Liber Vagatorum information

Liber Vagatorum

Title page of a 1510 edition; the image of a travelling beggar and his family was shared with little to no alteration by most of its earliest editions.[1]
Editor	Martin Luther (1528 edition)
Translator	John Camden Hotten
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject	Social history Cant
Publication date	c. 1509/1510[2][3]
Published in English	1860
Media type	Print
Pages	64 (English edition)
OCLC	3080033
LC Class	PF5995 .L88 (1528 edition) HV4485 .L6 (English edition)
Original text	Liber Vagatorum at Center for Retrospective Digitization
Translation	Liber Vagatorum at Project Gutenberg

Liber Vagatorum (Latin for 'Book of Vagabonds'), also known as The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars with a Vocabulary of Their Language in English,^[a] is an anonymously written book first printed in Pforzheim, southwestern Germany, probably either in 1509 or 1510. Its Latin title aside, the book was entirely written in German, thereby appealed to a broader audience rather than the learned class of the era. A well-known hypothesis regarding its authorship is that Matthias Hütlin [de], the Spitalmeister (lit. 'hospital master') of Pforzheim, was the author; however, this theory remains contested.

The book became a bestseller soon after the initial print and was reprinted many times over under different titles throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Martin Luther, the seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, edited a few of its editions beginning from 1528 and wrote a preface for them, which was in part a polemic against the Jews, wandering beggars, and their likes, and warned the reader not to give them alms as he believed that it was to forsake the truly poor. The book's main text does not mention the Jews, but features a catalogue of character types of beggars and their alleged techniques of deceit, and a list of more than 250 words in a cant known as Rotwelsch.