Soergel, Philip M.

English

Zwingliana

178 BuchbesprechungenJakob Ruf: Leben, Werk und Studien, hg. von Hildegard ElisabethKeller, 5 Bde., Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2008, 319,779, 707, 1019, 723 S. & 2 CD-ROM – ISBN 978–3–03823–415–9.Definitive, scholarly editions of medieval and early-modern au-thors are often, »like your father’s sedan,« dull and reliable, butuseful. This set, however, is something quite different. The productof more than five years of work by a team of researchers at theUniversity of Zürich directed by the indefatigable Hildegard Eli-sabeth Keller, this edition breaks the mold of the sometimes tra-dition-bound genre and manages to set a new »twenty-first-cen-tury« standard for such projects. Publication of this enormous edi-tion – the complete set of five volumes now totals more than 3500pages – was originally begun in 2006, when Chronos Verlag prin-ted the first volume. That book was intended to elaborate uponthemes treated in an exhibit at Zürich about the life and times ofthe city’s sixteenth-century surgeon, Jakob Ruf, as well as to serveas a general introduction to the larger project of a definitive editionof his works. Shortly after publication of that book, Verlag NeueZürcher Zeitung acquired the rights to publish the entire collec-tion. They have now produced a luxuriously bound, boxed set offive volumes beautifully printed on heavy paper. In this set the firstvolume has been newly titled and has been reworked to includelarger, more sharply reproduced illustrations. The collection nowincludes a thorough index, extensive bibliographies and supportingdocumentation, two volumes of scholarly commentary, and twoCD-ROM’s, one of which includes digitized copies of the edition’sillustrations and the other sound recordings of some of Ruf’sworks performed using sixteenth-century pronunciation. Boththese last, unusual additions will make attractive teaching tools.For anyone with an interest in the history of sixteenth-centurySwiss society, this work is a treasure trove and a review can per-haps only scratch the surface of the riches here on offer. The firstvolume presents a compelling picture of the life of Ruf, a native ofnearby Konstanz who rose from humble beginnings to become citysurgeon in Zürich. The largest section of the volume is subtitled a»Biography in Nine Chapters,« and treats Ruf’s familial origins,179Buchbesprechungenearly life, professional training, and his medical and literary careersat Zürich. In Zürich Ruf eventually became a trusted friend tomany in the city’s elite, although his status was always subordinateto the town’s university-educated physician, Conrad Gessner. Con-tributions here concentrate on the surgeon’s famous Trostbüchlein,a much republished and translated textbook for doctors and mid-wives, as well as his efforts as a prognosticator treating portents,and his work as a dramatist. All the pieces in this volume areauthored or co-authored by Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, AndreaKauer, Hubert Steinke, Stefan Schöbi and Seline Schellenberg Wes-sendorf.These chapters do an excellent job, not only of narrating whatcan be discerned about Ruf’s biography, but also of relating thatmaterial to broader trends and events in his time. In the sixteenth-century German-speaking world, as Hubert Steinke shows, the of-fice of surgeon was usually free from guild control and thus con-sidered a »free art« (fryge Kunst). In his piece, »Medizinische Kar-riere im städtischen Dienst,« (»A Medicinal Career in City Ser-vice«), Steinke shows how Ruf’s rising social capital at Zürichconstantly resulted in new duties. Still Ruf remained kleinbürger-lich, when compared against Zürich’s Gessner, since a surgeonworked with his hands, while the office of a physician was a ce-rebral occupation that consisted primarily of astrological chartingand the identification of humoral imbalances through the visualexamination of bodily fluids. Despite the distinctly inferior statusaccorded surgeons, Ruf came to be a trusted member of thetown’s administration. One sign of the faith Zürich’s town councilplaced in Ruf was its eventual decision to allow him to serve as»acting« city physician during those periods when Conrad Gessnerwas away from town. Another hint of the high regard in whichRuf came to be held during the generation he practiced in Zürichwas the city’s acquiescence in his request to reduce his duties be-cause of overwork. Beyond such attention to the intimate day-to-day details of Ruf’s professional life in Zürich we also learn in afascinating chapter from Andrea Kauer and Seline SchellenbergWessendorf, of Ruf’s support for his hometown Konstanz duringthe Schmalkaldic War of 1546–1547. As this brief snapshot sug-gests, Ruf was always something of an extraordinary. The result of180 Buchbesprechungenthe scrupulous attention to his life, as well as the view the textprovides on the religious and political events that were occurringin the world outside Zürich’s walls, is that Ruf becomes a lens forviewing both the normative and unusual possibilities on offer inthe sixteenth century.The remainder of the first volume includes a glossary of impor-tant sixteenth-century terms, people, and concepts titled »Drei-hundertsechzig Grad.« Here the manner of presentation recalls theZürich exhibit for which this book was originally intended to serveas a supplemental volume. Keyword headings are explained inshort essays that are also richly illustrated. These entries treat, notonly the famous religious reformers of the era, Heinrich Bullingerand Huldrych Zwingli, and other famous locals but also suchseemingly arcane subjects as the Züricher Ehelöffel (»Zürichermarriage spoon«), a mysterious object to which prospective can-didates for divorce were chained to encourage reconciliation in thedays before their final separation. Interesting contributions here,all written by Keller and members of her team, examine the cus-toms of sixteenth-century heraldry, the contemporary belief inmonsters, as well as the rituals surrounding drinking. Carefullyselected, these entries serve to enhance the peculiarities of Ruf’sown understanding of anatomy, society, and religious belief.The three volumes that follow present annotated versions ofRuf’s printed and manuscript works. Each text is accompanied byan exhaustive introduction that examines the work’s roots andsources in sixteenth-century intellectual or cultural concerns, and,if a printed work, the history of its editions and the modern pro-venance of surviving editions in European and American libraries.Keller has opted to arrange these texts in strict chronological or-der, rather than divide the Latin texts from the German, or groupRuf’s medical works aside from his plays and printed ephemera.Some will surely quibble with this decision, precisely because theconventions and questions of those trained in different disciplinesare often quite distinct from one another. Certainly, the decision toadopt the chronological approach may privilege study of Ruf’soeuvre as a literary artifact. The strict chronological approach, forinstance, provides for easy examination of changes in grammar,literary structures, topics, and language. Yet the author’s total lit-181Buchbesprechungenerary output was not so large as to make consulting texts of similargenres in each of three volumes onerous. Keller’s choice, althoughit may be vexing to some, seems one perfectly logical way to ar-range the data; another editor may have opted for another orga-nizational scheme on grounds equally defensible.The most famous of the texts reproduced here is Ruf’s Trost-büchlein, a work long familiar to historians of medicine as a gy-necological milestone. As part of his duties as city surgeon, Rufwas charged with examining and supervising Zürich’s midwives,and thus his book was intended to serve as a textbook for pro-spective practitioners. Yet schooling young women in the tradeseems to have been only a part of the surgeon’s aims in publishingthis work, since the book first appeared in 1554 in simultaneousLatin and German editions. Through the Latin edition, De con-ceptu et generatione hominis, Ruf staked his claim to being a manof learning. The supporting material that Keller provides for thistext is exhaustive and in sum, the entire section treating the Trost-büchlein runs to more than 500 pages, the greatest space accordedto any work in the collection. This is certainly fitting given theenormous impact the book had throughout Europe. Keller repro-duces the Latin and German text on opposing pages as well as anumber of archival documents that demonstrate the book’s widereception in both Latin and German forms. Ultimately translatedinto Dutch, English, and Czech (the text of which is reproducedand translated into modern German here!), the book came to playa vital role throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,helping to separate the chaff of spurious legends and demonic loreabout childbirth from the standards of gynecological knowledgeaccepted by many professionals at the time.Ruf’s two other medical treatises, an illustrated manuscript of1545 on eye surgery, Practica in arte ophthalmica copiosa, and his1556 printed edition of the Tumorbüchlein, a guide to the treat-ment of swellings and growths and the surgical removal of tumors,round out the presentation of Ruf’s work as a theoretical and prac-ticing surgeon. But still other works in these volumes will be ofinterest to social and medical historians as well, since the practica,calendars, prognostications, and Ruf’s readings of several portentsthat the edition presents aptly display the astrological, divinatory,182 Buchbesprechungenand natural philosophical concerns in which sixteenth-centurymedical practitioners frequently engaged. In particular, those withan interest in natural philosophy and the history of science mayfind Ruf’s three surviving texts interpreting recent portents fasci-nating reading. Throughout Europe at the time the reading of signswas often entrusted to medical professionals like Ruf. The knowl-edge that these figures possessed, not only of the natural philoso-phical corpus, but also of the history surrounding similar ominousevents in the past, was seen as an indispensable tool for diviningthe meanings of recent portents. Yet just as Ruf tried to makereaders of his Trostbüchlein aware of the natural forces that mightproduce deformed births, he also proved to be a rather sober andcautious reader of nature’s signs. In his treatment of the birth ofconjoined female twins born at Schaffhausen in 1543 (vol. 2,415–429), Ruf insisted that purely natural forces might deform thefoetus within a mother’s womb and produce an abnormality»against the entirely usual processes of nature« (etiam citra vul-garem naturae cursum, p. 424). Although the surgeon insisted, likemost learned commentators, that such events occurred withinGod’s Providence and were intended to stir repentance, the spacethat he devoted to outlining the astrological conjunctions of housesas the ultimate cause for the malformation of the children’s bodiesfavored his own understanding of natural processes over religiouscauses. Thus he ventured no moral or prediction for the future inconcluding his consideration of the Schaffhausen births, except tocounsel his readers that states and communities should show greatcare in appointing reliable doctors and midwives, so that deliveringmothers were adequately supported and protected from the terrorsthat surrounded monstrous birth. Thus this interpretation revealsRuf as the ever consummate, medical professional.Beyond the medical dimensions of his career at Zürich, Ruf in-volved himself in the city’s civic theater, both as a playwright and adirector. Like many productions in similar venues throughout thecontinent at the time, the performances of Zürich’s Stadttheaterinvolved hundreds of residents in performances and pageants thatmight last several days. Jakob Ruf turned to writing plays for theseperformances after he had already established a considerable pro-fessional reputation as a medical practitioner in Zürich, his first183Buchbesprechungenplay being Etter Heini of 1538. That work was both a polemicagainst Catholicism and an attack on the widespread custom ofReislauf, that is, the wandering off of young Swiss men to serve inforeign armies. Ruf’s subsequent dramas most often treated bibli-cal themes in ways designed to stir civic patriotism and to celebratethe city’s Protestant orthodoxy. Although he was neither as prolificnor polished as the most accomplished German-speaking drama-tists of the age, his last and greatest work for the stage, Adam undEva (1550) reveals a touching Protestant treatment of the moraland spiritual values of marriage set within a gentle lyrical verse.The fifth volume of this set presents commentaries on variousaspects of Ruf’s literary, medical, and dramatic career. Here threechapters by Seline Schellenberg Wessendorf, Stefan Schöbi, andAndrea Kauer, focus on technical issues of the textual transmissionof plays in Ruf’s time, the performance practices and functions ofthe Zürich theater, and the overarching theme of the pious fatherin the author’s opus. These studies, as others in the same volumethat treat the surgeon’s medical career and literary endeavors ge-nerally, manage to illuminate the texts, without dampening thedesire for self study.In sum, then, this attractive edition should appeal to any scholarwith an interest in early-modern German literature, medicine, re-ligion, or society. As Keller and her endlessly energetic team ofresearchers have here demonstrated, Jakob Ruf’s life came to in-tersect with many of the most important issues, dilemmas, andproblems of the age. One need not be a Ruf specialist to find thesetexts, or the secondary studies that are reproduced here, fascina-ting. This edition sets a standard that will be very hard for futureeditors of similar works to match, even as it demonstrates a quitefruitful synergy between modern technology and traditional phi-lological and codicological concerns. Finally, a large word ofpraise is due the publisher, Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, whohave not only produced a set of handsome and enduring volumes,but have done so at an attractive price that is not beyond the reachof poor academics.Philip M. Soergel, University of Maryland, College Park

Jakob Ruf: Leben, Werk und Studien, hg. von Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, 2008

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Jakob Ruf: Leben, Werk und Studien, hg. von Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, 2008

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