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Tom Scott, Der Oberrheinische Revolutionär: Das buchli der hundert capiteln mit XXXX statuten, German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 574–575, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq074
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Extract
The titleless tract, called by modern commentators (as the text itself suggests), ‘The Booklet of One Hundred Chapters and Forty Statutes’, was composed around the years 1498 to 1510 by an anonymous author whose homeland was the Upper Rhine. Of the copious literature devoted to imperial reform in the fifteenth century it remains the most elusive and problematic to interpret. It was not published (or known to scholarship) until the late nineteenth century; it is not an autograph, but rather the transcript of three separate scribes; and the tract itself is incomplete, combining fully-worked passages with inserted indices and truncated fragments. The first full edition appeared in 1967, produced by Annelore Franke (text) and Gerhard Zschäbitz (commentary), but the East German authors had neither the time nor the resources (or, indeed, the scholarship) to tease out all the references. It has taken the present editor, Klaus Lauterbach, decades to track down the author's sources: over twenty works from classical antiquity and the church fathers with some certainty, another thirty or more which may have been consulted. All these stand alongside late medieval reform tracts such as the Sachsenspiegel, Schwabenspiegel or the Reformatio Sigismundi, and contemporary works of history, prophecy and astrology. Lauterbach points out in his introduction that such a stupendous range of reading was only conceivable against the background of the printing revolution, in which by the 1470s presses were pouring out works previously accessible only in expensive blockletter editions or else as manuscripts in monastic or cathedral libraries. He might have added that some of the apparent confusion and disjointedness of the text may well stem from the enthusiasm of a new reader, unable in his eager appetite fully to digest the literary feast set before him.
