Knowledge
Conrad Gesner, a Swiss naturalist who primarily wrote compilations on plants and animals, originally published Bibliotheca in 1545, but this particular edition dates to 1583. The book is written in Latin, and is essentially a compilation of about 1,800 texts that were in print at the time, listed in alphabetical order. Each entry is comprised of the author’s name and books in print, followed by Gesner’s notes, analyses, or evaluations of each. While some entries consist only of a line or two, others have multiple pages devoted to them. The authors included in the list all wrote in either Latin, Hebrew or Greek.
This book is fascinating not only because it was the first of its kind to be written, but because the fact that it was written gives us some insights about the kinds of things people were interested in reading and the ways in which a critical thinker such as Gesner might read a text. Additionally, there are all kinds of marginalia inked all over the pages of this book that tell us a great deal about this particular book’s history, beginning with the fact that it lived in a German Carthusian monastery during the early years of its life.
This picture shows the complete title page of Gesner’s book, which has obviously been written in by the owners of it. In the short paragraph originally printed on the page, the author has written something to the effect of having intended the book to be used for the dispersal of knowledge and cataloging of facts of the arts and sciences. The last portion of this, however, has been crossed off and rewritten by hand to redefine the way in which the book is meant to be used “in this library.” That is, at the monastery in Buxheim where this book resided, the monks had a different idea of how the book should be used, and evidently felt strongly enough about it that they felt the need to revise what the author intended when he published it.
Although Margarita Philosophica has twelve different chapters that cover various categories of knowledge thought to be important at the time, the book places an emphasis on the seven liberal arts as is clear by the title page woodcut. This illustration portrays the liberal arts represented by human figures, surrounding a three-headed female, which is all encircled by the names of the sciences. On the outer portions of the page, a number of saints appear to represent theology, and a small illustration of Aristotle is meant to symbolize philosophy. The title page immediately signals to the reader the importance of the liberal arts at the time, and this importance is further reinforced as more woodcuts representing the liberal arts can be found throughout Margarita. While these particular illustrations don’t serve much educational purpose, they better convey Reisch’s authorial intention, signifying the subjects he–and presumably other academics of the time–deemed most relevant.
The title of this work translates to “Weigel’s Book of Trades”. The first paragraph of Friedrich Klemm’s foreword names Weigel as a contributor to a tradition of similar, earlier work. Illustrations by Jost Amman and verses by Hans Sachs make up one such earlier booklet of trades, “True Description of all the Trades of the Earth” (1568). That book is 130 years older than Weigel’s “Illustration of the Commonly Useful Main Trades” (1698), which “Weigel’s Book of Trades” (1966, the object of this collection) claims to be a reprint of. The foreword to “Weigel’s Book of Trades” describes traditional books of trades with occupation descriptions both illustrated and textualized, though either bound or unbound, in book or booklet form, with trades listed either in the divine order “in which everyone, whether high or low in the ‘status, occupation, or craft, whither God him placed, should be well pleased’ or simply alphabetical order, with successive editions reprinted inside of 300 years, and where apparently each bears a title more humble than its predecessor’s. Osnabrück’s Biblio Verlag is no more, an addition to the tradition of 16th and17th century German books of trade would have to be published elsewhere, perhaps online, where, Wiegel’s “Illustration of the Commonly Useful Main Trades” (1698) is stored in its entirety on Deutsche Fotothek, a site with images of important Germans and working Germans through history, though as single digital photographs of individual leaves of German trades.
![Schrifttumsverzeichnis [Literary Directory] for Weigels Ständebuch](https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/21005/archive/square_thumbnails/8c8926a65c9e657de7e68f4fee2135f7.jpg?Expires=1715817600&Signature=bsAwCOmQbiiPePbleU-wK0Z7CFExKUHcuMnlVXj2CdwfUnfMHVOBTINQjgStWRQWky2ZWPSdTmYXjhWry6TNA2teGXhL9x4vC94w1EsYjeouEdLmQGHHmQSykYycmFLObfIQWd%7ET1eSWI%7EI12PFQZvv4R-gVseZ0jCHqHC18E72zModoopjPUMHV6EWhUVe-DcGnT9YAfYYo4fYT4Lb%7EWzxxN8OsqGgamtVRyGp1QHdL%7Et1MylSBMNFn-T-ynxU4EkWIJIWqdYlcqZxQ610F0bWJls3j9GEIuSwKssMoPG0MdYHeFhdJh1mLa8r06KWYnylA2dD4mtb9fegRLW48TQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM "Schrifttumsverzeichnis [Literary Directory] for Weigels Ständebuch")
There are two names listed on the title page of “Weigel’s Book of Trades”, Weigel, and Friedrich Klemm. Some online catalogues credit Klemm with the foreword, some do not. I would credit him with co-authorship of the work for two reasons. First, he clarifies the context in which this book was created and thereby complicates its authorship (thought not explicitly). Second, without Klemm’s foreword, the reprinted work could not be properly read. Its format is simple but its authorship is not, and many of its authors would go unnoticed without the foreword. There are at least three named illustrators of “Weigel’s Book of Trades”. The reason? Nautical trades weren’t accessible or otherwise worthwhile for Weigel’s copper engraving workshop to produce. “Weigels Ständebuch” contains Dutch prints that were previously published from two artists who were father and son, Jan and Casper Luyken. All three illustrators of Weigels Ständebuch have markedly different styles. Jan and Casper clearly collaborated on certain images, as is indicated in the forward. They are both authors in their own right, though that information may have been lost if it weren’t for the author of the foreword. The verses underneath the illustrations are attributed to Abraham a Sancta Clara and Weigel, the two textual authors, though in this 1966 edition some of Weigel’s descriptions are omitted, as are the second and third volumes of Abraham’s work. To find out who authored which etchings and which texts, “Weigel’s Book of Trades” (1966) has included a sort of bibliography page, citing further authors/scholars who have put out other editions or texts about the (unauthorized) authors of “Weigels Ständebuch”. These great omissions of text and the Shrifttumsverzeichnis should also be attributed to an author or an editor at least, but they are not.