Satire, Sound, and Swine: The 2009 Flu Pandemic Goes (Musically) Viral

A pink pig puppet in a black and white striped hat with a bucolic background

News flash: “Swine flu breeds in pigs,” says announcer Anderson Cooper on CNN, and we flash through five flu alerts (including one interview with a masked couple) as we listen to the opening chords of “The Swine Flu Song,” posted to YouTube by PutnamPig in April 2009. Before we even make it to the first verse, we’re aware of the positionality of its creator. News anchors have been modified to judder, their mouths shaking in a visual equivalent of a musical trill, yet their anxious words proceed undoctored – except for the underscoring, of course. The news here is suspect, its narrative in question, the packaging of global media shown to be an artificial manipulation of reality. It is, in other words, an effective intro for a pop song about a problematic world event, written within a few days of the topic becoming international news.

And when we do get to the verse, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a satire, mocking the concept of Swine Flu as a whole and, even more, to the public narrative about the threat. The bulk of the text is delivered by a puppet pig wearing a black and white striped hat and an FBI shirt (! standing for “Bald Innocent” !), singing in a whiny and nasal Elmo-like voice, the timbre of which may haunt your dreams. That, coupled with the obsessive melodic repetition – relying on a pentatonic scale (degrees 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, a melodic language which avoids all the musically-directional half-steps) over and over and over again – creates a catchy-but-annoying landscape in which one’s brain knows exactly what to expect – and so slides its attention to the words.

Those words are quite remarkable too. From a textual standpoint, the song purports to be debunking the false claims leveled against the poor pig population. Pigs didn’t cause the swine flu, the song contends. It comes… from a lab. This is particularly funny if you happen to identify the musical inspiration behind the song – Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The claim here is much the same: if we’re culturally are not at fault for everything going wrong in society, well, pigs aren’t at fault for the swine flu either. The parallel is amusing.

PutnamPig’s version of the song has three verse sets, each of which includes four short quatrains linked together in a parallel structure (a1, a2; a1, a3). These, per standard pop-song format, alternate with a chorus. Structurally, after the beginning clips which orient us to the newsworthiness of the song, there are two more intercut news clips with continued harmonic underscore: one between the pairs of quatrains in the first set, and a much shorter one between the two pairs of the second set of verses. The overall structure is:

    News+Intro, Verse 1a, News, 1b, Chorus, 2a, News, 2b, Chorus, 3a, 3b, Chorus, Chorus, Outro

Image of Toot & Puddle

The first set of verses (1a through 1b) names a whole series of wholesome childrens’-book characters  as their images flash on screen; none, points out the song, have any symptoms:

Miss Piggy, Arnold Ziffle,
neither has a little sniffle
Porky Pig and Pooh's Piglet,
No fever yet

Putnam, Gordy, Toot and Puddle,
Not contagious safe to snuggle
Ask Petunia Babe, Noelle
All of them feel well

The patter presentation, mostly presented recitationally, plus the regular rhyming and the attention-grabbing hiatus for Piglet at the cadential drop – “No fever yet” [pause] -- pulls us into children’s song landscape.

But we cut back to the news alert, “The World Health Organization says it appears to be spread from human to human.” That topic seems to inspire a shift of melodic structure, for the second pair of strophes of the first verse (1b) start out parallel to the first pair, but digress as the song starts to blame-storm. Instead of heading downward for the cadence as we did for Piglet, the melody (can we call the recited text a melody?) moves upwards to an anxious clangor: “Now it’s in the USA, No one's safe this day and age!” Hammered out in bad Elmo-esque whine with staccato 8th notes repeating the same pitch 14 times (with some intonation bending), we certainly get the idea of street-shouting, even though there is nominally only the single singer:

How it started I don't know
Stay away from Mexico
Now it's in the USA
No one's safe this day and age

Together, that verse 1 complex makes sense of an unfolding pandemic: everyone’s well, and when they’re not, well, perhaps intensification should be the go-to response:

But there is some relief, at least musically. That pentatonic melody from the beginning, that seemed really repetitive? By now we’re glad to have its multi-pitch variety return in as the music of the chorus. Having established a recitational style during the four quatrains of verse one, the contrast of style comes as a relief and enhances the chorus’s musical allure. 

The text context of the chorus, however, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy: “Pigs didn’t start the swine flu / Blame the laboratory / For this awful Story // Pigs didn't start the swine flu / No we've been betrayed /The strain appears man-made… “ With the punchline rhymes of “betrayed” and “manmade,” the song posits a nefarious origin rather than a porcine one.

The second set of verses also starts by shaping the melody to descend at the end of each quatrain, but as we approach the next blame-topic, we again elevate the pitch as we escalate the claims, again with the shouty reciting: “Run a temp and get the chills / Everyone run for the hills.” There’s truth buried in the text – no-one blames dogs, for instance. (That’s actually for good reason, though. For swine flu (H1N1), the transmission chain was human to dog, rather than the reverse, and normal canine influenzas, HDN8 and H3N2, don’t typically infect humans.)

The third set of strophes actually starts at the escalated and elevated pitch as if shouting rejection to its claims; instead of viewing pigs as “clean and pink,” the association of name with virus sticks in the mind. Of course, the same was true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968; there is a reason we have moved from location-based naming of diseases. As it happens, the World Health Organization’s guidance in 2015 – six years after the 2009 Swine Flu – suggested avoiding associative terms for new diseases, in part because they triggered the needless slaughter of food animals. The world is counseled to avoid:

    • geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever),
    • people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease),
    • species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox),
    • cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and
    • terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).

Putnam’s recommendations, it seems, were culturally resonant, and eventually acted upon!

As we move toward the end of the song, the third strophe’s second half follows the more familiar shape. It offers a lower first quatrain first, and then the by-now-familiar escalation, this time for the climax: “This disease it needs a name / Which animals should we defame / Nobody will likely mind / If we named it for an ugly swine.”

The song ends with two full statements of the chorus, and a long instrumental outro. Over the first part of the outro, Putnam speaks his final lines, which are, curiously, non-rhyming, conveying both a sense of intimate conversation (just him as speaker and the solitary listener listening to confidences that just happen to be picked up by microphone), and an authentic perspective after the highly stylized and structured main body:

The pigs are innocent I tell you / We didn't do anything wrong
We didn't start this disease / But we're taking all the blame.

With all that, have a listen to the whole song: 

PutnamPig, “The Swine Flu Song,” April 30, 2009

 

ORIGINS AND CONTEXT

PutnamPig (who goes only by that cognomen, even on Facebook and LinkedIn, leaving his/her/their actual identity private) is primarily a Minecraft account, and was set up a year before the swine flu pandemic. Even though coming to health commentary as a sidelight to their normal offerings, their swine flu song is remarkably well-aligned with sentiments of the time, and perhaps even prescient.

Two things strike me as particularly insightful.  First, the timeline of events, traced by Paul Shapshak et al. (2011) and Smallman (2015), shows that Putnam’s creator was actually quite forward-looking, writing about the flu before it was considered a global pandemic. The lyrics early on in the song point out that cases were now being found in the United States. This is a remarkably quick capture of the event that had actually justified the change of the disease’s status to stage 5, as the timeline shows. The song was posted just 8 days after the first national alert, and only four after the US declaration of a public health emergency:

• March 24-April 24, 2009: influenza infections in Mexico
• April 22: the Mexican government issues a national alert
• April 23: the US government announces 7 cases across Texas and California
• April 25: the Mexican government declares a public health emergency
• April 26: The US government declares a public health emergency
• April 27: H1N1 found in Europe
• April 29: WHO raises pandemic alert level to “phase 5” (with outbreaks at least two countries in one WHO region)
• April 30: Egypt announces a cull of pig herds
• APRIL 30: PutnamPig’s Swine Flu Song
• May 2, 2009 China suspended flights to Mexico
• June 12, 2009: WHO announces a full “phase 6” pandemic alert level
• August 10, 2010, the WHO declared an end to the 2009 influenza A/H1N1 pandemic

Or maybe that’s easier to see in the calendrical view – here, yellow is outbreak, blue is government action, and pink is the song’s debut:

A little more than a week from first government action to the song's debut

Likewise, the themes of the chorus – the purported laboratory origins and man-made release of the disease – align with many of the conspiracy theories Smallman (2015) was able to trace, including a cluster which called out Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s long-term involvement with Gilead Laboratories as a potential beneficiary of a global pandemic. They were, after all, the ones who owned TamiFlu. As they say, “Information” doesn’t have to be true to circulate widely on the internet. Smallman also implicates YouTube as a news source, finding that more than 15% of the 142 “news” videos examined from that first few months of the swine flu epidemic “called the outbreak a man-made conspiracy.”

PutnamPig’s “Swine Flu Song” stands as both a time capsule and a cultural artifact. Although it shares the relentlessly upbeat idiom of the Flying Fish Sailor’s confrontation with the past in “The Flu Pandemic Song” (which I wrote about last month), it differs in important ways, since the “Swine Flu Song” captures the anxieties, misinformation, and conspiratorial currents that swirled around the 2009 pandemic as it was happening. It is reportage, but reportage with a difference. Its rapid creation and viral spread underscore the speed with which music, satire, and digital media can shape public perception, particularly in moments of crisis. By setting news clips against an intentionally grating yet catchy melody, the song exposes the performative aspects of media-driven panic while, ironically, simultaneously participating in the same ecosystem of viral information. 

 

A decade and a half later, the song’s themes remain strikingly relevant, reminding us that the ways we frame disease – whether through news narratives or pop-cultural satire – carry real consequences for how societies respond to outbreaks, assign blame, and remember pandemics.

WORKS CITED:

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” from the album Storm Front (1989), with the chorus “We didn't start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world's been turning / We didn't start the fire  / No, we didn't light it / But we tried to fight it...” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

Billy Joel, mocking his own melody for “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3T8pbDcms 

Cynthia Cyrus, “Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor” [Blog Post], Silences and Sounds, Feb 26, 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/02/flu-music-as-mockery-flying-fish.html
 

History of the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) outbreak of 2009:

• McCauley, M., Minsky, S. & Viswanath, K. The H1N1 pandemic: media frames, stigmatization and coping. BMC Public Health 13, 1116 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116; https://rdcu.be/eckME
• Shapshak, P., Chiappelli, F., Somboonwit, C. et al. The Influenza Pandemic of 2009. Mol Diag Ther 15, 63–81 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03256397, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03256397
• Smallman, Shawn C. “Whom do you trust? Doubt and conspiracy theories in the 2009 influenza pandemic.” Journal of International and Global Studies 6.2 (2015): article 1. https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=jigs

Phases of Pandemics explained: “Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and Response: A WHO Guidance Document,” National Library of Medicine, NIH, from Pandemic Infleunza Preparedness and Response, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143061/

Visualizing Pandemics: “A visual history of pandemics,” World Economic Forum, Mar 15, 2020  https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/a-visual-history-of-pandemics/

WHO disease-naming guidelines: “WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases.” [Note for Media]. 8 May 2015.
https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases

 

My Late Lamented “Everything Notebook”

Blue Spring 2025 notebook, plus a page from a previous notebook

I’m a paper person. I think best while writing; I am an inveterate list-maker; I write up things as a bit of anticipatory joy; I take notes in pen on things to come back to for class. My life is wrapped up in bound notebooks, not just in the abundant books-for-life that I am actively reading at any given moment. (Fantasy! Gardening! Nuns! The Gaze! Space! Soundscapes! If it has words, I probably want to read it. But that’s not what this post is about.)

Because writing is so integral to life, I carry an Everything Notebook almost everywhere I go. It’s gone to meetings (so many meetings); it’s been there while I’ve read email (put a note on the list of future agenda topics); it’s been there when I needed to outline or brainstorm; it’s been there at those difficult draft stages when the ideas need to move hither and thither. It’s done poetry, and drafts of valentines notes, and organized the garden. It has made note of trail damage to report to the ranger; it has the outline of the backpacking trip I want to take. It has non-Amazon book buying websites, and great quotes for the next time I teach that writing class.

And it’s gone. Sometime last weekend, the winter Everything Notebook escaped for freedom. It’s not in the scout bag, it’s not at the bottom of the car, it’s not at Lost and Found, it’s nowhere to be found.

The good news is, there were only about five pages of future-book related notes, and those are mostly mentally recoverable. I had just submitted project 1; I had also submitted project 2; and project 3 is up in the cloud, with part 1 out for review and part 2 in a brand new group brainstorm. There’s never been a better time to lose the Everything Notebook, because nearly all of its big sections are in the “done and done” stage, checked off with gigantic check-marks cutting across the page.

I can reconstruct most of it; there’s probably about three hours of focused work that I need to do to feel fully “back in control.” My list of Amazon substitutes will be out there in social media; the to-do list for the garden I can reconstruct in the car as we drive up north at the end of the week, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got notes on nearly all that I’ve read saved on the computer somewhere. I’ll be missing a couple of great quotes (“here’s that place I wanted to share this thing I once read” doesn’t go over as well as the quote I’d actually copied out, alas), and my record of what we did over the long holidays will be more memory than archive. But it’s okay.

WHAT?
So now, here I am, starting a Spring-based Everything Notebook. I’ve put the blue tape on the front with its label. I’ve foliated the thing (that is, put numbers on each leaf, or folio, rather than on every page – so each opening has a number). I have left my space for a table of contents.

But I thought you, dear reader, might like to know about the concept of the Everything Notebook.

I know a lot of people invest heavily in theirs, with nice almost-like-cardstock pages. I get mine from as bound books (wide ruled!) from the dollar store. It’s going on canoe trips in my backpack, so cheap cardboard covers and a capacity to take notes are my priority. But no spiral binding; spiral binding gets squashed and catches on things. A plain old bound composition book, one that doesn’t create a hurdle to writing in it. (I once carefully inscribed the title page of a notebook. That notebook was too nice for real use and it languished. Now, I just put a title and my contact information. My current notebook has a pre-torn spot on the cover and came pre-installed with a coffee stain when the cat bumped my arm one morning – it’s messy and disposable enough to USE, not to CHERISH.)

My brand new slightly soiled and torn Everything Notebook – plus a page out of one from last year

And treatment of the Everything Notebook differs from one person to the next. Some people are crafty and elegant. Their handwritten notebooks are works of art, with beautifully drawn flowcharts and multi-colored pen annotations that could be reproduced in their next article. Not me. My Everything Notebook is a squawky thing, with mind-maps with words sideways and angled to draw attention to this or that relationship, and lined-off lists of tasks accomplished, and giant caps to remind me to do “the thing” the next time I see that page. 

 A scholarship brainstorm with lines aslant

Some people use fountain pens and inscribe their notebooks as beautifully crafted legacies for their  progeny who may someday consult these pages of wisdom. My handwriting ranges from the tidy to the out-of-control scrawl as the car bounces up and down on carpool days. Nor do I use the fountain pens or multicolored pen shades to carefully shape what a person notices. Instead, in mine, there’s a mix of all-too-bleedable felt-tip ink with good solid ballpoint and even pencil that smears because for me, different kinds of writing implements support different kinds of thinking. This is a work space, not, for me, a pretty one. I don’t put on my glasses when I jot a note in the middle of the night, I just try not to overwrite things already noted down -- though it’s been known to happen.

Page labeled “Brahms” with some hotel scribbles, a note about Climbing safety, and prep notes for a training. Pretty? No. Functional? Yes.

SOURCE AND ORIGIN
I came to the Everything Notebook from two places. First, I used to take topical notes: one topic in one bound composition book. I’ve got three such notebooks from my early days as a monastic scholar, for instance – notes on readings, lists of convents, those kinds of things. And then I had another book on Beethoven, and one on Mozart, and piles of paper for my to-do list. Packing for the office was regularly a virtuosic act of “where did I put the things?” and not the calm collected departure that leads smoothly into the productive part of the day. Besides, I was forever leaving a notebook at the office, and needing it at home or vice versa, and writing on slips of paper to be added in later, and … well, it was a mess.

So by moving to a single bound composition notebook – large enough to fit a lot on a page, small enough to fit handily in even my smallest daypack – and ensuring that it goes everywhere with me, I’ve done away with a lot of the paper clutter. (Cue my family laughing heartily; but now my paper clutter is at the level of the article draft or PDF printout rather than at the level of little slips of paper. Trust me, it’s an improvement!). That “aha” moment was about a decade ago, after one last frustrating search for the list I’d made just the day before. I rage-wrote the list in the back of the nuns notebook. And then the lightbulb went off: what if I just put everything in one place? And the Everything Notebook was born.

The second inspiration was my 20 page to-do list. Okay, not everyone does that kind of self-organizing. But I found early on that each of my projects (and I have had a lot of projects) has about 10 things I’m trying to track. Schedule the next meeting, draft five bullet points, find the verb list and write up that Learning Outcome chart for the bureaucrats out there. Now, each project can be tracked at once in one place with my Everything Notebook in hand. My upcoming trip to China and Nepal is there alongside my class prep is adjacent to the bibliographic planning for the next article. And the list of seeds I need from the store will be there when I go to handle the recycling later today. I manage (mostly) to get it all done, because I can track it.

HOW?
To support my wild-and-crazy work/life balance, I’ve divided my book into sections. Sometimes I start at the back-end of a section and work toward the book’s front, and other topics work in the regular front to back. It seems chaotic, but it does help me navigate.

And my sections are:

• fols. 2-3: Table of Contents (grows organically as I work)
• SECTION 1: RESEARCH
• fols. 4-5: Info about conference and book deadlines, high level overview of the season’s plan
• fols. 5-20: Research on the book
• fols. 20-40: Research on other projects, either grouped or interspersed, depending on mood
• SECTION 2: CLASS PREP / TRAVEL
• fols. 50 backwards to 40: class prep stuff
• fols. 50 forward to 60: travel planning
• SECTION 3: ADMINISTRIVIA
• fols. 75 toward the front: meetings, so many meetings. And more meetings. And then some notes on meetings
• SECTION 4: PERSONAL
• fols. 75 toward the back: language learning. Right now, I’m getting ready for China. Chinese is haaaaaaard.
• Fols. 97 toward the front: to-do lists.

And, at random in the range of the 80s or so, things to do with life. Poetry. Bird lists. Recipes. Stuff.

WHY?
Why tell you all of this? On the one hand, it’s one quirky person’s way of managing All The Things. On the other hand, this is the kind of practice that can really make a difference in terms of personal productivity, because it puts “life” and “work” into the same physical space, and invites a contemplation of brussel sprouts (with honey and sriracha) alongside contemplation of the intricacies of prayer transmission in the 16th century. Because both are important. And the Everything Notebook helps me keep track of it all.

Another advantage, which I didn’t think of when I started this practice a decade ago or so, is that I do actually remember my work chronologically. Oh, that was the project I was working on when we were doing improvements down at lakeside. Pull out the 2019 notebook, and there are the bibliographic notes from that work on this-or-that. It helps me remember more than if it were limited to the thing itself. It also helps me find things on my computer, since I can put boundaries on the date search.

And third, I really do believe all the scholarship that tells us we remember what we write by hand better than what we type. Type is fast; ideas flow through the fingers onto the page. But the dramatic sad face next to the bad archival news recorded on the sheet of paper is the thing my brain actually chooses to remember. I’m a geographical filer; that’s true in note-taking space as well as in my life. I know where to look, and that’s enough to help me track down the thing I’m looking for. (Where was that great mushroom soup recipe? Oh, yeah, that was the year we did the quick departmental retreat – it was at the back of that notebook. Yum.) So for me, this kind of organization works with the ways in which my brain chooses to connect things. My coffee stains and rain-ruffled pages are my version of Proust’s madeleines – the spark that brings to life the whole complexity of thinking indulged in by my previous self.

As long as I can keep track of where I’ve put my book. Sniff. I’ll miss that winter volume, but I still carry around an image of the coffee stain on page 16 with the notes from that inter-library loan book on scribes, and the carefully checked-off “tell my sister X, Y, and Z” list from the winter holidays at the back of the book. The writing imprinted not just the page, but also my memory.

And that process of writing information into memory is exactly what the Everything Notebook is for!

The Seelengärtlein (Hortulus animae)

The title, Hortulus anime, with an elaborate first initial

The Little Garden of the Soul stands as one of the central prayerbooks of the 16th century, printed and reprinted, translated, and circulated not only in print but also in manuscript. It had first appeared in its Latin guise in 1498, and the German version emerged in 1501. We know it in its German form mostly by the title – Seelengärtlein – taken from a manuscript version (Cod. bibl. pal. Vindob. 2706), which Friedrich Dörnhöffer issued as one of the significant facsimiles of the 20th century. Published in 1911 as a 3-volume set, that facsimile is the standard “footnote me” work for early modern German prayer, famous for its art and for its extensive historical introduction.

But, alas, I did not happen to buy a 3-volume book printed more than 50 years before I was born. Neither, alack and alas, did my University library. And though the book is out of copyright, it’s not readily available in places I have looked.

What to do? Nerd out, of course! My goal as a practical person back in the day was to find a digital reproduction of one of the many early modern prints of the prayer collection. Finding relevant incunabula often has the added advantage of having woodcuts to help with navigation. And who doesn’t love a picture book?

FINDING PRINTS
For the world I inhabit – German language prints pre-1600 – working on such things means consulting the Verzeichnis der Drucke 16. Jahrhundert, also known as VD16 (Register of printed works of the 16th century) 
    http://www.gateway-bayern.de/index_vd16.html

Normally, I would have also gone to the ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) – and I did, when I initially worked on this project. But ISTC is a British Library resource and thus was knocked out by the October 2023 cyber-attack. Still, it should come back some day:
    https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/

Then there’s the GW (Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke), the complete catalog of incunabula, but I find it much easier to go there with a printer, place, or year in mind.
    https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/

To be honest, the format of the VD16 is the easiest for me to navigate, especially since its display supports clicking through to the full text of the items I’m most curious about.

SEARCHING CREATIVELY
If you search “Hortulus” on VD16, and then ask for the results in chronologically ascending order, you’ll see just how many editions there were!  (Of course, you have to weed out the Hortulus elegantiarum and the Hortulus Musices if you’re looking for editions of the prayer book.)

The Peter Schöffer d.J. edition of 1513 confirms the German name, though with a suitably creative period spelling:

Hortulus anime.|| Zů teütsch genant der || selen g#[ae]rtlin.||

Hortulus animae. In German, known as the “Selen Gärtlin.”

But a remarkable number of the editions are either listed solely by the Latin title (and may in fact be the Latin edition, of course) or just give the Latin title and then say “in German.” But, using the spelling that Schöffer used, “Selen” (for modern-German “Seelen,” Souls), up pop a number of other versions – though the Seelengärtlein, our “Little Garden,” is not to be confused with the Selen Wurzgarten (The soul’s herb-garden), a book which starts with a dramatic picture of a hell-mouth with the devils descending thither:

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 2 P.lat. 1766  Der Seelen Wurzgarten Augsburg
1504, VD16 S 5276

It’s dramatic, but it isn’t prayers; the Wurzgarten is narrative, and features an awful lot of devils.

Our prayerbook version – the regular garden, not the herb one – can be found in a German translation by Brant, published in Straßburg in 1501 by Johann Wähinger (VD16 H 5078) and again in 1502 (VD16 ZV 8229). In that 1501 version, Brant stakes a strong claim to authorship:
 

Ortulus anĩe. Der selen gärtlin wurd ich genent ... || Zu Straßburg in sym vatterlant || Hat mich Sebastianus Brant || Besehen vnd vast corrigiert || Zum tütschem ouch vil transferiert

[H]Ortulus anime. I was called the selen gärtlin ... || In Strasbourg in his fatherland || Sebastianus Brant || Inspected me and corrected me a lot || Also transferred to the German.

Brant inspected and corrected – extensively, he claims! – and “transferred” it into German. It’s a big project, so perhaps his over-the-top claims are warranted.

And from there, as we have seen, the prints spread and spread. There are a lot of them, and one could spend years comparing them all. But that isn’t my particular rabbit hole.

ACCESSING THE PRAYERS OF THE SEELENGÄRTLEIN
Because I was interested in accessing the prayer-texts themselves, and not just the digitized version, I worked through the list of editions on VD16 for one that had an OCR version as well as an online visual representation. During pandemic times (back in 2020), I settled on Johannes Knoblouch’s edition of the Seelengärtlein (Hortulus animae) from Straßburg, 1507 [VD16 H 5082]. That version was available in two ways:

1) directly from the BSB: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00009026-0 – use the URN resolver: https://nbn-resolving.org/gui/urn to navigate there
2) from Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=AdhCMsIz-jkC.

With both copies in hand, and time hanging heavy on my hands, I indexed the volume. The index was built starting from the volume’s Register (found on fols. 243v-247v), and adopts the foliation conventions from the BSB copy. Since Knoblouch himself used a combination of signature (Sig) and folio (fol) in the register in order to show location within the gathering structure of the volume, I preserve them in columns 2 and 3 of the index.

Overall, I decided that the subsections of prayers – sections which might spin out and be transmitted independently or might migrate into another prayer complex – needed to be included, but I greyed out all but the first section, so one can readily see which is the starting prayer (white) and which the subsections (grey) in a multi-partite prayer.

A sample from the index -- the rubric is in red, the first segment is white, and the subsequent sections are greyed out

To round out my work, I gave brief descriptions of the 73 woodcuts from the perspective of navigating the volume. Thus, I list St Gertrude, but not her cats -- or are those the mice that she banished? None of the animals made my description, for it is St Gertrude herself who is the navigational marker, setting the reader up for the next prayer "Seyest gegrůßt heilige iungfraw sant Gerdrut die du geboren bist von königlichem stammen..." [Hail, holy virgin Saint Gertrude, born of royal descent].

For those who are intrigued, I have made the index available through google sheets:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14UgeWOq9iPZ88uQiWw6a0PnPCrADabp5YqrGazk6Tuk/edit?usp=sharing

You too can play with the index by sorting columns this way and that way, and use it to navigate within the digital covers of the book itself.

AND IN CONCLUSION:
The Seelengärtlein may have begun as a 16th-century prayerbook, but its history is one of persistence, adaptation, and circulation across languages, formats, and centuries. My deep dive into its editions—navigating catalogs, parsing digital copies, and building an index—reflects the same impulse that shaped its transmission: the desire to make these prayers accessible, ordered, and usable. Whether in manuscript, print, or digital form, the Seelengärtlein continues to grow, much like the metaphorical garden it evokes.