ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses reports and narratives about unburnt books. Three aspects are examined: the earliest reports about books that the fire could not burn; the emergence and diffusion of the legend about the incombustible Paradiesgärtlein; and Lutherans’ views on unburnt Scripture. The chapter demonstrates how the interest in and the attribution of meaning to unburnt books developed over time. The initial attraction to unburnt books is traced back to the experience of confessional strife during the Thirty Years’ War and to the controversy about the orthodoxy of Johann Arndt. To begin with, incombustible books had a clear function in narratives about the war and about Arndt. Yet the later development of the phenomenon, especially the multiplication of unburnt books during the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth century, shows that the discourse about Lutheran books that “refused” to be burned had logic of its own. Neither functionality nor an abstract belief in miracles can alone explain interest in and fondness for unburnt books.
