Gripla - 2022, Qupperneq 402

GRIPLA400
Nockrar eptertakanlegar smá historiur is compiled from a variety of
Humanist collections of exempla, which circulated in a variety of forms
and in innumerable editions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In the present study, we concentrate on Andreas Hondorff’s
Promptuarium exemplorum (“Repository of Exempla”), the main source
for the Icelandic text, from which at least thirty-five exempla, more than a
third of the material, were drawn. The Promptuarium was a highly popular
compendium gathering wonders, adages, parables, and legends from anti-
quity, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance arranged accor-
ding to the Ten Commandments. After its first publication in German in
1568,3 the collection was issued some thirty times in German between 1568
and 1687 and twelve times in Latin between 1575 and 1633,4 soon becoming
“a best-seller of historical collections of the sixteenth century”5 and “the
most successful Protestant collection of exempla”.6
The Promptuarium exemplorum
After studying theology at the University of Wittenberg and the Uni-
versity of Leipzig, Andreas Hondorff (1530–1572) served as a priest in
Merseburg (1547), Großgestewitz (1551), Kistritz (1563), and Droyßig
(1563), where he completed the Promptuarium four years before his death.7
According to Schade, Hondorff began to gather material for his collection
already during his student years.8 His editorial purpose was to revamp two
3 Andreas Hondorff, Promptuarium Exemplorum: Historienn und Exempelbuch. Aus Heiliger
Schrifft, und vielen andern bewerten und beglaubten Geistlichen und Weltlichen Buchern und
Schrifften gezogen. Zum Spiegel der warhafftigen Christlichen Buß, jedermenniglichen zu diesen
letzen und gefehrlichen zeiten fur die Augen gestelt. Mit allem fleis auffs kurtzte nachden heiligen
Zehen Geboten fein ordentlich ausgetheilt (Leipzig: Durch Jacobum Berwaldt, 1568) [2o]. The
first edition contains 375 pages (foliated).
4 See the useful annotated bibliography in Heidemarie Schade, “Andreas Hondorffs Promp-
tuarium exemplorum,” Volkserzählung und Reformation: Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und
Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. by Wolfgang Brückner
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1974) 646–703, at 693–703.
5 See Rudolf Schenda, “Die deutsche Prodigiensammlungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,”
Arkiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 4 (1962): 637–710, at 637–38.
6 See Marina Münkler, Narrative Ambiguität: die Faustbücher des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts,
Historische Semantik 15 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 46 n. 8.
7 See Schade, “Andreas Hondorffs Promptuarium exemplorum,” 648 and references there.
8 See ibid., 653.
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