Liber Vagatorum

Liber Vagatorum is organised in three parts.[4] The first part comprises twenty-eight chapters that describe the "secrets" of various types of beggars; one of them is Dützbetterin who claimed to have given birth to a toad, a story first documented in 1509.[6]^[b] The second part instructs how to avoid their traps and trickery.[4] The third part is a glossary of Rotwelsch words.[4]

Most of the earliest editions are adorned on the title page with a woodcut of a beggar leading his wife and child on their journey on foot.[1]

According to German philologist Friedrich Kluge, Liber Vagatorum relied on Basler Rathsmandat wider die Gilen und Lamen (lit. 'Basel Council's Mandate against the Gilen and Lamen'), which had a short list of Rotwelsch words and was published around 1450.[7] Since the three parts of Liber Vagatorum were hardly coordinated—for example, its glossary in the third part did not list some of the Rotwelsch words used in the first—Kluge concluded that one author had combined three different sources.[7] John Camden Hotten, who translated Liber Vagatorum into English in 1860, wrote that Liber Vagatorum had been compiled from Johannes Knebel's reports of trials in Basel, Switzerland, in 1475, when "a great number of vagabonds, strollers, blind men, and mendicants of all orders were arrested and examined".[8] These trials were also recorded in Hieronymus Wilhelm Ebner von Eschenbach's Heumanni Exercitationes iuris universi, vol. I. (1749), "XIII. Observatio de lingua occulta (lit. 'An observation of a secret language')"; Knebel's and Ebner's accounts differ only in style and dialect.[8] A well-known hypothesis is that Matthias Hütlin,[6] who was the Spitalmeister (hospital supervisor) of Pforzheim, is the author of Liber Vagatorum but this theory remains contested.[9]

Its Latinised title aside, Liber Vagatorum was entirely written in German, thereby aimed at the layperson than an academic readership.[4] The four initial editions of the book were published circa 1509–1510, the first of which was printed in Pforzheim and in High German.[2] The book was met with immediate popularity, getting at least fourteen more editions printed the next year.[5] Some of them were in Low German or Low Rhenish,[3] and one had its glossary section expanded to list 280 words.[5]

Luther's preface in Von der falschen Betler Büberey (1528), with his name Latinised as Martini Lutheri

About twenty more editions were published thereafter in the sixteenth century and some of them had altogether different titles.[5] Beginning from 1528, a few editions titled Von der falschen Betler Büberey (lit. 'On the Deceitful Deeds of Beggars') were edited by Martin Luther who rewrote some of their passages and authored an admonitory preface for them.[1][5] Those who saw only the 1528 or a later edition with his preface sometimes mistakenly ascribed the book's authorship to him.[6] Luther, in his preface, lamented that he had suffered at the hands of wandering beggars and their likes, whose alleged deceit he claimed was a sign of the devil's mighty rule over the world. He warned Christians not to give them alms as it was, in his view, to forsake the truly poor, and declared that the Jews had contributed Hebrew words as a main basis of Rotwelsch.[6] Hotten partially agreed to this linguistic opinion, saying "the Hebrew appears to be a principal element. Occasionally a term from a neighbouring country, or from a dead language may be observed."[10] English historian Clifford Edmund Bosworth surmised the Hebrew words entered Rotwelsch via Yiddish.[11]

From around 1540, some editions were titled, rather inaccurately, Die Rotwelsch Grammatic (lit. 'The Rotwelsch Grammar').[5] A 1580 reprint of Von der falschen Betler Büberey was titled Ein Büchlein von den Bettlern genant Expertus in truphis (lit. 'A Little Book about Beggars, or, Expert in Frauds').[5] Around six more editions were printed in the seventeenth century and at least two others in the eighteenth.[5]

• Martin Luther § Anti-Jewish polemics and antisemitism