This volume is the result of a conference held in 2021 to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of the Alsatian humanist and sometime Stadtschreiber (chancellor) of Strassburg, Sebastian Brant (1457–1521). It comprises thirteen essays on a wide variety of topics concerning Brant, his scholarly output and his intellectual environment. Nikolaus Henkel's introduction outlines the imbalances of research on Sebastian Brant, noting that he has largely been investigated within the field of German studies, and within that field scholars have devoted most of their attention to Brant's wildly popular Narrenschiff, a satirical German-language poem from 1494. Henkel then outlines four major ‘cultural fields’ (p. 1) in which Brant was known to have been active but which have been entirely neglected or received scant attention: Brant's interest in law, his contributions to religious literature, his accomplishments as a textual editor and his work with woodcuts. The editors set out to rectify this previous imbalance and explore aspects of Brant's output beyond German studies and the Narrenschiff.
In this endeavour, they are successful. At least one, if not more, of the essays in this volume contributes to each of the various ‘cultural fields’ outlined by Henkel: law (Becker, Deutsch), religious literature (Henkel), textual editing (Deutsch, Zimmermann-Homeyer) and woodcuts (Zimmermann-Homeyer). The other essays research various aspects of Brant's life, including his life and activities in Strassburg (Bischoff), his family's coat of arms and his epitaph (Andersen, Henkel/Andersen), texts beyond the Narrenschiff (Wilhelmi) and music (Schwindt). Three essays do discuss the Narrenschiff, but indirectly, treating various stages of its reception (Schillinger, Frick, Hamm). Particularly welcome is Joachim Knape's reevaluation of the longstanding scholarly assessment of Brant as a ‘conservative humanist’, showing him rather as innovative and representative of transformations in European intellectual culture around 1500.
Anderson and Henkel's volume has considerable strengths. It is accessible through the Open Access Network's ‘Open-Access-Transition’, which allows the articles to be more readily available to an audience that might not be able to afford such normally costly books. The book also usefully reproduces Latin and French quotations in translation and the original language, and includes a hundred images (many large and full colour). Particularly striking are the forty-three images in Andersen's essay on the Brant family's coat of arms.
There are only a few weaknesses. The first is the handful of proofing errors scattered throughout the book.Footnote 1 The second, which, unlike the first, does actually detract from the volume, is the poor quality of the English-language abstracts at the beginning of each chapter. Technically these are written in English, but the syntax is very much not and often reads as German in English words. Only six of the thirteen abstracts are written in passable English (Bischoff, Knape, Wilhelmi, Frick, Schwindt and Zimmermann-Homeyer), but even these contain numerous problems. The other seven are written in non-idiomatic English and include very awkward constructions and even grammatical mistakes. For example, the opening line of the abstract for Hans-Jürgen Becker's essay reads: ‘Sebastian Brant had two souls in his breast’ (p. 179). This is simply a direct translation of a German idiom used earlier in the volume (p. 3). The nature of the translations indicate that the abstracts were never properly translated or reviewed. This is confusing because De Gruyter is perfectly capable of contacting individuals who command English and can proofread such material.
Despite the poor quality of the English abstracts, this volume accomplishes each of its goals. It is a worthy addition not simply to studies on Sebastian Brant, but also on late medieval and early modern culture in the German lands. The volume is all the more welcome because it helps to address great imbalances in research about individual German humanists. Outside of very famous humanists like Philip Melanchthon, German humanism is a very unevenly researched field and many of the most famous humanists suffer from such imbalances, such as Hartmann Schedel, Sebastian Münster, Conrad Celtis and Beatus Rhenanus. Brant is just one of the first to receive this necessary rebalancing.
