Reviewed by: Jakob Ruf. Leben, Werk und Studien Stephen L. Wailes Jakob Ruf. Leben, Werk und Studien. Edited by Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, with Linus Hunkeler, Andrea Kauer, Clemens Müller, Seline Schellenberg Wessendorf, Stefan Schöbi, and Hubert Steinke, assisted by Anja Buckenberger. 5 vols. Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2008. (Erster Band: Zweite, überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage.) Pp. 3,547. [XXX] plates. Two compact disks. EUR 184. Jakob Ruf (ca. 1505, Konstanz–1558, Zurich) is known to literary historians as the author of five plays (three on biblical subjects), of which two were not published during his lifetime. Their intellectual and artistic merit is, for the place and time, no more than average, i.e., quite modest. Nonetheless this minor playwright is the subject of a meticulous, exhaustive, and elegant edition comprising five volumes and more than 3,500 pages, a fact not to be explained simply by reference to his dramas, but rather by correct estimation both of his writings in medicine and other cultural areas, and of the representative roles he played in the small but dynamic and influential city of Zurich during the Reformation. This presentation of his “Leben und Werk” is a critical edition of very high quality that treats all of Ruf’s diverse writings with equal enthusiasm and rigor, and yet it is far more than that. It is the first scholarly edition of his works as a whole, based on careful inquiry in many archives. Matters of biography and attribution have been exhaustively studied for the first time, with significant new results. The project director and general editor, Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, and her associates, have attempted to situate the author and each written record of his life and thought in the plural contexts of southwestern German religious, political, intellectual, and social history, and in the bewildering and protean network of popular culture. To do this they have employed customary philological methods, so that texts are buttressed by an extensive introduction, annotations, and commentaries, but have also exploited the amazingly rich visual culture of Ruf’s works themselves—the hundreds of illustrations in his manuscripts and printed books—as well as that of the embracing society. Jakob Ruf aspires to be nothing less than a handbook on what it meant to be alive and to work in a sixteenth-century city, with the medical, astrological, and literary writings of a prominent citizen at its center. It was a most ambitious undertaking, and it is a spectacular success. The inner three volumes of Jakob Ruf are the edition proper. His writings are treated in the chronological order of their appearance, with modifications of this principle based on affinities of type (e.g., calendars and prognostications; see 2:20–21). Because Ruf was nothing if not multifaceted, this results in some odd bedfellows, such as the sequence in volume three: his catalog of famous doctors, his broadsheets of famous astrologers, the play Wilhelm Tell, the quasi-dramatic tract Passion (“Das lyden vnsers Herren Jesu Christi das man nempt den Passion / in verss oder rymen wyss gesetzt / also das man es spylen möcht”), then his (unpublished) “Practica in arte ophthalmica copiosa,” followed by a broadsheet on a meteorological event, and finally two songs, one each political and socially critical. Few will read this sequence of works in the order of their presentation, [End Page 378] yet for Ruf it was natural to write them in this order—a fact that challenges our later thinking on the unities of life and thought. The apparent disparity of the works in volume three highlights both the difficulties and the rewards of Jakob Ruf. The competent editing of his works, not to mention the placement of them in their many contexts, required expert knowledge in several fields, a requirement that was addressed in the first instance by the assembling of a “Kernteam . . . von April 2004 bis Mai 2007 tätig” (1:21). To this group of eight (including herself) appertains the large responsibility and the credit. Professor Keller names altogether forty-one people who worked with her on the underlying Forschungsprojekt “Jakob Rufs Theater-und Heilkunst”—philologists, literary historians, and linguists; historians of medicine, science, politics, religion, and...
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Aug 9, 2010
Gero Bauser + 5
Open Access