Het Boek. Serie 2. Jaargang 30

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Another vain effort of Albrecht von Bonstetten to get his work into print (1500)

At the end of a short article on Petrus Mitte, de Caprariis, contributed to the Huldeboek Pater Dr Bonaventura Kruitwagen O.F.M. aangeboden (1949; pp. 370, 371) I drew attention to the vain and singularly ill-timed efforts made in 1501 or 1502 by the Swiss publicist Albrecht von Bonstetten to get into print his panegyric on the House of Habsburg entitled ‘Historia austriaca’. I have now come across an account of another similar rebuff undergone by Bonstetten a little earlier which is contained in an article by Oskar Hase (author of ‘Die Koberger’) in Band X (1886) of the Archiv für Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels. The evidence, set out on p. 34 of the article, consists of two letters despatched by the City Council of Nuremberg on 5 August, 1500. The first, directed to Bonstetten himself, acknowledges the receipt of ‘etlicher Gedichte lateinisch und deutsch und Anderm’: these have been submitted, as requested, to the printer Koberger, who, however, finds himself unable to print them for reasons which he has set out in the letter enclosed (but unfortunately now no longer forthcoming). The second letter is addressed to the authorities of Constance, who had apparently recommended Bonstetten's manuscript to the Nurembergers, and repeats the information that Koberger is unwilling ‘dieselben angezeigten Bücher zu drucken’. Both letters are drawn up in the tortuous and obscure official jargon of the time, but their import is clear enough. Bonstetten had in the past been on very good terms with the Nuremberg authorities, but he must have been ingenuous indeed not to appreciate how times had changed. The Suabian War, fought in the previous year, had ended in a resounding victory for the Swiss, with the Nuremberg contingent on the losing side, and it would have been highly impolitic, not to say provocative, to publish anything from the pen of a pro-Habsburg propagandist such as Bonstetten was known to be. Hase is doubtless right in

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calling the interchange between Nuremberg and Constance ‘ein wohl etwas unbequemer Briefwechsel’. I have not been able to identify the Latin and German poems offered by Bonstetten, and it was perhaps not so much these as the unspecified ‘other matter’ which Koberger fought shy of. If this consisted of the ‘Historia austriaca’ itself, as may well have been the case, his refusal was a foregone conclusion.

Victor Scholderer