and vices, also of many wonderful and strange adventures, which D. Johannes Faustus, a notorious black-artist and arch-sorcerer, by means of his black art, committed even until his terrible ending. Fitted out and expounded with necessary reminders and admirable instances, for manifold instruction and warning.” The story is substantially the same as in Spiess’s book, but many additional anecdotes are inserted, and all the details are amplified. Instead of three “disputations” between Faust and Mephostophiles, there are ten, and each is followed—as, in fact, every chapter in the work—by a long-winded theological discourse, called a Reminder (Erinnerung). These Reminders are pedantic and fiercely Protestant in character: no opportunity is let slip to illustrate the vices of Faust by references to the Roman Church and its Popes. The name of the Famulus is changed to Johann Wayger, and two or three stories, taken from Luther’s table-talk, are arbitrarily applied to Faust; whence the work is not considered by scholars to be so fair a representation of the popular traditions as that of Spiess.
A new edition of Widmann’s book, revised but not improved by Dr. Pfitzer, was published in Nuremberg in 1674, and revived the somewhat faded popularity of the legend. The references to Faust in the Centuriæ of Camerarius (1602) and in Neumann’s Disquisitio Historica, were known only to the scholars, and Pfitzer’s reprint of Widmann was therefore welcomed by the people, several editions having been called for in a few years. By this time it was also represented as a puppet-play, and the knowledge of Faust and his history thus became universal in Germany.
The only other work which requires notice is an abbreviation of the legend, with some variations, written in a lively narrative style, and published at Frankfurt and Leipzig in the year 1728. The title is as follows: “The Compact concluded by the Devil with Dr. Johann Faust, notorious through the whole world as a sorcerer and arch-professor of the Black Art, together with his adventurous course of life and its terrifying end, all most minutely described. Now again newly revised, compressed into an agreeable brevity,
