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. 

Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor

Image from 1919 of three men in hospital beds, two with a head bandages

Music is a multi-purpose tool, and I appreciate its role in public health as a vehicle for advocacy and education. But it also has a sharp edge, one that mocks, satirizes, and even ridicules. Today, I want to explore this opposite side, in which music pokes fun – at public health efforts, at public concern, even at the sufferers of the illness themselves – as a potent human response to pandemics. And the flu in particular has drawn the attention of some deeply creative individuals as a topic for mockery. (So did COVID, but that’s a different discussion).

Why? In part, I think that this kind of “humorous take” is a form of catharsis. People process fear and loss in different ways, and graveyard humor is a useful presence in our lives. Musical humor is also, trenchantly, a tool for criticism, including political and social criticism. Through laughter (or at least inner grins), it gives us a space to contemplate the otherwise unthinkable. That people or policies were in fact horrid. That wisdom is not always the guiding hand on the decision tiller. That casual cruelty is sanctioned, and even rewarded. That suffering has been ignored – or even dismissed. “We sing about what we cannot talk about,” say the AIDS educators (McNeil). The same seems to be true in the context of other major medical disasters as well. We sing when we cannot agree. We also sing when we wish to revisit that which we wish to forget.

These humorous takes can have a strong downside, of course. They can reinforce stigma or ridicule those suffering, trivializing real harm. That they do so with a wink and a nod makes us complicit; as viewers, we give mental real-estate to the position that these songs take. And thus, we join the jeering crowds. Miguel Mera argues that “For an audience to find something funny, they must be complicit in this anticipation; they must expect what you predict them to expect.” As we take pleasure in the subversion – anticipation followed by the twist, the dislocation, the joy of the unexpected – we move beyond our own moral narratives to join in the fun. Until we don’t, or at least, until we wish we hadn’t. The line between satire and insensitivity is always thin, especially when illness is involved. Yet clearly “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe they said that” can go hand in hand with our urge to share. (Waves hand broadly at the internet.)

I offer these observations with direct knowledge aforethought that I am about to partake consciously and deliberately in that ambiguous space of sharing the uncomfortable. I disapprove of the happy message, for instance, of “The Flu Pandemic Song,” a song written and performed by The Flying Fish Sailors from Houston, TX. The repeated cheery refrain, “And they died, died, died” should be nothing to smile at. Yet die they did, those victims of the 1918-19 flu in its various waves. (Old estimates of 20 million dead have been updated since the time that Greg Henkel wrote the song to reflect more geographically diverse parameters; current consensus suggests that the death count was closer to 50 Million dead.)

This song partakes fully in the Flying Fish Sailors’ motto "Happy Music For Happy People," unless, of course, one actually attends to the lyrics. Why am I smiling about millions of deaths? Ugh, but ugh with a guilty sense of pleasure. Warning: it’s an earworm... 

That jaunty chorus may well haunt me forever. The major key and simple harmonic structures, the plain and singable melody with its high sense of motivic unity, all combine to make for a kiddy-song feel far removed from the actual meaning of the chorus:

It was the flu pandemic
And it swept the whole world wide
It caught soldiers and civilians
And they died, died, died!
Whether they’re lying in the trenches
Or lying in their beds
Twenty million of them got it
And they’re dead, dead, dead!

Once you’ve heard it, you’re stuck with it, complicit in its knowledge, and complicit in enjoying the receipt of this knowledge. (“The Flu Pandemic Song” is “Infuriatingly catchy,” as Mera once said of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers). Here we are together, grinning about the horrors of the past. And here I am, laughing along. Why?

I think that the very moment of discomfort that we experience in such songs is asking us to ask an important question. Why is it that we haven’t thought so much about the nature of this historical crisis? I mean, whether it was 20 million or 50 million dead, it isn’t the sort of thing we should go around forgetting, right? So the song serves yet another function beyond critique or catharsis: it reminds us that we need to be witness to the full scope of human experience, including the deaths – in the hospitals, the trenches, and the far reaches of the globe.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate function of songs like this: not just critique, not just catharsis, but confrontation with the past. These songs refuse to let us look away. To me, the persistence of musical mockery in times of sickness suggests that humor, even in its most irreverent forms, is a deeply human response to the chaos of disease. Whether it’s a medieval plague song, a 20th-century blues lament, or a 21st-century viral TikTok, music helps us laugh—even when (especially when?) we probably shouldn’t. 

WORKS CITED: 

• Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York : Viking, 2004. 
• Marrin, Albert. Very, very, very dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
• McNeill, Fraser. AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 
• Mera, Miguel. “Is Funny Music Funny? Contexts and Case Studies of Film Music Humor.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14 (2002): 91–113. 
• The Flying Fish Sailors [Website.] https://www.flyingfishsailors.com/, consulted 2/26/25.

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg) (2/23/25)

An image of Chaco Canyon ruins from 2012

Note: The current blog post is in dialog with Primeau and Witt (2018), and draws on my own wanderings through Vorarlberg during summer 2024 and on Herbert Kaufmann’s Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten to understand Vorarlberg church placement.

Primeau and Witt’s study of “Soundscapes in the Past” asks “how people heard in their wider surroundings,” and answer the question in part with GIS measures. Their insight is that landscape matters and consider significant the “location of features within the built environment and performance spaces” (875).  They use the term “soundshed” – akin to watershed – to capture the way in which sound carries or is disrupted by the topographical features of a place.

They center their study on the rich archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, proposing that the Chacoan builders utilized terrain and topography as acoustical elements in their planning. They suggest that “certain features may have been placed at their locations so individuals may have heard events occurring elsewhere” (p. 875). In other words, the Chaco Canyon residents built with an eye (an ear?) toward the soundshed that surrounded them, choosing building locations and orienting openings to best use the acoustical features of a resonant landscape.

Primeau and Witt acknowledge the embodied nature of hearing, but importantly point out that larger elements in the local environment can shape these embodied perceptions. As Tilley (2008) has shown, surfaces, inclinations, textures and other elements can reduce or amplify sound. Given the nature of a canyon environment, echoic and non-echoic surfaces abound, both as elements of the built environment and of the natural surroundings.

The stark nature of Chaco Canyon’s building ruins of mud-brick and stone (shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand column) might historically have been softened by furs and fabrics, and almost certainly had sound-absorbing storage or even people – in other words by surfaces with less resonance than the  present day. The landscape too with its swales and swells, the hills and cliffs, and even the plant life each contribute in positive and negative ways to noise propagation, particularly at distance.

  Four Views of Chaco Canyon, July 2012

Primeau and Witt  believe, with Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006) that there can be an effective and measurable distance for interactions including speaking and shouting. Their newer methodology, however, seeks to establish more objective parameters than merely personal experience. They propose SPreAD: a System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability.

They observe that there are various element at play, distance attenuation being only one. Sound source height plays into sound’s ability to carry, as does the atmospheric absorption loss, which varies by temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, they assert that “Like visibility, audibility can be an actively managed aspect of the built environment, and one can question the relationship between sound and site in the landscape.”

For them, the presence of ceremonial sites on higher locations had significance, for it might mean the audibility of a ceremony’s start or end by individuals elsewhere in the Canyon community. Events in one place were meant to be experienced by individuals in another, they argue, and topographical placement support that.

For a medieval monastic historian, their conch shell examples were readily translated into the positioning of churches in Austria’s Vorarlberg. Such churches had a marked preference for locations on the hills that jutted up out of the local landscape; it is the rare church indeed that lacks a view (or that can be visited without a hike or a climb!). The inventory in Kaufmann (n.d.) makes the point effective: in image after image, it is easy to get a photo of the church from down below (as it were), because they are so frequently higher than the surrounding neighborhood. This can be confirmed in person; wear good walking shoes if you want to climb to see the building in person.

The parish church of St Nikolaus in Damuls, for instance, is on a hill; if it were waterside, we’d describe its placement as on a promontory:

  Damuls -- church of St Nikolaus: image July 2024

Already more prominent than the surrounding landscape, the position of the bells for Vorarlberg churches were even further elevated through built bell towers, typically added in the 13th to the 17th centuries. Elevation proves to be even more important than central location; many of the central churches of my study are several blocks away from the heart of the medieval “downtown,” such as it was. Clearly, the acoustical benefits of being high, along with the defensible ones, made these locations prime real-estate from the perspective of church communications. Neighbors near and far could readily hear the ringing of bells for starts or ends of service – along with weather warnings or peals of other sorts (war, arrival, general announcements). This meant that the topographical benefits of height outweighed the inconveniences of a further walk or an uphill climb. Just as at Chaco Canyon, events in one place in medieval Vorarlberg were meant to be experienced by individuals somewhat distant, and, again like Chaco Canyon, the topographical placement of churches and their bells support that.

Primeau and Witt’s study reinforces the idea that sound is not just a byproduct of environment but an actively shaped and managed aspect of spatial experience. Their concept of the “soundshed” and the methodology of SPreAD provide tools for assessing how people in the past may have structured their auditory worlds with intention—whether for ceremony, communication, or social cohesion.

Applying this framework to medieval churches in the Vorarlberg highlights how different cultures have used elevation to project sound across landscapes. These parallels suggest that sound, like sight, was a crucial factor in how such historical spaces were designed and experienced. Soundshed and soundscape design mattered as much to the late medieval church-planner as to the Chacoan builder some three centuries earlier. Both actively sought to manage audibility as an element of their built environment. Building for the ear in this way reminds us that sound was never incidental—it was an integral part of how people of the past shaped and experienced their worlds.

WORKS CITED:
Hamilton, Sue, Ruth Whitehouse, Keri Brown, Pamela Combes, Edward Herring, and Mike Seager Thomas. “Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a Methodology for a ‘Subjective’ Approach.” European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.

Kaufmann, Herbert, ed. Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten: Landesausgabe Vorarlberg. Innsbruck: Süd-West-Presseverlag, n.d.

Primeau, Kristy, and David E. Witt.“Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 19 (2018): 875-885.

Mapping Soundscapes: Applying Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou’s Measures to Memory and Place

A 3-way Venn diagram of Individual, Sound and Environment

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece.

Every place, argues Stratoudakis &  Papadimitriou (2007), has its own distinctive sound picture. That is, it had a unique identity, “not only in terms of geography or physical-temporal aspects, but also in its acoustic properties.”

In their map of understanding (Fig. 1), the individual intersects directly with sound through meaning-making and can also listen and/or emit, shaping sound as it exists. Sound likewise interacts with the environment through coloration and direct/reflected sound. Thus, the three worlds interact with sound as one of the mediators of the individual’s relationship to the broader environment. That is, the “inner reality – inner sounds, thoughts, feelings and memory,” as Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou put it, takes in environmental information through sound.

Figure 1: Sound as Meter, derived by Cynthia Cyrus from Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou (2007)

This is an interesting point, since the shape of experience AS memory is heavily dependent on sensory memory. I wrote recently about the memory of a 1614 snowball fight and of the 13th feet of snow of one terrible winter that Sister Anna Wittweilerin attests to in her Tagebuch (absorbed later in the Thalbach Convent Chronicle). (Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up)

As we follow her memory (Thalbach Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625), we actually superimpose sound details without her naming them. We can imagine the “thwuck” of a snowball thrown and successfully landed on its target; we can hear in our inner soundtrack the laughter of the sisters engaging in a bout of unusually fine fun. I can hear the clucking hens, their day disturbed by the unusual activity, and perhaps a single rooster crow to establish inner territory within the hen-house while the outer world manifests these unusual games and noises. I imagine the trees whispering off to the right of the convent yard in the hillside between them and the parish church as the inevitable winter breeze rolls down the afternoon mountainside. And we know from experience that the broader landscape would be hushed, since snow deadens sound. All of these elements were present in my inner landscape as I read Wittweilerin’s passage, though she uses no sound words at all. Her nouns – snow, snowball, hen-yard – become my soundtrack through an associative linkage of my own inner memories of these things.

My projection of this past environment, in other words, DOES appear to be mediated in part by sound-memory as well as by the convent sister’s narrative. Readers bring their own experiences to the things they are reading; that includes their own experiences of sound-as-mediator.

The second big contribution that Stratoudakis & Papdimitriou make is to model one approach to considering sound. Since “soundscape is an ever-changing version of a given environment [and thus] presents great spatio-temporal variability,” they provide a model for considering changes over time. They ask that we consider sampling positions as well as recording periods. For them, sound (and its attributes), space (geographical coordinates) and time (annual and daily cycles) are the three main elements for describing a soundscape. They suggest a day divided into three hour chunks, and consider a variety of individual parameters. 

They also caution that one should note “places of particular geo-morphological interest.” The gurgling stream, for instance, that is close to Thalbach’s back property in summertime, would shape the soundscape as a kind of acoustical dent (or would it be hill?), a natural feature that would deform the experience of other sounds as its summer-time omnipresence shades and colors the other sounds in its proximity.

Measures from their study that could be particular useful for other projects (like my own) are these:

• Source (bird, frog, car…)
• Area sampled
• Timestamp
• Origin: biological, geological, anthropological
• Meaning: background, foreground

I gave some thought to those measures as I trod through graveyards on my research trip. Birds: check. Crickets: Also check. Stream: Yep. Fountain: noted. Bell peals: Cool, I mean, yep. Cars are, of course, historical anachronisms, but they function too as a reminder that the wagons and carts of former time should be accounted for in a historical re-imagining of the past.

To be fair, Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s ultimate interest lies in the mapping and manipulations that computer modeling allows, and it is indeed fascinating stuff. But for me, at this point, the pragmatic elements of parsing the sound-world had more ready applicability, and it is that more humanistic element of their study that I have shared here.  A link to their full study is in the notes below.

TAKE-AWAY
Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou offer a handy model for thinking about sound as measurable yet deeply experiential. While their research is oriented toward computational modeling and A-V replication, its implications extend beyond technical applications. Their framework provides a useful lens for humanistic inquiries, helping us parse how environments, past and present, are aurally constructed and mediated. In particular, their model of a sound-mediated understanding of environment emphasizes the importance of spatial and temporal variability in soundscapes. It also inadvertently underscores the ways in which individual memory and perception shape our understanding of sound. My own reflections on convent narratives and historical re-imaginings highlight how memory itself can function as an imagination-informed soundscape—one in which readers contribute their own inner sonic realities to narratives that seem on the surface to be silent.

In short, whether addressed to the recorded sounds of a contemporary Grecian landscape (them) or to the imagined echoes of historical spaces (me), Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s measures offer a method for attending more carefully to the role of sound in shaping experience.

---

WORKS CITED: 

Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds Blog, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com, 19 Feb 2025.

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2. Brixen 1896.

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece. Digital copy available here.

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.

Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up

A comet and a winter scene from Bregenz, with the theme: Worry into joy

In the early 17th century, Anna Wittweilerin was a Thalbach sister when, at age 40, she found herself promoted to convent Maisterin in 1619.

She had joined the convent in 1589 at age 10, and was given holy orders in 1592 at age 13. She professed in 1595 on St Ursula’s day. Thus, she was a young and newly-professed sister – age 16 – in 1595 when the convent’s liturgical practices were reformed (Chronicle p. 31, P1360 and Gathering 6 #15, P1464). She served as convent Superior for 22 years, and died at age 62 in 1641. (See Chronicle p. 20 and Gath. 2 fol. 3r). The chronicle points out that she “endured a great deal of hardship,” (Gath 2, fol. 3r), not least of which was the 30-years war.

Wittweilerin’s personal interests add nuance and depth to the convent records, for it is thanks to her diary, much of which was incorporated verbatim or in close paraphrase into the Convent Chronicle, that we have accounts of the weather extremes and of the comet of 1619. She started the diary at age 33 in 1612 and continuing until 1641. For today’s post, we’ll concentrate on events before 1620.

We learn from Wittweilerin’s diary of the year that snow held off until Lent (1612), so that flowers were available on Christmas. The sisters used the extra-long season of greenery to make fresh wreaths for the statue of St Anna. Other years weren’t so lucky; a tree fell due to snow in 1613, and the winter of 1613 to 1614 was one for the record-books.  As the Chronicle tells it, “in the fall it was cold and wetter [than normal], on the 19th of September it began to snow, and the ground never became dry until St. George's Day (April 23) in 1614.”  That’s 31 weeks – 217 days – of muddy or snowy footing on the ground. The snow wound up going all the way up to the shutters of the gatehouse – and the Holunder account, drawing on her diary, says that “In front of the window in the hen garden the snow was 13 feet 7 inches high.”

An outdoors person by heart, she reports that “In Feb 1617 it was so fine and warm that people thought they should go out in the fields.” One can hear the desire to enjoy the unseasonable weather, and the joyful spirit with which she celebrates the various things of the outdoors: trees, fields, flowers. Later that same year, however, she finds the weather more oppressive, “it became so hot that people thought they would burn.” (Holunder 1934). Working in the heat can be enervating at the best of times; heat exhaustion could be a real fear.

Yet it is from Wittweilerin, too, that we have stories of fun. She tells the story of the sisters’ snowball fight (!), when the sisters went out into the still-snowy yard on the Thursday before Pentecost and pelted one another with their hand-crafted zingers (Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625). She tells as well of their wreath making, and of crop tallies from their work in the fields. The sisters themselves, for example, harvested the wine (that is, the grapes that would become wine).

And, we learn that they indulge in a ready bit of star-gazing:

In the month of December [1618] a comet was seen with a tail in the sky, which had appeared a short time before. We grant that the dear God may graciously turn it away from us, and have mercy on the Christian Church, which is in the greatest danger, as well as the noble house of Austria. [On the pamphlet-wars that this comet inspired, see: Stillman Drake and C.D.O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618:Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler (U Penn Press 1960).]

To her, as to so many of her peers, the stars are still portents; she sees the “rod” – the comet tail – as a potential for God’s punishment. Through prayer and God’s grace, however, this pointed threat can be averted. By her account, the prayers worked, since the next year’s harvest was especially fine, though the political scene did not fare nearly as well. “We praised God that we may proclaim [our wine] with health and enjoy it in peace with one another since things are going very badly in the war. May the lord strengthen Christianity! It is well needed!” (Holunder 1934).

Sister Anna Wittweilerin’s diary and its close parallels in the Convent Chronicle offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the daily rhythms of convent life, framed by the larger forces of nature, faith, and war. Her observations remind us that even within a monastic environment, the world outside remained ever-present—whether through the creeping cold of a relentless winter, the heady promise of an early spring, or the celestial warnings streaking across the sky. She looked up, not only to track the stars but also in hope, finding solace in shared labor, seasonal celebrations, and the enduring rituals of convent life. Though she lived in a time of uncertainty (to which we’ll return in a future post), she answers her own worries with joy. To her, the snow becomes an occasion for play, and the comet an occasion to celebrate the peace of community, in hopes that such peace might ripple ever outwards. To Anna Wittweilerin, looking up is looking into the promise of a world touched by the divine.

WORKS CITED:

“Das alte Frauenkloster zu Thalbach (3. Fortsetzung),” Holunder: Wochen-Beilage für Volkstum, Bildung und Unterhaltung zur Vorarlberger Landes-Zeitung No. 38 (28 Sept 1934), from the series, Nos. 36-43 (8 weekly entries, 8. Sept to 27. Okt 1934). Quotes heavily from Wittweilerin’s diary. https://texte.volare.vorarlberg.at/viewer/fullscreen/Holunder1934/154/

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2.  Brixen 1896.

Stillman Drake and C.D.O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618:Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler (U Penn Press 1960).

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.
 

A NOTE ON NAMING:

I typically use the "-in" suffix that designates females in surnames, following the conventions the sisters themselves used. Thus, her father was Herr Wittweiler, but she is Anna Wittweilerin.