Flacius, but
he did think that proper church history must necessarily do two very important things: it
must provide the reader with a ‘genealogy’ of orthodoxy, which meant in effect a
genealogy of Lutheranism, and it must provide the reader with examples of where and
when the earthly church went wrong, which in his view meant recounting the so-called
‘decline’ of the Catholic church from the fourth century to the eve of Reformation.17
Lesser historians such as Letzner, who were not as theologically sophisticated and were
generally more concerned with details than doctrine, did not write their histories as
explicit demonstrations of the truth of Lutheranism or the supposed errors of
Catholicism, but they did work from the premise that the Reformation was a fundamental
turning point in history and that their church had a special place in the new age.18
For most of his working life as a historian Letzner thought in these terms. All the
remaining evidence suggests that he was an orthodox Lutheran who accepted and
preached the teachings of the churches in Calenberg-Göttingen and Grubenhagen and
did not stray, theologically, from the status quo.19 So too with reference to his theologicohistoriographical views. In his early days, in so far as Letzner reflected on method, he
followed the traditional line of thinking described above: history was a reflection of the
intentions of the divine and a story of decline that was only brought to a close with the
appearance of Luther and the Reformation.20 When Letzner did speak explicitly about
the place of the Reformation in the course of Christian history (which he did relatively
infrequently), he too viewed it as a providential event, brought about by God to overthrow
the corruption and false teaching of the papacy. The central means for this was Martin
Luther, whose role as the reformer of the present age had been prophesied decades
before his birth and whose efforts, by way of the ‘pure, clear, and unambiguous’ preaching
and teaching of the Word, was the catalyst that brought down the ‘great errors’ of Roman
Catholicism.21
Letzner’s profile as an orthodox Lutheran historian was further revealed in his
mention of the testes veritatis, the alleged proto-Protestants who were thought to have
15A.G. Dickens and John M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Oxford, 1985), p. 95.
16The classic statement is Polman, L’élément historique; Polman’s thesis has recently been challenged by Backus, who
speaks of ‘the creative role of history in the Reformation era as a decisive factor in the affirmation of confessional
identity’. See Backus, Historical method, p. 5.
17Backus, Historical method, p. 331.
18Pohlig, Zwischen Gelehrsamkeit, p. 40.
19There is a good summary of his views on justification at HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol. 65v.
20Klinge, ‘Johannes Letzner’ (1950/51), pp. 63–79.
21Letzner, Historische, Kurtze, Einfeltige und Ordentliche Beschreibung des Closters und Hospitals zu Heina
(Mülhausen, 1588), pp. Giir; HAB Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fols. 141r-177r; HAB Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol. 84r; HAB
Cod. Guelf. 46.1 Extrav., fol. 35v.
182 C. Scott Dixon
surfaced on occasion throughout Christian history. Elevated to a historiographical
method by Flacius, the ability to identify these evangelicals avant la lettre became one of
the hallmarks of the Lutheran method. Letzner included examples in his works. One
appeared in the account of the Walkenried Confession, a fairly well-known episode
taken up in his unpublished history of Walkenried Abbey, where, in the midst of a
discussion of the late-medieval lapse into superstition and ignorance, he recounted the
story of a group of monks who, in 1469, drew up a confession of their faith that made
reference to belief in Christ alone. Faith, they proclaimed, rather than works, was the key
to salvation.22 Even more persuasive was the short history of Engelbert Arnoldi, a
medieval monk of Loccum Abbey, who was reputed to have prayed so passionately about
Christ as the sole means of justification that his brothers in the neighbouring cell
overheard every word. Letzner claimed to have seen this confession written on the pages
of a liturgical text while visiting Hamburg in 1589, though there were different versions
of this history and not all agreed in the details.23 And in a manuscript study devoted to
the theme of the rise of errors in the Church, he went into even greater detail, listing the
names of important proto-Protestant ‘witnesses’ throughout Christian history who
either preached the Word or prefigured the thought of Luther to some degree. Letzner
even provided the names of a few clergymen in Hardegsen—his home town—who had
preached the need for reform and the necessity to return to the ‘true religion’ in the
coming final days.24
Finally, like most second- and third-generation Lutheran historians, Letzner was
quick to condemn medieval Catholicism for its reliance on rite and ritual as well as its
arsenal of ‘superstitious’ beliefs. The works-based Catholicism of the late-medieval
period, he claimed, had long since fallen away from Christianity. Rather than serving
Christ and his Word, the Church had become subject to the ‘godless, tyrannical,
antichristian papacy’, and indeed to the point that the pope himself had become an
object of worship, an idol for the deluded masses. Other errors had crept in as well, as
was evidenced in the nature of the Catholic Mass, the luxury, wealth and power of the
clergy, and the sheer range of material objects instrumental in medieval piety, from
golden chalices, images and idols, candles and chrism oil, to letters of indulgence and
pilgrimage badges.25 The two standard Lutheran grievances were thus at the top of
Letzner’s list. First, he condemned the Catholic church and its clergy for the decline into
wealth and worldliness, something that was easy to prove by way of the historical record.
There was a clear trajectory, he claimed, from the faith and purity of the early Christians
to the fraudulence of the medieval church, the result being a religion based almost
22Johannes Letzner (Fritz Reinboth, ed.), Die Walkenrieder Chronik (Walkenried, 2002), pp. 199–203; Albert
Querfurth, ‘Das Walkenrieder Bekenntnis’, in Nicolaus Heutiger (ed.), 800 Jahre Kloster Walkenried (Hildesheim,
1977), pp. 96–8.
23Ernst Berneburg, ‘Ein evangelischer Mönch vor der Reformation’, in Horst Hirschler and Ernst Berneburg (eds),
Geschichte aus dem Kloster Loccum: Studien, Bilder, Dokumente (Hannover, 1982), pp. 217–19; Johann Georg
Leuckfeld, Antiquitates Michaelsteinenses et Amelunxbornenses (Wolfenbüttel, 1710), pp. 119–21. Leuckfeld
mentions in his footnote that this was a notable example of a ‘witness of truth’.
24HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fols. 125r-39v; Letzner also spoke of the Corveyer Litany as a medieval example of
proto-Protestantism, a suggestion that was dismissed by Anton Pistorius in his Anatomiae Lutheri (Cologne, 1598).
25HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fols. 113r-124v.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 183
entirely on works righteousness.26 And second, Letzner ridiculed medieval Catholicism
for its trust in the objects and works related to worship at the expense of faith, his main
target being the trade in relics (monkey business, or Affenspiel, as he termed it), which he
considered the most powerful evidence of the distorting effects of human laws on
Christianity. And it was made worse by the fact that, as Letzner recognized, many of
these beliefs still resided in the hearts of the Saxon parishioners of his own day.27
Over time, however, Letzner’s study of the Lower Saxon past pushed him beyond the
parameters of the orthodox scheme. He never doubted that Lutheranism was the true
faith; but as he struggled to reconcile the orthodox model with his research, it prompted
him to rethink the nature of medieval religion. And more to the point, he began to
question the reality of Lutheran history as projected by the orthodox paradigm. For if
the standard Lutheran interpretation was correct, and if the providential model was
anything more than a theological presupposition, then post-Reformation Christianity
should be improving, faith should be strengthening, the church should be flourishing,
and most important of all, the past should be catching up with the present—that is, the
founding truths of apostolic Christianity should once more be coming to light and
completing the arch of Lutheran history. But Letzner found the opposite to be the case.
The more he researched, the fewer proofs he found of a heightened devotion to
Christianity; and in fact, the more he contrasted the religious culture of Reformation
Saxony with the religious culture of his Saxon ancestors, the less pious it seemed. And
the most powerful evidence of this was the fact that history too, the only sure trace of
God’s everlasting plan, was vanishing from the earth.
Letzner was able to register this loss in a number of ways. To begin with, his experience
was like that of many other Lutheran pastors of his day: the mere encounter with parish
religion confirmed him in his most pessimistic beliefs. Measured against the expectations
of the pastorate, the vast majority of local church-goers were far less Lutheran, and
indeed far less Christian, than the clergymen thought they should be. Just as in other
Lutheran lands, the parishes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg were home to people who paid
no heed to the teachings of the new church, refused to go to services, continued to trust in
magic and superstition, held fast to medieval beliefs, and knew little about the
Reformation or that they were living in an age of reinvigorated faith.28 After visiting his
birthplace, Hardegsen, Letzner claimed that the young people knew nothing about the
time under the papacy or how the Reformation liberated Christians and brought the
gospel to light.29 And it was more than just a lack of knowledge. As a long-term pastor in
a number of different parishes, Letzner would have had more than his share of firsthand encounters with religious culture at the local level. If the visitation reports are
anything to go by, the parishes were bursting with people who mixed and mingled beliefs
while making little distinction between Catholic and Lutheran teachings. In
Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, for instance, the visitation process of the 1570s revealed the
26Letzner, Historische, Kurtze, Einfeltige und Ordentliche Beschreibung, Biiir-Divr; Johannes Letzner, Dasselische und
Einbeckische Chronica (Erfurt, 1596), p. 16r.
27HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol. 89v; Letzner, Historische, Kurtze, Einfeltige und Ordentliche Beschreibung, pp. Bivv,
Fiiiv.
28On the ongoing issue of ‘success and failure’ see the discussion in C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from
Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 175–84.
29HAB, Cod. Guelf. 49 Extrav., p. 111r.
184 C. Scott Dixon
same sort of indiscretions that had plagued the medieval priests, ranging from
drunkenness and adultery to magic and disbelief; and more to the point, the parishioners
continued to insist on observing medieval customs such as the feast days of the saints or
trust in sacramentals such as the ringing of blessed bells.30 Letzner made note of some of
these practices, but it was the general disinterest and disrespect for religion that shocked
him the most, or as he put it,
the dreadful and outright unthinking insolence and nonchalance of the common, ill-bred folk. They will not
let themselves be ruled or led for the better, not by God, nor by the preachers, nor by the authorities. For this
reason they pay no more heed to punishment, and what is worse, no longer consider sin to be sin.31
The waning interest in religion was further confirmed by the fate of the material
remains. The Reformation in Lower Saxony was not an iconoclastic movement. Unless
objects were overtly Catholic in their symbolism or usage (such as monstrances or side
altars), most of the interior paraphernalia was either retained in the church or locked
away in chests.32 The churches were certainly not stripped clean of the Catholic past in
the manner of the Swiss reforms. Nevertheless, Letzner often remarked on how much of
the material past was disappearing during his lifetime. He often came across gravestones
and monuments with the lettering chipped or worn away, weathered and defaced murals
and crumbling tombs, pictures that had been cut in part or removed altogether, and
church buildings left in a state of decay. Occasionally he encountered a ‘lover of
antiquities’ such as the custodian of Lamspringe who erected a protective wooden
tracery around a sepulchre in the cloister church, but for the most part things were either
abandoned to the elements or they were put to private use.33
What was worst of all in Letzner’s view was that so much of this was done ‘under the
pretext of the Gospel’.34 As in many parts of Germany, the Reformation provided
numerous opportunities for local communities to put the church fabric and its contents
to use. Some buildings were simply torn down, the stone and brick, as in Hildesheim,
then used to build houses or to buttress the town walls.35 As for the costly objects inside—
organs and altars, candles, bells and images—they often disappeared, either falling into
private (or princely) hands or confiscated by departing Catholic priests. On occasion the
medieval objects were destroyed altogether by parishioners eager for the full brunt of
reform, though Letzner had doubts about these overt acts of religious zeal, fearing that
30See the reports in Ernst Georg Wolters, ‘Die Kirchenvisitationen der Aufbauzeit (1570–1600) im vormaligen
Herzogtum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel’, in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte, 43,
1 (1938), pp. 204–37; 44, 2, (1939), pp. 64–85; Friedrich Spanuth, ‘Die Grubenhagische Kirchenvisitation von 1579
durch Superintendent Schellhammer’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte, 52
(1954), pp. 103–27; Karl Kaiser, ‘Die General-Kirchenvisitation von 1588 im Lande Göttingen-Kalenburg’, Zeitschrift
der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte, 8, 1 (1904), pp. 93–238; 9, 2 (1904), pp. 22–72.
31Johannes Letzner, Beschreibung der Ernstlichen und Erschrecklichen Busspredigt (Hildesheim, 1602), p. Aivv.
32See Martin Wandersleb, ‘Luthertum und Bilderfrage im Fürstentum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel und in der Stadt
Braunschweig im Reformationsjahrhundert’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für niedersäschsische Kirchengeschichte, 66
(1968), pp. 18–80; much of the medieval paraphernalia in Barsinghausen, including the relics, was preserved in iron
trunks well into the eighteenth century. See Achim Bonk, ‘Die mittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Ausstattung der
Klosterkirche in Barsinghausen’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für niedersäschsische Kirchengeschichte, 101 (2003),
pp. 7–39.
33HAB, Cod. Guelf. 46.1 Extrav., fol. 146v.
34HAB, Cod. Guelf. 46.2 Extrav., fol. 22v.
35HAB, Cod. Guelf. 46.1 Extrav., fol. 98v.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 185
many of these evangelical iconoclasts gave lip-service to the new faith but remained
Catholic in their hearts.36 Such destruction and neglect were signs of the times to
Letzner, and they did not speak well of the religious sincerity of the present. ‘Previous to
this age’, he wrote,
the people gave willingly and gladly to the church—even of their own volition—and cultivated the harvest
of God. Contrariwise, there are also many people in our time who—of their own volition—have willingly
and gladly confiscated and hoarded church property for themselves. Whatever benefit, advantage, or betterment has resulted as a consequence is laid bare by daily experience.37
It is interesting to note that he sometimes reflected on the passage of time by recalling
from memory images that used to adorn the pre-Reformation churches. The 1383
portrayal in Münden of a woman dressed as a queen with a mirror in her hand and the
surrounding text (vanitas vanitatum) remained fresh in his mind, and so too did the
medieval fresco of the dance of death once in the monastery of Gandersheim.38
But the most shocking evidence that the Christian past was vanishing was the fate of
the written word. Everywhere Letzner looked, books and manuscripts were disappearing.
This was tragic in his view, for two reasons: first, it cut his bibliophile’s heart to the quick,
and second, he so strongly believed that the contemplation of Christian history
strengthened faith and led the reader closer to the mind of the divine, that it was a sure
sign of waning religion. To forget was to fall further from God. It was thus with a great
measure of sorrow that he recorded the path of destruction that followed in the wake of
the Reformation. The central tragedy in this respect was the Peasants’ War of 1525.
Throughout Saxony and Thuringia, libraries and archives—which were the repositories
of feudal charters and tax rolls—had been a main target for the peasant bands, and
Letzner noted on numerous occasions the destruction they had wrought. While
researching the history of Walkenried, for instance, he lamented how much material had
been lost when a band of rebels burned down the library. Whatever texts remained were
left to serve as stepping stones to negotiate muddy paths.39 Cyriakus Spangenberg had a
similar tale to tell with his discovery of texts and manuscripts that had been stuffed down
a monastery well in 1525.40 And this appetite for destruction survived long after the war.
Letzner was still speaking about the ‘spirit of Müntzer’ in the latter decades of the
century, fearing that if the books and antiquities of Saxony were not held in greater
reverence there were more than enough born-again rebels in the present day (‘unsere
newen Stürmer’) who would readily consign such things to the flames.41
Of course, not all books were destroyed out of malice. With the introduction of the
Reformation in Calenberg, for instance, Letzner noted that many people, partly due to a
lack of understanding and partly due to overzealousness, burnt books simply because of
their association with the old religion. Others were secreted away by monks and priests
and carried off when they left Braunschweig-Lüneburg in order to escape the
36HAB, Cod. Guelf. 49 Extrav., fols. 110v-111r.
37HAB, Cod. Guelf. 159 Extrav., fol. 48r.
38Letzner, Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica, pp. 155r-157r.
39Letzner, Die Walkenrieder Chronik, pp. 74, 155–61; other references to the destruction of 1525 include: Letzner,
Corbeische Chronica, p. Hiv; Johann Letzner, Stammbuch oder Chronick: Des Uhralten Adelichen und
Gedenckwirdigen Geschlechts, Der von Berlebsch (Erfurt, 1593), p. Xiiir.
40Cyriacus Spangenberg, Querfurtische Chronik (Erfurt,1590), p. ***r-v.
41HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol. 6v; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fo l. 60v.
186 C. Scott Dixon
Reformation.42 And we should not forget that Letzner was rooting through the monastic
holdings at precisely the time when the dukes of Wolfenbüttel were building up their own
private libraries, an undertaking that resulted in the confiscation of whole collections.
On 15 April 1572 alone, 292 manuscripts and printed works arrived in Wolfenbüttel
from the nunnery of Marienberg, one of Letzner’s later hunting grounds.43 But it is
doubtful whether he would have taken much solace from this. The central fact remained:
during his lifetime, a period historians generally consider the honeymoon phase of print,
the written word seemed to be disappearing. God had gifted humankind with the
alphabet, along with ink and paper, in order to retain a living memory of his divine plan,
but the Reformation and its aftermath was reducing it to ashes. And so it was, wrote
Letzner,
that in former times books without number were written, especially in foundations and monasteries, where
indeed the quantity was beyond reckoning. God willing we had preserved these books with better care and
kept them in good condition. They could have provided us in the present age, and our descendants after us,
with many useful and necessary things, and so that there was something to pass on to the following
generations.44
But, he as remarked, what has been lost is lost and can only with great difficulty be
brought back into being.
Faced with vanishing religion and waning faith, Letzner began to think in different
terms about medieval Christianity, going so far as to speak of a post-Carolingian ‘golden
age’ when the gospel was preached ‘clear and pure’ and both clergy and parishioners
ordered their lives around the church. He did not retreat from his conviction that
medieval Christianity was mired in false belief and an erroneous opus operatum conception
of grace; but he was willing to overlook the theological errors in order to draw attention
to the sheer intensity of religious feeling. His surveys of chapters and bishoprics quite
often included long lists of monks and prelates whom he considered models of learned,
pious and modest men, true followers of Christian teaching who set out to reform the
cloister and parishes.45 Compare these men with the current incumbents of Bursfelde
Abbey, he suggested. Whereas in previous centuries it was a hive of piety and learning,
these days it would be difficult to find a single worthy candidate.46 Parishioners too were
much more pious in former times, putting down tools and bowing their heads as soon as
they heard the ringing of church bells. Letzner was almost Rabelaisian in the colourful
detail and lexical flourishes he devoted to a description of the religious culture once
enjoyed by his ancestors in Hardegsen.47 Although misguided in many ways, he
remarked, in terms of devotion and piety it was a golden age, and indeed one that brings
shame on present-day Christians living under the recent liberation of the Word. As he
wrote:
42As when the abbot of Haina took all documents with him when he transferred to Aldenburg in 1527. See Leuckfeld,
Antiquitates Michaelsteinses, Preface.
43Wolfgang Milde, ‘The Library of Wolfenbüttel, from 1550 to 1618’, The Modern Language Review, 66 (1971),
101-112, p. 103.
44Letzner, Corbeische Chronica (:::), p. iir.
45HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol. 121v; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 46.1 Extrav., fols. 77r-79r; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav.,
fol. . 158v; Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica, pp. 17r-67r.
46HAB, Cod. Guelf. 49 Extrav., fol. 53v.
47HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fols. 50r-51v, HAB Cod. Guelf. 49 Extrav., fol. 124v; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 159 Extrav.,
fols. 58r-64v.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 187
O, if only these people were to have had the shining evangelical light that we, praise God, have at present,
they would have been even more devoted to the church. These days, however, the parishioners are indifferent to the shining clarity of God’s light; they are completely listless, lazy and apathetic—indeed, they are the
living dead, and they have chosen to honour the fleeting and ephemeral above the heavenly and eternal
priceless treasure. May God have mercy on their souls.48
The seedbed of this heightened religiosity was the wave of foundations that followed the
rule of Charlemagne. Letzner understood that not all readers would share his high
opinion of monastic life. Decades of Protestant discourse had turned monks, abbots,
friars and nuns into caricatures of waste and prodigality, and very few of the laity in
Lower Saxony had fond memories (or indeed any memories) of the days under
ecclesiastical suzerainty. Thus in the preface to his manuscript history on the foundations
he acknowledged that some readers would protest that it was not a worthy subject of
study and best left forgotten, while others would take issue with his generally favourable
opinion of its early history. But this did not dissuade Letzner, who simply insisted that the
truth (Jungfrau Veritas) will out.49
Both as a vision and an early actuality, he proposed, the first monasteries in Lower
Saxony had been extremely pious undertakings. Founded as places of devotion and
Christian refuge, they doubled as schools, hospitals, houses of discipline and shelters for
the poor. Within the cloisters the monks and nuns practised a pure form of faith, by
which was meant they led modest and industrious lives, devoted themselves to prayer
and contemplation, preached the Word regularly during the course of the day, and
contributed to the common good in the local community. In all respects it was a lifestyle
that provided the perfect basis (fundamentum) for the faith.50 Over time, Letzner granted,
this purity fell away. Like the rest of late-medieval Roman Catholicism, the monastic life
succumbed to earthly temptations while marginalizing Scripture with a religion of works
righteousness that was closer to double-entry accounting than saving faith. But what was
particularly noteworthy in Letzner’s reading of this history is that he did not think that
the former state of purity and piety had been recovered, not even after decades of
evangelical reform. In his history of Haina he praised Landgrave Philipp for his efforts to
restore the remaining monasteries to the purity of the original vision while using the
resources to support schools, hospitals and shelters; yet he did not think that there was the
same general spirit at work in his own day. All one had to do was contrast the era of ‘our
dear ancestors’, when all people, from bishops and princes to well-to-do burghers,
contributed to the upkeep and sheltering of the poor, with the present age, when the
streets are swarming with beggars, alms are being embezzled, and the poor are being
chased out. Whereas previously the foundations had been established in order to
48HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fol. 44v.
49HAB, Cod. Guelf. 49 Extrav., fols. 29r–30r.
50HAB, Cod. Guelf. 49 Extrav., fol. 30r-v; Letzner, Kurtze, Einfeltige und Ordentliche Beschreibung, p. Divr. Letzner’s
praise of the monasteries as sites of piety, learning, and charity was in line with orthodox opinion. The Calenberg
church order of 1542, for instance, had this to say of the original foundations: ‘Denn es waren etwa schulen, da die
jugent in rechtschaffener lere zu rechtschaffen gottsdiensten, zu guten sitten und zu aller erbarkeit gezogen ward’.
The idea that this purity had not been recovered by the Reformation, however, was Letzner’s own conceit. See Emil
Sehling (ed.), Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts (Die Fürstentümer Calenberg-Göttingen
u. Grubenhagen mit den Städten Göttingen, Northeim, Hannover, Hameln u. Einbeck, die Grafschaften Hoya u.
Diepholz), vol. 2 (Tübingen, 1957), p. 780.
188 C. Scott Dixon
contribute to Christian charity and the upbuilding of the faith, in the present age wealth
is more likely to go into private pockets or be used for private ends (eigen nutz).51
Ultimately Letzner’s revaluation of the medieval past reached the stage where he
began to question the providential place of the Reformation in Christian history. The
basic features of evangelical reform, he proposed, were already evident in the eighth and
ninth centuries during the age of Boniface (circa 672–754), the apostle of the Germans.
Raised as a pious monk and nurtured on Scripture as a young man, it was Boniface who
had first brought the Christian faith to the heathen Saxons; and it was not just the faith in
a general sense but rather the ‘Christian evangelical religion’—the same terms used to
describe the religion preached by Luther—that he spread through the land.52 And to
match this reformer there was an evangelical prince as well. After Boniface had laid
the spiritual foundations, Charlemagne (r. 768–814) established the secular framework
for the rise of the first true evangelical church in Europe. According to Letzner,
Charlemagne, whom he compared with Luther’s patron Friedrich the Wise of Saxony,
was the ideal godly prince, for he not only made it a personal mission to bring the Word
of God to the Saxon people, he also made sure to appoint pious men as bishops and
archbishops so that the ‘evangelical teaching’ would continue to spread after his death.
To this purpose he also founded bishoprics, monasteries, churches and schools, actively
rooted out the heathens and the heretics in his lands (whom Letzner termed ‘enthusiasts’,
or Schwärmer, to make the association with Luther and the Reformation explicit), and
filled the parishes with men who preached ‘the pure Word of God’ in the manner of the
Reformation churches. These foundations were further strengthened during the rule of
his successor, Ludwig the Pious (778–840), though Letzner claimed that they were soon
buried beneath papal corruption.53
The implications of this were clear: the Reformation was not a unique event in
Christian history, nor was it a certain turning point, for just as the reforms of Boniface
and Charlemagne had been lost over time so too might the fruits of the Reformation
fade from the earth. Needless to say, a number of Lutheran scholars took Letzner to task
for this reading, not the least being his lifelong friend and relation Cyriakus Spangenberg,
whose own history of Boniface appeared in the very same year. Unlike Letzner’s
Boniface, Spangenberg’s apostle was more of a papal stooge than a proto-reformer, the
man primarily responsible for bringing the religion of works righteousness and the laws
of Rome into the German lands.54 Sensing the furore to come (and perhaps knowing
Spangenberg’s opinion in advance of publication), Letzner sought refuge in the sources:
Whatever I claim or write about Boniface, I do so from a historical and not a disputatious point of view. I
write what I find or what others have written before me. And I will leave each to judge for himself.55
51Letzner, Kurtze, Einfeltige und Ordentliche Beschreibung, pp. Aiiv, Aiiir.
52Johannes Letzner, Historiae S. Bonifacii, Der Deutschen Apostel genandt, Erster Theil (Erfurt, 1603), pp. Diir, Giir.
53Letzner, Historia Caroli Magni, passim; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 46.1 Extrav., fol. 34r-v; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 47 Extrav., fol.
167v; HAB, Cod. Guelf. 48 Extrav., fols. 124r-125r; Letzner, Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica, p. 16r; Johannes
Letzner, Chronica. Und Historische Beschreibung, Des Lebens, der hendel und Thaten, Des aller Großmächtigsten
und Hocherleuchten andern und teutschen Röm: Key: Ludowici Pii (Hildesheim, 1604), pp. 1–35.
54Cyriakus Spangenberg, Bonifacius. Oder: Kirchen Historia . . . (Schmalkalden, 1603), passim; see the discussion in
Pohlig, Zwischen Gelehrsamkeit und konfessioneller Identitätsstiftung, pp. 390–97.
55Letzner, Historia Caroli Magni, p. Biir.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 189
In the final works of his career, Letzner abandoned the providential schematic altogether
and took refuge in universal history, his final project being the Fasciculus Temporum, yet
another work that remained in manuscript at his death. Conceived along the lines of the
rhymed chronicles of world history, it was partly an attempt, late in life, to write a book
that might earn him some money. It was also recognition of the fact that he had neither
the time nor the energy to complete the Chronicle. He conceded to the reader that he had
long thought the writing itself would be a cakewalk (‘als ein Tanz zur Kirchmeß’), but in
the end his judgement and his resolve fell far short of the goal.56 But there was a deeper
reason as well, namely that Letzner could no longer reconcile his research or his
understanding of Christian history with the orthodox Lutheran approach. He no longer
had a historiographical bearing for his momentous assemblage of facts.
Lacking a ready fit between historiographical vision and historical fact, Letzner
embarked on the writing of the Fasciculus Temporum. He still drew on historiographical
templates for the ordering of the material, primarily the Danielic four monarchies
scheme and the triadic prophecy of Elias, and he also borrowed much from chroniclers
such as Johann Funck, Leonhard Krentzheim and Georg Nigrinus, but in the main it
was simply an exercise in matching the determination of dates with the sequence of
events from the creation of the world to the present day. In doing this, Letzner turned
away from confessionalized historiography and sought refuge in the one text that he
claimed sat above the transience and decline of his age: the Bible.57
The precursor to the Fasciculus Temporum was the Wunderspiegel, a typical example of the
short surveys of natural history that invested the natural world with eschatological
meaning.58 Comets, eclipses, lightning storms, floods, misbirths and other phenomena
were pointed up as harbingers of God’s pending wrath, the only safe course of action for
the Christian reader being heightened faith and piety. Much of this was formulaic, and
we should not read too much into Letzner’s laments about a world overflowing with
godless epicureans and the approaching End Time. But there were outbursts that seem to
speak of real personal disappointment, not the least of which was his claim that ‘all works
of man are filthy, boggy and ill-reeking paths, all leading to hell and eternal damnation’.59
In its way, however, even though it was much more measured and scientific in its
approach, the Fasciculus Temporum was the more profound register of Letzner’s sense of
despair and detachment in his final years. Beginning with the creation of the world to the
birth of Christ in the year 3970 and then continuing from the year 0 to 1612, Letzner
marched through history matching dates with people and events.60 The further back in
56Rehtmeier, Braunschweig-Lüneburgische Chronica, pp. 15–16.
57Ibid.
58On these types of works, see Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran
Reformation (Stanford, 1988); C. Scott Dixon, ‘Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany’,
History, 84 (1999), pp. 403–18.
59Johannes Letzner, Wunder-spiegel, Das Ander Buch (Erfurt,1604), p. Aiiiv; Johannes Letzner, Wunder-Spiegel, Das
Erste Buch (Erfurt, 1604), p. Aivv.
60The figure 3970 was a common calculation, projected by Heinrich Bünting and Georg Nigrinus, for instance, and
Letzner provides the reader with 9 calculations in defence of the date. See Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Preußischer
Kulturbesitz, Hdschr. 234, fols. viir-viiir; for the range of possible calculations, see Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis,
pp. 100–40; for some of Letzner’s draft attemps, see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek, Hannover, MS XIII, 792,
fols. 22r-33v, 117r-176v; for apocalypticism in general, see Volker Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag: Das Profil
apokalyptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum 1548–1618 (Gütersloh, 1999).
190 C. Scott Dixon
time, the more infrequent and momentous they tended to be; the closer to his own age,
the more local and quotidian they become, ranging from battles, births and princely
marriages to bouts of the plague and village fires. And it is worth noting that the
Reformation was not accorded a significant place in the overall shape of the work.
Luther’s birth is announced in a short verse, but there is no mention of his death, and
neither Luther nor any other reformer is treated in more detail than important secular
personages such as Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus or Jean Gerson. Letzner did not
even take the time to provide page numbers in the index next to the heading ‘religious
change’—primarily, no doubt, because there was no section in the text devoted to this
theme. As the final confession of a man who spent his life in the service of the Lutheran
church, it was a rather sheepish tribute to the faith; and as a final reckoning of a historian
who spent a lifetime gathering sources for a single work of history, it is a rather vague and
distant dialogue with the past. But by this stage Letzner was taking leave of the world,
and indeed he said his farewell in the closing verse:
With this I conclude the fasciculum temporum,
And will not write a single word more,
For I have lost the strength.
My great age weighs down on me,
My work no longer inspires me,
My ears sing, my eyes seek,
My memory shrinks—all things escape me.
My hands, as well, shake badly,
Not to mention the countless other ailments.
And so I must now be satisfied
With what I have done to this point.
Therefore, you, my honour-loving reader,
I commend this book to you.
Read it with modesty,
With enthusiasm and free of prejudice.
I ask only that you enjoy it,
And trust myself to God’s hands,
In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
For all eternity, Amen.61
Johannes Letzner died on 16 February 1613. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the
small chapel of Strodthagen, the filial of his final parish of Iber. Less than a month later
the ducal officials arrived from Wolfenbüttel and began sorting through his literary
remains.
III: Letzner’s Afterlife
In 1715 the Welshman David Jones, who spent much of his life divided between his work
as an author of multi-volume works of history and serving as a British spy at the French
court, published The History of the Most Serene House of Brunswick-Lunenburgh, a book he
dedicated to the regnant Hanoverian sovereign, King George I. At the outset, Jones
described the main obstacle he faced when he started into the work. ‘It is strange’,
he wrote, ‘that no body in the Course of so many Ages (wherein the House of
61Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Hdschr. 234, fol. 129r.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 191
BRUNSWICK-LUNENBURGH has flourish’d) has taken upon him the Task of writing
the History of it’.62 The other great houses of Germany were much better served.
Readers interested in the history of Austria, for instance, could turn to Gerhard de Roo,
Sigmund von Birken’s reworking of Johann Jakob Fugger, and the Historia Austriaca
(1651) of Nicolaus Vernulaeus. Basic details of the house of Brandenburg-Prussia were
readily at hand in the Annales Marchiae Brandenburgicae (1598) of Andreas Angelus, while
the more recent works of Caspar Sagittarius, Gregory Leti, and above all Samuel von
Pufendorf situated the history of the land and its dynasty in the modern age. The same
held true for scholars of the houses of Bavaria, the Palatinate and Saxony: there were
several multi-volume works, all modern in their provenance, devoted to the histories of
these states and their rulers. But there were no analogous large-scale modern histories of
Braunschweig-Lüneburg.
‘Great Expectations indeed there were’, remarked Jones, ‘from the Lucubrations of the Famous
Mr. Leibnitz, that we should in time have a Compleat History of the House of BRUNSWICK, seeing the
late Elector, and the other Princes of his House, had committed this Work to his Care and Judgment. It was
in Agitation about Twenty Years; and at length, in 1711, came out Three Volumes in Folio.’
But as Jones remarked, not only was Leibniz’s Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium a difficult text
to find outside of the German lands, it was in fact no history at all but rather an edited
collection of source materials. In the absence of dedicated modern histories, Jones
turned to more general works, authors who ‘wrote any thing particularly concerning the
Affairs of this Country’. In the end he was able to plumb enough information from
historians ranging from Albert Krantz and Johann Sleidan to Caspar Sagittarius, the two
Meiboms and Samuel Pufendorf. Jones drew particular attention to the Germania Princeps
(1702) of the Halle jurist and historian Johann Peter von Ludewig, whose legal study of
the empire and its electors was an important source for histories of the early
Enlightenment in Germany. But even this work, though pitched by way of a ‘very pretty
Method’, did not have much to offer Jones in his writing of a narrative history of the
house of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. And in fact he made the point that the work by
Ludewig had the same general failing as all of the others that took up this theme: ‘he is
like the rest of them, too much stinted, and over compendius in History, a Fault that runs
thro’ all the Authors extant, who have written any thing in Relation to this Most
Illustrious House’.
Too over-compendious: this would have been a reasonable reader’s report of Letzner’s
Chronicle had it ever reached that stage. For like the historians that came after him, Letzner
failed to bring a history of the house of Braunschweig-Lüneburg to completion. He
never finished compiling; he could never amass the right amount of materials or round
out his narrative. There was always something to add, something to correct, some name
or date that had to be interspersed or blotted out. Whenever Letzner had the
opportunity—which, due to the fact that his history sat in unpublished form on his
desktop, was all of the time—he would scribble corrections and addenda to the pages of
his Chronicle. Even in his final work, the manuscript version of the Fasciculus Temporum, he
62David Jones, The History of the Most Serene House of Brunswick-Lunenburgh (London, 1715), unpaginated
preface. All of the quotes that follow are also taken from this unpaginated preface.
192 C. Scott Dixon
took the time to inform the reader of some of the factual errors and mistaken dates in his
earlier history of Boniface. In part, he informed his ‘most friendly, dear reader’, this was
the fault of the printer, who had introduced errors while setting some of the dates. But it
was also due to the oversights of the author. Occasionally, Letzner confessed, he had
made transcribing errors while interpreting the hand of the medieval scribes, a task
made even more difficult by the poor physical state of the documentation. To set things
right, Letzner advised the reader to correct the mistakes by collating the details using the
Fasciculus text—though he offered the advice without knowing whether he would ever
find a publisher for the work.63
The fear of deficiency was difficult to ignore, and it reveals something about why the
Chronicle remained unpublished after a lifetime of labour. History, or more precisely, the
history of Letzner’s own time, was too recent to be written; there was still too much
research and fact-finding required before historians could start shaping narratives of
German history. Before this type of historiographical enterprise could take shape, there
had to be a firm historical foundation, some sort of solid landscape with signposts, routes
and directional markers to guide scholars on their way. Ultimately the legacy of Letzner’s
Chronicle was to serve as this species of text.
Letzner feared that his manuscripts would be dispersed after his death and the Chronicle
would fall out of order. The warning signs were there during his retirement in
Strodthagen, where he was forced to sell books to meet his debts. As feared, not long after
his death his manuscripts met a similar fate: parts were sold off to pay creditors; some
were sought out by the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, fearing they contained arcana; a bundle
was bequeathed to Heinrich Petreus; the remainder ended up in various public and
private libraries.64 Just over a century after Letzner’s death, the Braunschweig historian
Philipp Julius Rehtmeier identified where some of the manuscripts could be found. The
first four books of the Chronicle were in Wolfenbüttel; parts of the third book were with
‘good friends’, and out of these Johann George Leuckfeld was editing a volume; the fifth
part was in the archive in Braunschweig, having been purchased by the council for 10
thaler from a seller in Einbeck; while the seventh book, Rehtmeier assures his reader—
though without going into details—was also still available.65 Similar works appeared
cataloguing the traces of Letzneriana and they make it clear, as Letzner feared, that the
original order had been lost. Sections of the Chronicle were now being catalogued as
individual histories.66 And yet despite this dispersal, the Chronicle in its many parts quickly
became a stock item in footnotes and bibliographies; and indeed, in an irony that would
have pleased Letzner in his younger years, his manuscripts became one of the seminal
sources for the history of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. No informed study was without
them.
63Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Hdschr. 234, fol. 53r-v. According to Philipp Julius Rehtmeier, at one
stage this work was in the possession of the bibliophile Johann Christian Biel of Braunschweig. Rehtmeier,
Braunschweig-Lüneburgische Chronica, p. 15.
64Klinge, ‘Johannes Letzner’ (1950/51), pp. 44, 62.
65Rehtmeier, Braunschweig-Lüneburgische Chronica, p. 13.
66Lauenstein, Einleitung in die Scriptores Rerum Hildesiensium, pp. 58–77; well into mid-century, Letzner’s manuscripts were considered an important part of a library’s holdings. See Anton Ulrich von Erath, Conspectus historiae
Brunsvico-Luneburgicae universalis (Braunschweig, 1745), pp. 1–4, 63, 84.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 193
Meanwhile, as scholars consulted the manuscripts, a few theologico-historici prepared
parts of the Chronicle for publication. The most brazen was Heinrich Eckstorm, who
simply translated Letzner’s history of Walkenried into Latin and brought it out it under
his own name. Around the turn of the century, however, a very scrupulous and devoted
group of historians and antiquaries emerged, all tireless ‘lovers of antiquities’ in the
mould of Letzner himself, and these men did much to preserve the corpus and see it into
print. Johann George Leuckfeld, Philipp Julius Rehtmeier, Joachim Meier and Michaelis
Heineccius were among those who edited and published substantial parts of the
collection, not to mention the many local historians who peppered their works with
verbatim excerpts.67 Letzner and his unfinished chronicle remained a presence in the
literature well into the eighteenth century; and while his methods were not always up to
the standards of Enlightenment scholarship, later Saxon historians frequently paid their
respects to the man and his work. Reminders of this are scattered throughout the
marginalia of his books now housed in Wolfenbüttel, as readers added details to his
references or corrected factual mistakes. No doubt Letzner, given his love of the Saxon
dialect, would have been pleased to know that the grammarian Justus Georg Schottelius
read his work closely and included excerpts from the Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica in
his study of the German language.68
By the end of the seventeenth century, the type of regional study pursued privately by
clergymen such as Johannes Letzner, Heinrich Bünting and Cyriacus Spangenberg was
fast becoming a respected academic discipline. In large part this was due to the growing
status of regional history at the universities. While at Helmstedt, both Heinrich Meibom
and Reiner Reineccius had undertaken substantial research on local history and advised
colleagues to do the same. At the start of his Walbeckische Chronica, for instance, Meibom
declared how he sought ‘to search out, restore, comment upon, and put into order the
antiquities of our dear fatherland, in so far as they still exist, moth-eaten, covered in dust,
and tucked away here and there in dark corners’.69 In doing this, Meibom was being true
to the mission statement of the university, for in addition to its role as a bulwark of
Lutheranism in northern Germany, Helmstedt had been founded to serve the interests
of the prince, and that included exploiting the expertise of its faculty to enhance the
standing of the dynasty. The expectation that the Professor of History would do research
on Lower Saxony and its people was enshrined in the university statutes (1576).
Reineccius had been appointed on the condition that he would complete a work that
would incorporate the history of the dynasty into a universal scheme.70 This stress on the
67Heinrich Eckstorm, Chronicon Walkenredense (Helmstedt, 1617); Johann Michael Heineccius and Johann Georg
Leuckfeld, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, vol. 4 (Frankfurt, 1707); Leuckfeld, Antiquitates Michaelsteinses;
Joachim Meier, Origines and Antiquitates Plessenses (Leipzig, 1713); Rehtmeier, Braunschweig-Lüneburgische
Chronica; Daniel Eberhard Baring, Descriptio Salae principatus Calenbergici locorumque adiacentium, vol. 1
(Lemgo, 1744).
68I refer to the marginalia in Johannes Letzner, Dasselische und Einbeckische Chronica (Erfurt, 1596) and other texts
bound together in 138.15 Hist 2°. There are multiple hands, two of which may have belonged to Sigismund Bergius
and Joachim von Einem. But there is also a distinct hand that records quae mihi patria est at the mention of Einbeck.
The theologian and music theorist Caspar Calvör claimed this was Schottelius’ calling card. For Schottelius’ reference
to Letzner, see his Ausführliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache, vol. 2 (Braunschweig, 1663), pp. 1171–72.
69Heinrich Meibom, Walbeckische Chronica (Helmstedt, 1619), p. aiiir-v.
70On the teaching of history at Helmstedt, see the contributions in Jens Bruning and Ulrike Gleixner (eds), Das Athen
der Welfen (Braunschweig, 2010).
194 C. Scott Dixon
secular and the regional filtered through to other disciplines. Later in the century, for
instance, the polyhistorian Hermann Conring drew on the political history of Lower
Saxony as a means of preparing students for offices of state, and his influential work De
origine iuris Germanici (1643) was based on a thorough knowledge of the primary sources
housed in the neighbouring libraries.
Helmstedt was perhaps unique in its regional mindset, but the turn towards political
history, and indeed the political history of distinct regions, was also evident in other
universities in Protestant Germany. In Kiel and Jena, for instance, there was a turn away
from universal history to a focus on the political and legal dimensions of the German
lands, with staff and students taking up the study of public and constitutional law,
geopolitical relations, and even dynastic history. The same trends took hold in
Heidelberg, where Samuel Pufendorf was active in the 1660s. In Altdorf by the 1730s,
secular history and spiritual history were taught in separate faculties, with the former
branching out and specializing. Heraldry, genealogy and numismatics emerged as
serious fields of study. In the universities of post-1648 Germany, the close study of the
Empire and its territories had emerged as a viable historiographical alternative to the
universal and providential paradigms of the confessional age.71
There was another reason why Landesgeschichte became so important in the Welf lands
in the late seventeenth century. The dukes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg had always been
prickly about their dynastic heritage, and there had been repeated attempts to
commission the great history of the house. Reineccius had been appointed with the
expectation he would see through the Historia Julia, and Meibom noted in one of his
prefaces that Heinrich the Younger had sponsored a large-scale genealogy, which
apparently had been completed, in manuscript form, by the court servant Dominicus
Dreuer the Elder. Before his death in 1679, Duke Johann Friedrich had also supported
the efforts of the court historian Johann Heinrich Hoffmann to bring the great history to
completion, providing him with a salary, research expenses and a secretary to help with
the drafting of the book. But Hoffmann died before it was finished, and his manuscript
collection was purchased by the prince and boxed up in a locked room.72 With the
accession of Duke Ernst August, however, history became an even greater priority at the
court, not so much because the new prince was a promoter of scholarship, but rather
because he realized its utility as a means of extending and consolidating his rule. As a
consequence, not long after his accession Ernst August put Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to
work researching into the rights and privileges of the house as a means of supporting his
political ambitions. Ernst August sought to establish and legitimate the right of
primogeniture for his sons, a necessary step in the elevation both of his own line at the
expense of other potential candidates and the principality of Hanover in the Empire,
which he hoped to see transformed into the ninth electorship. Leibniz recognized the gist
71Emil Clemens Scherer, Geschichte und Kirchengeschichte an den deutschen Universitäten: Ihre Anfänge im Zeitalter
des Humanismus und ihre Ausbildung zu selbständigen Disziplinen (Freiburg, 1927), pp. 135–273.
72Dieter Lent, ‘Landesgeschichtsschreibung’, in Horst-Rüdiger Jarck und Gerhard Schildt (eds), Die Braunschweigische
Landesgeschichte—Jahrtausendrückblick einer Region (Braunschweig, 2000), p. 70; Manfred Hamann,
‘Überlieferungen, Erforschung und Darstellung der Landesgeschichte in Niedersachsen’, in Hans Patze (ed.),
Geschichte Niedersachsens (Hildesheim, 1977), pp. 47–9; on Hoffmann, see Johann Georg Leuckfeld, Antiquitates
Ilfeldenses (Quedlinburg, 1709), pp. 211–13; the bulk of the manuscript collection was destroyed in 1943.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 195
of the ducal ambitions, playing up the importance of the sciences he had learned while
in Paris (among them geodicy, cartography and topography, all of eminent utility for
taking the measure of the land) and submitting proposals for the reform of the archives,
which Leibniz proposed he would turn into a repository of law, rights, privileges and
regalia.73
With the arrival of Leibniz in Hanover, it seemed that all of the pieces were in place
and the great total history projected by Letzner would finally be written. As court
librarian in Hanover, Leibniz had access to the huge collection of books and manuscripts
left behind by Hoffmann, and the range of potential material increased considerably
following his appointment as librarian in Wolfenbüttel as well; but because Leibniz was
occupied with the library, the draining of the Harz mines and universal philosophy, he
had to wait a few years before he could dedicate his time to the history. Only after he had
been commissioned to investigate the dynastic ties between the Welfs and the Italian
House of Este did Leibniz embark wholeheartedly on the research that would eventually
lead to the publication of the Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium (1707–11), a collection of 157
primary documents edited by Leibniz and published in three volumes.74 This was not
what Elector George would later term his ‘invisible book’—that is, the great history of
Braunschweig-Lüneburg and the House of Welf—but it was a hugely valuable advance
on the technical quality of Lower Saxon historiography, for in the best spirit of the
Enlightenment it sought to provide a scientific basis for the analysis of primary
documents, a hermeneutical exactitude that would unlock the secrets of any document.
The documents Leibniz consulted included those of Hoffmann’s estate as well as the
huge amount of material he gathered on his own initiative by visiting archives and
libraries in Saxony, or corresponding with scholars who were known to have valuable
collections.75 Necessarily, his research brought him into contact with the remains of
Letzner’s earlier attempt to complete the ‘invisible book’ that Leibniz was expected to
write. There are references to Letzner’s fragmenta manuscripta in Leibniz’s correspondence,
in relation both to the Hoffmann collection, which included copies and originals from
the Chronicle, and also to other bits and pieces of the corpus. Leibniz was also aware of
the wide diffusion of the manuscripts and seems to have sent out inquiries about Letzner’s
missing book on the cities. Justus von Dransfeld and Conrad Barthold Behrens wrote to
him with news of its whereabouts, the latter informing him that just a year earlier, a
Halberstadt bookseller had planned on publishing ‘omnia Lezneri in einem format’,
though this came to nothing.76
In the end, however, not even Leibniz was able to bring the Welf history to completion,
a failure that was noted with growing frequency in the last years of his life. Johann Georg
73Armin Reese, Die Rolle der Historie beim Aufstieg des Welfenhauses 1680–1714 (Hildesheim, 1967), pp. 7–30,
46–73; Günter Scheel, ‘Leibniz und die geschichtliche Landeskunde Niedersachsens’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch
für Landesgeschichte, 38 (1966), pp. 61–85.
74Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 12–30, 46–73, 195–280,
281–319, 381.
75Horst Eckert, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 1–60.
76Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Allgemeiner politischer und historischer Briefwechsel, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1938), pp. 49, 52,
54–5; vol. 9 (1975), pp. 218, 327–9; Leibniz continued to chase up the stray book on the cities, later remarking:
‘H. Hofrath Block seeliger hat Lezneri Ms. De urbibus gehabt so sich iezo nicht mehr finden will’. See Scheel, ‘Leibniz
und die geschichtliche Landeskunde’, p. 81.
196 C. Scott Dixon
Eckhart, his soon-to-be successor, claimed that not even with the help of angels could
Leibniz turn his massive collection of sources into a book, though Eckhart promised the
Elector that the project would quickly turn a corner were he appointed historiographer
of the Welf House.77 But what Eckhart viewed as his main chance was viewed by other
scholars as a weakness that needed to be remedied before the great history could be
written. And it was due in no small part to Letzner’s own history, and the sheer
monumental remains of the Chronicle in the archives, that historians of Leibniz’s
generation and beyond embarked on the massive gathering and collation of manuscript
sources and unwritten histories that went into the writing of modern German history.
Johann Georg Leuckfeld, for instance, who had edited and published the fifth book of
the Chronicle in 1722, appealed to his fellow Lower Saxon lovers of antiquities to gather
together as many letters, manuscript sources, diplomatic and legal documents as possible,
even inscriptions and ‘other curiosities’, and make them available to fellow researchers.78
Such appeals struck a chord, as we can see in the efforts at stock-taking that followed
Leibniz’s death. Joachim Friedrich Feller, for instance, one-time amanuensis to Leibniz,
came up with a list of over one hundred historians of the German nation whose
manuscripts remained hidden away in archives gathering dust. Inter alia were manuscripts
by Johannes Aventinus in Leipzig, and works by Franz Bertholds von Flersheim and
Joseph Imhof in Frankfurt am Main; the Annalium Augustanorum of Gassarus was in Gotha
(consulted by Seckendorff), and there was a genealogy by Johannes Bersword (consulted
by Meibom) in the library of a canon of Hildesheim, and another by Paul Götz in
Arnstadt. And it goes without saying, Feller reminds the reader, that there was a huge
wealth of material in Wolfenbüttel and the monastic and city council libraries. Moreover,
many manuscripts remained in private hands. Johann Peter von Ludewig had a number
of important manuscript histories in his possession, as did the Helmstedt professor
Caspar Sagittarius, who left behind manuscript histories of Magdeburg, Lübeck,
Regensburg, Bremen and the monastery of Oldisleben, and a history of the imperial
cities.79 A decade after Feller, Daniel Eberhard Baring published a similar type of work,
stressing the need for historians to follow the lead of scholars in France and elsewhere
and put together an exact register of the ‘unknown, unpublished Histories’ of Germany
and Saxony, not only to help in the writing of the past, but also to preserve such works
before they fell victim to fire, thievery or destruction.80 By the late seventeenth century,
the knowledge of missing or destroyed manuscripts was substantial enough for Johann
Heinrich Hoffmann to have started (it was rumoured) a Tractatus de methodo utendi archivis
which inventoried the works destroyed by fire.81
Fortunately, the bulk of Letzner’s manuscripts were spared the flames. Instead, they
sat in public and private archives and were used by later generations of historians as a
means of providing their studies of Lower Saxony with a bedrock of basic facts and a
77Günter Scheel, ‘Leibniz als Historiker des Welfenhauses’, in Wilhelm Totok and Carl Haase (eds), Leibniz: sein Leben,
sein Wirken, seine Welt (Hanover, 1966), p. 228.
78Leuckfeld, Antiquitates, Preface.
79Feller, Monumentorum, pp. 20–59.
80Daniel Eberhard Baring, Succincta notitia scriptorum rerum Brunsvicensium ac Luneburgensium (Hanover, 1729),
Preface.
81Feller, Monumentorum, p. 30.
The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part II 197
skeletal narrative for the ordering of their analyses. When scholars of the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries began to turn Landesgeschichte into a valid intellectual pursuit, it
was to the massive manuscript collections of amateur historians such as Letzner, the first
collators and assemblers of regional history, that they turned. And they did so in exactly
the same spirit, and in many ways with the same methodology, as the first few generations
of theologico-historici. All of the scholars in close contact with Leibniz were animated by
the same passion that first moved Letzner: namely, the desire to gather as many sources
as possible, using as many methods as required, in order to preserve the Lower Saxon
past before it was lost to later ages. And any and all sources would do. In the words of
Johann Michael Heineccius:
In my opinion the actual sources needed for a full study of the Historia patriae antiqua include, in addition to
the printed and manuscript histories and annals that have been preserved, none other than old coins, inscriptions, diplomatic documents, records of public affairs, and correspondence, which, because they have
the seal of public testimony, are completely trustworthy [as sources].82
Of course, thanks in large part to Leibniz, the type of research they were doing was more
sophisticated than that of Letzner’s day. It was asking more of the source materials and
making more of the past.83 Moreover, now that regional history had found a niche in the
universities, it was becoming a more professional pursuit, as evidenced by the attempts
of Leibniz and others to establish historical colleges for the gathering and the study of
source materials. For the Bremen pastor Gerhard Meier, for instance, this was the last
piece of the puzzle, the one sure means of preserving the Lower Saxon past for all times.
As he wrote in a letter to Leibniz:
We will bring to light more manuscripts from the archives and libraries than the amount of ore that has been
quarried from the mines of the Harz mountains. It will number not in the hundreds but the thousands, and
the rest of the German lands will look on in wonder.84
Meier even had the names of the men he hoped to win for the project: Johann Heinrich
Eggeling, city secretary of Bremen; Johann Justus Winkelmann, historian; Johann
Deichmann and Johann Faesius, both clergymen and theologians of Bremen; Johannes
Moller, school rector in Flensburg and antiquarian. Other potential members wrote to
Leibniz directly, including Johann Kelp, district official of Ottersberg, who introduced
himself to the philosopher as a ‘lover . . . of our Lower Saxon Fatherland’s antiquities’.
All of these men, and indeed even Leibniz himself, were the heirs of Johannes Letzner.
82Johann Michael Heineccius, Kurtze Historische Nachricht Von dem Zustand der Kirche in Goßlar (1704), Preface.
83For post-Leibniz historians and historiography see Günter Scheel, ‘Braunschweig-Lüneburgische
Hausgeschichtsschreibung im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert im Anschluß an das historiographische Erbe von G.W. Leibniz’,
in Dieter Brosius und Martin Last (eds), Beiträge zur niedersächsischen Landesgeschichte: Zum 65. Geburtstag von
Hans Patze (Hildesheim, 1984), pp. 220–39.
84Quoted in Gerd van den Heuvel, ‘“Deß NiederSächsischen Vaterlands Antiquitäten”: Barockhistorie und landesgeschichtliche Forschung bei Leibniz und seinen Zeitgenossen’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte, 68
(1996), p. 37; for the historians around Leibniz and the attempts to found a college, see Stefan Benz, ‘Historiker um
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’, in Herbert Breger and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds), Leibniz und Niedersachsen (Stuttgart,
1999), pp. 148–72; Karl Hammer und Jürgen Voss (eds), Historische Forschung im 18. Jahrhundert: Organisation,
Zielsetzung, Ergebnisse (Bonn, 1976), pp. 82–101, 236–59.
198 C. Scott Dixon
Abstract
This two-part article is a study of the Lower Saxon Lutheran pastor-historian Johannes Letzner (1531-1613)
and his efforts to write a history of the lands of Braunschweig-Lüneburg entitled the Chronicle of
Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Göttingen. In this second part of the article, which follows on from the earlier
discussion of Letzner’s working environment and the historiographical foundations of his work, the analysis
takes up Letzner’s unsuccessful efforts to complete his massive Chronicle, and it demonstrates the extent to
which he was unable to reconcile the second of the historiographical paradigms—namely, that of a confessionalized, or Lutheran, reading of the past—with the historical evidence that he was uncovering in his
research. Ultimately, Letzner could not balance the evidence with the preconceived paradigm, and this
proved one of the main reasons why his Chronicle remained unpublished at his death. Its impact did not end
there, however, as the manuscript was quickly deposited in numerous Lower Saxon libraries where it was
continuously consulted by historians over the course of the next century and a half, eventually becoming
itself one of the foundation sources for the long-awaited history of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, a project taken
up by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who also tracked down and consulted portions of Letzner’s Chronicle in the
course of his own research.
Keywords: German Reformation, Lutheranism, confessionalization, historiography, antiquarianism, history
of books
The Queen’s University of Belfast
[email protected]