English: description from Flickr entry: Hans Carl Erlenwein and his classmates in seminary school, all teenage sons of German aristocrats, composed this Liber Amicorum, or friendship book, for his Latin alter ego “Joannes Carolus Erlenwein.” The book’s creation was itself a game: friends one-upped each other through impressive family crests, heartfelt Latin inscriptions, and charming images. Through images, Joannes became the hero of his own story as he and his friends jousted, played tennis, hunted, and rescued damsels in distress. Their choice to convey their strong emotional bond through these images is extraordinary. Yet as boys on the cusp of manhood, they juxtaposed light-hearted joys of youth with images of war and quests for honor, which resonate with prints of the Trojan War interleaved throughout.

This friendship book was bound in 1615 for Joannes Carolus Erlenwein (Hans Carl Erlenwein), a student in the seminary at Fulda. The value of this book lies not only in the heraldry of fifty-five aristocratic German families at the time, but also in the printed book contained within it as well: the complete first (and only) edition of Isaac Hillaire's Speculum Heroicum, including half-page engravings by Utrecht artist Crispin de Passe the Elder. The personal inscriptions in the book, the majority from Erlenwein's classmates at Fulda, date from 1615 to 1619, with several additional hands visible throughout. One hand has written the family names over the coats of arms on most of the personal messages from 1615; a later hand (possibly from the Erlenwein family) has added notes to many pages on the dates of births, deaths, marriages, and offices held; an even later hand created an almost complete index of the family names in the book on the last pages, and is possibly the same hand that added a second set of notations on important dates to several pages. It should be noted that the family names are spelled up to three or four different ways in the course of the friendship book; the primary spelling followed here is taken from the personal inscriptions.

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