Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond 9781442630383

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CULTURES OF COMMUNICATION: THEOLOGIES OF MEDIA IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND BEYOND

THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES General Editor: Barbara Fuchs

CULTURES OF COMMUNICATION THEOLOGIES OF MEDIA IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND BEYOND

Edited by Helmut Puff, Ulrike Strasser, and Christopher Wild

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

© The Regents of the University of California 2017 www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-3037-6 Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cultures of communication : theologies of media in early modern Europe and beyond / edited by Helmut Puff, Ulrike Strasser, and Christopher Wild. (UCLA Clark Library series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-3037-6 (cloth) 1. Intercultural communication – Europe – History – 16th century. 2. Communication – Religious aspects – Christianity. 3. Mass media – Religious aspects – Christianity. 4. Theology – Europe – History – 16th century. 5. Reformation. I. Puff, Helmut, author, editor II. Strasser, Ulrike, 1964–, editor III. Wild, Christopher J., 1967–, editor IV. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, issuing body V. University of California, Los Angeles. Center for 17th- & 18th- Century Studies, issuing body VI. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series P94.C84 2017

302.209409’031

C2016-905857-3

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3 CHRISTOPHER WILD AND ULRIKE STRASSER

Part 1: Divine Messages and Human Media 1 The Absolute Medium: Nicholas of Cusa on the Mediality of Christ 35 CHRISTIAN KIENING

2 Fragmentation and Presence: Reformation Debates and Cultural Theory 55 L E E PA L M E R WA N D E L

3 “Here I Stand”: Face-to-Face Communication and Print Media in the Early Reformation 77 MARCUS SANDL

4 Mediated Immediacies in Thomas Müntzer’s Theology 99 HELMUT PUFF

5 “Sing unto the Lord”: An Anthropology of Singing and Not-Singing in the Late Reformation Era 126 SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN

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Contents

6 Reading Images, Printing Voices: Simulation of Media and Epistemic Reflection in German Baroque Literature 142 DANIEL WEIDNER

Part 2: Going Global 7 Divine Messengers and Divine Messages: Angelic Media in Early Modern Hispanic America 163 ANDREW REDDEN

8 On Reading Missionary Correspondence: Jesuit Theologians on the Spiritual Benefits of a New Genre 186 MARKUS FRIEDRICH

9 Early Modern Translation Theories as Mission Theories: A Case Study of José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute (1588) 209 R E N AT E D Ü R R

10 Apocalyptic Times in a “World without End”: The Straits of Magellan around 1600 228 S U S A N N A B U R G H A RT Z

Contributors 249 Index of Names 253

Illustrations

Figures 0.1 Pancratius Kempff, The Difference between the True Religion of Christ and the False, Idolatrous Teachings of the Antichrist, 1546 (Woodcut) 0.2 Pancratius Kempff, The Difference between the True Religion of Christ and the False, Idolatrous Teachings of the Antichrist, 1546 (Woodcut) 0.3 Der Neue Welt-Bott oder Allerhand so Sehr als Geistreiche Brief/Schrifften und Reisbeschreibungen, Augsburg/ Graz 1726 (Frontispiece) 2.1 Albrecht Dürer, The Mass of Saint Gregory, 1511 (Woodcut, 29.5 × 20.5 cm) 2.2 Andreas Vesalius, Imagines Partivm Corporis Hvmani, 1566 3.1 Martin Luther, 95 Theses about Letters of Indulgence, Leipzig 1517 (Single-leaf Print) 3.2 Martin Luther, Warumb des Bapsts vnd seyner Jungern bucher von Doct. Martino Luther vorbrant seynn, Wittenberg 1520 (Title Page) 3.3 Ein Sermon geprediget tzu Leipßgk vffm Schloß am tag Petri vnd pauli ym. xviiij. Jar / durch den wirdigen vater Doctorem Martinum Luther augustiner zu Wittenburgk, Leipzig 1519 (Title Page) 3.4 Martin Luther, Von den guten werckenn, Wittenberg 1520 (Title Page) 3.5 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther as a Monk 1520 (Engraving)

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17 58 60 81

84

85 87 89

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3.6 Ain antzaigung wie D. Martinus Luther zu Worms auff dem Reichtstag eingefahren […], Augsburg 1521 (Title Page) 3.7 Doctor Martini Luthers offenliche Verhör zu Worms […], Augsburg 1521 (Title Page) 4.1 Thomas Müntzer, Deutsch Euangelisch Messze (Eilenburg: Nikolaus Widemar, 1524) 4.2 Christoffel van Sichem, Eyghentlijcke afbeeldinghe ende corte Historie van Thomas Muntser (Amsterdam: Christoffel van Sichem, 1605) 4.3 Thomas Müntzer, Ordnung vnd berechnunge des Teutschen ampts zu Alstadt (Eilenburg: Nikolaus Widemar, 1524) 6.1 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644, reprint 1968), 411 (455) 6.2 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 50 (94) 6.3 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 144 (188) 6.4 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 42 (86) 6.5 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 73 (117), 67 (111), 77 (121) 6.6 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 173 (217) 6.7 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 106 (150) 6.8 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 107 (151) 6.9 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae … Erquickstunden (1636−53, reprint 1990−1), vol. 2 (1651), 258; vol. 3 (1653), 258 10.1 Cornelis Claesz, Americae tabula nova multis locis tam ex terrestri peregrinatione quam recentiori navigatione ab exploratissimis naucleris emendata et multo quam antea exactior edita (1602) 10.2 Johann Theodor and Johann Israel de Bry, America (IX/2, plate 24) 10.3 Jodocus Hondius, Freti Magellanici ac novi Freti vulgo Le Maire exactissima descriptio / J. Grijp sculpsit, 1620 10.4 Zinneprent door Barent Jansz Potgieter

90 93 100

101 105 143 146 147 150 151 152 154 154

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231 240 242 244

Illustrations

Plates (Plates follow page 116) 1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther Preaches Before the Crucifix (Reformation Altarpiece) 2 Pieter Jansz Saenredam, St. Katherine’s Church, Utrecht 3 Colonial gateway into the courtyard of the Dominican Church of San Juan Bautista Coyoacan 4 Command that these things be borne by the hands of thy holy angel to altar on high (Detail from plate 3) 5 Facade sculpture above the doorway of the Convent church of San Francisco, Arequipa 6 Detail above side doorway of Church of Santa Marta, Arequipa 7 Detail from the facade of the Convent church of San Francisco, Arequipa 8 Detail of the facade of the Church of Santo Domingo in La Paz 9 Jodocus Hondius, Typus Totius Orbis Terrarum (1596–97)

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Acknowledgments

This book grew out a series of conferences, entitled “Theologies of Media, Cultures of Communication in Early Modern Europe and Beyond,” held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2009–10. We are most grateful to the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Clark Library for their generous support of both ventures. Our particular gratitude goes to the former director of both institutions, Peter Reill, for his indispensable encouragement and sponsorship in the early stages of planning this ambitious undertaking; to former director Patrick Coleman for dedicated support during each conference; and to the current director Barbara Fuchs for generous financial assistance enabling the inclusion of colour illustrations in the book. We further wish to thank the Center staff for their unflagging assistance, particularly Candis Snoddy, Suzanne Tatian, Fritze Rodic, Alastair Thorne, and Clark Librarian Bruce Whiteman. Finally, we owe enormous gratitude to the conference participants for their probing contributions and discussions. They made this a much better book. This volume benefited tremendously from the careful copy-editing, formatting, and proof-reading of Sky and Virginia Johnston, Tamra Wysock-Niimi, and Charles Stuart and in particular from the attentive care of Richard Ratzlaff at the University of Toronto Press. We are most grateful to all of them. A book on media begs for the presentation of visual materials alongside the verbal. We are indebted to many institutions that have supplied us with images from their holdings and the permissions to reproduce them in our volume. While we credit each of these institutions individually in the pages that follow, we would be remiss if we did not express our gratitude for their crucial collective contributions here.

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CULTURES OF COMMUNICATION: THEOLOGIES OF MEDIA IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND BEYOND

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Introduction CHRISTOPHER WILD AND ULRIKE STRASSER

No Reformation without Print – No Print without the Reformation Scholars have spilled considerable ink exploring the conjunction between the religious revolution sparked by the Reformation and the communication revolution evident in the rise of print culture.1 The historiographical commonplace “no Reformation without print” stands as a monument to those long-standing efforts. While this collection recognizes the tremendous importance of this earlier literature and of print media, we pursue a larger goal. Building on existing scholarship, this collection offers a sketch of the broader media culture that made the resounding success of print technology possible – a success that only appeared self-evident from hindsight. Our approach resists the technological focus and teleological pull of the Gutenberg galaxy and instead seeks to bring into view the powerful religious and theological undercurrents that led to the reform of old media and the emergence of new media. We contend that in order to grasp the complexity of early modern media history it is imperative to explore and emphasize the “early” as much as the “modern.” The focus on print has highlighted the modernity of early modern media, but it has also meant that much of this history has been written under the sign of technology, the organizing principle of contemporary media theory.2 We propose to re-evaluate the “early” of early modern media history and argue that such re-evaluation points to theology as the primary pivot of pre-modern media cultures.3 If a focus on technology lends coherence to accounts of the rise of modern media, a focus on theology enables us to narrate early modern media history as more than an earlier and always deficient version of this later history. It

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brings into relief how much our modern – that is to say, technologically inflected – understanding of media owes to (early modern) theology and religion.4 This genealogy has neither been adequately acknowledged nor systematically traced. The essays assembled here show that the history of media in early modern Europe is best understood in reference to the long-term aftershocks of the Reformation and the profound transformation of both media and mediation that the Reformation set in motion. The sixteenth-century reformers not only revolutionized the use of religious media, as has been noted before, but concomitantly articulated their own theorizations or, more simply, theologies of those very media. Concerns about communication and mediation had, of course, haunted Christianity since its inception, but it reached a crisis point during the Late Middle Ages. Lay and clerical critics thought mediation and religious media were fundamentally corrupted and corruptive, and hence in need of reform. In responding to the late medieval crisis of mediation, the Reformation in effect helped perpetuate this crisis. In the reformers’ eyes, priesthood, liturgy, worship, and scripture, to name only a few examples, had all been perverted and hence were in need of restoration to their original state of “pure communication.” Consequently, media were as much instruments of reform as they were its targets. Likewise, the various theologies of the Reformation, including their Catholic counterparts, offered different solutions to the perceived crisis of mediation. In the case of print, the reformers (particularly Luther) supplied the new medium of print with newsworthy information and gave the (then) flagging print business a much-needed boost.5 More important still, the reformers provided theological and theoretical legitimation for this medium and thereby ensured its cultural resonance and long-term success. Theology was thus key to the fortunes of print, as it was more broadly key to the formation of new media cultures throughout the early modern period. This intimate, generative alliance between theology and new technology warrants that we complement the familiar “no Reformation without print” with its chiastic inversion: “no print without the Reformation.”6

Theology as Media Theory: Ad Fontes or Thinking with the Bible Arguably the most important and pervasive response of reformers to the late medieval crisis of mediation was to return ad fontes and to reread the Bible as the foundation of all religious communication. And one way

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to understand this return, which was championed by reformers of all denominations, is that it tests contemporary religious media against the scenes of religious communication narrated or prescribed in the Bible and consequently permits only those religious media actually instituted by the Bible. Particularly Luther’s reform of religious communication is grounded in his rereading of what could be called the Bible’s media (his-)stories. The media theologies that the other Protestant reformers developed grew in a similar manner out of their interpretations of Scripture. But Protestants were not alone in turning to Scripture to (re-)conceptualize religious mediation and media. One need only cast a cursory glance at Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which seek to facilitate a direct line of communication with God by imaginatively returning to the scenes narrated in the Bible. Similarly, the Jesuits’ apostolicity, that is their notion of religious messaging, is grounded in this imaginative return. While the religious reforms of the sixteenth century relied to varying degrees on a return to the Bible, the Book of Books did have a sufficiently privileged place to warrant using it as a starting point for the following discussion of the media-theoretical issues that proved salient to early modern religious reformers. As a history of God’s relationship to man (and, of course, vice versa), the Bible is also a collection of stories about (primal) scenes of communication – between God and man as well as between man and man (or, of course, woman). In a sense, the Bible narrates, again and again, the institution of communication and its media. In the beginning everything was paradisiacal including the communication between God and man. It occurred face to face and was characterized by intuitive understanding. In the purest and most fundamental sense it was, thus, immediate and unmediated. With man’s fall and expulsion from paradise communication between God and humanity becomes precarious and problematical – along with everything else about the human condition. No longer face to face, communication between God and man from now on is characterized by maximal distance and improbability7 and requires angels or “messengers” and media, which always separate as much as they connect. From now on communication and its media must newly be instituted and cultivated again and again. Ever in question, much about communication in the Old Testament is about making and maintaining contact. While the communication between God and the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis is still relatively unproblematic and unemphatic, the Book of Exodus demonstrates the unlikelihood and difficulty of God making

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contact with man. One may think here of the resistance on Moses’ part of becoming God’s privileged messenger and the distance and altitude covered at Mount Sinai by this old man shuttling between an angry God and a disobedient and reluctant people of Israel. The story that the rest of the Old Testament narrates is one of the gradual deterioration and increasing improbability of the communication between God and his people – which necessitates the repeated reinstitution of religious communication and media. Thus, the Old Testament anticipates a mediahistorical pattern that is repeated many times in the history of Christianity and reaches a peak in the Reformation. The New Testament presupposes this dynamic and tells of its overcoming in the advent of the messiah. In other words, the whole historical trajectory from paradise to the final, apocalyptic return of Christ can be reconfigured in medial terms. Along those lines the Word becoming flesh can be reinterpreted as the restitution of the possibility of face-toface communication, lost with the Fall, and more generally as the rehabilitation of the materiality of communication. With the withdrawal of Christ, a system of communicational media is put into place to mediate his absence. Only the very end of time, the apocalypse – the revelation and unveiling – promises to restore the unmediated presence of God and Christ. If in the meantime communication and its media are never self-evident or to be taken for granted, communication itself must become the object of these communications, in short, must be communicated. Countless episodes from the Old and the New Testament are concerned with the institution of communication as communication, the installation of media as media – in contrast to false modes and media of communication. Moreover, communication is always threatened by corruption and perversion; for instance, the obstinacy of the people of Israel or in the Christian context the devil – in Greek the dia-bol, who corrupts the integrity of symbolic communication.8 Consequently, the numerous media stories of the Bible do not operate with a preconceived and fixed concept and notion of communication and mediality.9 Instead they narrate again and again how people, objects, actions, and natural phenomena become media with which communication and mediation take place. Put differently, the Bible tells stories of what the German literary and media theorist Joseph Vogl has termed “becoming media.”10 He proposes to “set aside any general concept of media in favor of examining historically singular constellations in which we can identify the metamorphosis into media of things, symbolic systems, or technologies.”11 In other words, it

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makes little sense to approach premodern religious communication with a preconceived media-theoretical terminology, but instead we need to be open to ever new articulations of mediality and mediation. The authority of Scripture of course lends normative status and legitimacy to the media instituted in these Biblical stories of “becoming,” even as these media are also not immune to the cycle of corruption and reform. In short, the Bible offered powerful templates for confronting and managing medial crises of various kinds. When the sixteenth-century reformers set out to rethink the religious communication of the Roman Catholic Church, they not surprisingly sought and found in Scripture original scenes of “becoming media” or instances of God instituting and thereby sanctioning modes and media of communication. Likewise, they also sought and found numerous stories of the corruption and perversion of these divinely instituted modes of communication, and their subsequent reform and purification. It is thus no coincidence that the various reformers so readily adopted what they considered Biblical blueprints to understand their own media-historical situation and chart out a course of reform. The following two sections concretize the mediatheological trajectory sketched here by examining two images, one Lutheran and the other Jesuit, that exemplify their respective communication and media cultures. Furthermore, these two pictorial documents highlight two dimensions of religious communication that structure this collection of essays. While the Lutheran broadsheet from the middle of the sixteenth century foregrounds the vertical axis of communication between the divine and the human, the frontispiece from a Jesuit publication of the early eighteenth century addresses the challenges and opportunities opened by vast horizontal distances in the course of global evangelization.

Reform and Perversion: A Caricature of Competing Communication Cultures A broadsheet from the Cranach school illustrates how Lutheranism understood itself as a media reform that restages Biblical scenes of institution to condemn Roman Catholic communication practices as antiChristian and legitimate their own as divinely sanctioned (see figs. 0.1 and 0.2).12 This highly polemical woodcut, titled The Difference between the True Religion of Christ and the False, Idolatrous Teachings of the Antichrist (Unterscheid zwischen der waren Religion Christi / und falschen Abgöttischen lehr des Antichrists in den fürnemsten Stücken), probably dates from around

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Figure 0.1 Pancratius Kempff, The Difference between the True Religion of Christ and the False, Idolatrous Teachings of the Antichrist, 1546 (Woodcut) [bpk Berlin / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY]

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1550 and, thus, from the period of the emerging religious settlement between the emperor and the Lutheran territories. The Gnesio-Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus probably devised the woodcut and oversaw its production. At any rate, the context of its production seems to have been the initial stage of the struggle for purity in the Evangelical church service. This is reflected in the broadsheet’s antithetical and dichotomous composition – a feature of Lutheran pictorial polemics from at least the “Passional” of 1520 on. Systematically, the Antichrist’s idolatrous doctrine is portrayed as the perverted mirror image of the true religion of Christ. The column in the middle forms an axis of contrastive mirroring that separates both halves and relates the elements of one half to their counterparts in the other half. The column supports two pulpits housing two preachers who are similar and yet antithetical: on the right Catholic side (see fig. 0.1) we see a monk, on the left Protestant side (see fig. 0.2) we see the former monk Martin Luther who now wears a preacher’s coat. Clearly, the right side is supposed to be the perversion of the left. Both are inspired, the monk by a little devil who uses bellows to blow air into his ear, and Luther by the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove. Thus, both function as media or mediators for a message originating elsewhere. Luther’s preaching is grounded in the divine word in the form of the open Bible to which his left hand points. The (somewhat free) quote from Acts 10:43: “Of him all prophets give witness …” (the German inscription reads: “Alle Propheten zeugen von diesen / daß kein ander name unter dem Himmel sey”) makes clear that the Protestant preacher is little more than God’s mouthpiece citing and reciting God’s speech in the form of the Bible when he is preaching. Thus, the broadsheet portrays the Protestant reform of religious communication as being grounded in a reform of preaching as the primary mediation of God’s word. In contrast, Scripture is noticeably absent on the right pulpit. The message of the Antichrist’s emissary originates not in God, but himself: “Behold, there you have many Roman Catholic and non-heretical ways to salvation. I fancy [in German “meinen” instead of “glauben,” i.e., “to believe”] you can easily be saved.” The promise of salvation that he extends to his audience is not God’s but his own. By following and preaching his own “Meinung” or opinion he is really following the little devil’s prompting. But there is no actual message entering the monk’s ear, only air. By having the devil pump air into the preacher’s ears – a common visual trope of the time – the broadsheet literalizes the universal trope of inspiration.13 Thus, the monk’s diabolical inspiration is reduced to its

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materiality and, in Evangelical eyes, proves to be anti-Christian exactly for that very reason. So in a way the Catholic preacher doesn’t mediate the divine word. All he mediates is his own or his church’s opinion. Media-theoretically, the Catholic priest’s message is actually threefold: (1) The Catholic Church offers many salvational media; (2) they have been instituted by man; and (3) the communication of salvation is highly probable. In the broadsheet Catholic cult is portrayed, to play on a famous phrase by Freud, as polymedially perverse. In fact, there are so many messengers and mediators that not even the pope, who is depicted in the bottom right-hand corner selling indulgences, receives the pride of place and centres the Catholic media ensemble – despite, of course, his status as the head of the Church and the Vicar of Christ. Instead of acting as the main human mediator who organizes and centres all other religious media, he simply joins in this seeming cacophony of communication. If there is a focus of attention, it is the preaching monk as he commands the attention of, at least, a small part of the intra-pictorial audience. But the viewer’s gaze is quickly dispersed by the mass of uncoordinated salvational media. All the communicative actions depicted on the right side are strangely “self-centred”; all “information” circulates among closed and isolated groups. That would explain why there is hardly any laity present on the Catholic side. Whichever rituals the members of the Catholic clergy perform, they do it for themselves and not for others; nothing in fact is directed outward. To put it somewhat differently: from the “enlightened” Evangelical perspective all this frantic communication remains immanent and horizontal. In other words, it stays within the human sphere; or, as Joseph Leo Koerner expresses it elegantly, “the Catholic rites unfold within a world or mundus.”14 This self-centredness applies equally to the vertical axis of communication. Even though all these communicative actions depicted are supposed to secure the sender’s, i.e., the believer’s, salvation, not one of those messages is directed at, let alone reaches, its divine recipient. God in the upper right-hand corner is cordoned off from the scenes below by a ring of clouds that are fortified with spiky rays whose sharp points are directed towards the world below suggesting that his response to the human non-communication is hostile and punitive. So in a sense, the Catholic communicants do communicate with God by not communicating. There is, of course, an exception: St Francis. He faces God the Father with raised hands displaying his stigmata. Clearly his intercession or, better, mediation is failing as he is unable to assuage God’s wrath.15

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Figure 0.2 Pancratius Kempff, The Difference between the True Religion of Christ and the False, Idolatrous Teachings of the Antichrist, 1546 (Woodcut) [bpk Berlin / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY]

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His faith and imitation of Christ may have gained him entry to heaven, but he nonetheless serves no function as mediator. If we look to the left side, this role belongs (or ought to belong, according to the woodcut) to Christ alone; and he is noticeably absent on the Catholic side, as are all other manifestations of the divine Word. In contrast, the well-organized media ensemble on the Protestant side is centred completely on Christ as the only mediator or “Mittler” – instituted by God himself in the first citation on the banderole connecting him to Luther: “There is only one mediator” (Es ist nur ein Mittler). Martin Luther’s Christo-centrism is, thus, essentially medial. All modes and media of religious communication are connected to or instituted by Christ. He may be the only mediator, but due to the mediator’s irreducible absence and opacity he is himself in need of mediation. In fact, he is depicted no less than five times on the left-hand side: (1) Facing God the Father in the shape of a “living” Man of Sorrows; (2) facing Luther as the Lamb of God; (3) as a crucifix behind the altar on the left side; (4) as bread and wine on the altar and being communicated to two believers during communion; (5) and finally in the many quotations scattered across the page. Nevertheless, this multiplication of medial forms does not result in the same kind of self-contained and ineffective polymediality as we have seen on the Catholic side, as Christ provides the principle of unity. This medial monism organizes the mediation and dissemination of Christ’s phenomenal appearance and prevents medial dispersion. To play on the passage from Acts 10:43: all religious media give witness to Christ. This medial monism is also at work in the physical and social space visualized by the grid on the floor and the orderly arrangement of the worshippers. While the polymedial perversion of Catholic cult results in disorder and chaos, the Protestant medial ensemble is well-ordered and transparent.16 It is organized around three foci of attention: Martin Luther on the pulpit on the right-hand side, a group around a baptismal fount in the centre background, and the altar on the left. This triadic constellation is replicated again in Luther’s intermediary position between the divine and the human, the trinity on the on hand and the community of Evangelical believers on the other. This triadic structure is, of course, grounded in the trinity, which is completely represented on the left-hand side. Thus, the ordering of social space below, in which everyone has his or her place, reflects the transcendent order depicted above. Martin Luther as a preacher functions as the central relay between God and man, heaven and earth. Positioned above the congregation

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and below the heavens he serves as the interface between both. Between him and God the Father a direct, vertical channel of communication has opened up that grounds and organizes all (horizontal) communicative actions and events below. This channel is “vectored.” It runs in one direction, namely, from God the Father to Luther, as is indicated by the pointed tip touching Luther’s pointing finger. Thus, it is initiated and controlled by God the Father. But the communicational relation visualized by this channel is rather complex. Christ, who is, as the text in the very middle of the banderole states, “the way” through which the channel passes, is represented twice, once as Man of Sorrows facing God the Father and then facing Luther in his allegorical guise of the Lamb of God. Facing in both directions he functions as interface or, cast more traditionally, intercessor between God and man. By making the communication of grace wholly dependent on Christ it becomes – at least in the eyes of these Lutheran reformers – exponentially more probable. While the communication between God and man depends primarily on the institution of Christ as medium/mediator, it fails without the proper reception; a reception that, in Lutheran eyes, has gone awry on the Catholic side where Christ is no longer recognized and consequently forgotten. The left side of the broadsheet visualizes this reception in Luther’s gesture of pointing towards the Lamb of God; a gesture that is contextualized by the accompanying passage from the Gospel of John in which John the Baptist exclaims upon the sight of Christ: “Behold there the Lamb of God, [which taketh away the sin of the world]” (John 1:29, and 1:36). It takes faith to see the sacrificial Lamb of God, to “see” what cannot be seen with one’s corporeal vision.17 Thus, faith mediates not only between the visible signs and the invisible truth, but it recognizes and accepts God’s communication with man, namely, the one mediator or medium Jesus Christ. It is not so much that faith facilitates the reception of specific messages sent by God, but that it grasps his address as such; that God is actually caring and communicating with man and, more precisely with a particular man, namely, the man that believes that God the Father has sent his son Jesus Christ as the mediator. By individualizing the divine address faith renders communication between God and man probable again – however improbable it appears. Or to play on Joseph Vogl’s coinage, it is through faith that things, actions, and people “become” divine media and mediators in the first place. The broadsheet also makes clear that faith is not man’s work alone, but is brought about by the divine word in the form of Scripture.

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For Luther points with his right hand at the Lamb of God, but his left hand rests on and points at an open Bible. In that material text the believer finds the injunction “behold there” that helps him see what is essentially invisible and immaterial. Luther’s insistence on the materiality of communication and media is owed to his resistance to what he perceived as a dangerous immediacy in the theologies championed by more radical reformers like Andreas Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer.18 In Luther’s eyes their claim to a more direct communication with the divine negated Christ’s work of mediation. He insisted, therefore, on the irreducibility of material media in religious communication, be it the corporeality of the sacraments or the literality of Scripture. Of course, this insistence on material mediality brought Luther, in the eyes of many Protestants, dangerously close to the media culture he sought to overthrow. So how to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of Catholicism’s medial fetishism and radical Protestantism’s anti-medial fundamentalism? Again, John the Baptist’s (and Luther’s) gesture literally points the way. He is a mediator that does not stand in the way of delivering his message. In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, which narrates his encounter with the messiah, John, when asked who or what he is, stresses repeatedly: “This is he of whom I said, after me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me” (John 1:30). So when this prophet of the present points to Christ, who is the way, he always also points away from himself. Thus, his act of mediation does not corrupt and only minimally interrupts what it mediates. Thereby Luther solves the dilemma he is faced with when he, on the one hand, sets out to reform the corrupting influence of religious mediation in Catholic cult and, on the other, strives to uphold the ineluctability of material media in the face of rival reformers’ attempts to do away with all mediation. According to Luther’s mature theology, material media are both necessary and expendable for they suspend themselves in the act of mediation. The exegetical description of this broadsheet was forced to adopt Lutheranism’s polemical perspective in characterizing two competing media cultures. Therefore, it seems important to emphasize that both early modern Catholicism as well as the various “radical” reform movements simply developed their own answers to the inherent aporias and challenges of religious communication and media; in other words, they developed their own media theologies. Let us, therefore, turn to an image that originated in a Catholic context.

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Media of Space and Time: Catholicism Goes Global Catholic reformers similarly rethought religious mediation and media in order to address the European medial crisis that originated in the Late Middle Ages and had been fomented further by the Protestant Reformation. Just like their Protestant counterparts, they (re-)turned to Biblical models or primal scenes of communication to seek guidance for solving the media-historical dilemmas of their day. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises invited exercitants to discern God’s message by placing themselves in Biblical scenes and conversing with God in this imaginary framework. In the same vein, Jerome Nadal produced the Adnotationes et Meditationes in Evangelia to aid meditation on the true meaning of God’s words. He provided believers with vibrant visual prompts, in particular images of Christ’s life and preaching – a Biblical slide show that ran parallel to and served to illuminate the readings of the liturgical calendar. For all confessions the Bible was thus the primary point of reference for how God had communicated with humanity in an often troubled past and for how to keep this line of communication open in a crisis-ridden present. Catholic reformers, however, were the first to explore and theorize altogether new frontiers of communication: the realm of global evangelization and long-distance communication. It is important to note from the outset that this growing concern with horizontal connections did not replace but developed in tandem with ongoing attempts to solve the problem of vertical access to the divine. Both sides of the confessional divide continued to struggle with the question of knowing and communing with God. But due to the long institutional history of the Roman Church and the support of monarchs with colonial aspirations, Catholics were able to direct their reformatory zeal beyond Europe’s boundaries. Catholicism became the world’s first truly global religion. The above-mentioned Spiritual Exercises and Adnotationes, popular tools of self-reform and teaching for Jesuits in Europe, hence also travelled to Ming China, Mughal India, and the Spanish Empire in the Americas, where they aided missionaries in spreading God’s message.19 Such outward expansion placed novel demands on communicational practices and media technologies as well as their theorization. Practices and theories of mediation had to be reformed to accommodate an array of altogether new communicative situations across unprecedented distances, unfamiliar languages, and unknown cultures. Over time, the sustained

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encounter with such novel communicative situations unleashed its own effects, reforming in turn Old World media technologies and theories. Loyola’s Society of Jesus, more than any other Catholic group, developed concepts and instruments for facing these new challenges. Reflective of the self-conscious approach that this new order took to issues of mediation, Jesuits were the first to claim the term “missionary,” an honorific that medieval theology had reserved for Christ alone, for men like themselves who delivered the gospel.20 The order’s system of epistolary exchanges amounted to an unrivalled information network, more wide-ranging than any other at the time. 21 To apply Harold Innis’s twopronged classification of media as privileging either temporal duration or spatial extension, this epistolary system was a space-biased media ensemble par excellence.22 Add to this the voluminous output of linguistic and (proto)-ethnographic Jesuit works that aimed at facilitating communication between missionaries and their diverse flock, and the Jesuits appear as the premier media theoreticians of global evangelization in the early modern world.23 A look at the frontispiece of a Jesuit publication tellingly entitled Der Neue Welt-Bott (New World Messenger; see fig. 0.3) will provide a Catholic counterpart to the Cranach woodcut discussed above (see fig. 0.2).24 Although Der Neue Welt-Bott contained texts that dated to earlier centuries and in some cases had been published before, it was the first printed serialized collection of missionary writings that presented a global panorama of texts in the German language. The first instalment of Der Neue Welt-Bott dates from the 1720s, taking us to the end of the early modern period, when religious publications, while still reflective of the concerns of the confessional community in which they originated, also increasingly reached beyond these communities to target a trans-confessional, learned audience.25 The frontispiece mirrors these larger currents. Its visual language is especially striking in its play on the very question of media. It simultaneously thematizes media’s ability to facilitate communication across multiplying audiences or growing distances and the omnipresent danger that those same media and the message they carry can be corrupted along the way. The image references a set of “becoming media” (to once again invoke Joseph Vogel’s concept) that came into stark relief in the context of global evangelization. The central position is occupied by a flying Hermes, known as the speedy messenger of the gods, patron of travellers, and trickster. This figure alludes to the emergence of new types of intermediaries, human and spiritual, and information brokers enlisted to meet the

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Figure 0.3 Der Neue Welt-Bott oder Allerhand so Sehr als Geistreiche Brief/Schrifften und Reisbeschreibungen, Augsburg/Graz 1726 (Frontispiece) [From the holdings of Special Collections and University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside]

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unprecedented challenges to communicate across geographical and cultural borders. The Jesuit monogram atop his staff and the pile of letters in his right hand link this Hermes figure to the Jesuit order’s epistolary system of information transfer, to its vast network of collectors, translators, printers, and of course to the overseas missionaries themselves. The Jesuits’ mobile apostolate, encapsulated in the additional, fourth vow members took, namely, to preach the gospel wherever the pope may send them, marked a new departure within European Christianity and its monastic culture of stabilitas loci. At the same time, this Jesuit apostolate can be seen as an early modern reworking of a media-theological template in the New Testament. It harks back to the model of the apostles who spread the gospel message, through letters and itinerant preaching, across the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire, but then refashions this template for use on a global scale.26 It is no coincidence that the Jesuit Hermes props himself up with the words found in Luke: “I bring you good tidings of great joy” (Ich verkünde Euch eine große Freude) (Lk 2:10), the good news of Christ’s birth that the angel of the Lord delivered to the fearful shepherds. On the one hand, this passage promises the reinstitution of untainted communication with God, as the advent of the Messiah signals God’s making contact with man and thus the beginning of the end of the communication difficulties outlined in the Old Testament. On the other hand, the multiplicity of messengers leaving their imprint on this frontispiece – the angel, the apostle, Hermes, and the Jesuit missionaries – indicates a sense of continued distance between God and man, an urgent need for multi-layered mediation, and, on a more disturbing note, the increased likelihood of corrupting a message with too many mediators or false intermediaries in the mix. Hermes after all was also known as the patron of thieves and liars. New World writings including those printed on the pages of the New World Messenger abound with examples of problematic agents and acts of mediation and even outright information theft. The Devil, the ultimate deceiver, is a powerful presence in missionary reports from overseas. The preaching of indigenous converts raised fears of contaminating the gospel, and so did the use of indigenous terms to explain Christian theological concepts.27 Hermes as a pagan figure is himself an intriguing if ultimately fitting choice for a visual protagonist of a Catholic missionary journal published in the early Enlightenment. Through its selection and redaction of texts, Der Neue Welt-Bott deliberately pitched itself to a wider educated readership beyond its narrow denominational circle and to a market shared

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with other missionary and scientific journals. The frontispiece thus amalgamates Christian evangelization with classical learning by casting a figure of Greek mythology as its main intermediary between heaven and earth and, on a horizontal level, between different human audiences. Similarly, the boat and the lighthouse at the bottom of the frontispiece can double as symbols of religious mission and of intellectual pursuit.28 The light guiding the boat into a safe haven alludes to the notion of Christ as light. But the lighthouse can also serve as a stand-in for contemporary philosophical discourses that were beginning to transform the very meaning of “enlightened” from a state of religious illumination to a state of intellectual clarity.29 The boat in the image delivers additional double-messages. An old symbol for the church, this boat sails under the Jesuit flag and transports four animals, a numerological reference to the tradition of imagining the four evangelists as living creatures. But only one of the beasts on board, the lion, is actually found in this tradition as a representation of the apostle Mark. The other beasts – a camel, an elephant, and a leopard – make for the kind of exotic menagerie that was rarely seen on European shores and presented objects of learned curiosity. Not surprisingly, the Jesuit Hermes on our frontispiece carries more than just missionary writings from afar: he also delivers the world in the shape of a globe. Hermes’s globe points to yet another dimension of “becoming media” in the age of world-spanning evangelization efforts. This era witnessed the proliferation of cartographic media as well as of new, theologically informed interpretations of European territorial discoveries. Religious interpreters understood these discoveries as signs of divine communication and sought to decipher their meaning by linking them once again to Biblical templates. Missionaries christened unfamiliar locales with names from the familiar lexicon of revelation and traced the genealogy of their inhabitants to the apostle Thomas or the Sons of Noah.30 Spaces and places became sites of exegesis for those who traversed and mapped them for the first time for Christian audiences. Religion thus shaped perceptions of space and the development of new cartographic media, fostering a global Christian imaginary.31 Further, the accelerated speed of discovering new (from the European point of view) lands was widely interpreted by missionaries as an indication that the end of time was nearing and the return to God’s unmediated presence imminent.32 This apocalyptic vision informs the choice of the second Biblical quotation at the bottom of our Jesuit frontispiece: “And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the

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north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29). It is a reference to the final days, when the conversion of the earth is complete and people from everywhere come face to face with God. A plea as much as a promise, it heralds the time when humanity at long last re-enters a stage of unmediated communication with God. There is more to it still. The outline of the four (known) continents on Hermes’s globe links this apocalyptic interpretation of the European discoveries to contemporary efforts to master space scientifically. The development of the semiotic system of longitude and latitude too altered how space was perceived and experienced in the early modern period. The same Jesuits who viewed geographical discoveries through an apocalyptical lens brought their mathematical skills and astronomical knowledge to bear on a large-scale, state-run mapping enterprise. Rulers from Spanish America to absolutist France and Qing China discovered cartography’s usefulness to governance and recruited Jesuits to assist in mapping their respective realms.33 This brings us to the last aspect of “becoming media” that needs to be highlighted here. The era clearly witnessed an intensifying interplay between religious media technologies and experts, on the one hand, and the infrastructures of transportation and communication associated with empire and trade, on the other. The Jesuits may have simply thought of themselves as following in the apostles’ footsteps, but the world had become a much bigger and complex place in their own day. If, as Harold Innis has argued, church and state divided between themselves the rule over space and time and their respective media during Late Antiquity, it stands to reason that this division of labour collapsed, if not long before, certainly during the early modern moment of increasing global connectivity, and that religious and secular media cultures began to crossfertilize one another in unprecedented ways.34 The boat in the image hints at this process. It evokes the many vessels that shuttled preachers, Bibles, printing presses, and missionary letters between distant places, alongside other commodities, merchants, colonial officials, and members of other confessional communities. Information and communication technologies were exchanged in multiple directions, between farflung places and people. When viewed in this light, our Hermes shows yet one more of his many faces: he appears as the patron of merchants and general commerce across barriers, including those between the agents of church and state. Even a cursory reading of this Jesuit frontispiece serves to illuminate just how pressing questions of communication and media across large

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distances became for religious reformers with the onset of global evangelization. Growing distances put enormous demands on the agents and instruments of religious mediation and further raised the stakes of failed communication. Simultaneously, the rapid expansion of Christendom promised to hasten the end of time and restore God’s unmediated presence; such apocalyptic understandings of the global conquest of space added yet more urgency to the missionary enterprise. As they faced these challenges, Catholic religious reformers found themselves entering new kinds of alliances with state authorities and reaching out to more trans-confessional audiences, thus paving the way for religious ideas about media to enter altogether different cultural domains in the eighteenth century and beyond. One can almost imagine Hermes nodding in approval.

Divine Messages and Human Media: Going Global As mentioned above, the arrangement of the contributions to the present collection follows the structure of this introduction. The articles in the first part, entitled “Divine Messages and Human Media,” focus on the vertical axis of the communication between God and man, and examine the contested role of various media employed to facilitate the bridging of the enormous ontological distance. Under the heading “Going Global,” the essays of the second section explore the challenges that arise when this vast vertical gap is exacerbated by the large horizontal distances opened by global evangelization. This is not to suggest that the problem of communication with God across the vertical gap became any less pressing but rather to foreground novel concerns with horizontal connections and communication during the early modern wave of largescale Christianization. Christian Kiening opens the first section on “Divine Messages and Human Media” with a deft reading of a fifteenth-century philosophicaltheological treatise that takes the reader into the vortex of late medieval religious thought and practice. Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei (On the Vision of God) of 1453 responds to the search for actualization as believers common among monastics (as well as laypeople) of the time. For this theologian, contemporary paintings with painted figures that gaze at the beholder wherever he or she stands or moves provide a model and analogue for the cognitive-affective processes of recognizing the human condition. Humanity can experience God neither fully nor directly; the divine can be gleaned only in mediated form. In this sense, Christ

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emerges as the perfect or absolute medium: he is both man and God – a perfection we can comprehend in the abstract but not partake of. A visual experience whereby seeing or being seen by the all-seeing seer becomes knowing thus serves to capture media’s paradoxical nature. On the one hand, media are utterly indispensable; on the other hand, they are of import mainly insofar as they instigate glimpses into the limitlessness associated with God. That Cusa thought such spiritual insights into God, “the Divine Painter,” attainable for man under the conditions of life after the Fall – with its ineluctable impairment of the human senses – is what makes this verbal-visual experiment so striking. These glimpses of fullness are always inherently tied to the realization that one can never transcend one’s humanity. From this vantage point, the human condition therefore is inherently medial. In her chapter on Reformation debates and cultural theory, Lee Palmer Wandel takes us to the heart of the proliferating cultures of communication and of media during the early modern period: the theologies of Christ’s incarnation. How Christ was imagined to be manifest in the world after his death on the cross, she argues, had profound implications on all aspects of Christian life: how religious services were structured, whether places of worship were adorned, how time was experienced, how the body was inhabited, and how the divine entered into the daily life of believers. In a way, all theology revolved around this fundamental attempt to bring Biblical word, religious message, and church life into line. As a result, the proliferating notions of sacred presence during the Reformation ushered in confessional cultures whose differences were marked by their respective media ensembles. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists differed in how they theorized, verbalized, visualized, understood, or made experiential Christ’s presence in their midst. Notions of the incarnated God thus emerge as the very motor of early modern media of the divine. Approaching the Eucharist not as a doctrinal problem but through the lens of how the various confessions fostered particular regimes of divine presence, as Wandel proposes, therefore opens up new avenues for charting the dynamic character of religious media, mediation, and the role of religious mediators in this period. Furthermore, what constituted God’s presence for one group became a touchstone for God’s perceived absence in a confessional group other than one’s own. In his contribution on the effects of print in the early Reformation, Marcus Sandl revisits the crucial, well-known time span between the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517 and his appearance

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at the Diet of Worms in 1521. To isolate print as a medium from the multimedial contexts within which it functioned would be a mistake, he contends at the outset. And yet in the period that saw Luther’s breakthrough as a monastic theologian to a reformer known throughout the Christian world, the relationship between the reformer, reform ideas, and the medium through which his ideas came to be known primarily shifted. In 1517, print functioned as an auxiliary that, to a large extent, complemented face-to-face interaction. By 1521, however, print had gained precedence over other media for followers of Luther. Increasingly, Sandl finds, reform acts were staged for communication via print; paratextual frames of reference related printed texts to prior events or publications; and print emerged as the primary forum through which the Reformation unfolded. This became evident in 1521, when Luther departed from the proceedings the imperial-ecclesiastical party had devised in order to communicate his allegiance to a superior force, a conscience he said was held captive by God, and to express his appeal to a general audience not immediately present at the diet. In other words, the relationship between reformer, events, and the medium’s agency was not a given, as much of Reformation historiography has assumed. This nexus was instituted; and its rise therefore needs to be critically investigated. It has long been recognized that the execution of the radical reformer Thomas Müntzer for his participation in the German Peasants’ War was a turning point in the course of the Reformation as well as a defining moment in the history of Protestantism. The Protestant churches that emerged from these pivotal events must in part be understood as a response to the perceived threat of spiritualists or Schwärmer who supposedly sought immediate spiritual fulfilment at the cost of a theology inspired by and centred on the Biblical word. From that moment on, for everyone to see, Protestantism was a religious movement riven with a divisive factionalism that, in subsequent years, generated ever new forms of belief. Yet verbal vitriol and theological differences between Lutherans and radical reformers aside, Luther and Müntzer had much in common, as Helmut Puff argues in his contribution to the present volume. In fact, Protestant reformers of all stripes shared one goal above all, namely, to address the perceived crisis of religious mediation and renew media of the divine for the sake of salvation. This chapter therefore focuses on a little-known Müntzer: the author of the first comprehensive liturgy in the vernacular, the pastoral reformer, translator, and savvy institution-builder. As a parish priest or, in Müntzer’s own words, as “God’s willing messenger,” he seized the opportunity to work towards launching a Christian

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society where God’s message could or would come alive. Because of its novelty in liturgical contexts, German offered itself as an exhilarating vehicle to revitalize the ministry, and church services allowed for activating the laity spiritually. In short, Müntzer sought to ready his parish, through a variety of well-tempered rituals and measures, for gradually entering into a less mediated and spirited communication with God. Of all the media that reached prominence between 1517 and 1648, singing has held a special place. According to many reformers, Martin Luther prominently among them, parishes performing music together gave testimony to a novel sense of belonging; communal singing expressed the spiritual, social, and cultural renewal the Reformation was said to bring about. Susan Karant-Nunn’s exploration of the actualities around singing starts from the startling observation (first noted by Joseph Herl) that many parishioners refused to participate in the musical practices so dear to the reform-oriented clergy. Throughout the extended period she considers in her contribution, visitation records register concerns about the successful implementation of this musical Reformation or its acceptance among believers. Finding answers to the question why individual believers or whole communities refrained from choral singing is complicated by the fact that we know little about the late medieval practices that preceded the period’s liturgical reforms. Turning to historical anthropology as an approach, the author sheds light on a variety of contexts to explain this silent resistance: rejection of the new churches’ disciplinarianism, the shortcomings of reform-inspired schooling, and the delegation of musical performance to better trained singers are part of an explanatory framework that allows us to approximate answers to this intriguing, elusive problem. Zooming in on one particular medium such as singing therefore brings to the fore a wealth of attitudes or mentalities that defined the medium as experienced. Writing a history of media exclusively from the perspective of their inception thus falls short, if we do not also take into account a social history of communication. Taking on the concept of “becoming media” may therefore require us to think about how media “lived.” In keeping with this long-term view on the history of media, Daniel Weidner directs our gaze to the seventeenth-century afterlife of Gutenberg’s invention and the highly complex interplay among print media, the medium of the Baroque theatre, and Protestant Eucharist theologies of absence and presence. Weidner unpacks this relationship through a skilful reading of Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s pastoral opera Seelewig (The Eternal Soul ) as published in the fourth volume of his Frauenzimmer

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Gesprächspiele in 1644 during the last phase of the Thirty Years War. Rich in cross-references, reflective commentary, and visual play on the printed page/stage, Seelewig amounts to a multi-medial artefact that belies simplistic views of print as a straightforward textual delivery device. Weidner’s analysis reminds us of the importance of considering print as part of a broader media culture in which different means of communication (images, space, singing, speaking) regularly operated together and even interpenetrated one another. The pastoral Seelewig presents the spiritual progress of a pious yet easily deceived soul by alternately simulating and critiquing the spoken, sung, printed, and staged word; on another representational level, it thus also calls attention to the very capacity of different media to both reveal and conceal the sacred. That the Baroque Seelewig concludes with a prayer rather than the genre’s typical apotheosis, the essay suggests, does not reflect a secularization of the Christian pastoral: the sacred is not altogether absent, it is simply differently present. Thus the opera’s conclusion registers a Reformationinspired rethinking of media’s capacity for representation and promotes an embrace of the word, printed and spoken, as a means to produce presence. Weidner’s rich example from the end of the confessional age invites further exploration of the long-term effects of the sixteenth-century reforms of theories and practices of media on literature, theatre, and art into the modern age. Rather than moving forward in time, however, the volume’s second part, “Going Global,” addresses the impact of space or expanding geographical horizons on early modern media and theories of communication. Andrew Redden explores the ubiquity and importance of angels – the age’s “media par excellence,” as he dubs the otherworldly messengers – in early modern Catholic culture in the age of global evangelization. He tracks the new guises that these Old World figures took on as they moved across the Atlantic and into the indigenous worlds of the Spanish Americas. Since early Christianity, angels fulfilled a number of communicative and medial functions. Once European notions of angels traversed the Atlantic Ocean and encountered the autochthonous traditions of Spanish America they took on new shapes and significations. Devotion to guardian angels flourished in Catholic Hispanic American culture. But this culture also forged a close link between angelic mediation and children who had died in a state of innocence, the so-called angelitos. More striking still is Redden’s finding that the New World context brought a refurbishing of the European Eucharistic connection between humans, angels, and the divine. Angelic mediators became

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directly linked to pre-conquest sacrificial rites to indigenous gods. Church paintings had them carry the host upwards in a monstrance whose sunburst shape harked back to the pre-conquest cult of the sun. Thus, angelic figures mediated on yet another level: they helped incorporate autochthonous traditions into the Catholic message yet also, and more subversively, enabled the communication of other messages beyond the “pure gospel.” Among the human media of early modern long-distance evangelization, the epistle arguably holds pride of place. Markus Friedrich’s contribution traces the evolution of Jesuit letter-writing practices and theories. Even though letter writing formed an integral part of the monastic tradition and received a powerful secular boost with the rise of humanism, Jesuits forged an altogether new form of epistolary medium: missionary reports that were designed to master not only the administrative but, more crucially still, the spiritual and social challenges of evangelization across unprecedented geographical distances. As regards the individual member, missionary correspondence was seen as an aid to spiritual development and moral betterment. To read and write an edifying letter was part of good ascetic practice; the exempla provided in these letters were powerful “mirrors” for comparison and could “inflame” the mind with a desire for improvement. Interestingly, here the most recent, contemporary examples of virtuous actions in the field were viewed as the most suitable and spiritually efficacious. As regards the Society of Jesus at large, Friedrich shows, the exchange of missionary letters was meant to help create and maintain unity among the members “since they are,” as Ignatius put it, “so spread out in diverse parts of the world among believers and unbelievers.” Missionary letters were believed to enable the flow of “fraternal charity,” which was itself an expression of God’s grace, and turn widely dispersed, individual men into one unified religious body. The Pauline medium of the epistle was recast to meet the new demands of a globalized mission field. Renate Dürr in her chapter calls attention to the central role of “personal experience” in recovering and transmitting, or differently put, mediating Christian revelation in an expanding world. Dürr probes José de Acosta’s influential 1588 handbook De procuranda indorum salute (On Procuring the Salvation of the Indians), which first defined missionary activity as an essentially communicative process demanding exact knowledge of the language and culture of the target population, to show how the ongoing Europe-wide reassessment of Biblical translation practices took on heightened urgency in New World settings. On one

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level, the Jesuit de Acosta’s views of language, translation, and revelation turn out to be strikingly in sync with Martin Luther’s views. Albeit on opposite ends of the confessional spectrum, both theologians juxtaposed dead-book learning with lived personal experience and argued that the latter provided a key to unlocking the meaning of divine revelation in the Scriptures for others: A good translation had to “pair divine revelation with the world of human experience” (Dürr) and hence demanded linguistic and cultural knowledge of that world. For the overseas missionary, however, this meant a deep engagement, not with everyday, spoken German, but with the indigenous languages of the Americas, whose acquisition and use for Christian revelation was a much harder sell. In his manual, de Acosta specifically invoked the Pentecost miracle and other Biblical episodes to advocate for the learning of all languages and redeem the Amerindian languages that were widely dismissed as “barbaric tongues” incapable of communicating the Word of God. Modeling the interpretive approach he championed, the Jesuit sought to reformulate these Biblical templates based on his personal experience as a New World missionary. The flood of cartographic media that sprang from the European discoveries has drawn scholarly interest for some time and prompted exploration of shifting conceptions and experiences of space in the early modern world. Susanna Burghartz’s contribution brings into view powerful religious undercurrents of this cartographic swell. The Straits of Magellan, a particularly perilous sea passage, became a potent medium for encountering the divine while demanding the kind of extreme human effort that had to be marshaled to assert the superiority of Europeans over indigenous people in general, and, more specifically, of the Dutch over the rival Spanish. Encounter with the Straits generated knowledge – of God, self, and nation. Maps and accounts representing the Straits thus display a combination of religious motifs, a quest of precise scientific information, and competitive parading of nautical and survival skills. The end of the earth and the end of time converged in medial representations of the Straits. Burghartz traces the strong trans-confessional appeal of such print products to their successful integration of religious with scientific and colonial knowledge of the kind that was in increasing demand by Europe’s reading public and burgeoning consumer culture. This final essay offers an important reminder that by the seventeenth century the media-theological discourses of the Reformation period had begun to make waves way beyond narrow denominational circles, moving along complex processes often associated with so-called secularization.

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1 The most notable examples are Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in EarlyModern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981); Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit, ed. Hans-Joachim Köhler (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); Jane O. Newman, “The Word Made Print: Luther’s 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Representations 11 (1985): 95–113; Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994); Werner Faulstich, Medien zwischen Herrschaft und Revolte: Die Medienkultur der Frühen Neuzeit 1400–1700 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998); Manfred Schneider, “Luther with McLuhan,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198–215; Johannes Burkhardt, Das Reformationsjahrhundert: Deutsche Geschichte zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionenbildung 1517–1617 (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2002); Jonathan Green, Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450–1550 (Ann Arbor: UM Press, 2012). 2 Modern media theorists and historians have tended to assume a technological apriori and, thus, implicitly define media as technical media. This is especially true for much of the work coming out of German media history and theory in the wake of Friedrich Kittler. Yet, even a general survey like Frank Bösch, Mediengeschichte: Vom asiatischen Buchdruck zum Fernsehen (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus, 2011), although bemoaning the narrow conception of media in the Anglo-American context, organizes his history along technological inventions and, thus, lets it start with the invention of the printing press. 3 For a similar approach, see Marcus Sandl, Medialität und Ereignis: Eine Zeitgeschichte der Reformation (Zurich: Chronos, 2011). For the Middle Ages, see publications coming out of the National Center of Competence in Research “Mediality” at Zurich University, for example: Die Medialität des Heils im späten Mittelalter, ed. Carla Dauven-van Knippenberg, Cornelia Herberichs, and Christian Kiening (Zurich: Chronos, 2010). 4 A debt that is acknowledged by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, Religion and Media. 5 The Reformation may even have saved print from its premature extinction as Burkhardt, Reformationsjahrhundert, 25–30, argues. 6 Cf. Burkhardt, Reformationsjahrhundert, 26.

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7 We borrow this term from Niklas Luhmann, “The Improbability of Communication,” International Social Science Journal 23 (1981): 122–32. Luhmann’s starting point is the observation that the process of communication is inherently improbable and that considerable communicative work and technology has to be invested to make it more probable. In most situations this constitutive improbability drops out of sight because communication is successful. In contrast, religious communication foregrounds this very improbability and makes its processing its raison d’être. 8 The Greek diabolos is derived from the verb dia-ballein, literally meaning “to throw across or apart,” and, thus, presents the semiotic opposite to the symbolon (derived from sym-ballein, “to throw together”), the clay token that was broken apart and served to authenticate the messenger upon delivery of his message (by recombining both parts). The diabolos, thus, interrupts all kinds of messaging. 9 Scripture, of course, never explicitly talks of communication and media per se, but only of particular modes and media of communication, which is the main reason it has not been read in light of communication and mediality, but only in view of particular media, such as orality, literacy, images, etc., and their respective history and theory. 10 See Joseph Vogl, “Becoming Media: Galileo’s Telescope,” Grey Room 29 (2008): 14–25. 11 Ibid., 23. 12 For the following, see Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk, 199–206, and in particular Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 272–81. 13 Instead of being overcome by the Holy Spirit like the apostles during the Pentecostal miracle when “suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind” (Acts 2:2), the Catholic preacher is full of nothing but (hot?) air. Not coincidentally, the passage from Acts inscribed on Luther’s pulpit, “Of him all prophets give witness” (10:43), are the last words of Peter’s sermon upon which “the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word” (Acts 10:44). 14 Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 274. 15 Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 201. 16 Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 275f., following Max Weber, speaks of “system.” 17 In his conceptualization of faith, Luther cites repeatedly the definition from Hebrews 11:1: “fides est argumentum non apparentium,” which he translates as “faith is … not to doubt what one cannot see.”

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18 Cf. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 197 and 199. In his contribution to this volume, Helmut Puff points to the theological grounds Luther and Müntzer shared, despite the many and important differences that differentiated their theology of media. 19 On early modern Catholicism as a global religion, see Simon Ditchfield, “Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 101 (2010): 186–208; id., “Of Dancing Cardinals and Mestizo Madonnas: Reconfiguring the History of Roman Catholicism in the Early Modern Period,” Journal of Early Modern History 8 (2004): 386–408. On the role of the Jesuit order in globalizing early modern Catholicism, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Simon Ditchfield, “The Jesuits in the Making of a World Religion,” History Today 57 (2007): 52–9. See, ibid., 56, on Nadal’s Adnotationes in Ming China. On the reception of the Spiritual Exercises in the Americas and, more generally, the role of this spiritual technology in creating global Catholicism, see J. Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2013) 20 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 13–14. 21 Markus Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitenorden, 1540–1173 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011); Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 212–40; id., “Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–1773,” Isis 96 (2005): 71–9. 22 Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950; reissued: Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). 23 Harris, “Jesuit Scientific Activity,” 73; Simon Ditchfield, “What Did Natural History Have to do with Salvation? José de Acosta SJ (1540–1600) in the Americas,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2010), 144–68. 24 Der Neue Welt-Bott oder Allerhand so Sehr als Geistreiche Brief / Schrifften und Reisbeschreibungen, welche von denen Missionaris der Gesellschaft Jesu aus Indien und andern weit-entfernen Ländern seit 1642 bis auf das Jahr 1726 in Europa angelangt seynd. Jetzt zum ersten male Theils aus handschriftlichen Urkunden, theils aus denen französischen Lettres edifiantes, ed. Joseph Stöcklein, Peter Probst, Franz Keller, 5 vols. (Augsburg/Graz 1726–36 and Vienna 1748–61).

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25 Galaxis Borja and Ulrike Strasser, “The German Circumnavigation of the World: Missionary Writing and Colonial Identity Formation in Joseph Stöcklein’s Neuer Welt-Bott,” in Reporting Christian Missions, ed. Markus Friedrich and Alex Schunka (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, forthcoming). 26 “The world is our house,” as Jerome Nadal explained the Jesuit understanding of mission, turning the entire globe into a space of devotion. Cited in John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68. On the influence of the Pauline model on the Jesuits, see ibid., especially pp. 15 and 73. 27 The most famous example is the use of Chinese terms for God that sparked great conflict during the Chinese Rites Controversy. Can a foreign tongue be an appropriate medium for speaking about the Christian God? See David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 1989) and David E. Mungello, ed., Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1995). 28 For another reading of the frontispiece that also stresses the dual meaning of these two symbols, see Renate Dürr, “Der ‘Neue Welt-Bott’ als Markt der Informationen? Wissenstransfer als Moment jesuitischer Identitätsbildung,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 34 (2007): 441–66, in particular 448–51. 29 On the changing meaning of the term “illuminated,” see T.C.W. Blanning, The Eighteenth Century: Europe 1688–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 151. 30 Columbus set the stage for Biblical naming practices. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 83; Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 103–42. 31 Modern media theory stresses the reciprocal relationship between understandings of space/place and the experience and use of media. See Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2004). 32 On Jesuit views of time, truth, and space or what Clossey aptly terms the “missionary cosmo-vision,” see Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 91–102. 33 David Buisseret, “Spanish Colonial Cartography, 1450–1700,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3: Cartography in the Renaissance, ed. David Woodward and John B. Harley, 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1143–71. Drawing on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s concept of “connected histories,”

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Laura Hostetler views the simultaneity of cartographic undertakings in the early modern world as an expression of new conceptions of space and “a product of exploration by centers of power world-wide.” See Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Cartography and Ethnography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4 and 74. 34 Innis, Empire and Communications, 21–31, 106–37.

PART 1 DIVINE MESSAGES AND HUMAN MEDIA

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chapter one

The Absolute Medium: Nicholas of Cusa on the Mediality of Christ CHRISTIAN KIENING

I. What holds for all medial phenomena also holds true for the media of salvation: as forms and instances of mediation, they bear within themselves something of the paradoxicality of the medial. They are characterized by fullness and lack. They rely upon participation in the divine, upon the identity of signifier and signified, and upon the disappearance of the medium in the act of becoming present. However, they also make visible the borders of an absolute mediality: the incommensurability of the absolute and the constrained, the simultaneity of communicability and incommunicability, mediacy and immediacy.1 For the Christian belief that salvation can be present in one’s immediate surroundings the contrastive moment of absence is also integral. This moment of absence plays a central role not only because the body of the Messiah, around which the mediality of salvation revolves, is absent as a result of the Ascension, but also because so long as world and history endure, the fullness of salvation remains outstanding. Undoubtedly, there has been a tendency since the High Middle Ages to emphasize moments of presence over those of absence: the showing of the Host during Mass; the worship of the so-called relics of Christ in popular religious practices; the appearance of the risen Christ instead of the exhibition of the empty shroud in the liturgical drama; the litany of new figural and textual representations of the various biblical and apocryphal scenes of Christ’s appearance between the Resurrection and the Ascension. And yet the flip side of this is impossible to ignore: the degree to which salvation is made accessible in one’s lived environment fuels a scepticism towards devoting oneself to external images,

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material reality, and corporeal appearances. A critical discourse arises in which the effects of grace and the salvational power of sculptures are not simply accepted, but rather debated, linked to contextual liturgical or theological conditions and treated not as a magical phenomenon, but rather as a symbolic one. Spiritualizing and interiorizing tendencies begin to develop that are no longer content with the presence of the divine as it appeared in liturgy, devotions, or drama. A dialectical intensification of internality and externality emerges; the external can, by means of an enhanced imagination, be transposed into the internal, but it can also be translated at any time back into mimetic, corporeal acts. In general, medial forms appear as that which produces presence while simultaneously exhibiting this act of production or even explicitly thematizing it. This is the background against which, in the fall of 1453, the philosopher, theologian, cardinal, and prince-bishop of Brixen, Nicholas of Cusa (of Kues on the Moselle; 1401–64) sent the monks in Tegernsee a painted image accompanied by a preface, in which he writes: If I strive to convey you by human means unto divine things, then I must do this through a likeness. Now, among human works I have not found an image more suitable to our purpose than the image of someone omnivoyant, so that his face, through subtle pictorial artistry, is such that it seems to behold everything around it. There are in existence many of these excellently depicted faces – e.g., the one of the archer in the forum at Nuremberg, the one of the preeminent painter Rogier [van der Weyden] in his priceless painting in the city hall at Brussels, the one of the Veronica [i.e., of the image of Christ] in my chapel at Coblenz, the one, in the castle at Brixen, of the angel holding the emblems of the church, and many others here and there. Nevertheless, so that you not be lacking in practical experience, which requires such a sensible figure, I am sending to Your Love a painting that I was able to acquire. It contains the figure of an omnivoyant [individual]; and I call it the “Icon of God.” Hang this icon somewhere, e.g., on the north wall; and you brothers stand around it, at a short distance from it, and observe it. Regardless of the place from which each of you looks at it, each will have the impression that he alone is being looked at by it. To the brother who is situated in the east it will seem that the face is looking toward the east; to the brother in the south, that the face is looking toward the south; to the brother in the west, that it is looking westward.2

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Significant works of Nicholas of Cusa, such as his treatment of “learned ignorance” (De docta ignorantia, 1440), had been known, copied, and discussed for years in the Benedictine monastery at Tegernsee. Developed in the work on learned ignorance was the idea (derived from negative theology) that man could not, through his limited understanding (ratio), reach the knowledge of an absolute maximum (and thereby of God). Further, with respect to his reason (intellectus), man could only allegorically “touch” or “see” the divine truth that lay in the paradoxical coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), but never actually grasp it. This was not meant in the sense of a radical scepticism towards knowledge, but rather as the impetus to a rational self-assurance with respect to both the differences between the human and the divine as well as the possibilities of their intellectual convergence. The Tegernsee monks were, in contrast to many representatives of Scholasticism, quite taken with these thoughts. Some of them had studied in Vienna, where, in 1450, the spirit of Italian humanism was perceptible. They enjoyed the breath of fresh air that Cusa’s writings (and those of the associated Devotio Moderna) brought into theological and philosophical discourse.3 When the much-admired Cusa spent a few days at Tegernsee early in the summer of 1452, the Tegernsee monks presented him with a diverse array of questions relating to priestly and monastic life. Soon after, they asked him for advice in more substantial matters: in a letter from September of the same year Abbot Kaspar Aindorffer communicated the brothers’ desire to know more about mystical theology, particularly with respect to the hotly contested question of the extent to which immediate (immediate) access to the divine was possible only affectively, through shutting out intellect and thought. This question had a medial dimension that is not to be underestimated, for it concerned the relationship between mediacy and immediacy in divine knowledge, and may have also contained an element of image-scepticism. With this in mind, Cusa wrote to Aindorffer in September of 1452 that many deceived themselves in mystical rapture: clinging to images (imagines), they took figments of the imagination (visio fantastica) for the truth – which, paradoxically, could only be seen invisibly (invisibiliter videtur).4 A more detailed answer, however, would not arrive until a year later, when a letter made clear that for Cusa efforts towards a “mystical theology” did not aim to abandon rationality, but rather to mark its limits and to transcend them.5 Every unio mystica, Cusa determined, presupposes some sort of cognition (cognicio), because within the Platonic

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tradition, the completely unknown could be neither loved nor found. As a practical implementation, he reported, he had “inserted” between two other works (De mathematicis complementis and De theologicis complementis) “a chapter explaining how before a certain image – which I possess – that simultaneously sees everything wholly and individually, we are led from a perceptible experience to mystical theology.”6 He also reported having a painter at hand “who would endeavor to paint a similar face” and having the desire to send a second libellus, which would go farther along the already indicated path to a sensual experience (praxis experimentalis) of mystical theology. As Cusa reported, he was not familiar with any medium better suited for illustrating the idea he was concerned with.7 Several things are of interest here: (1) The medium is a tool (Hilfsmittel ) and yet is at the same time situated in the realm between experience and knowledge. (2) The reflection of the image (imago) stands at the intersection of mathematics and theology. (3) This reflection is not to be separated from the moment of the sensual and the experimental (sensibilis experimentum), from which the ascent to higher knowledge takes place. The promised text, De visione Dei, finished in 1453 and furnished significantly with the alternate title De icona, is, however, more than a mere complement to the few pages of the letter. De visione Dei treats the topic in twenty-five chapters, spread over a broad frame and laid out as a meditative dialogue with God, as a not particularly systematic movement of reflection and as a circuitous striving for an understanding of the Absolute in educated ignorance. The text constantly circles back to its starting point, the icon, whose paradoxical structure of knowledge is carried over into the text – which thereby becomes itself “iconic.”8 Simultaneously raising an abundance of philosophical and theological questions and reacting to current discussions, the text quickly became one of Cusa’s most-read pieces of writing. It is passed down in more than two dozen manuscripts and four printed editions from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

II. The quoted prologue to De visione Dei gives concrete instruction for attuning oneself to the matter at hand, which is to say, how to interact with the image that accompanies the text, a small panel image (tabella) typical for its time. Going hand in hand with the growing significance of individual, private, and even lay piety were smaller-format versions of manuscripts and devotional images and objects. These made possible

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a mobile relationship to the divine in the new spaces of the intimate and the internal: broadsheets with images and text, for example, were sometimes even mounted on the wall, as Cusa foresaw for his tabella. All of these aided in meditation and pious practices (praxis devotionis; Prol. 4). For the consciousness of that time, however, they also contained something of the divine – not in the sense of an immediately effective salvational cult image, but rather in the sense of media capable of bearing salvation. One of the most popular of these was the vera icon. Immanent in this icon, even when one possessed only a painted or printed miniature image, was the promise that it was fully steeped in the energy of the original. The face of the Redeemer, impressed by Christ himself upon Veronica’s veil, created a doubled transferral, through both touch and gaze. As a contact relic, the vera icon represents an image not fashioned by human hands, an archeiropoieton whose salvational power could be transferred through touch to copies. At the same time, as a portrait of Christ, the vera icon also allowed the observer to become the observed, regarded by the divine gaze emanating from the image.9 Cusa notes this as well: “To see You is not other than that You see the one who sees You” (Nec est aliud te videre, quam quod tu videas videntem te; V 13,14f. [686]) – or more generally: “The being of a creature is, alike, Your seeing and Your being seen” (Esse creaturae est videre tuum pariter et videri; X 40,12 [698]). Indeed, even the title of the essay is a play on the subjective and objective genitive: the visio Dei can mean not only the gaze upon God, but also God’s own gaze. The mediation of salvation through a doubled gaze, an exchange and crossing over of gazes, would play an increasingly significant role in the Later Middle Ages. Visually, both the vera icon and the ecce homo representation embody the doubled gaze of salvation by using precisely the phenomenon that Cusa focuses upon: the representation of Christ from a frontal view, eyes not fixed upon a particular point but rather covering a broad visual angle such that they appear to be looking towards both sides. For Cusa, however, it is not a question of this specific type of image (which had, as he himself knew, become quite popular [multae aliae undique] in the fifteenth century). Only from the description of the image as eicona can it be determined that the included image was a portrait of Christ, most likely a “Veronika” similar to those that the church dignitary had become accustomed to in his own private chapel.10 More interesting than that which was represented was the character of this representation: the other examples of the image type that Cusa references lead out of the

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realm of Christian iconography, indeed out of religious art and even the realm of painting. In the case of the heraldic angel on the Brixen castle, as well as that of the bowman in centaur form in the Nuremburg marketplace, the object in question is a sculpture that, perspectivally foreshortened, appeared to zero in on passersby in a discomfiting manner. The example from Brussels comes from Rogier van der Weyden’s Trajan tapestry: a figure on the edge of the image, likely a self-portrait of Rogier, looks outside of the image – a play with the inclusion of the observer and the layers of reality in the image that grew increasingly common in the fifteenth century.11 All of the examples are expressions of virtuosic craftsmanship. Cusa speaks of the sophisticated visual artistry (facies subtili arte pictoria), the many outstanding images (multae optime pictae), the great painter, and his invaluable work (Rogeri maximi pictoris in pretiossima tabula). Thus, he is referring not to miraculous images of Christ or the saints, or to cult images.12 Indeed, he even states explicitly at the end of the text that the observation of the imago crucifixi does not of itself effect insight, but rather can, at most, stimulate it. Observation does not itself lead to devotion (devotio), but rather awakens only memory (memoria), a precondition for devout commitment. However, this memory has a personal note here. The examples given by Cusa all correspond to locations where Cusa stayed during the course of his life. From them emanates an eyewitness character of a very particular nature. In their various forms, they all seem to suggest that the all-seeing gaze followed Cusa throughout his life, a series of “successive appearances” that “the scene constructed for Tegernsee recapitulates, as in a mirror.”13 In such a concave mirror, as in the eye itself, diverse things and appearances are concentrated, from which they can, in turn, be extrapolated, giving a succinct example of the interconnection of forms of perception and forms of cognition. This takes place in a multi-step process of cognition that makes the scene into the intersection of multiple planes of meaning. The fixed nature of man’s own standpoint is to be transcended. Not only the experience of a reciprocal connection of gazes between man and God is to be mediated, but also the experience of the possibility of occupying, in the gaze, that other position which is in fact not accessible: the position of him who sees everything, who knows no limitations to his vision. The way in which this occurs links the expansive world of ideas, of art, and of creation with the small world of monastic piety and pragmatic training, circulating between the collective of the monks and the

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situation of the individual meditating. It runs through three stages. In the beginning, there is individual experience: every brother has the impression that, regardless of where he stands in the room, the image is looking at him. Then, the experience becomes dynamic: even while moving through the room, the gaze never leaves the observer. Finally, the communicative and social dimension is added: moving about, the monks converse among one another and realize that every individual has had the same experience. With this, the paradox reaches its apex: not only does the gaze of the image seem to fix on various points, it also seems to fix on all these points (and not only static ones, but mobile ones, too) at the same time. As early as his De docta ignorantia, Cusa had already formulated the relativity of all perceptions of movement, giving up the privileging of one observer position in favour of a potentially infinite variety of equivalent standpoints: “And because of the fact that it would always seem to each person (whether he were on the earth, the sun, or another star) that he was at the ‘immovable’ centre, so to speak, and that all other things were moved.”14 The logical consequence of this is that, on the one hand, the earth alone cannot represent the centre of the cosmos, and on the other hand, that one has to reckon with the possibility of other inhabited worlds. Most significant, however, is the resulting dynamic relationship between centre and periphery: not a panoramic gaze that subsumes everything to its power, but rather a gaze in which one experiences the presence of the absent, the deus absconditus. This is not simply a central perspective, in which parallel lines meet in an imaginary vanishing point, but rather a metaperspectivity in which the principles of perspective itself become visible, in the sense of the oft-cited, pseudo-Hermetic definition of God as a “circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere” (sphaera cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam). Cusa transports this traditionally mystical-speculative definition of God into the realm of cosmology, while simultaneously transforming it into a geometric-mathematical model that makes visible the possibility of the impossible. Both the transcendence of the conditions of immanence and the transgression of concepts, testimony, and traditional patterns of thought are equally necessary for this to occur. Transcendence as well as transgression will be put into action through the experiment in the opening scene of De visione Dei. The objective is to set in motion several positions: first, the address of the collective, then the demonstration of the main theoretical premises, and finally an appeal to the “you” of the individual,

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from whose position the transition to a dialogue with God takes place: “Now, O brother contemplative, draw near to the icon of God […] you will be aroused and will say: O Lord, by a certain sense-experience I now behold, in this image of You, Your providence” (4.9). In this manner, the one who turns in prayer and praise to God becomes a mobile subject, one in whom author and receiver coincide, a subject that is at the same time challenged even in its mobility: sometimes to enter into concrete visualization and sometimes to postpone it, sometimes to enter into the world of the observed image and sometimes to transcend it. Extending a thought of Michel de Certeau’s,15 one might say that the idea of the figura, as manifested in the form of the all-seeing one (figura cuncta videntis), touches upon several domains: (1) that of a dramatic staging, in which an experimental acting-out takes place; (2) that of the processional movement, as takes place for example in the gaze upon the Passion of Christ; (3) that of mathematical-geometric forms, which appear here in the form of points, lines, and angles; and finally (4) that of cartographical representation, indicated in the reference to the four cardinal directions – north as the location of the image, and south, west, and east as the locations of the observers, whereby the movement from east to west imitates not only the movement of nature, that is, the sun, but also the movement of culture (art and science, for example). The multilayered nature of this scenario prepares that which will be developed in De visione Dei: an alternation between the concrete and the abstract, seeing and understanding, schema and action, idea and life, meditation and philosophy. This alternation is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the figure of the all-seeing one – a primal scene of the ordered, geometric, perspectivally expanded gaze. The proximity to the only slightly older tract on painting of Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura), or to Italian art discourse of the time more generally, is undeniable.16 Yet there are unmistakable differences. For Alberti, art (and the theory dedicated to it) does not take as its object the invisible, the supersensual, the transcendental: “No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible.”17 To be sure, both Alberti and Cusa think of perspective as a “symbolic form,” but for the one, it is a matter of central perspective, and for the other, of a metaperspectivity. Alberti is concerned with the maximal technical possibilities of the artist as he becomes a second God, Cusa with the limits of a perception that remains immanent and trapped within human limitations.18 In this light, what appears to be of interest to Cusa is not perspective as such, but rather the location that he accords

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it: between mathematics and theology, real and mental images, between the figura cuncta videntis and the imago omnia videntis. Thus, a central role is assigned to the tension between the irreversible insight into the mediality of all knowledge and the intensive effort to know the Absolute that lies above all mediality, the knowledge from which the conditions of the medial can be determined.

III. The esteem bestowed upon seeing is no discovery of the Renaissance. Even traditionally, despite all the significance that the revealed, living, oral word possessed within the framework of Christian culture, vision was held to be the most certain of all the senses.19 A distinction of epistemological modalities was widespread: while hearing gave only a receptive knowledge of the “being-so” – the presence-at-hand of things and world – vision was held to mediate a productive knowledge of the what and the why, the ground and the being of the existing. It too, however, is reliant upon a series of mediations. Regardless of whether one conceived of the process of seeing as emissions stemming from the perceived object or as the emanation of sight-rays from the eye, or even – typical for the Middle Ages – as a combination of reception and emission processes, one was always confronted with a host of interlinked and interconnected media joining the two extrema (the bodily and the non-bodily) together.20 Cusa, however, spends just as little time discussing the optical-medial theories of contemporary natural philosophers as he does with the Scholastic subdivisions of seeing, the ontological-metaphysical considerations of the character of light, or the eschatological dimensions of the visio beatifica. To be sure, he draws on all these discourses, incorporating many of their elements into his dialogues and tracts.21 His interest, however, is more fundamental. Cusa is interested in vision as a form of knowledge that is neither simply metaphoric nor primarily ontological in character, but rather capable of mediating between the two, indeed, as one which offers a model for precisely this mediation. De visione Dei deals with the immediate sight of God in the visio facialis, the gaze from face to face. While the book of Exodus describes as dangerous, even deadly, Paul had promised for the end time that “for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor 13:12).22 Cusa, however, does not turn his attention towards the end time and the saints, but rather towards the present and the possibilities of the thinking subject.

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Cusa circles around the possibilities of a punctual encounter with God in rapture (raptus), ecstasy, the moment. But he does not let thinking come to a halt in this moment of rapture. After citing the passage from Paul, he sums up with the following: “Trusting in Your infinite goodness, I endeavored to become the subject of a rapture, in order to see You who are invisible and who are the revealed but unrevealable vision. But You, not I, know how far I got” (XVII 79). At stake is the possibility of finding a location that would lie beyond all possible mediation. The visio facialis promises such a location, because in it not only do all media (and their noise) disappear, but also the extrema, sender and receiver, subject and object, become a unity: “O inexplicable Graciousness, to him who looks unto You You give Yourself as if You received being from him” (XV, p. 711). Significant here, as in other passages, is the character of the “as if.” Man can only speak of God inauthentically, but in this inauthenticity, he can perceive the necessity of an authenticity that precedes it. Every statement about the absolute is then only conceivable as paradox: formulated in the realm of the relative, it cannot leave this realm, but it can determine the conditions of its possibility. The visio facialis is then not simply the peak of a mystical praxis, designed to enable the external vision to penetrate the invisible via the inner eye. The visio facialis is simultaneously a formal structure, in which the two meanings of the visio Dei, the subjective and the objective, are placed in a relationship of endlessly alternating referral: vision as the vision of vision, as the vision of vision of vision, and so forth. In order to make the paradoxes of De visione Dei capable of being intellectually experienced, the following must be the case: the text must initiate a constant back and forth between abstraction from the concrete figure and the return to it. The experience the image provides serves first of all to demonstrate the constraints of human vision, and then, in view of the absolute vision of God, to exceed them.23 In this regard, the icon is a measurement of similarity as well as difference: it adumbrates how an encounter with God could be thought. And yet this adumbration does not lead to any certainty, rather only to the knowledge of the radical difference between the finite and the infinite. The image offers only the semblance of the presence of God, whose gaze is not really present in the image. In return, however, it offers an indication of a presence that is there even where God appears absent. This necessitates abandoning the image and shifting focus from relational to absolute vision, using the former as the basis for understanding the latter. The latter is determined by the lack of that which is characteristic

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of the former, namely, the limitation of the field of vision, fixed relationships to time and space, dependence on the type of organ, on age, on sex, and so on. Absolute vision is, in essence, a vision without vision. This absolute vision, then, as Cusa reiterates in numerous predications of identity, is simultaneously being, creating, and loving; providence, grace, and eternal life; savouring, searching, pity, and deeds. It is situated above concepts, above the distinctions, above the oppositions, and indeed even above any coincidence of these oppositions. As a result, the concreteness of the visual point of departure seems screened off. However, as indicated, since the absolute cannot actually be known, the model of the icon maintains its heuristic significance – at least for the first half of the text, until it is eventually replaced by another, that of the Wall of Paradise. In so doing, Cusa takes recourse to a traditional motif of medieval Genesis narratives, emphasizing, however, a different, primarily epistemological aspect.24 The murus paradisi embodies the border of the comprehensible and is thus an archetype of the medial: simultaneously dividing and connecting (disiunctio enim pariter et coniunctio; XI 46, 9). There are three conceivable situations: on this side of the wall, the divine remains concealed; at or on the wall itself, the collision of the apparently incommensurable becomes perceptible; beyond the wall, God can be seen as he is, albeit without this being categorically comprehensible as such: “I see You in the garden of Paradise, and I do not know what I see, because I see no visible Thing” (XIII 51,3). Cusa identifies the walls with the barriers that present themselves to the type of thought that relies on comparison and distinction. He situates the wall there where the incommensurability of finite and infinite becomes visible, an incommensurability that embodies a proposition dating back to Aristotle (and which Cusa cites as well): finiti ad infinitum nulla est proportio (XXIII 101,7f.). But then how are mediations conceivable, when there is no relationship? The answer lies in the idea of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites: unity and diversity; creating and being created; knowledge and ignorance; seeing and being seen; past, present, and future. Where these terms coincide, what ensues is not an a-linguistic, a-conceptual, unmediated unity, but rather a paradoxical intertwining of mediacy and immediacy. Cusa adheres to Neoplatonism’s idea of a graduated cosmos, one based upon connections between higher and lower levels. As Ernst Cassirer puts it, “From one pole to the other, from the super-being and super-one, the domain of absolute form, reaching down to matter as the absolute-formless, there is an unbroken path of mediation.

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[...] In this conception, there is always a “between” to be bridged; there is always a separating medium that cannot be jumped over but must be traversed step by step in strictly ordered succession.”25 For Cusa, the solution consists in that visio intellectualis, which is capable of thinking (or “seeing”) the coincidence of opposites and the simultaneity of division and participation. This coincidence is neither merely a logical connection, nor a topological mapping, nor even an ontological identity. Perhaps the best description is that of a methodological measure that makes it possible to refer distinction and non-distinction to one another without having to introduce a third entity: a mediality without a medium, an in-between without substance, a border that does not divide A and B from one another, but rather appears in both as the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of the other. For this, however, there is a model more valuable than any of those taken from optics, gaming, or architecture.

IV. Theology had long possessed a figure of mediation and the middle that implied no mixture, no compound of distinct natures, and no mere participation in the extremes: the figure of Christ. Indeed, as early as De docta ignorantia, Cusa had characterized Christ’s status as Son of God as a medium between absolute and conditioned being – more precisely, as something that could appear like a medium.26 He picks up this thread again in the concluding section of De visione Dei. But what interests him, as is often the case, is not the genuinely theological dimension, as with, for example, the subtleties of Scholastic scholars, who had distinguished between different types of intermediaries. Instead, Cusa is interested in the elementary figures of paradoxical mediality, on which he focuses in the concepts of mediator absolutus and medium absolutum. The absolute mediator is everything that is and can be (omne id, quod et esse potest; XIX 83,7). In him, there exists no division between the divine and the human, rather, only unification and connection. In him, an image is given “between which and its exemplar a more perfect image cannot mediate” (inter quam et exemplar non potest mediare perfectior imago; XX 88,9f). He represents, then, the perfect copy, in which the truth of the original is not merely represented, but actually present. Christ stands both theologically for the person (mediator) through whom divinity and humanity are connected, and ontologically for the principle (medium) that carries out this connection. In him, the incommensurable is unified in such a manner that it is not merely two states that are

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connected to one another, as if a terminus medius had been created between the termini extremi. Instead, the unifying figure is to be conceived of as something in which the One both abides by itself and also binds with its Other – and offers this Other the possibility of converging with it in turn. What takes place is a process: on the one hand, Christ is a necessary means of unification (medium unionis), capable of effecting the most expansive unity of human and divine nature. On the other hand, there remains an insuperable difference for human nature – as much as absolute mediation enables it to elevate itself to the level of the divine, it remains incapable of becoming one with the medium absolutum. Human nature does not itself become the medium, but is capable of binding itself with the medium so tightly, “that nothing can mediate between the human nature and Your Son, who is the Absolute Medium” (quod inter ipsam et filium tuum, qui est medium absolutum, nihil mediare potest; XIX 85,15f.). Thus, a mediation is presented that isn’t simply a middle point (Mitte), but rather a mediating (vermittelnde) movement that grants man an ontological participation at the base of all mediality, without however annulling the difference between human and divine. Following the Neoplatonic tradition, Cusa thinks the movement of mediation as doubled: from the perspective of a salvational history, God communicates himself to humanity, which for its part has the task of transcending its own thinking, perception, and communication towards God’s absolute self-communication. This should demonstrate the uniquity of human participation in Christological mediality, while simultaneously avoiding a simple deification of man. Man remains tied to the terrestrial world, in which he is capable of recognizing analogies that shed light on the divine – for example, the image or the gaze. The particular existence of the absolute mediator is illuminated in such a way that the unique characteristics of human perception and sign usage can also be deduced (chap. 22). According to Cusa’s account, Jesus, with his corporeal eyes, did not see any differently in the visual, sensible world than other men – and yet there was a difference: he saw more quickly, more completely, more astutely. This vision, Cusa asserts, took in everything in a single moment: through signs, it could touch the inner depths of men’s souls; in the slightest indications, it perceived the entire breadth of Man; in every figure, it detected the whole. With the human eye it grasped the accidental, and with the divine the essential. In Jesus, the perfect organ of vision and the organ-less perfection of absolute vision coincide.

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The figure of Christ expresses most clearly the extent to which God is simultaneously object (objectum), medium (medium), and limit (terminus) of man’s vision.27 And yet, there is no mention of that suffering Son of man upon whom the pious devotion of Cusa’s contemporaries centred, and whom the vera icon took as its object. Cusa’s Jesus is an abstract figure, central for theology and anthropology, albeit more as a location within a particular system than a historical figure, and more a mediator in a logical, rather than a theological or even pragmatic sense. His appeal is not as a part of that ensemble of mediating figures of salvational energy that dominated the pious culture of the time: Maria, the saints, the sacraments. His appeal is as the figure in whom it can be observed how the absolute is to be mediated with the limited. He becomes, as the icona had before, part of a type of thinking that transforms figures of presence into models of knowledge, that sharpens theorems into paradoxes, a way of thinking by means of which the unthinkable should be experienced not only at the level of content, but also formally. It is thus at the end of De visione Dei, when discussing the death of Christ, that yet another optical demonstration is introduced: the image of a candle that illuminates a chamber and then pulls its rays back into the flame, without however leaving the chamber itself. Death would then be an interruption of the external visibility of mediation, whose fundamental existence, however, persists.

V. Much of what Cusa says about the role of Christ as mediator and medium is quite traditional, and can be traced in part back to the Patristics. New, however, is the extent to which he refers such statements to relations of perception and observation, and the manner in which he formulates a Christology without Fall, sacrifice, or suffering is nearly unheard of. This makes possible a different understanding of Christ as incarnation: as the embodiment of that which is conceivable as the relationship between the finite and the infinite. This relationship becomes perceptible in a variety of ways, in the most diverse images or forms (figurae) in which the similarity of the multiple and the singular becomes manifest. They are all capable of possessing the systemic position of a medium that does not stand between the extremes, but rather represents their relationship of reciprocal implication. This is suggested in the final chapter of De visione Dei, when the question of the relationship between creator and created is thematized in the example of a painter who creates a self-portrait

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(sui ipsius imago) in order to possess his own image: “Although the Divine Painter is one and is not multipliable, He can nevertheless be multiplied in the way in which this is possible: viz., in a very close likeness [in propinquissima similitudine]. However, He makes many figures [figuras], because the likeness of His infinite power [virtutis suae infinitae similitudo] can be unfolded in the most perfect way only in many figures” (XXV 116, 13–117, 2, p. 735). Cusa wrote in a time in which the portrait as well as the self-portrait grew in significance as not only emphatic but also critical perspectives on a new, lay self-consciousness, a new role for individuality and subjectivity.28 What remains open, however, is how precisely one is to understand the figurae. Were one to take as model the terminology he employs elsewhere, the figurae could be taken to mean both concrete representations (like the all-seeing one) as well as abstract, geometric, or diagrammatic schemas (such as the figura p), bodies as well as signs or objects, indeed all experimental and technical models, mathematical and physical ones, cosmographical ones as well as those drawn from the visual arts – all those that are even occasionally referred to as medium: eyeglasses, for example, are understood by Cusa as medium through which the “indivisible origin of everything” is “touched” (De beryllo, II,3); writing as medium through which an experience (experientia) of past, present, and future is made possible (Sermo 254). To be sure, it remains beyond question that Christ alone represents the most complete similarity (similitudo) of the non-multipliable God, and that a radical difference exists between the medium absolutum and every other medium. And yet these other forms are nonetheless accorded the possibility of containing within themselves, in their own way, the principles of divine creation, and of leading from the senses and intellect to the experience of God. There are also instances like reason or wisdom, which are held to be creations that mediate between cause and effect. This model would become quite popular in the early modern period. When Descartes determines in his second Meditation (1641) that perception (perceptio) does not actually take place as seeing, touching, or representing, but rather strictly as mental insight (mentis inspectio); when Vermeer, in his painting The Geographer (1668–9), portrays a scholar in his quarters who gazes not directly outwards, but rather looks distractedly off into the distance, lost in personal reflection – then it becomes clear how much it is a matter of producing the true image of the world in the human soul, in the camera obscura of the intellect.29 Cusa develops out of this moment a theory of signs that takes as its object not simply

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the relation of the sign to its signified, but rather the question of how it is possible to secure a truth of signs at all, in light of their ineluctable contingency.30 In his argumentation, Cusa does not take up an ontological ground of signs, as did Neoplatonic metaphysics. Rather, he operates with a distinction between internal and external signs and the possibilities of analogization, whereby the analogies discovered are not meant to be taken as those of Creation itself, but rather as ones that man creates – and in which he nonetheless grasps something of the essence of Creation. Mediality plays a central role in this, and yet the medium, in its trivial sense as something that stores and transmits information, plays as little a role as the specific panel painting. Instead, the reflection turns upon a medium that is capable of taking sight of forms of reference and signification precisely where there actually is no mediality, namely, between the relative and the absolute, where no relationship (of continuity) exists. What takes place in this medium is not, as in the case of a magically effective image, a fusion of the mediating and the mediated. Instead, the incommensurable becomes observable with respect to its limits, different with respect to its origins. This observation is always at the same time selfobservation, and for this reason, it is always intimately connected with that thought which is expressed in the final section of De visione Dei: the thought of creative self-determination. In this thought, man becomes a privileged mirror of the infinity of God to the same extent in which God proves to be infinitely different. Cusa makes perspectivity the centre of knowledge of the world and the divine. He experiments with models in which the inconceivable is meant to become conceivable. He tests figures that are no longer bound to typological productions of relationships or sacramental productions of presence, but rather evince the paradoxical. In so doing, he opens the possibility of conceiving questions of mediation and knowledge that are no longer (strictly) within the province of theology and ontology, but (also) within that of anthropology and epistemology.

NOTES 1 On this entire complex, see Carla Dauven-van Knippenberg, Cornelia Herberichs, Christian Kiening, eds., Medialität des Heils im späten Mittelalter, Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 10 (Zurich: Chronos, 2009), particularly Christian Kiening’s introduction (with further references).

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2 Nikolaus von Kues, De visione Dei / The Vision of God, trans. Jasper Hopkins, in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001), here 680f. The Latin text follows: Nicolaus de Cusa, De visione dei, ed. Adelaida Dorothea Riemann, Nicolai de Cusa Opera omnia vol. 6 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000). For the in-text citations, the Roman numerals refer to chapter numbers, whereas the Arabic numbers indicate section and line number. 3 Cf. Nikolaus Staubach, “Cusani laudes: Nikolaus von Kues und die Devotio moderna im spätmittelalterlichen Reformdiskurs,” in Frühmittelalterliche Studien 34 (2000): 259–337; Staubach, “Cusanus und die Devotio moderna,” in Conflict and Reconciliation: Perspectives on Nicholas of Cusa, ed. Inigo Bocken, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 126 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 29–51; Martin Thurner, ed., Nicolaus Cusanus zwischen Deutschland und Italien, Publication of the Grabmann-Institute 48 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002). 4 Nikolaus von Kues, Briefe und Dokumente zum Brixner Streit: Kontroverse um die Mystik und Anfänge in Brixen, ed. Wilhelm Baum and Raimund Senoner (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 1998), 92–7 (Latin and German text), here 94; Edmond Vansteenberghe, Autour de la docte ignorance: Une controverse sur la théologie mystique au XVe siècle, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 14.2–4 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1915). For the context, see Werner Beierwaltes, “Visio Dei: Die mystische Theologie des Nicolaus Cusanus im Kontext benediktinischer Spiritualität,” in Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 117 (2006): 81–96. On the relation to truth, see Norbert Herold, “Bild der Wahrheit – Wahrheit des Bildes: Zur Deutung des ‘Blicks aus dem Bild’ in der Cusanischen Schrift ‘De visione Dei,’” in Wahrheit und Begründung, ed. Volker Gerhard and Norbert Herold (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1985), 71–98. 5 For an overview, see Werner Beierwaltes, “Mystische Elemente im Denken des Cusanus,” in Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte, ed. Walter Haug and Wolfram Schneider-Lastin (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 425–48. 6 Nikolaus von Kues, Briefe und Dokumente, 96–103 (Latin and German text). 7 Ibid. 8 H. Lawrence Bond, “The ‘icon’ and the ‘iconic text’ in Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei I–XVII,” in Nicholas of Cusa and His Age: Intellect and Spirituality, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 177–97. See also Markus L. Führer, “The Consolation of Contemplation in

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10

11

12

13 14

15

Christian Kiening Cusanus’ De visione Dei,” in Medioevo: Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale 20 (1994): 205–32; Louis Dupré, “The Mystical Theology of Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei,” in Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church: Essays in Memory of Chandler McCuskey Brooks, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 205–20; Bernard McGinn, “Seeing and Not Seeing: Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei in the History of Western Mysticism,” in Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance, ed. Peter J. Casarella (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 26–53. On the portrait of Christ (amongst others), see Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Villa Spelman Colloquia 6 (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998); Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002); Martin Büchsel, Die Entstehung des Christusporträts: Bildarchäologie statt Bildhypnose (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2007). It occasionally appears in the Greek form as eicona in the manuscripts and in print (see Karl Pearson, Die Fronica: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Christusbildes im Mittelalter [Strasbourg: Trübner, 1887], 57) as well as in a manuscript of De visione Dei, in which the scribe, before the beginning of the text, pasted in a (now lost) Eycona dei quasi cuncta circumspiciat, while in another manuscript, an ecce homo image had been added following the text; Nikolaus von Cues, Von Gottes Sehen: De visione Dei, trans. Elisabeth Bohnenstaedt, Schriften des Nikolaus von Cues 4 (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1944), 163f. Hans Kauffmann, “Ein Selbstporträt Rogers van der Weyden auf dem Berner Trajansteppich,” in Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 39 (1916): 15–30; Erwin Panofsky, “Facies illa Rogeri maximi pictoris,” in Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Albert M. Friend Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 392–400; Alfred Neumeyer, Der Blick aus dem Bilde (Berlin: Mann, 1964), 99. Alex Stock, “Die Rolle der ‘icona Dei’ in der Spekulation ‘De visione Dei,’” in “Das Sehen Gottes nach Nikolaus von Kues,” ed. Rudolf Haubst, Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 18 (1989): 50–62, here 60. Michel de Certeau, “The Gaze – Nicholas of Cusa,” trans. Catherine Porter, Diacritics 17, no. 3 (1987): 2–38, here 13. Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and an Appraisal of De docta ignorantia, trans. Jasper Hopkins, (Minneapolis, MN: A.J. Banning Press, 1981), 93 (II, XII, Nr. 162). Certeau, “The Gaze – Nicholas of Cusa,” 14f.

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16 See Gerhard Wolf, “Nicolaus Cusanus ‘liest’ Leon Battista Alberti: Alter Deus und Narziß (1453),” in Porträt, ed. Rudolf Preimesberger, Hannah Baader, and Nicola Suthor, Geschichte der klassischen Bildgattungen in Quellentexten und Kommentaren 2 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1999), 201–9; Cesare Catà, “Perspicere Deum: Nicholas of Cusa and European Art of the Fifteenth Century,” in Viator 39 (2008): 285–305. 17 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 42. 18 Karsten Harries, “On the Power and Poverty of Perspective: Cusanus and Alberti,” in Casarella, Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance, 105–25. 19 Gudrun Schleusener-Eichholz, Das Auge im Mittelalter, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 35, 2 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985); Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild: Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995). 20 See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); “La visione e lo sguardo nel Medio Evo,” Micrologus 5–6 (1997–8). On the relationship between Eastern and Western theories of vision, see Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008). 21 Christian Kiening, “‘Gradus visionis’: Reflexion des Sehens in der Cusanischen Philosophie,” in Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der CusanusGesellschaft 19 (1991): 243–72. 22 Werner Beierwaltes, Visio Facialis – Sehen ins Angesicht: Zur Coinzidenz des endlichen und unendlichen Blicks bei Cusanus, Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse 1988/1 (Munich: 1988). 23 Werner Beierwaltes, Visio absoluta: Reflexion als Grundzug des göttlichen Prinzips bei Nicolaus Cusanus, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse 1978/1 (Heidelberg: 1978). 24 See Rudolf Haubst, “Die erkenntnistheoretische und mystische Bedeutung der ‘Mauer der Koinzidenz,’” in “Das Sehen Gottes nach Nikolaus von Kues,” 167–91; Walter Haug, “Die Mauer des Paradieses: Zur mystica theologia des Nikolaus Cusanus in ‘De visione Dei,’” in Theologische Zeitschrift 45 (1989): 216–30. 25 Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9. 26 Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance, 132 (III, VII, Nr. 225): humanitas Iesu est ut medium inter pure absolutum et pure contractum. 27 Catà, “Perspicere Deum,” 291.

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28 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), on Cusa: 127–33; Preimesberger, Baader, Suthor, Porträt. 29 See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), chap. 2. 30 See Detlef Thiel, “Scientia signorum und Ars scribendi: Zur Zeichentheorie des Nikolaus von Kues,” in Scientia und ars im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, ed. Ingrid Craemer-Ruegenberg and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 22.1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 107–25.

chapter two

Fragmentation and Presence: Reformation Debates and Cultural Theory L E E PA L M E R WA N D E L

Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem coeli et terrae; Et in Iesum Christum, Filium eius unicum, Dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine, passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, descendit ad inferna, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit ad coelos, sedet ad dexteram dei Patris Omnipotentis, inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos; Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, sanctam ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem, et vitam aeternam. Amen.1

Each Mass, the priest spoke the words of the Apostles’ Creed, words which sought to capture briefly the core beliefs of a people and what those people themselves recognized as the “mystery”: a person both God and man, who was “born,” who was “crucified,” who “died,” who “was buried,” who “descended,” who “was resurrected,” and who “sits at the right hand” of his Father.2 These words, so familiar, point towards aporia.3 What is “Incarnation,” if death does not end it? For medieval Christians, the Incarnation was a protean puzzle. Each tentative answer to a question engendered a plethora of new questions. It confounded any bipolarity of presence and absence. God Incarnate linked in his person, his acts, and his words the tangible, visible, audible world to an omnipotent and transcendent God, and implicated that world in Creation and in Christ’s self-revelation. Jesus’s commands at his final meal with his disciples, “This do” and “This is my body,” given in the

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shadow of his own death, elided any simple division of life from death, presence from absence. Following eighth-century debates on images, the Incarnation authorized representations in stone, wood, and tempera. Thomas Aquinas placed images on a spectrum of presence ranging from Christ’s living person through Mary and the saints, to representations of Christ, Mary, and the saints – the representations of saints at the opposite end of a spectrum of “presence” from Christ’s living person, but nonetheless on a continuum.4 Medieval Christians painted, carved, glazed. They placed crosses at intersections of roads. Each, following medieval conceptions of cognition and representation, was an effort to make Christ “present,” each in its own way.5 “Presence” was not a single phenomenon; Incarnation invited imitation, representation, contemplation, and imagination, all of which, some medieval Christians held, make Christ “present,” each in a way instantiated by Incarnation, each itself a distinctive mode of “presence.” They lived in caves, preached peripatetically, flagellated themselves, seeking through their own bodies “to live as Christ,” not simply to mimic this or that attribute, but to overcome the physical distance the Crucifixion had created, to identify body and body, and in all these ways, to make present. In its first decree, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated, There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors.6

The Fourth Lateran Council further complicated the doctrine of the Incarnation.7 It explicitly emphasized material continuities between both “this is my body” and “this do” and the present. In officially decreeing transubstantiation the orthodox doctrine of the Church – a doctrine which would itself engender rich thinking – it affirmed Christ’s “presence” in wine and bread, otherwise mundane matter. In officially decreeing the apostolic succession of the office of priest, it linked the person of the priest to Christ as priest. Following Fourth Lateran, the priest’s

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words and gesture were to evoke the person of God Incarnate, even as they contributed to the mystical moment when Christ was, again following Fourth Lateran, “really” present: present in substance, in matter, in body in the consecrated host. Following Fourth Lateran, then, Christ was variously present: generationally through the person of the priest, “really” in the consecrated Host and wine. Communion – taking Christ’s transubstantiated body into their mouths and consuming that mystical Host – as Caroline Bynum has suggested, became a way to overcome the absence of a resurrected God.8 In communion, Christ’s presence was densely layered: Host and body, mimesis and action. In the wake of Fourth Lateran, images such as Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the Mass of Pope Gregory (see fig. 2.1) depicted both the material presence of the living body of Christ on the altar and the mirroring of his body in that of the celebrating priest – through Christ’s gaze, the gesture of his hands, the angle of his head.9

Fragmentation Fourth Lateran set as orthodoxy a number of positions that the sixteenth century confronted directly, none more dramatically than the role of the priest and the doctrine of transubstantiation.10 The sixteenth century was also heir to a technology that transformed Europeans’ sense of “the Bible” from a Latin text the laity heard only in pieces organized liturgically to “the Word of God.”11 When Erasmus published his Latin translation of his edition of the Greek New Testament, readers found he had chosen for the opening of the Gospel of John not verbum, as Jerome had done, but sermo – the spoken word.12 He brought to the text of the Bible a sense that has now become clichéd, that of “the living word.” In translating the New Testament and then the Old, Martin Luther sought the German of the hearth, the marketplace, the workshop. A printed thing became a site where God spoke. European Christians “heard” “the Word of God.” Christ spoke – his words given voice in the preaching of hundreds, once again audible after centuries. That sense of God’s Word took root in a world in which dissections and the encounters of the western hemisphere at once riveted the eye on the human body and presented ocular data that challenged humoral and microcosmic conceptions of the human body.13 Medieval articulations of Christ’s “presence” had not rested upon a single model of the human body – there was no consensus on what the body was or how it functioned, and multiple theories were at play.14 Galenic models of

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Figure 2.1 Albrecht Dürer, The Mass of Saint Gregory, 1511 (Woodcut, 29.5 × 20.5 cm) [bpk Berlin / Hamburger Kunsthalle / Christoph Irrgang / Art Resource, NY]

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the body organized according to “humors” circulated alongside conceptualizations of the body as a model of the cosmos, none normative, each influential. But the sense of the body that was emerging in the sixteenth century, as something material, bounded, graphic as Leonardo and then Vesalius rendered it (see fig. 2.2), was far more deeply at odds with transubstantiation than medieval models had been, the graphic rendering of tissue, ligament, and muscle echoing in evangelical repudiations of the idea that bread could become body. The host, that thin round wafer, was far more the focus of visceral rage than the wine, whose liquidity and colour – to which Luther referred – may have helped to preserve an identification that late medieval images of the Mass of Saint Gregory invoked. A Cartesian conception of the human person as divisible into mind and body often underlies modern approaches to sixteenth-century debates.15 And yet, that conceptualization of the body postdates sixteenth-century debates: Descartes had not yet posited the mind-body duality that has so shaped modern thinking;16 William Harvey’s systemic body was still a century away. Sixteenth-century Christians shared neither a single model of the human body nor a uniform conceptualization of matter.17 If priests intoned the words of the Apostles’ Creed and Christ’s injunctions to his disciples with each Mass, those words, as the sixteenth century revealed, were not understood in the same way from person to person. Sixteenthcentury Christians such as Erasmus found the multiplication of discrete voices shattering. It seems not to have occurred to him that “God’s Word” could have so many different resonances. Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum and Luther’s Deutsche Bibel circulated in a world of no common understanding of the body, of matter, of the relationship between matter and time, of physics. That sense of God speaking reverberated in a world of images, relics, bells, mimesis – a multitude of efforts to make “present” Christ, whom the Apostles’ Creed taught had “died,” “was buried,” “was resurrected,” and “sits at the right hand” of God the Father. Incarnation and Word were, following Erasmus and Luther, inseparable from one another – Word was both the direct consequence of Incarnation and its gloss. However one defined the doctrine of the Incarnation in the sixteenth century, each doctrine held that Christ united in his person the matter of the world and transcendent eternal divinity. What tore apart the sixteenth century were the questions “How?” and “How does that particular unity implicate the here and now?” And as they articulated answers, sixteenth-century Christians gave voice to divergent conceptualizations of “presence,” no

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Figure 2.2 Andreas Vesalius, Imagines Partivm Corporis Hvmani, 1566 (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin) [Museum Plantin-Moretus, photograph by the author]

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longer conceptualized along a spectrum, but articulated in relationship to time, to matter, to the human person, each different from one person to the next.

Time Medieval worship offered Christians multiple experiences of time, each a mode of making Christ “present.” The liturgical calendar inscribed into each year a cycle of Christ’s birth, Advent and Christmas; manifestation of Christ’s divine nature, Epiphany; forty days in the desert, Lent; suffering, Passion; death, Good Friday; resurrection, Easter; and reappearance among his apostles, Pentecost. Each Sunday in smaller churches the parish priest celebrated the Mass, his actions evoking Christ’s movements, his vestments invoking both Christ’s priesthood and the Crucifixion. Each Mass – celebrated a number of times each day in the great cathedrals – culminated in the consecration, when, following Fourth Lateran, Christ was present corporeally, in substance, in the bread and wine – “present” materially and experientially here and now. Evangelicals – those who held worship, ethics, and doctrine to the test of Scripture – posited a division between human time and God. Echoing Augustine, they located human beings within one kind of time.18 They differed on God’s and Christ’s relationship to human time, but all rejected the premises of medieval worship, what they held to be the human arrogance of the medieval liturgy. No calendar could command or construct or institute or instantiate Christ’s presence into the year. No human activity could. That power resided with God alone. That sense, at the very centre of the medieval understanding of the Mass, that the priest’s actions, the consecration (and, in popular understanding, the elevation), could effect Christ’s “real” presence within the cadence of the Mass – that sense was anathema to evangelicals. God alone had agency for them, even as they struggled with the consequences of that doctrine. Anabaptists rejected most fully the particular understandings of “presence” that Fourth Lateran had articulated.19 They emphasized the temporal boundedness of Christ’s life: for them, Christ sat at the right hand of the Father. Their Suppers emphasized the very mundaneness of that first communion – the stuff of daily meals, among “brothers and sisters in Christ.”20 Their Suppers consciously repudiated not simply the “ceremony” of the Mass – the intricately embroidered stoles, albs, and altar cloths, the dramatic actions of blessing,

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kneeling, and elevation. In the mundaneness of their Suppers, Anabaptists rejected the Mass’s “action” – its movement from profane to sacred time. Their Suppers rejected the significance the Mass accorded to human action: that the consecration and elevation could in any way make Christ “present”; that it resided with human beings to bring God into human time. Anabaptists had no liturgical calendar. There was no moment of consecration, no moment in which Christ’s body and blood were made “really” present. Of all the conceptualizations of “presence,” Anabaptists attended most specifically to the ways in which Christ implicated the mundane: bread and wine linked the faithful to the moment of the Last Supper, their material presence linking two discrete moments in time. For all others, Christ was “absent” in the Anabaptists’ communion. And now I come to my own position: Our faith maintains that Christ is God and man, and the two natures are one person, so that this person may not be divided in two; therefore he can surely show himself in a corporeal, circumscribed manner at whatever place he will, as he did after the resurrection and will do on the Last Day. But above and beyond this mode he can also use the second uncircumscribed mode, as we have proved from the gospel that he did at the grave and the closed door. But now, since he is a man who is supernaturally one person with God, and apart from this man there is no God, it must follow that according to the third supernatural mode, he is and can be wherever God is and that everything is full of Christ through and through, even according to his humanity – not according to the first, corporeal, circumscribed mode, but according to the supernatural, divine mode. Here you must take your stand and say that wherever Christ is according to his divinity, he is there as a natural, divine person and he is also naturally and personally there, as his conception in his mother’s womb proves conclusively ... Wherever this person is, it is the single indivisible person, and if you can say, “Here is God,” then you must also say, “Christ the man is present too.” Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 152821

For Luther, Christ, as God, could be present whenever he chose (see plate 1). This is what his opponents understood as ubiquity.22 Christ’s body, Luther argued, was neither temporally nor materially constrained by what he called human mathematics – Aristotelian physics or observed laws of nature. For Luther, God’s omnipotence overrode the medieval construction of liturgical time as well as Fourth Lateran’s particular articulation

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of Christ’s “presence” in the Mass. For Luther, the marking of liturgical time belonged to things indifferent, adiaphora: Images, bells, eucharistic vestments, church ornaments, altar lights, and the like I regard as things indifferent. Anyone who wishes may omit them. Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 152823

Christ’s freedom to appear when and where he chooses superseded any construction of time that human communities might make. For John Calvin, Christ’s relationship to time was unique.24 With Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin argued that Christ had died, and his body, which was spatially bounded, sat at the right hand of his father. With Luther, he asserted Christ’s divinity, but he understood that divinity, with regard both to Christ’s person and to Christ’s relationship to human time, differently.25 Calvin held Christ’s death at the Crucifixion as fixed in time, a specific moment that had a before and an after.26 Like Zwingli and unlike Luther, Calvin held that Christ’s body was a human body – subject to the human body’s boundedness and its specificity in time: And this remains for us an established fact: whenever Scripture calls our attention to the purity of Christ, it is to be understood of his true human nature, for it would have been superfluous to say that God is pure ... No wonder, then, that Christ, through whom integrity was to be restored, was exempted from common corruption! Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 1327

Unlike Zwingli, however, Calvin asserted the essential perfection of Christ’s person: even as Christ shared with all humankind a body, that body was not a medium of identification, and therefore, the human bodies of sixteenth-century Christians were not a means to make Christ “present.” In edition after edition of the Institutes, Calvin explicated ever more fully his understanding of Christ’s relationship to human time. Those efforts, as well as the different understandings of Christ’s presence that the Reformed tradition ultimately instituted, testify to the singularity of Calvin’s conceptualization. It did not share with Luther, Zwingli, or the Reformed tradition either a conception of the body itself or a physics of divinity, a conceptualization of the relationship among matter, time, and God. Calvin rejected medieval physics. Calvin posited a radically different conceptualization of the relationship of Christ to the

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here and now of living Christians. The death was real, the divinity was real – Christ’s relationship to time was singular, simultaneously human and divine, bounded and eternal.28 Far more than Luther, Calvin rejected the deeper premise of the liturgical calendar, that Christ’s presence was cyclical. Calvin rejected vehemently the conceptualization of time and presence at the heart of the doctrine of transubstantiation – Christ’s “presence” was neither momentary nor at the beck and call of humankind: Since the Supper was instituted for us by our Lord to be frequently used, and also was so observed in the ancient Church until the devil turned everything upside down, erecting the mass in its place, it is a fault in need of correction, to celebrate it so seldom. [Add: For the present, let it be advised and ordained that it always be administered four times in the year.] Hence it will be proper that it be always administered in the city once a month, in such a way that every three months it take place in each parish. Besides, it should take place three times a year generally, that is to say at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas in such a way that it not be repeated in the parish in the month when it should take place by turn. Draft Ecclesiastical Ordinances, 154129

The more detestable is the fabrication of those who, not content with Christ’s priesthood, have presumed to sacrifice him anew! The papists attempt this each day, considering the Mass as the sacrificing of Christ. Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 1530

In Geneva, John Calvin first sought to institute the Eucharist every week; the magistrates resisted such frequency, and Geneva formally instituted the Eucharist four times a year. Rejecting the human agency of the medieval Mass, Calvin asserted a very different kind of “presence.” Frequent communion, for Calvin, was inseparable from “presence” – not because Christ was made present on an altar, but, as Calvin wrote of the Eucharist, “Christ grows in us and we in him.”31 Taking bread and wine into a human mouth, material substances that the faithful received as Christ’s true body and true blood, worked to link human beings and Christ as God – progressively over time, incrementally. “Presence,” for Calvin, could “grow” – his word – in time. Incarnation worked in and through time, in and through the human body. That presence was neither bounded, as in a body, nor occurring according to the humanly

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constructed liturgical calendar, but more like sunlight: always there for those who experienced it (see plate 2). Let all everywhere adopt and observe what has been handed down by the Holy Roman Church, the Mother and Teacher of the other churches, and let Masses not be sung or read according to any other formula than that of this Missal published by Us. This ordinance applies henceforth, now, and forever, throughout all the provinces of the Christian world, to all patriarchs, cathedral churches, collegiate and parish churches, be they secular or religious, both of men and of women – even of military orders – and of churches or chapels without a specific congregation in which conventual Masses are sung aloud in choir or read privately in accord with the rites and customs of the Roman Church. This Missal is to be used by all churches, even by those which in their authorization are made exempt, whether by Apostolic indult, custom, or privilege, or even if by oath or official confirmation of the Holy See, or have their rights and faculties guaranteed to them by any other manner whatsoever. ... Furthermore, by these presents [this law], in virtue of Our Apostolic authority, We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remain always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription – except, however, if more than two hundred years’ standing. Pope Pius V, “Quo primum,” 14 July 157032

In 1570, Pope Pius V issued the bull Quo primum, requiring the use of the new missal in all but seven dioceses, whose liturgies were ancient (Braga, Cologne, Lièges, Lyon, Milan, Toledo, and Trier).33 At the front of that missal was a single calendar that each place was to follow. Whether one was in Goa, Lima, Manila, Mainz, or Valladolid, the same days of

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the year were distinguished as marking moments in Christ’s life. In each place, northern and southern hemispheres, Easter was to be celebrated on the same day. Everywhere on the globe, on the same day – Easter – Christ was “present” in the moment the Host and wine were consecrated, through the office of the priesthood and in the temporal cycle of worship.

Person Sacrifice and priesthood are so joined together by God’s foundation that each exists in every law. And so, since in the new covenant the catholic church has received the visible sacrifice of the eucharist from the Lord’s institution, it is also bound to profess that there is in it a new, visible and external priesthood into which the old has been changed. The sacred scriptures show, and the tradition of the catholic church has always taught, that this was instituted by the same Lord our saviour, and that power was given to the apostles and their successors in the priesthood to consecrate, offer and administer his body and blood, as also to remit or retain sins. Council of Trent, Session 23, 15 July 1563, Chapter 134

Trent also affirmed the identification, through the office of the priesthood, of the person of Christ with the person of the priest. The priest was not Christ, but in his conduct, his manner, the outward manifestations of his inner life, he was to represent Christ: to make living again defining attributes of the person of Christ. The priest served in Christ’s complex role as the officiant at the sacrifice of the Mass, and through the power of the keys, ordination, effected the real presence in the Mass. For Catholics, the gestures of the priest, like those recorded in pigment, wood, and stone, were the link that Incarnation had enabled: God, in choosing to take on a body, provided the means, the “this do,” to make not a priest God, but a priest a medium through which God’s movements, as Incarnate, once again became visible in the here and now. The priest evoked Christ: in blessing, in crucifixion, at the moment of the consecration in the Last Supper. In the age before mechanical reproduction and the illusion of “reality” of photograph and film, memory and imagination brought the person of God Incarnate to mind, and in this way made Christ present.35 The elevation was not simply a theatrical moment, but exactly the gesture that marked the consecration and transubstantiation.

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For evangelicals, Christ was no more present in the gestures of the priest than he was in tempera or stone.36 The evangelical critique rejected Aquinas’s careful differentiation of kinds of presence. For them, emulation could not make Christ present. God’s omnipotence and human sinfulness divided human bodies from the Incarnation. As Luther said at Marburg, Christ’s body is not like our bodies.37 Against Osiander, Calvin argued that the “flesh” Christ took on was the same “flesh” as human bodies – it was the necessary connection between God and humankind – but in the Institutes he affirmed the singular purity of Christ’s body. For Zwingli, Christ’s body was an important link between God and humankind, a site of material connection. For Calvin and Zwingli, the human body was a means of knowing Christ, but both rejected the agency Fourth Lateran had accorded the person of the priest. There were to be only ministers, servants of the people, in Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist churches, whose function was to make God’s Word audible. It was not their movements that brought Christ into the space, but their voices, as they placed their bodies in service to God’s Word. Luther insisted upon an absolute divide between humankind and God that only God’s mercy bridged. The human body, as Luther told Zwingli at Marburg, was no bridge, no medium of presence – not in identification, as Zwingli argued, not in mimesis, as Catholic saints and priests enacted. For Luther, Christ’s “presence” in the Eucharist was real, but it was restricted to the site, the bread and the wine, that the text of Scripture named. Indeed, his understanding of the Eucharist precluded drawing upon the human body in any way – eyes, mouth, ears – to discern that presence. For Luther, “presence” could be known only in faith. Human beings needed to be granted, through God’s mercy, the ability, faith, to discern God’s presence in the Eucharist. It is therefore in vain that so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its Author. Although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no way lead us into the right path. Surely they strike some sparks, but before their fuller light shines forth these are smothered. For this reason, the apostle, in that very passage where he calls the world the [effigie ou spectacle] of things invisible, adds that through faith we understand that they have been fashioned by God’s word [Heb. 11:3] ... As if this defense may properly be admitted: for a man to pretend that he lacks ears to hear the truth when there are mute creatures with more than melodious voices to declare it;

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For Calvin as for Catholics, the Incarnation instantiated a particular kind of divine presence, but for Calvin, as for Luther, that presence could be known neither through mimesis nor through re-enactment. These were human efforts. God, as Calvin said, had given humankind eyes to see: Creation; the word written, made visible, if not universally legible. God had also given humankind ears to hear: the word preached, made audible; the word sung, blending human voice and divine. God became man not only in order to redeem humankind through the sacrifice of that body on the cross – though the sacrifice was impossible without the body. God became man in order to bridge the chasm between an omnipotent, omniscient, uncircumscribed divinity and bounded, finite in matter and time, humanity. With his human voice, Christ preached and spoke and told parables. With his human body, Christ did: he gave to the poor; he preached; he healed; he was baptized; he took, blessed, and offered material objects on a material surface in a particular space in a specific moment in time. Calvin and Catholics agreed that the human body was implicated in the Incarnation. They differed as to the ways in which it was implicated. For Catholics as for medieval Christians, the body was itself a means for making present: its materialities were the very substance God had taken on – “become flesh,” become visceral. For Calvin, sin prevented human beings from using their bodies to reach God. God’s choice, to become Incarnate, was for Calvin the choice to become audible and visible. So, too, Calvin said, God had given humankind the senses to discern his presence.39 For Calvin as for Luther, the ability to discern presence was a divine gift. But Calvin located that ability firmly within the human body: its eyes, its ears, its own materialities.40 God was and is invisible, uncircumscribed, incomprehensible in both senses of the word. But God had chosen to “become,” to unify God and man in the Incarnation. The human body was not for Calvin mere matter, but that which

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God had taken on to make himself accessible to humankind through their bodies. Calvin rejected the premises of “representation”: that human beings could know God or Christ, that human hands could in any way render divinity or even a proximity to divinity. “Presence” was not something human beings could make, invoke, call – effect in any way. But Calvin did not reject matter itself, which, as he wrote again and again, God had made. God made the world; God ordered the world according to his will; God inscribed the world with his will; and the world bears the marks of that creation. God was and is “present,” Calvin wrote, everywhere, in everything: in sunlight streaming through windows, in the stars in the heavens, in the ordering of nature. God is abidingly present in the here and now. God, for Calvin, is never absent. For the faithless, God is invisible, inaudible – but this inaccessibility had nothing to do with God and everything to do with human nature. The human person was exactly the form God chose, at creation, with Adam and Eve, and at Incarnation. “Presence” was discernible to those whom God had given the ability to see – God’s presence out there in the world, abidingly, eternally in the here and now, viscerally knowable. Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, as Calvin wrote again and again over a lifetime of controversy, is “real” for the faithful, who receive through their bodies the ever-growing capacity to discern God and Christ’s presence in the world.

“Presence” and Its Media Sixteenth-century Christians shared neither a single model of the human body nor any consensus as to physics. As they grappled with the Eucharist – its meaning, its work – they articulated many different understandings of Christ’s body, of Christ’s relationship to human time, of what Incarnation meant some fifteen hundred years after Christ’s death and resurrection. The Eucharist was in no way a single unitary doctrine. In the sixteenth century, it became a touchstone for thinking about the Incarnation and the relationship among divinity, the human body, and time. As European Christians divided on the Eucharist, conceptualizations of “presence” proliferated. That proliferation, while agonizing for sixteenth-century Christians, proved enormously fertile. With it came new conceptualizations of the space for worship – not simply whitewashed walls, but “temples,” where the faithful raised their voices singing psalms, where natural sunlight

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signalled God’s “presence” (see plate 2). With it, too, came a multiplication of conceptualizations of images and their cognitive function in worship.41 For Luther, images were, like the bells to mark liturgical hours, things indifferent. But for Calvin, for Reformed Christians, and for Catholics, images were inseparable from thinking about “presence.” Calvin’s critique of images followed that same conviction of the division of God from humankind: human-made images partook of human sinfulness and could not, therefore, render anything of God.42 The Council of Trent authorized images, in conscious repudiation of Reformed iconoclasm, affirming a spectrum of material connection between the person of Christ and sculpted forms. Debates about “presence” also laid the groundwork for thinking about “ritual,” a concept that emerged in the Reformed critique of the Mass as “mere ceremony.”43 Evangelicals, in severing the connection of the body of the priest from the person of Christ, separated the human actor. In repudiating that actor’s efficacy in making Christ “present,” they severed the action from its frame of meaning – no longer a mimesis that made Christ “present,” the movements of the priest were seen as human movements, artificial, which falsely sought to construct meaning. Debates about the meaning of the Incarnation for the praxis of worship took up the relationship among the human body, movement, time, and God, articulating a range of connections between human movement and God, between human movement and an intensity of significance. All Christians took as their point of departure the Incarnation, but they diverged on its relationship to human bodies and human time, and with those, on the relationship between presence and matter, presence and time. All drew upon the terms “presence” and “real presence” to name a somatic experience of God’s being in the here and now. But those experiences, as the collapse of talks at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 brought home, were viscerally different: “presence” did not unify the participants in the Colloquy, but divided them irreparably.44 “Presence” did not mean the same thing from one person to the next, and the debates made explicit how very different divergent understandings were. For Catholics, rituals could “make present” the person of Christ: the words of consecration, spoken by an ordained priest, regularly made Christ “really present,” in body and blood, on the altar. For Lutherans, Christ was “present” when the minister spoke the words of institution: “for this is my body,” “this is the blood of the new covenant,” that presence effected through the power of

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God’s Word to overcome time and space. For Calvin, though not for most Calvinists, Christ was “present” in the complex interplay of Incarnation and the human body, at once reaching each human being through the senses and reaching across the chasm from God to humankind. For Calvin, especially, Christ’s “presence” in one’s person enabled one to discern divine presence, a presence that one’s enemies could only see as absence. For many Christians in the sixteenth century, a shared understanding of “presence” constituted community, no matter how dispersed spatially, geographically – across oceans and continents, communities shared that intimate, visceral sense of God’s presence among them.

“Presence” and “Absence” In their polemics, sixteenth-century Christians cast difference in terms of the bipolarity of presence and absence. In one’s own, “true” conceptualization, Christ was “present” – whether in the gestures of the priest or in the faith of the congregant. And, antithetically, in others’ conceptualizations, Christ was “absent.” Not hidden. Not obscured. Not remote. Absent. “Absence” was not a question of distance – the fear that Augustine, for instance, had voiced of a remote God. It was the name applied to a conceptualization of the relationship among matter, time, person, and God that the polemicist held wrong. Sixteenth-century Christians did not simply articulate divergent understandings of “presence” – they denied the “reality” of others’ experiences of “presence,” designating those other experiences as “absence,” as the antithesis of “presence.” “Absence,” moreover, was not spatial: it could be found among one’s neighbours or one’s kin; even one’s spouse could be directing himself or herself towards an absence. In the fragmented landscape of sixteenth-century Europe, absence and presence were frequently found in the same towns, with presence known viscerally, and absence a label applied to practices and beliefs of what one did not do, what one did not hold. “Absence” was far more than a subjective judgment of difference. It mapped the materialities of others: the movements of priests, altar cloths, altars and tables, chalices and cups – each could be labelled as a site of absence. In deploying the term, polemicists located God “with” themselves: “presence” was not an attribute of the worship of others, but something one knew, viscerally, intimately, certainly. Polemicists could designate “absence,” because they knew the precise contours of “presence”: in what

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kind of space it was to be found, in what kinds of actions, words, objects. “Presence” and “absence” designated fields divided by a stark boundary: the one designating where persons, matter, and God existed in correct relationship; the other, where persons and matter were not connected to God. Sixteenth-century Christians did not fear the absence of God for themselves as much as see absence in the practices, spaces, and objects of others. Those polemics abide to this day: for Catholics, Reformed Churches are “empty”; Lutherans and Catholics alike characterize the Reformed Eucharist as “mere memorialism,” or, in the words of a recent dissertation, “virtualism.” While the rhetoric appears gentler, it shares with the sixteenth century the premise that the speaker knows where to find God and where God is not.

NOTES 1 “[1] I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. [2] And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, [3] who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, [4] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended into hell. [5] On the third day, he rose from the dead; [6] he ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. [7] Thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. [8] I believe in the Holy Spirit, [9] the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, [10] the forgiveness of sins, [11] the resurrection of the body, [12] and the life everlasting. Amen.” “The Apostles’ Creed,” in Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 669. 2 On the Apostles’ Creed in the Mass, see foremost Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Das Apostolische Symbol: Seine Entstehung, sein geschichtlicher Sinn, seine ursprüngliche Stellung im Kultus und in der Theologie der Kirche, vol. I (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1962 [Leipzig, 1894]). On the origins of the Apostles’ Creed, see most recently Markus Vinzent, Der Ursprung des Apostolikums im Urteil der kritischen Forschung (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Liuwe H. Westra, The Apostles’ Creed: Origin, History, and Some Early Commentaries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). 3 I am grateful to the editors of this volume, who offered me the opportunity to think further about questions I took up in The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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4 See, for example, Summa Theologiae, vol. 50, The One Mediator, ed. Colman E. O’Neill (London: Blackfriar’s, 1965), article 4. 5 On medieval cognition, see foremost Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 230. 7 For a sense of the richness of Eucharistic thinking in the period between the late Roman Empire and the sixteenth century, see foremost Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen van Ausall, eds., A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 8 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 9 On representations of the Mass of Pope Gregory, see Andreas Gormans and Thomas Lentes, eds., Das Bild der Erscheinung: Die Gregorsmesse im Mittelalter (Berlin: Reimer, 2007); Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century,” in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, eds., The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 208–40; Esther Meier, Die Gregorsmesse: Funktionen eines spätmittelalterlichen Bildtypus (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). 10 On the priest, see The Eucharist in the Reformation, 224–8. Transubstantiation has received far more attention. For a brilliant sense of its complexity, see Robert J. Daly, SJ, “The Council of Trent,” in Lee Palmer Wandel, ed., A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 159–82. Daly had previously edited Edward J. Kilmartin, SJ, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004). For an introduction to Reformation debates more generally, see A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, part 1. 11 Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, eds., The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), esp. chs. 2, 3, 6, and 11. 12 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 13 See Walter Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, eds., Early Modern Eyes (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 14 For a sense of the multiple conceptualizations of Christ’s body in medieval theologies of the Eucharist, see Gary Macy, “Theology of the Eucharist in the High Middle Ages,” and Stephen E. Lahey, “Late Medieval Eucharistic Theology,” both in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, 365–98

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23 24 25

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Lee Palmer Wandel and 499–539, respectively. For a fuller exploration of the heterogeneity of medieval Eucharistic thought, see ibid., passim, and Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999). For a succinct overview of medical conceptions of the body, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: Norton, 2003), chs. 1–3. Roy Porter took up an analogous duality, body and soul, in Flesh in the Age of Reason. For a brief summary, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/ #MinRel (accessed 13 January 2015}. I explore some of those different conceptions of matter in The Eucharist in the Reformation. I make this argument more fully in The Eucharist in the Reformation. John Rempel, “Anabaptist Theologies of the Eucharist,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, 115–37. Michele Zelinsky Hanson, “Anabaptist Liturgical Practices,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, 251–72. “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 1528,” Luther’s Works, vol. 37, Word and Sacrament III, ed. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 218; “Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, 1528,” Luthers Werke in Auswahl, ed. Otto Clemen, vol. 3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1959), 396–7. On Luther’s Eucharistic thought and liturgical formulations, see The Eucharist in the Reformation, ch. 3. See my “The Body of Christ at Marburg,” in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Reindert Falkenburg, Walter Melion, and Todd M. Richardson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 195–213. “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper,” 371; “Vom Abendmahl Christi,” 514. I develop Calvin’s understanding of “flesh” and “body” more fully in The Eucharist in the Reformation, chap. 4. I develop this idea in “Incarnation, Image, and Sign: John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and Late Medieval Visual Culture,” in Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, eds., Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960) [hereafter Institutes], vol. 1, bk. 2, especially chap. 16, sec. 14. Latin text: Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt Omnia, ed. Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, vol. 2, Corpus Reformatorum 30 (Braunschweig: C.A. Schwetschke et Filium, 1864) [hereafter CO], cols. 381–2.

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27 Institutes, 481; CO, col. 352. 28 See, for example, Institutes, bk. 2, chap. 16. 29 John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1975), 237–8. 30 Institutes, 503; CO, col. 367. 31 For a fuller consideration of this phrasing, see Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, chap. 4. 32 “Quo primum,” Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/ Pius05/p5quopri.htm. 33 On the Eucharist at the Council of Trent, see The Eucharist in the Reformation, ch. 5, and Daly. 34 Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 742. 35 Carruthers, The Book of Memory. 36 The following draws from The Eucharist in the Reformation, passim. 37 On the Marburg Colloquy, see foremost, Walther Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 148 (Leipzig: Eger & Sievers, 1929). 38 Institutes, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 5, sec.14, p. 68. The English more closely follows the French text: “Voyla comment tant de si belles lampes alumées au bastiment du monde nous esclairent en vain, pour nous faire voir la gloire de Dieu, veu qu’elles nous environnent tellement de leurs rayons, qu’elles ne nous peuvent conduire iusques au droit chemin. Vray est qu’elles font bien sortir quelques estincelles, mais le tout s’estouffe devant que venir en clarté de durée. Pourtant l’Apostre apres avoir dit que le monde est comme une effigie ou spectacle des choses invisibles, adiouste tantost apres que c’est par foy qu’on cognoist qu’il a esté aussi bien compassé et aproprié par la parolle de Dieu (Heb. 11,3): signifiant par ces mots, combien que la maiesté invisible de Dieu soit manifestée par tels miroirs, que nous n’avons pas les yeux pour la contempler iusques à ce qu’ils soyent illuminez par la revelation secrete qui nous est donée d’enhaut.” Institution de la religion chrestienne, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit, vol. 1 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1957), bk. 1, chap. 5, sec. 13, pp. 83–4. 39 Ford Lewis Battles’s translation of the Latin differs at a couple of points: “Indeed, his essence is incomprehensible; hence, his divineness far escapes all human perception. But upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.” Institutes 1, 52. 40 I make this argument more fully in “John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne on the Eye,” in Melion and Wandel, Early Modern Eyes, 135–54.

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41 For a sense of the richness of that thinking, see Melion and Wandel, Image and Incarnation. 42 Cf. “Incarnation, Image, and Sign.” 43 On the emergence of a notion of “mere ritual,” see foremost Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [2005]). 44 “The Body of Christ at Marburg.”

chapter three

“Here I Stand”: Face-to-Face Communication and Print Media in the Early Reformation M A RC U S S A N D L

Over the last two decades, historians have paid increasing attention to media of communication as agents of historical change. In particular, they have underlined “the importance of the mass media in precipitating crises and determining their outcome.”1 The primary focus of media-historical enquiries thus has been on historical upheavals.2 This emphasis on grand historical change has also placed the Reformation centre stage. Already in the early 1970s, Robert Glen Swanson provided an analysis of the “press strategy” and “typographical mentality” of Martin Luther’s writings.3 During the 1980s, Bob Scribner characterized the “Reformation propaganda” as an explosion in new forms of popular communication such as pamphlets and broadsheets.4 Subsequently, numerous historians have published studies of the Reformation focusing especially on one particular medium, print. “Without print,” so the dictum, “no reformation.”5 Nowadays there is hardly a Reformation historian who does not emphasize the close link between the invention of print technology and historical change in the early sixteenth century. While all critics recognize this nexus, every account projects a different relation between printing and historical change. Some historians stress the instrumentality of print media in elaborating how the Reformers intentionally used printing to shape a religious movement.6 From this perspective, Luther’s success as a reformer and subsequently that of other reformers resulted from disseminating their convictions regarding theology, religious practice, and ecclesiastical politics via print to a mass audience. Yet other historians view the Reformation through the lens of Marshall McLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy” and claim that the Reformation ideas themselves resulted from the new technology.7 Finally, a third group of researchers favours complex historiographical models of

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media history,8 concentrating on the new modes of perception and the modified concepts of knowledge effected by printing. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, for instance, or Martin Giesecke’s Der Buchdruck in der Frühen Neuzeit investigate changing cultural patterns as a result of printing. Such interpretations continue to play an important role in recent articles and monographs on Reformation history.9 These studies often promote a technical, if not teleological, understanding of media, however. In this vein, Johannes Burkhardt recently argued that not the reform movement but printing had initiated the cultural changes associated with the Reformation – a medium that searched for an event and found it in the Reformation. For Burkhardt, then, printing, in a sense, launched the Reformation in order to realize itself as a technology.10

Printing and the Beginning of the Reformation Without a doubt, practically all Reformation historians agree on one point: the constitutive relationship between the Reformation and printing. This can be illustrated by exploring, once again, Martin Luther’s “Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” of 31 October 1517 – a text that marked the beginning of the Reformation.11 The question of why the “Theses” had the effect they unquestionably did can only be answered if we consider their distribution en masse. As is well known, the “Theses” were first posted in manuscript form. They circulated among scholars within the epistolary network of humanists and were printed only subsequently. Thus they found their way to a broad, initially urban, public. In this manner, they quickly sparked a public discussion about how to practise religious beliefs and how to gain certainty about one’s salvation. This discussion unfolded primarily, though not exclusively, in the medium of print. Over the ensuing years, the debate effected nothing less than a true explosion of reform-oriented printed works: books, pamphlets, and broadsheets. As a result, the Reformation gained more and more followers also in regions far away from Wittenberg. In short, without the mass circulation of the “Theses,” made possible by their having been printed, the success of the Reformation can hardly be imagined. Nonetheless, it is not enough to isolate printing in order to explain why and how the Reformation took off in 1517. A closer look at how the “Theses” became known shows that a media history of the Reformation needs to posit complex relations instead of a straightforward nexus between

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cause and effect. Initially, Luther wrote the “Theses” in all likelihood not for their being printed and publicly released but for an academic disputation between theologians that was meant to be held at the University of Wittenberg. The purpose of the “Theses” was to initiate face-to-face communication in order to test their persuasiveness according to a set of elaborate rules.12 Luther simply followed what was standard procedure in theological debates at universities.13 As is well known, the publication of the “Theses” in print changed this. The disputation envisaged by Luther actually never took place. It should be noted, however, that the written “Theses” were meant to acquire their original meaning in the context of a communicative event characterized by dynamic interactions between actors who were bodily present and according to technologies of perception and expression.14 It follows that printing alone didn’t “change the world.” This applies not only to the beginning of the Reformation. Long after the “Theses” as well as countless other pamphlets and broadsheets were printed and distributed, printed texts as such did not shape events. Far more was necessary so that they had an impact and made something happen: letters had to be written, conversations engaged in, sermons delivered, gatherings organized and protests initiated, and above all decisions made. Printing therefore was part of a context of communication in which many media interacted. Multi-mediality was needed for the Reformation to come about and flourish. At the same time, multimediality was essential in establishing a narrative of what happened. And much had to happen beyond the mere fact of printing to derive effects from causes – for instance, events from printed texts and these in turn from bodily present actors, or, in Burkhardt’s vision, events and actors from printing. Against widespread assumptions that reduce the Reformation to an effect of printing, I contend that the historical significance and impact of the Reformation is owed to its multi-mediality. The idea that guides my investigation is that historical events should not be reduced to one cause, one medium, or one technology. After the invention of print, other forms of communication did not disappear; on the contrary, images, handwriting, and face-to-face communication gained new significance. Furthermore, media technologies didn’t operate in a vacuum. People used them according to their own understanding of media – a trivial but little-noticed fact of considerable importance in media historiography. Therefore, the agency of media was closely related to the contemporary media practices, as well as the discourse on media and its narratives of

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historical change. And the main discourse about these media was theological. Questions of representation, agency, and intercession, or, so to say, questions of mediacy, above all the mediacy of salvation, were crucial issues in this context. Particularly in promoting scripture, the principal media became entangled with their Protestant message. If we take the multi-mediality of the Reformation seriously and investigate it before the horizon of the media-theoretical reflections in theological discourse, then Reformation history can be written from a new perspective. What is at issue is neither an intellectual history nor a history of (media) technologies, but rather a history of complex relationships between the events in the early 1520s, the media establishing and publicizing these events, and the emergence of historical actors who believed in the force of Scripture. More generally, the historiographical problem I want to focus on is how to conceptualize relationships between subjects, media, and events. I will argue that the relationship between reformers, events, and the medium’s agency was not a given or self-evident; it needed to be forged. The early Reformation had neither a clearly defined object nor recognizable actors.15 Yet in the historical dynamics of the years after 1517, printing technology came to dominate other forms of communication, especially face-to-face communication. This particular nexus between media, people, and events emerged then, not before. I will investigate how relating people, events, and media surfaced as a problem in regard to the Diet of Worms. Its solution resulted in a reconfiguration of the communicative field that affected both print and face-to-face communication.

Printed Texts and the Relationship between Subjects, Media, and Events Printing allows for the multiplication and dissemination of texts. What it does not necessarily make easier is their reception. In this respect, the first, Latin print versions of the “Theses” are a good example. Densely covered with black lettering, the page that circulated in different, but substantially identical, versions initially appears highly hermetic in its material and visual manifestation. The paratexts, such as the heading of the Leipzig print of 1517 we see in the first illustration (see fig. 3.1), call attention to a disputation, hence to the original pragmatic context for which the “Theses” were written. Those not present at the event, we are informed in the heading, and thus unable to participate in the debate with their own spoken words (verbis presentes nobiscum disceptare), are able

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Figure 3.1 Martin Luther, 95 Theses about Letters of Indulgence, Leipzig 1517 [Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, HA 1 GR, Rep 13 Nr4-5a, Fasz.1. – Print B, Single-leaf Print]

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to do so in writing (agant id literis absentes). But beyond this, there is no word that illuminates the content, no verbal but only a typographical organization, no typographical emphases on especially delicate, explosive passages. As a printed text, the “Theses” have no date and therefore are not marked as belonging to a particular event; nor does the text allude to the context for which they were composed. Only in one copy is there an indication that it had an impact beyond its original pragmatic context. A handwritten note in the upper right margin of one copy reads as follows: Anno 1517 ultimo Octobris, vigilie Omnium sanctorum, indulgentie primum inpugnate – “In the year 1517, on 31 October, on the eve of All Saints, the indulgences were fought against for the first time.” The note’s author is Luther. Although no date is given, the past tense reflects a later perspective and knowledge about the effects the posting of the “Theses” had.16 What this marginalium points to – the embedding of a document in a series of events – was a general feature of the Reformation in print after 1517. Following the “Theses,” Luther’s publications were marked by a strong focus on actual effects of previous texts – a focus generated predominantly by the paratexts of print publications. Increasingly, in prologues and dedications, each text referenced not only previously published texts but also preceding events. This amounted to an extension, so to speak, of the event caused by publishing the “Theses” into their reception. This event and all following events then became the basis for the writing and reception of further texts – indeed, the basis for the idea that the Reformation progressed. The growing intratextual and intertextual web of references corresponded in turn to the fast pace with which Reformation materials appeared in print. Starting in 1518, practically everything that took place within this Reformation context saw print: Luther’s sermons, commentaries, and polemics – aimed at perceived wrongs committed by the church and the papacy – were all printed, as were reports about the disputations, decrees, and comments with regard to the proceedings against Luther that began in Rome in 1519. Up until 1520, 27 titles in 270 editions appeared under Luther’s name; the material amounted to 900 pages, and was equivalent to half a million printed documents.17 One feature of the early Reformation is that as an event, the printed work reflected the actual process that was unfolding, reshaping it, as it were, under the sign of print technology. In this way, events were staged in advance in light of printed reports about them. Luther arranged, for instance, a spectacle of sorts in December of 1520, scorching the recently

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published papal bull that excommunicated him. Accompanied by his students, he went to the bank of the River Elbe in order to burn the bull together with books of canon law. Thus he demonstrated for everybody to see that he refused to acknowledge papal jurisdiction. He did so in a manner whose symbolic aspects turned the act into a printing event. Accordingly, he commented on the event shortly after it happened with a printed account explaining “why the books of the Pope and his followers were burned by Doctor Martino Luther” (see fig. 3.2). In this way, not only did print disseminate news of the symbolic annihilation of the papal bull but also – once more – the papal declaration why Luther was convicted. Even the bull itself was reprinted again; Georg Spalatin – a follower of Luther – had already published a translation of the bull.18 Also in Wittenberg, writings by Luther’s opponents in Rome and elsewhere were consistently printed, often in the original version and sometimes without comments. The permanent reporting on events linked to Luther and the Reformation turned texts into “documents” of the Reformation’s progression. Even papal texts now pointed out Reform issues. Therefore, they could be printed and spread without modifications. At the same time, through printing, events in which Luther encountered his opponents face to face were reformulated and restaged or, in a sense, produced in a reform framework of thought. The Leipzig disputation of 1519, for instance, ended in a clear defeat of the Wittenberg professor by his adversary Eck. In print, however, the same event emerged as a triumph for Luther and his followers. Not the official minutes of the meeting but a sermon delivered by Luther during his residence in Leipzig was publicly distributed. In his sermon, Luther vigorously attacked the papal teaching authority and the church hierarchy. The image we find on the title page of this print – the very first image published of Luther – additionally reinforced the impression of the victorious reformer (see fig. 3.3). At the start of the Reformation, as the examples above demonstrate, printing was what one could call an absolute medium. I am speaking here not about the agency of printing as a media technology but about an epistemology of contemporary perception of the world involving technological as well as theoretical and practical aspects. Through print, all persons mentioned were constituted as participating in, if not pertinent to, the Reformation. In turn, the Reformation was an event enhanced and maintained by printing. From the vantage point of systems theory, the epistemology of print encompassed media, subjects,

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Figure 3.2 Martin Luther, Warumb des Bapsts vnd seyner Jungern bucher von Doct. Martino Luther vorbrant seynn, Wittenberg 1520 (Title Page) [Staatsbibliothek München, Res/H.ref. 750 a]

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Figure 3.3 Ein Sermon geprediget tzu Leipßgk vffm Schloß am tag Petri vnd pauli ym. xviiij. Jar / durch den wirdigen vater Doctorem Martinum Luther augustiner zu Wittenburgk, Leipzig 1519 (Title Page) [Staatsbibliothek München, Res/4 Th.u. 103, XXVII, 20 a]

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and events, defining them as aspects of the same process of “observation.”19 This setting provided a forum for the thematic concerns of the Reformation movement; its substantive theological core unfolded its evidence in the context of print publications as well. For what was at stake here was nothing less than Scripture, more specifically, sola scriptura, and, accordingly, from the point of view of the reformers, direct access to the Bible and the promise this unmitigated access contained. No longer did one’s salvation hinge on good works or similar interactions with God and his saints. It was incumbent on faith alone, as Manfred Schneider puts it, “to set the black signifier aglow, until it dissolved its actuality as a medium.”20 So every single printed Reformation text participated in what is, in the final analysis, a vision of salvific media-history.21 By printing, the early Reformation thus generated its possible references and its own referential frame: within itself, it assembled the events, conditions for being perceived, and possibilities of achieving salvation. It had – as indicated, in an epistemological sense – no outside.

The Diet of Worms, Print Media, and Face-to-Face Interaction In the initial phase, the Reformation appeared not only as a process playing itself out within the framework of print technology, but also as generating within that very medium the questions that were most central to it. Face-to-face communication was staged, retrospectively restaged, or even replaced through media defined by distance between interlocutors. That is to say, the emerging Reformation was less a subject or referent by itself than a poetic entity: a wealth of information and data, of printed words and, successively, images, all of which was not in itself endowed – especially not for the actual participants – with a necessary or self-evident connection. And just as this connection would have been absent without the Reformation in print, in essence “real” actors were missing as well. Martin Luther, or often M.L., or D.M.L., as in the printed text of 1520 entitled “Von den guten Werken” (On Good Works) (see fig. 3.4), was the cipher for an author that only those in the know could decode. He authored texts and was himself the subject of texts. Even if, as in the case of the burning of the papal bull, he was addressed as a social actor or, as in the case of the first image, appeared as a reformer with a face and a body, these were the external signs for an, as it were, typographical event.

Face-to-Face Communication in the Early Reformation

Figure 3.4 Martin Luther, Von den guten werckenn, Wittenberg 1520 (Title Page) [Staatsbibliothek München, Res/4 Hom. 1167#Beibd.3]

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The reference to something outside the typographical dynamic, however, remained vague. We see this, for instance, in the caption placed beneath the first portrait of Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder (see fig. 3.5), completed in 1520.22 Cranach distinguished between the outward image of Luther that he had engraved in wax and the “eternal image” of Luther’s spirit, which, according to a contemporary topos, only Luther himself was in a position to express: Aeterna ipse suae mentis simulachra Lutherus exprimit at vultus cera Lucae occiduos (The eternal likeness of his spirit Luther himself expresses, the wax of Lucas his mortal appearance).23 What was hidden behind the print’s surface – the realistic image of the Augustinian monk – only Luther’s contemporaries, both followers and opponents, could access. And more than that, what was at stake, what they were able to witness, was unclear. Even Luther himself claims to not have understood what happened with and through him, as he repeatedly stressed in the Reformation’s early years.24 Viewed through the lens of media theory, the early Reformation therefore had a significant problem in establishing and managing references between subjects, media, and events. Arguably, this problem was solved at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In the field of tensions between face-to-face communication and printed media, the Reformation was here embedded in a historical “context.” More precisely, by Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms, the Reformation received a presence and as a result a historical effectiveness substituting face-to-face communication in the medium of print – and that included, in line with what has already been mentioned, possibilities regarding the attribution of subject, medium, and event. What took place between Luther’s arrival in Worms on 16 April 1521 and his precipitous departure ten days later has been documented in numerous contemporary accounts, single-leaf prints, and woodcuts.25 Many of them already appeared during the diet itself (see fig. 3.6). What happened in Worms unfolded within a framework defined by print: a framework that was redefined and transformed within face-to-face communication. In order to gain an overview of this transformation, we need to consider closely the actual sequence of the events in Worms, the “how” rather than the “what” of the events, so to speak. This “how” was first shaped by the texts themselves becoming agents. Luther had expected to defend his ideas in Worms. But this is not what happened. When he appeared before the emperor and the imperial estates a day after his arrival, he found a table covered with the printed editions of his most important writings; their titles were then read out to him. Standing in front of the table, Johannes von Ecken, a minister of the archbishop of Trier, who acted as speaker for the emperor (orator imperii), called upon him to comment on the publications in two respects. He was to first publicly confirm the authorship of these

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Figure 3.5 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther as a Monk 1520 (Engraving) [Albertina Wien, DG1929/78]

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Figure 3.6 Ain antzaigung wie D. Martinus Luther zu Worms auff dem Reichtstag eingefahren […], Augsburg 1521 (Title Page) [Staatsbibliothek München, Res/4 H.ref. 801,6]

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texts – texts that had appeared in print in numerous locations across the empire under his name. He was then to comment on their contents, either confirming that what had been authored by him was his opinion or retracting some of its contents. Questions of attribution were thus in play. Yet the proceeding’s purpose was to equate the texts and their author, in order to possibly get rid of both in the course of a trial. But this situation produced a dynamic that departed from the effect the emperor and his entourage had wished for. Luther first confirmed his authorship, but then requested time to reflect on the second question, referring to its significance for his soul’s salvation. Despite von Ecken’s comment that a request of this sort was astonishing in the case of such a famous professor of theology, further actions were postponed to the following day. In this way, the events that ensued adhered to a dramaturgy that was different from the planned script. Whether intended or not, the confirmation of authorship and the request for time to reflect on whether he wanted to retract or not produced a double presence: the materiality of the printed books that Luther had authored and the materiality of the author’s body. Although Luther confirmed his authorship of the texts, he thwarted a simple equation between the printed material and his persona. The following day, the defining scene of both the Diet of Worms and possibly the Reformation as a whole followed the logic of face-to-face communication. This resulted in a dynamic relationship between bodies, movements, and gestures; between books, words, and objects; between actors, spectators, and readers. Arriving at the emperor’s court for the second time at the agreed-upon hour, Luther was once again asked to retract his writings. He answered, as Luther’s Wittenberg colleague Justus Jonas informs us, in a modest but upright manner that impressed his opponents.26 He first reiterated his response of the previous day that “those books are manifestly mine and published under my name by me” (esse videlicet eos libros meos meoque nomine a me evulgatos).27 But instead of providing a direct answer to the second question – the weightier question of the two from the assembly’s perspective – Luther began with a verbose explanation of the various genres among his publications. In all cases, however, he rejected retraction, unless he were refuted “through the writings of the prophets or the Gospels” (scripturis propheticis et Euangelicis).28 Luther’s position sparked unease among those present, because it was now apparent that the strategy of the emperor’s side would not work. While Luther affirmed his authorship, he refused to nullify the difference between text and person by demanding that his publications be judged according to intertextual criteria – that is to say, comparatively. The indignant reaction of the orator imperii was again aimed at an equation of

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the book’s author and the present person of Luther, whom he requested to respond in a “simple and not complicated” fashion (simplex, & non cornutum) whether he wished to retract or not. Luther answered in brief and apodictic Latin: “Nisi convictus fuero testimoniis scripturarum aut ratione evidente […], victus sum scripturis a me adductis et capta conscientia in verbis dei, revocare neque possum nec volo quicquam, cum contra conscientiam agere neque tutum neque integrum sit” (If I am not refuted by written testimony or manifest reason […] I will remain completely convinced by the texts I have drawn on and my conscience captured by God’s word; I neither can nor wish to retract something, since acting against one’s conscience is surely neither safe nor unblemished). Then he continued in German: “Ich kan nicht anderst, hie stehe ich, Got helff mir, Amen” (I cannot act otherwise, here I stand, God help me, Amen).29 With these words, Luther presented a profession of faith.30 Confronted with his books spread out on the desk before him, he determined his relationship with his work through an act of inner reflection. He invoked his conscience – a conscience indebted to God’s word (that is to say, scripture) – and emphasized that he could not act against this conscience because doing so would mean to turn against God. And he made it clear that, because of the human capacity for error, he could not vouch for the truth of what had been printed. But he would stand behind his conscience with his entire persona, his body, and his life. The power of conviction in Luther’s profession of faith evidently did not arise from a simple equation – neither of a persona and texts nor of declarations and objects. Rather, while Luther initially took up the separation between work and author implicit in the question put before him, he transformed it, abandoning the space of the text in order to answer for his works as an actual person. As an actual person, he made this personhood evident through a performative act. For this, the unity of time, space, and action was a decisive factor just as the materiality of the objects and artefacts and the testimony of the spectators – the presence of secular and clerical dignitaries, and even the audience in front of doors and windows. In this situation, unfolding in actual time and between actual people, the relationship between books and author took a new form. Luther didn’t represent the books published in his name but personified them and their meaning.31 In this way, he created a historical event including printing without being limited to it. How this works is illustrated by the frontispiece of a 1521 print from Augsburg (see fig. 3.7) that presents Luther’s credo as a face-to-face communication: Luther stands wearing a monk’s habit and gesticulating in

Face-to-Face Communication in the Early Reformation

Figure 3.7 Doctor Martini Luthers offenliche Verhör zu Worms […], Augsburg 1521 (Title Page) [Staatsbibliothek München, Res/4 H.ref. 721]

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the woodcut’s foreground; he is engaged in a dispute with a representative of the Roman Church, who is also gesticulating. The adversaries are accompanied by compact groups of supporters. Yet the main protagonist and, as it were, cause of the events in Worms is located in the image’s centre: Luther’s texts. They form the stage on which the adversaries meet. All this is played out before a public consisting of the imperial estates (to be located in the pictorial background), on the one hand, and those actually observing the picture, on the other. The woodcut places the event before the eyes of those observers not present at the scene, in order to turn them into participants or into witnesses of events whose unfolding is narrated in detail in the text. As a manifestation of conscience, Luther’s credo took place – this the woodcut expresses – at a specific point in time and particular place, before the eyes of a public. Printed books were an essential component of the scene, not as an absolute medium, however, but as part of a face-toface communication enabling Luther to establish a genuine, concrete relation between words and things, persons and beliefs. The material (self-)presentation of the act of profession translated what could be said and shown (and what has been said in books) into a different register: that which is singular and historically manifest and concrete. In this process, however, something fundamental revealed itself: the transformation of conscience into certainty of what was happening, and why it was happening. Thus a clear connection between inner conviction of conscience, the dissemination of Reformation writings through print, and historical change became evident. Luther’s profession of faith rendered into actuality what, in the framework of print, had long been virtual: the Reformation as a historical event. As a historical event, the credo Luther voiced before emperor and empire only became effective in connection with the mass distribution of printed accounts thereof. What preceded these published accounts was a translation of a face-to-face situation into narrative patterns and images of a specific sort: ones that tied the significance of texts and declarations to concrete situations in which people acted according to conscience. From now on, the conscience that Luther had brought into play as a relation of the self with itself would organize most Reformation writings. These writings assumed the character of a credo. In other words, they constituted acts that had their impact within and through history. The credo-like character of practically all Reformation writing, generated above all through paratexts, substituted genuine corporeal presence. Countless credos or professions of faith succeeded in the

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further course of the Reformation and marked the events to come.32 Retrospectively, the credo appeared to be the basis of the Reformation’s beginning. Emerging in Reformation circles even before Luther’s death and determining historiographical approaches to the Reformation well into the mid-twentieth century, the narrative of Luther’s posting of the “Theses” is a form of attribution of subjects to media and events in which we can identify a specific, reformist constellation of presence and printed medium, conscience, certainty, and credo. More or less all writings about and images of the Reformation since 1521 have operated on the same assumption.33 To conclude, in this chapter, I argued for reassessing the role of media in the early Reformation. During its emergence, the Reformation came to occur within the framework of printing; importantly, printing defined its central theological concerns, such as the search for a scriptural basis in regard to all matters of spiritual significance. But this does not mean that printing technology itself initiated a linear historical process as print has often been described. Printing was not an agent of Reformation history. It was not even the only relevant medium. In order to recognize the historical relevance of print as a medium, the nexus of media, subjects, and events in its entirety has to be taken into account. In other words, one has to consider the complex relations between print and face-to-facecommunication – relations that, as I contend, underwent a fundamental change in 1521. The Diet of Worms marked a turning point in the history of this nexus. It constituted not only a medial or theological but also a historical event, maybe even the first in the history of the Reform movement. From Luther’s appearance in Worms onward, the Reformation unfolded as a theological and a historical process.

NOTES 1 See Jeremy D. Popkin, “Media and Revolutionary Crises,” in Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1995), 12–30, here 13. 2 To name just two examples, Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France 1789–1799 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); and Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: Tauris, 2001). 3 Robert Glen Swanson, The Changing Word: A Media Analysis of the Writings of Martin Luther (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1973), 95 and 147.

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4 Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 5 Bernd Moeller, “Stadt und Buch: Bemerkungen zur Struktur der Reformatorischen Bewegung in Deutschland,” in Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1979), 25–39; the “Moellerian thesis” on page 30. 6 See, for instance, Rainer Wohlfeil, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Reformation (Munich: Beck, 1982). 7 See Manfred Schneider, “Luther mit McLuhan: Zur Medientheorie und Semiotik heiliger Zeichen,” in Diskursanalysen 1: Medien, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler et al. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 13–25. English trans. Manfred Schneider, “Luther with McLuhan,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198–215. 8 Very worth reading is Mark U. Edwards Jr, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Berndt Hamm, “Die Reformation als Medienereignis,” Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie 11 (1996), 137–66. 9 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie über die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 10 This is the gist of the first main chapter entitled “Das Medium war das Moderne.” In the course of his argument, Burkhardt nevertheless stresses also the reciprocal influences between theological, political, social, and media-historical aspects of the Reformation. See Johannes Burkhardt, Das Reformationsjahrhundert: Deutsche Geschichte zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionenbildung 1517–1617 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002), 17–30. 11 On the “Theses,” their context, and their effects, see the comprehensive overview in Heiko A. Oberman, The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications, trans. Andrew Colin Gow (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 117–48. 12 These rules regulated, among other things, the times allotted each speaker and their conduct. See Marion Gindhart and Ursula Kundert, eds., Disputatio 1200–1800: Form, Funktion und Wirkung eines Leitmediums universitärer Wissenskultur (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010). 13 On the significance of religious disputations in the Reformation era, see Thomas Fuchs, Konfession und Gespräch: Typologie und Funktion der Religionsgespräche in der Reformationszeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995).

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14 The specific logic of face-to-face communication is the subject of the helpful and informative study by André Kieserling, Kommunikation unter Anwesenden: Studien über Interaktionssysteme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). 15 Following Niklas Luhmann, causality is the result of attributions and attributions are the result of observations. Causality in this sense doesn’t simply exist but is an effect of selective observations. See, for instance, Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. Rhodes Barrett (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), 67–8. 16 We don’t know exactly when Luther wrote them. The print can be found under call number “Rep 13 Nr.4–5a, Fasz. 1. – Print B [Leipzig: Jakob Thanner] 1517” in the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage, HA I GR, Berlin-Dahlem. For the context of the print and Luther’s handwritten annotation, see Reiner Groß, Manfred Kobuch, and Ernst Müller, eds., Martin Luther 1483–1546: Dokumente seines Lebens und Wirkens (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1983), 72. 17 The print run is explored in detail by Burkhardt, Reformationsjahrhundert, 44. 18 Leo X., Die verteutsch Bulle vnder dem namen des Bapst Leo des tzehenden: Wyder doctor Martinus Luther ausgangen, trans. Georg Spalatin (Leipzig: Valentin Schumann, 1521). The print is identified as “K 283” in the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD16). 19 See Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 20 Schneider, Luther, 21. 21 That included the expectation of Judgment Day. This eschatological component of the Reformation is rightly emphasized in Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 3–12. 22 Martin Warnke has analysed Cranach’s numerous portraits of Luther. See Martin Warnke, Cranachs Luther: Entwürfe für ein Image (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984). 23 The mention of wax refers to the production process of etchings. A copper sheet was covered with a wax film, and the image drawn through it with a needle. When dipped in acid, only the exposed lines were etched into, while the rest of the plate was protected by the wax. 24 Luther’s reaction is treated in Bernd Moeller, “Das Berühmtwerden Luthers,” in Luther-Rezeption: Kirchenhistorische Aufsätze zur Reformationsgeschichte, ed. Bernd Moeller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 2001), 15–41. 25 On the Diet of Worms and the contemporary reporting on it, see Fritz Reuter, ed., Der Reichstag zu Worms von 1521: Reichspolitik und Luthersache (Worms: Stadtarchiv, 1971).

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26 Justus Jonas, “Acta et res gestae D. Martini Lutheri in Comitiis Principium Wormatiae (1521),” in Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1897), 825–57. Hereafter cited with page number and line numbering. 27 Ibid., 832, 16–7. 28 Ibid., 834, 21. 29 Ibid., 838, 4–9. 30 Henning Schroer defines a profession of faith as “faith moving into life and speech.” Accordingly, the key feature of a profession of faith is that God is praised and this praising is oral, public, and heard. Luther’s performance included all these characteristics. See Henning Schroer, “Glaubensbekenntnis(se) X. Praktisch-theologisch,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 13 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), 442. 31 The difference between “represent” and “personify” is discussed at length in Christian Kiening, “Mediale Gegenwärtigkeit: Paradigmen – Semantiken – Effekte,” in Mediale Gegenwärtigkeit, ed. Christian Kiening (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), 9–70. 32 The Reformation history of the sixteenth century was an ongoing confession of faith, as Robert Kolb states. See Robert Kolb, Confessing the Faith: Reformers Define the Church 1530–1580 (St Louis: Concordia, 1991). 33 Erwin Iserloh was the first to doubt that the “Theses” were nailed to the doors of the Wittenberg castle church by Luther. See Erwin Iserloh, The Theses Were Not Posted: Luther Between Reform and Reformation, trans. Jared Wicks, SJ (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Over the course of the debate that ensued, his argument convinced also Protestant historians. Today, there is little doubt that Luther’s posting of the “Theses” is a legend of the Reformation era – a legend, however, with a long, intensive history of effects.

chapter four

Mediated Immediacies in Thomas Müntzer’s Theology HELMUT PUFF

Heyno Gottschalk, last abbot of Oldenstadt, left a handwritten note on the title page of Thomas Müntzer’s Deutsch Euangelisch Messze (German Evangelical Mass) in the abbey’s library. Composed shortly after the events reported, these lines portray the book’s author as someone who “introduced many ills into Christianity” (multa mala induxit in populum Christianum). Through “his twisted and seditious doctrine” (suae perversae ac sedeciosae doctrinae), it is said, he fomented rebellions of rural people (rurales) against their rightful masters – rebellions known to us as the Peasants’ War. When he was executed in 1525, he therefore met a fate he richly deserved in the eyes of the note’s author. Gottschalk conjures up this reformer’s cruel end in detail, as if, by offering a précis of a life gone awry, one could warn the book’s potential reader of its content (see fig. 4.1). This reform-minded cleric thus closed the circle between Müntzer’s publication of a German Mass and his violent death at the hands of his persecutors.1 Since the fatal year 1525 and Gottschalk’s note, this reformer has frequently been approached from the presumed telos of his life and writings, his execution. Tellingly, a background scene to his first known likeness, published posthumously, features his decapitation: a powerful memento that this reformer’s life ended in violence and destruction (see fig. 4.2). As Hans-Jürgen Goertz has argued, this and subsequent images of Müntzer are pictorial fantasies. They have the viewer imagine the monstrous devil Martin Luther exhorted us to see when looking his former comrade-in-theology into the eyes: “Who has seen Müntzer can say that he has seen the devil incarnate, at his most evil” (Wohlan wer den Müntzer gesehen hat, der mag sagen, er habe den Teufel leibhaftig gesehen, in seinem höchsten Grimm).2 For Luther’s followers and

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Figure 4.1 Thomas Müntzer, Deutsch Euangelisch Messze (Eilenburg: Nikolaus Widemar, 1524) [Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: K 263 Helmst. 4°, 10]. Title page with handwritten note by Heyno Gottschalk.

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Figure 4.2 Christoffel van Sichem, Eyghentlijcke afbeeldinghe ende corte Historie van Thomas Muntser (Amsterdam: Christoffel van Sichem, 1605) [© Trustees of the British Museum]

Lutherans of subsequent generations, this death served as a sign, an exemplum, a deterrent. Yet Müntzer’s challenge to emerging Protestantisms, especially Lutheranism, did not end with his own end. “Muntzeri spiritus non desinit spirare” (the spirit of Müntzer does not stop to spirit around), Luther lamented in a letter of 1528.3 The fact that Gottschalk, Luther, and others preserved Müntzer’s demise in the memoria of Protestantism betrays anxieties about his reform theology with its spirited critique of clerics as mediators of the divine.4 Anticlericalism, millenarianism, and mysticism – intellectual-religious strands that shaped his outlook as a theologian – had fostered the various Reformations, including Luther’s, in their turn against the established Church. Yet these same currents also served as a ready inspiration for a critique of the reformers and the reforms they

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launched. After all, Protestants of various persuasions embarked on vigorously building up their churches as early as the 1520s. This ongoing process made the many Reformations vulnerable to charges that they themselves had levelled against the pre-Reformation Church. To the radical reformers, organized churches of whatever stripe were institutions that were at risk of inserting themselves unduly into the relations that link mankind and God. The explosive legacy of such a theological outlook for the confessions that emerged in the sixteenth century thus did not end with 1525. In the following, I reopen the book Gottschalk wanted to see closed yet kept in the library of Oldenstadt Abbey. This means no less than recovering Müntzerian liturgy and theology from the many attempts to contain it. By virtue of this example, my investigation also seeks to shed light on the understanding as well as the use of media of the divine among radical reformers such as Müntzer. Gottschalk’s dictum to the contrary, Müntzer’s religious thought is anything but doctrinal. As we will see in this chapter’s pages, his reform efforts focused on communicative scenarios launched to infuse the world with the workings of the Holy Spirit. Yet contrary to the attempts of Luther and others to brandish Müntzer as a spiritualist firebrand, he aimed at invigorating religious life through various measures. His contributions to a German liturgy, his earliest print publications, therefore offer an excellent starting point from which to reassess his religious thinking and the problematic of a theology of media among radical Protestants. In my analysis, this German liturgy emerges as a ritual instantiation of a theology focused on scenarios of communication that sought to invite in the Holy Spirit. As eagerly as he or others might have awaited the advent of the Holy Spirit, a flock needed guidance to get ready over time for an encounter with the divine. Put differently, Müntzer pursued an approach that recognized the particularities of place, time, and audience. After all, the “elect friends of God” ought to engage in “the exercise” of watching the sphere of human interaction with an eye to the history of salvation and Holy Writ.5 The occasionalist contours evident in his liturgy and elsewhere in his writings thus respond to a moment perceived as current or, rather, urgent in salvation history. A focus on what I call Müntzer’s occasionalism prevents us from seeking to synthesize his small body of writings – nine print publications overall – as a systematic elaboration of religious dogma. Such an account has proven elusive in this case. The sources of Müntzer’s originality as a theologian have been the subject of a debate that has yet to move beyond identifying very broadly construed strands of thought. Theologians and

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historians alike have been frustrated by a writer whose religious thinking, while thriving on scriptural passages, is centred on communicative scenarios of which church service is but one.6 A focus on the occasional, conversely, allows us to delve into the contingencies, contexts, circumstances, and communicative scenarios of his publications. Mediated immediacy is a deliberately paradoxical formulation to characterize the reform efforts of this radical reformer. For Müntzer, mittel or “medium” had a negative connotation. As in mystical writings, the term connoted not so much a possibility but an obstacle – something that needed to be overcome, if only, as he suggests, gradually.7 Yet, unlike much of medieval mysticism, Müntzer’s search for spiritual immersion did not end with readying oneself for an encounter with God. It involved the congregation and, at least potentially, Christianity as a whole. The question then became how to pave the way for leaving behind, if only momentarily, the strictures of a world marked by religious intermediaries and mindless ritual observance – the sphere of mediators and mediation, a sphere set in stark opposition to the vibrancy of the Holy Spirit and a live faith in his thinking. In short, the question amounted to which measures would allow believers to “re-establish some kind of bridge between Man and God.”8 Liturgy was one of his answers. Approaching Müntzer from the vantage point of his liturgical publications means, among other things, to unlock the far-reaching significations the vernacular held for this and other reformers. It is commonly acknowledged that the Reformation ushered in or furthered a shift towards religious expression in the vernaculars. In fact, this description has become so commonplace that it tends to invite little reflection. It is therefore requisite that researchers unearth the manifold promises and potentials attached to the use of the vernacular in religious contexts with a novel lens. For his part, Müntzer saw German as a linguistic vessel profoundly apt to enliven pastoral care, church service, and religious practice. This is why my analysis culminates in the discussion of a German neologism that proves emblematic for Müntzer’s approach to liturgy and its attempt to work towards infusing the realm of the literal with the spiritual: geheim gotis or “God’s secret.”

I. Whereas many commentators, just like Gottschalk, have approached Müntzer through his end, there has always been a different vantage point for approaching this reformer.9 While a priest in Allstedt between

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April 1523 and August 1524, Müntzer published “a German version of the Mass” in several instalments.10 This was one of the first of its kind and the first substantial liturgy with musical notation.11 When he launched his efforts in reforming church service, Luther’s Septembertestament, the first part of his Bible translation, was half a year off the press. Müntzer’s German liturgy may well be understood as a parallel, if more modest, endeavour in supporting his new parish and the fledgling reform movement. When the liturgy appeared in print, Müntzer’s relations with Wittenberg were frayed, as a letter to Philip Melanchthon from March 1522 shows, but they had yet to turn into a permanent rift.12 When and where available, Müntzer inserted Luther’s psalm translations into his liturgy.13 Remarkably, his German liturgy marks the reformer’s point of entry into the culture of communication through print. The Prague Manifesto of 1521, his first known publication, with its anticlerical credo, has come down to us in several manuscript versions only and was not printed during his lifetime.14 Through the use of print Müntzer intended to draw a wide audience into the orbit of his liturgical reforms. Peter Matheson provides a vivid account of the tremendous efforts that went into these published building blocks for a German missal. They were “an incredibly ambitious, costly undertaking,” he states, “even with the help of the Allstedt Council.”15 Because of the many woodcuts necessary to render music, the printing took several months to complete. It is hard to imagine how Müntzer was able to execute this monumental task in the small Saxon enclave in Thuringia. Yet it is precisely this place with its six hundred to nine hundred or so inhabitants16 that allowed Müntzer to advance his reforms through concerted interventions on the interlocking levels of ministry, parish organization, and liturgy. This was so until his success as a sermonizer, theologian, reformer, and publicist sparked the attention of the authorities who were concerned over churchgoers and adherents from their territories – an opposition that ultimately led to his flight from the parish.17 In a letter written shortly after his departure from Allstedt in August of 1524, Müntzer asked that remaining print copies of the German Mass be sent to him in order to secure them for future use – evidence that he saw these liturgical publications as a key instrument of reform.18 In an anonymous report about his activities in Allstedt, written after his death, its author suggests a connection between his “perverse doctrines,” to quote Gottschalk once more, and his efforts in the reform of church service: “he taught publicly, so that many followed him. His teachings concerned the external freedom from the

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Figure 4.3 Thomas Müntzer, Ordnung vnd berechnunge des Teutschen ampts zu Alstadt (Eilenburg: Nikolaus Widemar, 1524) (Title Page) [Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res/4 Liturg. 456]

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authorities and the aristocracy. He translated the Latin responsoria, mass, and other [liturgical] songs into German. He had German missals written and printed of which many still existed some years ago.”19 In sum, Müntzer, defamed by his fellow reformers as a spiritualist, entered the annals of print publication as a savvy institution-builder, promoting a German version of the Roman liturgy to reform church service. Such a starting point promises to elucidate the contradictions inherent in mediating spiritual immediacy. While the exact dates for the publication of Müntzer’s three liturgical publications – the German Church Service (Deutzsch Kirchen Ampt), the German Evangelical Mass (Deutsch Euangelisch Messze), and the Order and Explanation (Ordnung und Berechnung) – are conjectural, their sequence is fairly certain. The first of the three, the German Church Service, comprising the liturgy of the hours – matins, lauds, and vespers – for Advent, Christmas, Passion, Easter, and Pentecost, was the first to appear in print (there is evidence that certain parts circulated initially as partial publications).20 Its explanatory title page announced that in Allstedt the “light of the world” (das Liecht der welt) “now shines forth again through these hymns and godly psalms for the edification and growth of the Christian people” (yetzt widerumb erscheynt mit dysen Lobgesengen und Götlichen Psalmen die do er bawen die zunemenden Christenheyt) after it had been treacherously kept from view (auffzuheben den hinterlistigen deckel ) by the “Godless” (gottlosen).21 The later German Evangelical Mass complements the former by offering printed Mass services for the respective feast days (Advent, Christmas, Passion, Easter, and Pentecost). The Order and Explanation, either the second or the final instalment, contains a treatise – a guide on how to implement the changes envisioned (see fig. 4.3). Apparently, reform-minded critics had accused Müntzer of embracing “old papal ceremonies” (die alten beptischen [sic] geberden) in his liturgy – a point to which I will return.22 Order and Explanation therefore amounted to a defence for having issued such a liturgy in the first place. These three contributions to an evangelical liturgy are meant to repair the “neglect” or nachlessigkeit 23 that Müntzer saw as rampant in the Church. The much decried decay of ministry therefore required a spiritual leader like himself to launch initiatives in invigorating pastoral care: “Hence my genuine intention remains to this day that of helping our poor, confused Christian people by [providing] services in German, whether they be masses, matins or vespers, which will enable every goodhearted person to see and hear and understand.”24 Importantly, service was conducted entirely in the German language so as to allow general

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access to the religious message. Second, contrary to the Catholic Mass and church service, the whole congregation became involved in the liturgy by speaking and singing.25 Third, the priest turned to the congregation of which he presented himself to be part. Hard facts about which liturgical conventions these novel practices replaced are difficult to come by. It is clear, however, that Müntzer reduced the number of church feasts to those of direct relevance for one’s salvation in Christ. In general, his reforms focused on increasing comprehensibility, comprehensiveness, and completeness of church service. In this context, the printed missal became an agent of change. It was a text no longer reserved for the clergy. Though the laity were expected to attend service during late medieval times, “the emphasis was … on witnessing the Mass” as the centre of liturgy.26 Whereas in medieval church life “seeing” had the potential of involving believers profoundly,27 in Müntzer’s Allstedt the congregation participated directly. Churchgoers were entrusted with print copies during service. One needs to imagine the scenario in order to grasp its implications. After all, not everyone was literate, let alone able to chant according to musical notation. Now singing enveloped and engaged the congregation as a whole; the use of German encouraged understanding; and communion under both kinds signalled, on the most basic level, inclusiveness of clergy and laity. In other words, the religious and social divisions that lay at the core of medieval liturgy gave way to a liturgical unity that was launched to encompass all parishioners. At first sight, Müntzer’s contributions to an evangelical liturgy seem beholden to Catholic models. They did not break with known liturgical forms or the Gregorian chant that accompanied the traditional Roman rite. The Mass for Advent, for instance, consists of all the parts that the celebration of the Mass conventionally comprised in late medieval times: an introductory psalm, a hymn, readings from the gospel and a declaration of creed, the preparation for the communion (offertorium), and the actual ritual, followed by prayers and blessings.28 If the formulae for the Mass on the occasion of other feasts are shorter, they nonetheless do not depart from this basic structure in principle; they simply offer a more condensed version of the rite. Yet the assessment of Müntzer as conservative, common as it is, fails to capture what his reforms tried to set into motion. In fact, the reformer of Allstedt started from existing forms in order to launch a gradual transformation of Christendom.29 On the most basic level, church service was “a public incitement to faith and Christendom,” as Luther formulated in his

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treatise on the German Mass of 1526 (eyne offenliche reytzung zum glauben und zum Christenthum).30 The fixity we associate with liturgical standards rubs against the notion of a flexible and changeable text we find expressly in Müntzer’s liturgy. Some statements in this regard concern primarily the temporal arrangement of liturgical parts: “[E]veryone should feel free to shorten or lengthen them himself as circumstances dictate. Likewise with such hymns as ‘et in terra’ or ‘patrem,’ which sometimes drone on and become tedious. It is up to the individual to include them or omit them, whichever is more convenient,” adding the somewhat polemical note, “I have no intention of perpetuating or restoring the papal abomination by them.”31 In late medieval Europe, the Mass underwent two major changes. On the one hand, different kinds of masses as well as local variations of the Mass proliferated. On the other hand, reform-minded clerics started to launch attempts to enforce liturgical standards and rein in the multiplicity of liturgical forms.32 Müntzer’s German liturgy provided an answer on both accounts. The Psalter, however, was a different matter. Müntzer advocated using the Psalms in service as means of religious edification. Saying that they ought to be sung in their entirety without being abridged, he also suggested that priests unmoor particular psalms from their place in the year’s liturgy.33 If “the range of psalmic influence in the early modern period” was tremendous, “a time when the Psalms were sung, translated, published, adapted, redacted, illustrated, set to music, and imitated anywhere in the world that Jews or Christians practiced their faith,” then this fact rested on the medieval practices that preceded it.34 The Psalter had been part and parcel of daily monastic practice. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, these biblical models for prayer increasingly shaped lay religious piety as well. Their significance for prayer and service in devout communities and among individual devoti is reflected, among other things, in the increasing number of psalm translations and paraphrases, many of them in prose, that are known to have existed at least since the mid-fourteenth century. What holds true for Luther’s 1521 translations of selected psalms can also be said for Müntzer’s. They were an “earnest attempt on the part of the author to give his people the Psalms in a language which they could understand, and thereby lead them to make the Psalter part of their daily religious worship both public and private.”35 The German liturgy with its emphasis on the Psalms constituted a formula borne out of a particular constellation of local and timely

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necessities. In other words, Müntzer’s liturgical reforms appear in a circumstantial guise. We are left with a tension between the German liturgy’s printed page and paratexts that present this same publication as a liturgical text that could be adapted to local conditions. It is this occasionalism that opens a telling window onto Müntzer’s mediated immediacies. My approach takes its cues from terms integral to Müntzer’s writings, gelegenheyt and gelegen, with their references to the site or lage of Allstedt in the year 1523.36

II. To Müntzer, Allstedt was a seminal community. It may have seemed fortuitous in this regard that the very name of this particular place could be translated as “all places,” suggesting that what happened there had relevance elsewhere, if not everywhere. Decidedly, Müntzer was not the “Reformer without a Church,” as the title of Eric W. Gritsch’s biography has it.37 Allstedt was another Wittenberg: a tiny place from where a theologian sought to revive the Bible in the expectation that doing so would help to transform Christendom.38 In their provincialism, both places provided ideal grounds for a religious as well as institutional renewal.39 When locating the Reformations in the towns from where they originated, Ulinka Rublack recently reminded us that contemporaries viewed Wittenberg as something of a mud hole.40 Yet if Wittenberg was muddy, how would one describe the place by the name of Allstedt? Just as Luther was identified with Wittenberg, Müntzer assumed the epitheton “from Allstedt.” His persecutors sometimes dubbed him the “Alsteter.”41 After a restless life in the years preceding his arrival, Müntzer found refuge in Allstedt where he married and remained for a period under the radar of secular authorities – something that enabled him to launch a series of religious reforms. Attentiveness to the local and particular circumstances captures a theology in flux regarding genre, authorial self-presentation, addressees, and conceits. Tellingly, Müntzer signed his letters and writings with changing notions of “alliance”: “a servant of the elect of God” (letter to Nicholas Hausmann, 15 June 1521),42 “messenger of Christ” (letter to Melanchthon of 29 March 1522),43 “a willing courier of God” (letter to followers in Halle, 19 March 1523),44 “a disturber of the unbelievers” (letter to Ernst von Mansfeld, 22 September 1523),45 and “a servant of God” (letter to Frederick the Wise, 4 October 1523),46 to pick some prominent examples. Similar variations in self-descriptions characterize

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his publications: “guardian of the soul in Allstedt” (sel werters zu Alstedt; seelwarter zu / Alstedt),47 “a servant of the living God” (ein knecht des lebendigen gottesson)48 and “servant of the word of God” (diener des wordt gottes),49 and “Thomas Müntzer, with the hammer” (Thomas Muntzer / mit dem hammer).50 From writing to writing, the author recalibrated and readjusted his self-descriptions as he took on the role of a prophesying messenger between the divine, a sphere associated with immutability, and the earthly – a sphere deeply marred by historicity and change.51 Not only did Müntzer’s self-descriptions vary over time and with the occasion, but so did the polemical gist of his publications. There has been a tendency to downplay the polemics of his writings among those who champion Müntzer as one of the most learned theologians among the reformers. “The general tone, then, despite some spirited polemic, is one of eminent reasonableness and flexibility, a catholic awareness that the church universal cannot, and need not, insist on uniformity of practice,” writes Matheson, Müntzer’s translator into English, in his introduction to the German Church Service.52 Controversialism is obviously not exclusively Müntzerian; it is a feature common to many, if not most, reform writings. Yet the particular amalgamation of mystical thought and adversarial positioning is anything but ornamental in Müntzer. Rather, it is integral to activating the audience by flourishes of rhetorical enthusiasm. Polemicism is meant to bridge the distance between sender and recipient, enveloping both in an air of proximity. It is therefore part and parcel of strategies that pull the readership into the orbit of the stark oppositions that inundate these writings. Müntzer’s opponents fluctuated over time, with one exception: the Catholic clergy remained a constant antagonist from the moment we get to know him as a publicist. Yet the anticlerical idiom proved tremendously applicable to various groups in the short period between 1521, the year of the Prague Manifesto, and 1525, the year of his execution: the papacy, Luther and his followers, and, finally, the rulers.53 “Resistance against princes and rulers followed from the resistance against the clergy, as soon as the authorities failed to respond to the task assigned to them,” in the words of Hans-Jürgen Goertz.54 We are dealing less with a fixed program or strategy but with foes and allies instantiated on the occasion of speaking and publishing. Its oscillations were predicated on what “every good-hearted person [was able] to see and hear and understand” (ein itlicher guthertziger mensch sehn, hören und vornemen mag), to quote once again from the German

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Evangelical Mass.55 Such occasional publics are but a segment of the widest possible audience, the “world,” which Müntzer invokes regularly. Not accidentally, this word shows up on the title page of the German Church Service.56 The conundrum of Müntzer as the author of a German liturgy touches on the problematic of verbal communication. According to Müntzer, words are unreliable vehicles. As transmitters of messages between humans, they are vulnerable to manipulation and deviation from their original meaning. That he quotes St Matthew, the evangelist who equated “scribes,” “Pharisees,” and “hypocrites” (Mt 23:27), in a 1522 letter from Nordhausen against critics among the reformers is telling, all the more since the dead letter of their words is juxtaposed with the living word (verbi viui).57 As conveyors of the divine, words are insufficient, at least if they serve as the sole basis for the religious message. It is not the mouvance or indeterminacy of the sign that is at issue alone. Rather, the exclusivity of the verbal sign is at stake. Words cannot and should not operate in a vacuum.58 As signs, words are in need of an embodied truth beyond the verbal medium: experience, life, and spirit are among the concepts regularly adduced to circumscribe this extra-verbal dimension necessary to make words resonate with the conditions in which they are uttered. The truth about words then is that we cannot do without them. But they are not the whole story either. Scepticism regarding words as sole mediators of the Christian message can be traced back to St Paul, “the saintly messenger of God” (der heylge bote Gottes), according to Müntzer’s German Church Service,59 or the “media and semiotic specialist” among the apostles, in the words of Manfred Schneider.60 A paradox was already at work with this disciple of Jesus who disseminated a theology of the Holy Ghost through the medium of letters written in order to unite communities of early Christians scattered throughout the Mediterranean. The Pentecostal events when the apostles were infused with the divine spirit were themselves embedded in a complex web of inspirations of which the Holy Ghost was only one. The stark opposition Paul elaborated between the literal-mindedness of the Jewish covenant and a Christian spirit of community, with Pentecost serving as the archetype of transmission, proved a perfect model for Müntzer. This, among other reasons, may be why St Paul is referenced frequently in the prefaces to the German Church Service and the German Evangelical Mass.61 The contingencies and pitfalls of communication through words do not entail a laissez-faire attitude towards words, however. “I will back up

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all I have said from the Scriptures, from the order of creation, from experience, and from the clear [open] word of God” (Si volueritis, omnia mea scripturis, ordine, experientia apertoque verbo Dei roborabo), Müntzer concludes his letter to Melanchthon.62 One may well note the concatenation of frames of reference that starts from scripture to proceed to other registers such as creation63 and experience in order to end with the vivum verbum. On the contrary, accuracy of transmission warranted considerable attention, as is evident in the preface to the German Evangelical Mass. Importantly, decay in the administration of Holy Writ reflected the general decline that set in with the early history of the church.64 There is little evidence, however, that Müntzer thought an apostolic standard could be restored with immediate effect. What the elect were called upon to do was rather to embark on a path towards “improvement” (besserung).65 This need for gradual change, among other reasons, is what inspired Müntzer to set into motion liturgical reforms in Allstedt. Like all things earthly, languages for Müntzer are subject to historic change. In fact, he thought both linguistic decay and improvement possible. A contrast between different and distant time periods served Müntzer to characterize the confluence of forces in his own situation and time. When Italian and French monks – those “pious and goodhearted fathers” (frommen, gutherzigen veeter [sic])66 – converted the Germans of the past, the vernacular, “the German language” (die Deutzsche sprache),67 lacked the well-structured form needed to unify Christianity. Six hundred or so years later (to use Müntzer’s chronology), the situation had changed. Through hundreds of years of abuse, Latin had become associated with magic. This is why German offered itself as a linguistic medium ready for liturgical edification, education, and overall betterment. That it appeared as an idiom supposedly untouched by the impurities of church traditions recommended its use in the context of this intended apostolic restoration – an approach to language akin to that of Valentin Ickelsamer, Sebastian Franck, Simon Roth, and other sixteenth-century reformers of language who saw in the vernacular a linguistic vehicle of the greatest spiritual potential. Yet the state of German, a language predictably characterized as lacking in grammatical structure, also raised questions about its reliability as a bearer of messages.68 Sixteenth-century thought on language was often expressed through stark oppositions. With regard to the conventional contrast between translating word by word and translating meaning by meaning, a formula first

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expressed in German by the fifteenth-century humanist and translator Heinrich Steinhöwel, Müntzer chose to describe his German psalms as translated “more according to the meaning than according to the words” (mehr nach dem sinne dan nach den worten).69 Importantly, though, he transcended this binary through introducing a third player, the Holy Ghost, into the scene of translation: “Drumb hab ich zur besserung [!] nach der Deutschen art und musterung, ydoch in unvorrugklicher geheym des heyligen geists vordolmatzscht die psalmen.”70 In order to convey the meaning of this passage, Matheson translates it as follows: “I [Thomas Müntzer] have translated the Psalms in accordance with German style and form but under the intimate and direct leading of the holy spirit.”71 His phrasing captures competently the immediate presence of the Holy Ghost with its permanence, certainty of truth, and immanence. Yet this same wording excises, for reasons of clarity, the term “geheim” and its many associations – associations that, as I want to argue in the remainder of this chapter, prove relevant for our understanding of Müntzer’s theory of media of the divine.

III. The noun “geheim” translates the Latin mysterium or “mystery.” The term invokes the sensus mysticus or spiritualis and therefore the model of scriptural interpretation, as it had informed readings of the Bible since Clemens of Alexandria (c. 200 AD). The sensus litteralis, by implication, can be infused with the workings of the Holy Ghost. Müntzer apparently seeks to tear down the wall that supposedly kept these realms separate, creating a new space where literal-mindedness and spirit-mindedness could mingle. This move addresses a burning issue with regard to medieval interpretations of the Bible, namely, the rift felt to exist between the sensus litteralis on the one hand and the spiritual or mystical senses on the other. “The relationship between ‘littera’ and ‘spiritus’” was more “contentious” in the history of Bible interpretation and translation than would appear from Müntzer’s formulation.72 Not every theologian would have agreed with Jean Gerson’s De sensu litterali sacrae Scripturae (Of the Literal Sense of Holy Writ) – a treatise arguing that the “Church alone had the power to determine the literal sense.”73 Christian exegetes had long “wished to avoid association with the tendency in pagan and oriental religions to emphasise language as an arcane mystery available only to initiates.”74 Yet what constituted the literal sense was particularly contentious with

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regard to the psalms. Their medieval commentators (Alcuin, the School of St Victor, Nicholas of Lyra, etc.) were much concerned with explicating their often-obscure literal meanings. Similarly, in his Operationes in Psalmos of 1519–21, Luther took conventional biblical exegetes to task for having divided the word of God into the four senses of scripture, advocating instead the divine text as one and indivisible.75 Müntzer responds to these central questions in biblical exegesis by insisting on a revelation of the deeper senses of scripture. In his writings, “geheim” conjures up among readers its opposite, aperture. Müntzer’s concept of translation “creates a nexus of meanings around the idea of ‘openness,’”76 to use a formula Rita Copeland once coined regarding stances among English religious dissenters of the fifteenth century. The literal sense of the psalms is recast as a “site of openness” for the spiritual.77 It is certainly no accident that Müntzer’s Order and Explanation commences with the word “offenbarlich” or openly (with the association of revelation) to then contrast such openness in conducting a church service with the Catholic “mumbo-jumbo.”78 In fact, every veiling of meaning is considered a distortion of the truth. The followers of John Wycliffe known as Lollards, for instance, heralded English as a linguistic medium that was “openere” than Latin.79 Similarly, Müntzer associates German with openness. This association amounts to a turn against theologians as gatekeepers who prevented the different senses of scripture from interpenetrating – to the detriment of Christianity. Ultimately, this complex also motivated Müntzer’s barb against Luther as Dr Liar (Dr Lügner). In this well-aimed expression, he turned the link on its head that proLutheran propaganda had forged between Luther’s last name and the meaning of “luter,” Early New High German for “lauter,” as pure, candid, and honest.80 At the core of this German liturgy then lies a gesture of unveiling and a readiness to settle into a permanent translation. This reordering of distinctions and hierarchical relations echoes Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation): “We ought not to allow the spirit of liberty – to use St Paul’s term – to be frightened away by pronouncements confabricated by the popes … We ought to apply that understanding of the Scriptures which we possess as believers, and constrain the Romanists to follow, not their own interpretation, but that which is in fact the better.”81 To be sure, Luther’s early theory of translation is strikingly close to that of Müntzer. In the preface to his 1521 translation of the Magnificat – Mary’s prayer from the gospel according to St Luke – he states: “For nobody can truly understand God

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or God’s word, if he has not received it without intermediary from the Holy Spirit” (Denn es mag niemant got noch gottes wort recht vorstehen, er habs denn on mittel von dem heyligen geyst ).82 What is more, Luther explicitly grounds his edition in the “experience” (erfarung ) and “school” of the Holy Spirit (ynn seiner eygenen schule) – choices of concepts that, even if they are warranted by the unassailable stature of Mary as a witness of Christ’s passion and the inclusion of her prayer in the New Testament, further underline Luther’s similarity to Müntzer’s notion of translation.83 In a similar vein, Luther professes to his princely protector, Elector Frederick the Wise, in a letter of March 1522: “I received the Gospels not from man but solely from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ” (ich das Euangelium nicht von Menschen, sondern allein durch unsern Herrn Jesum Christum habe). He says he could even call himself Christ’s “servant and his Evangelist” (einen knecht und Euangelisten) – note the resonance with Galatians 1:10, St Paul’s epistle that also is a source for Müntzer’s self-descriptions.84 Yet he was Christ’s servant and Evangelist only in the irrealis, the grammatical mode in which he presents himself as such in this letter. In this passage, Luther follows the lead of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, who conceptualized the sensus litteralis as an arena “infused by the divine Spirit” in his Quincuplex Psalterium of 1509.85 While rejecting the descriptor for himself, Lefèvre suggested that only a prophet can fully exhaust the meaning of the Psalms. Luther readily espoused both Lefèvre’s spiritual approach to the sensus litteralis and his spirit of modesty. What is more, Luther expressed this particular approach to translation in a letter addressed to an exclusive addressee, but not in print publications. By contrast, the Luther of the later Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (Open Letter on Translating, 1530) shunned naming the Holy Ghost or Jesus Christ as a direct force in his translating the Bible. This is to be understood as a result of the spirited critique Luther increasingly mounted of what, after the events of 1525, he viewed polemically as spiritualism. In addition, however, claims about someone having successfully accessed the realm of spiritual immediacy inevitably reach the reader or listener in the mediated form of verbal statements. Due to these words’ removal from the scene of immediacy, they are by their very nature subject to questions or doubts. Yet the visual evocations of Luther as translator of the Bible occasionally sent a message to the reading public that was different from his cautious public utterances about his practice as a translator. By drawing on a well-known iconography, a Wittenberg woodcut showed Luther in his study as a new St Jerome, enlightened by none other than the Holy Spirit.86

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The hortus conclusus of what passed as theology among the “Romanists” with their wrong-headed sophistication, learnedness, and deception was in need of someone to unlock gates of signification that, if we follow Müntzer, had separated the mystical from the literal realm of meaning since the time of the apostles. This intention points to yet another semantic level operative in Müntzer’s use of the term “geheim,” namely, the suggested personal familiarity of the fidus interpres with the Holy Ghost; the reliability of this interpres rests in his function as mediator between the spirit and the letter, between the Holy Ghost and the Christian flock, between the inner and the outer man. Tellingly, “in der geheim” is a much-used formula in the language of chanceries for familiarity, intimacy, and nearness, drawing on the resonance between this word and a home. The metaphors of vassalage and servitude Müntzer, the servant (familiaris), introduced to characterize his role as God’s spokesperson, therefore bespeak a triangulated scenario in which the actualization of the spirit is predicated on a powerful, learned, and versatile messenger. Accordingly, in March of 1523, Müntzer signed a letter with “eyn williger bottenleuffer Gots” (a willing messenger of God).87 It is consistent with this quasi-charismatic understanding of transmission, if in the version of Psalm 67 (68) published in Müntzer’s German Church Service, he deviated from Luther’s 1521 translation of this psalm, changing Luther’s word choice bottschaften or “messages” into bothen or “messengers,” thus stressing the role of individuals in salvation history, individuals like himself.88 Whereas the divine is marked by permanence in eternity, according to Müntzer, the human sphere of communication is irreparably riven by ruptures, decay, and risks. Forms of non-verbal exchange therefore need to complement messages mediated verbally. A 1524 treatise presented the gaze as if it were entirely unaffected by loss in transmission. Visual communication connotes an effective transfer of knowledge from master to student as an ideal mode associated with fullness, exhaustiveness, and a purity of exchange: “a diligent pupil of his master, constantly and ardently watching all that he does, seeking to be found conformable to him in every respect, to the best of his ability” (ein emsiger Schüler seins Meisters, welchen er mit ungespartem Vleis allenthalben ansicht, uf das er im möge nach seinem Mass in allem Muster vergleicht werden).89 Müntzer avoids the traditional image of an imprint in wax in this context, the “alien power” (imperium alienum), an expression Jacques Sadolet once used to describe the hold a teacher has over his pupil.90 By contrast, visual transfer of knowledge invokes the freedom of the “elect friend of God” in the pursuit of the living word.

Plate 1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther Preaches Before the Crucifix (Reformation Altarpiece). [bpk, Berlin / Stadtkirche, Wittenberg / Art Resource, NY]

Plate 2 Pieter Jansz Saenredam, St. Katherine’s Church, Utrecht. [National Trust Photo Library / Upton House / Christopher Hurst / Art Resource, NY]

Plate 3 Colonial gateway into the courtyard of the Dominican Church of San Juan Bautista Coyoacan. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Plate 4 Command that these things be borne by the hands of thy holy angel to altar on high (Detail from the colonial gateway, plate 3). Photograph courtesy of the author.

Plate 5 Facade sculpture above the doorway of the Convent church of San Francisco, Arequipa. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Plate 6 Detail above side doorway of Church of Santa Marta, Arequipa. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Plate 7 Detail from the facade of the Convent church of San Francisco, Arequipa. Note the association between the Eucharist and the sun. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Plate 8 Detail of the facade of the Church of Santo Domingo in La Paz. The bird of paradise (a parrot) is in the top left and the angel in the bottom right hand corner. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Plate 9 Jodocus Hondius, Typus Totius Orbis Terrarum (1596–97). [Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sammlung Woldan, Sig. K-V(Bl): WE 49]

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A passage from Genesis serves to capture communicative scenarios presented as antithetical: the black raven and the dove sent from Noah’s ark to survey the terrain during the flood (Genesis 8:7). This polemically tinged allegory juxtaposes the frailty of communication with communication in its most perfect form. Suspended between the divine and the human sphere, the dove images the ascent of the mystical I, its wings turned into gold, while the black raven was never seen again. Famously, Müntzer later used this image to defame Luther with his black cowl in the Hochverursachte Schutzrede (Vindication and Refutation) while applying the imagery of the dove to himself.91 But the same scenario, as referenced in Psalm 67 (68), already appeared in the German Church Service as part of the liturgy for Pentecost in Luther’s translation – which underlines once more the centrality of scenarios of communication for Müntzer.92 The celebration of the Mass in Allstedt then can be understood as giving ritual form to a transmission between the messenger of God and the recipients of his message: his flock and, by extension, Christianity as a whole. This church ritual marks the moment of exchange where God’s messenger confronts the Christian collective, making spiritual truths known to the congregation. Again, the term geheim is key in characterizing this ritual. Importantly, geheim Gotis is what Müntzer calls the Mass.93 In late medieval German, the term “geheimnus” was occasionally used for the Eucharistic gifts; the same word even translates both sacramentum and mysterium – terms used synonymously to describe the Mass on the eve of the Reformation. But the term “geheim Gotis” for the Mass is, as far as I can see, Müntzer’s own coinage. It marks the move away from medieval interpretations of the Mass as sacrifice to the new understanding of Mass as the locus of an encounter with the divine. We have come full circle. I have offered the term “geheim” or secrecy in its multiple meanings as a key to the paradox with which I started, Müntzer’s efforts in publishing a German liturgy. What is more, I have used this verbal key to unlock some of the tensions inherent in the communicative scenarios at the core of Müntzer’s theology. Mediality and its transcendence thus emerge as a fundamental concern for Müntzer, a theology much centred on overcoming obstacles to transmissions of the divine message. His writings are meant to invoke and set into motion a third – a third suspended between the overlapping antithetical structures and oppositions that pervade Müntzer’s texts. As an author, Müntzer mustered an army of rhetorical helpers, scriptural passages, and theological concepts to enliven the fixity of the verbal message and activate processes of embodied signification beyond the materiality of the

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sign. If Christian Kiening approximates media as “a formal, dynamic in-between” – a definition that relieves media of the weight of materiality while cross-fertilizing modern media theory with medieval significations – then this term also approximates and, what is more, anchors Müntzer’s theology of communication at the seams of the divine and the earthly, as evident in his liturgy.94 In closing, we can say with some confidence that Gottschalk had it wrong when he took the Allstedter to task for his “seditious and perverse doctrines.” Müntzer’s is a theology on the move that revolves around revelations in time and through occasions. It may in fact be easier to state what Müntzer’s theology is not than to say what it is. In that sense, my own analysis follows Müntzer’s writings to the letter – literally.

NOTES 1 Thomas Müntzer, Deutsch Euangelisch Messze (Alstedt: n.p., 1524). The Herzog August Bibliothek owns the copy (call number K 263.4° Helmst., 10) as well as other volumes from Oldenstadt’s library. See Helmar Härtel, “Notabene Heyno Gottschalk bei der Lektüre: Ein Oldenstädter Abt zwischen Reform und Reformation,” Wolfenbütteler Ausstellung “Kloster und Reform” (1999): 1–8; Sven Limbeck, “Thomas Müntzers Gottesdienst in deutscher Sprache,” in “verklingend und ewig”: Tausend Jahre Musikgedächtnis 800–1800, ed. Susanne Rode-Breymann and Sven Limbeck (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011), 196–7. I want to express my gratitude to Felix Heinzer and Claudius Sieber-Lehmann for having generously assisted me in deciphering this note. 2 Martin Luther, “Letter to Johann Rühel” (30 May 1525), in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel, vol. 3 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1933), no. 877, 516. Luther varied a formula Rühel, the letter’s addressee, had offered in a letter of 21 May where he speaks of the “satan in” Müntzer (ibid., no. 873, 505). On images of Müntzer, see Hans-Jürgen Goertz, “Verzerrte Bilder: Thomas Müntzer in Kunst und Literatur,” in Der Aquädukt 1763–1988: Ein Almanach aus dem Verlag C. H. Beck im 225. Jahr seines Bestehens (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 198–207; Goertz, Thomas Müntzer: Mystiker – Apokalyptiker – Revolutionär (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 15–20. 3 Martin Luther, “Letter to Georg Spalatin” (24 January 1528), in Briefwechsel, vol. 4 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1933), no. 1212, 355. 4 Müntzer’s demise in the memoria of Anabaptists is testified, among other documents, by an anthology of one hundred drawings (of which fourteen

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treat Müntzer) with accompanying texts from the seventeenth century. See Günter Vogler, Thomas Müntzer in einer Bildergeschichte: Eine kulturhistorische Dokumentation ([Gütersloh:] Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2010), 102f. Particularly explicit in this regard is “Of Counterfeit Faith” in Thomas Müntzer, Schriften und Briefe: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Günther Franz, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 33 (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1968), 218–24, in the following as Müntzer, Schriften. The new edition which is in preparation at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig (Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig) under the editorship of Helmar Junghans has yet to publish the volume that will contain Müntzer’s writings. Bernhard Lohse, Thomas Müntzer in neuer Sicht: Müntzer im Licht der neueren Forschung und die Frage nach dem Ansatz seiner Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991). See Rudolf Bentzinger, “Thomas Müntzer und die deutsche Sprache,” in Schriften, Liturgische Texte, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Bentzinger and Siegfried Hoyer (Berlin: Union, 1990), 300. Edmund Leach, “Genesis as Myth,” in Genesis as Myth and other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 10. Thomas Müntzer, Schriften, 25–215. Thomas Müntzer, The Collected Works, trans. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 162, in the following as Müntzer, Works. On earlier attempts to reform service and the Mass, see Hans-Christian Drömann, “Das Abendmahl nach den deutschen Messen vor Martin Luther,” in Die Abendmahlsliturgie der Reformationskirchen im 16./17. Jahrhundert, ed. Irmgard Pahl (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1983), 7–13. The liturgies of the Mass by Andreas Karlstadt and Kaspar Kantz, listed as earlier than Müntzer, were not published as a missal for the congregation, however. This seems to have been Müntzer’s innovation. See also the introduction to Martin Luther, “Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdiensts. 1526,” in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Schriften, vol. 19 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1897), 44–113. “Thomas Müntzer an Philipp Melanchthon” (29 March 1522), in Thomas Müntzer, Briefwechsel, ed. Siegfried Bräuer and Manfred Koch (Leipzig: Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 127–39. See also “Thomas Müntzer an Martin Luther” (9 July 1523), in ibid., 160–72. According to Franz in Müntzer, Schriften, 27, this is the case with Psalms 51, 67, and 110. See the excellent article by Edward Henry Lauer, “Luther’s Translations of the Psalms in 1523–24,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 14 (1915); 1–34. See also Artur Göser, Kirche und Lied: Der Hymnus

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15 16

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18 19

20

21 22 23 24

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“Veni redemptor gentium” bei Müntzer und Luther; Eine ideologiekritische Studie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). Müntzer, “Das Prager Manifest,” in Schriften, 491–511. Franz edited three versions of The Prague Manifesto: a short German, a long German, and a Latin text. (Since the Czech translation is not by Müntzer, it was not included in the edition.) Müntzer, Works, 162. Tom Scott, Thomas Müntzer: Theology and Revolution in the German Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 49. Siegfried Bräuer speaks of “less than 1000” inhabitants; see his introduction to Thomas Müntzer, Deutsche evangelische Messe 1524 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1988), 8. Müntzer reiterates his success in Hochverursachte Schutzrede. See Müntzer, Schriften, 333: “alle strasse vol leüte waren von allen orten, anzuhören, wie das ampt, die biblien zu singen und zu predigen, zu Alstedt angerichtet wart.” “Thomas Müntzer an Schosser, Rat und Gemeinde zu Allstedt” (15 August 1524), in Briefwechsel, 344. Quellen zu Thomas Müntzer, ed. Wieland Held and Siegfried Hoyer (Leipzig: Verlag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 2004), 202: “ehr … leret offentlich, also das sehr viel volckes im allenthalben nach lieff, sein lehr war von der eusserlichen freyheit wieder die obrigkeit und den adel, verteutzschte die lateinischen responsorien, messe und ander gesenge, ließ auch deutzsche mesbucher schreiben und trucken, wie ir allhie etliche noch vorhanden gewesen vor wenig jahren.” According to Franz in Müntzer, Schriften, 25: “Druck von Nikolaus Widemar in Eilenburg, wohl für das Osterfest 1523 verfasst und bald danach in Druck gegeben.” See also Bräuer in Müntzer, Deutsche evangelische Messe 1524, 11. Müntzer, Works, 166; Schriften, 25. Müntzer, Works, 180; Schriften, 163. Müntzer, Schriften, 161 (not included in Works). Müntzer, Works, 180; Schriften, 163: “Derhalben ist meine ernstliche wolmaynung noch diesen heutigen tag, der armen zurfallenden christenheyt also zu helffen mit Deutschen ampten, es sey messen, metten oder vesper, das ein itlicher guthertziger mensch sehn, hören und vornemen mag.” See Susan Karant-Nunn’s contribution to this volume. Claire Cross and P.S. Barnwell, “The Mass in Its Urban Setting,” in Mass and Parish in Late Medieval England: The Use of York, ed. P.S. Barnwell, Claire Cross, and Ann Rycraft (Reading: Spire Books, 2005), 13. See also John

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28 29

30 31

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Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700,” Past & Present 100 (1983): 29–61; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400 – c. 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 91–130. Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1–43; Ann W. Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Müntzer, Schriften, 165–80. Jonathan Wills, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 46–51. Wills deftly explicates Catholic practice and the changes the Reformation brought about in Reformation England. See also Bräuer, Deutsche Evangelische Messe; Ernst Koch, “Das Sakramentsverständnis Thomas Müntzers,” in Der Theologe Thomas Müntzer: Untersuchungenzu seiner Entwicklung und Lehre, ed. Siegfried Bräuer and Helmar Junghans (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 129–55. For a concise introduction to Müntzer’s liturgy in the context of Lutheran church music, see Helga Robinson-Hammerstein, “The Lutheran Reformation and its Music,” in The Transmission of Ideas in the Lutheran Reformation, ed. H. Robinson-Hammerstein (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 141–71, here 147–51. Luther, “Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdiensts,” in Schriften, vol. 19 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1897), 75. Müntzer, Works, 181; Schriften, 164: “Dann ich eynem itzlichen solchs zu vorkürtzen oder vorlengen selbs noch seiner gelegenheyt wil heym gestellt haben. Desgleichen mit den gesengen, es sey et in terra [Gloria] oder patrem [Pater noster], zu zeyten vordrißlich seint von wegen des vielen gedöns, mag ein jeder nemen odder nachlassen, wie es sich fugen wil, und nit das ich domit wil dem bepstischen grewel erhalten oder wider auffrichten.” Adolph Franz, Die Messe im deutschen Mittelalter: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Liturgie und des religiösen Volkslebens (Freiburg i.Br.: Herdersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1902), 292–330; Peter Wagner, Geschichte der Messe, Part 1: Bis 1600 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1963); Joseph A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. Francis A. Brunner (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1961), 96–100. This is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that, after having arrived in Allstedt, he had started his publication with the appropriate Easter liturgy.

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34 Linda Phyllis Austern, Karid Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis, introduction to Psalms in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 3. 35 Lauer, “Luther’s Translations,” 34. 36 Müntzer, Schriften, 164; Works, 181 (quoted above). In the same context of a reform of church service, Luther also embraced an occasionalist approach and the term “gelegenheyt”; see Martin Luther, “Von Ordnung Gottesdiensts in der Gemeine.1523,” in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Schriften, vol. 12 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1891), 31–7, here 37. 37 Eric W. Gritsch, Reformer without a Church: The Life and Thought of Thomas Müntzer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). 38 One indicator of this is the number of letters Müntzer wrote from Allstedt. The recent publication of his Briefwechsel has no fewer than twenty-nine letters written during his stay. See Müntzer, Briefwechsel, 160–341. 39 Goertz, Thomas Müntzer, 88–117. 40 Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10. 41 Quellen zu Thomas Müntzer, 201f., 220. 42 Müntzer, Works, 34; Briefwechsel, 94; Schriften, 371: “servus electorum dei.” 43 Müntzer, Works, 46; Briefwechsel, 137: “Thomas Muntzer, nuntius Christi”; Schriften, 380. 44 Müntzer, Works, 54; Briefwechsel, 157: “eyn williger botenleuffer Gots”; Schriften, 388. 45 Müntzer, Works, 67; Briefwechsel, 199: “eyn verstorer der vnglaubigen”; Schriften, 394. 46 Müntzer, Works, 70; Briefwechsel, 206: “eyn knecht Gots”; Schriften, 397. 47 Müntzer, “Protestation or Proposition,” in Works, 225; “Von dem gedichteten glauben,” in Schriften, 218. 48 Müntzer, “Protestation or Proposition,” in Works, 188; “Protestation oder Erbietung,” in Schriften, 225. 49 Müntzer, “Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel,” in Works, 230; “Auslegung des Unterschieds Danielis,” in Schriften, 242. 50 Müntzer, “A Manifest Exposé of False Faith,” in Works, 260; “Ausgetrückte Entblößung,” in Schriften, 267. The biblical passage to have inspired this descriptor is probably Isaiah 41:7. 51 See Jonathan Green, Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450–1550 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), esp. chap. 1. 52 Müntzer, Works, 164. Hans-Jürgen Goertz recently advocated accepting the strong anticlerical polemic “as the intellectual milieu within which Müntzer came to his basic Reformation mindset, and it was the material that oriented his actions on behalf of the Reformation.” See Goertz, “Müntzer,

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54 55 56 57

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59 60

61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

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Karlstadt and the Reformation of the Commoners, 1521–1525,” in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700, ed. John D. Roth and James Stayer (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1–44, here 25. On Müntzer’s understanding of the term clergy, see Hans J. Hillerbrand’s insightful remarks. See his “Thomas Müntzer’s Prague Manifesto,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 441–7, here 442f. Goertz, “Müntzer, Karlstadt and the Reformation,” 31. Müntzer, Works, 180; Schriften, 163. Müntzer, Works, 166; Schriften, 25. Müntzer, Works, 51 (Letter of 14 July 1522 to an unknown recipient); “Thomas Müntzer an einen ungenannten Kritiker,” Briefwechsel, 139–41, here 140. The dense web of mostly Biblical quotations and allusions that are woven into the rhetorical fabric of Müntzer’s writings instantiate a paradoxical relation to the word itself. Müntzer, Schriften, 107. See also the reference to St Paul in the preface to the German Evangelical Mass; see Müntzer, Schriften, 161. Manfred Schneider, “Luther with McLuhan,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198–215, here 205. Müntzer, Schriften, 161–5; Works, 166–8, 180–2. Müntzer, Works, 46. See Müntzer, Briefwechsel, 137. This is my attempt to render ordo in this context – a term that is a matter of debate among scholars of Müntzer. Müntzer, Schriften, 161. Müntzer, Schriften, 161 and 162 (the verb “to improve” appears several times). A view of historical developments as decay is thus complemented with a look forward. Müntzer, Schriften, 161. Ibid. Ibid., 161f. Ibid., 162. See Werner Schwarz, Schriften zur Bibelübersetzung und mittelalterlichen Űbersetzungstheorie, Vestigia Bibliae 7 (1985). Müntzer, Schriften, 162. Müntzer, Works, 168. Brian Cummings, “Literally Speaking, or, the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan,” Paragraph 21 (1998): 200–26, here 211. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 210.

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75 Martin Luther, Operationes in Psalmos, in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Schriften, vol. 5 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1892), 644 and passim. In his own psalm translations and commentaries, Luther observed a different mode of interpretation, as can be gleaned from “Deutsche Auslegung des 67. (68.) Psalms” [1521], in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Schriften, vol. 8 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1889), 1–35. 76 Rita Copeland, “Rhetoric and the Politics of the Literal Sense in Medieval Literary Theory: Aquinas, Wyclif, and the Lollards,” in Interpretation: Medieval and Modern, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), 1–24, here 19. 77 Ibid., 20. 78 Müntzer, Schriften, 208; Works, 170. 79 Copeland, “Rhetoric and the Politics of the Literal Sense,” 19. 80 Müntzer, “Hochverursachte Schutzrede,” in Schriften, 322–43. “Doctor lügner” appears eight times in this treatise (327, 329, 331, 332, 333, 334, 342). See Müntzer, “Vindication and Refutation,” in Works, 324–50. Cf. Ingo Warnke, Wörterbuch zu Thomas Müntzers deutschen Schriften und Briefen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 204. 81 Martin Luther, Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1961), 414; Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Schriften, vol. 6 (Weimar: Böhlau 1888), 412: “... sollen wir mutig und frey werden, unnd den geyst der freyheit [wie yhn Paulus nennet] nit lassen mit ertichten wortten der Bepst abschrecken, sondern frisch hyndurch allis … nach unserm gleubigen vorstand der schrifft richten, und sie zwingen zufolgen dem bessern unnd nit yhrem eigen vorstand.” 82 Luther, “Das Magnificat verdeutschet und ausgelegt,” in Schriften, vol. 7 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1897), 546. The translation and emphasis are my own. 83 Ibid. 84 Luther, Briefwechsel, vol. 2 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1913), 455. 85 Schwarz, Schriften, 174. 86 Stephan Füssel, The Book of Books: The Luther Bible of 1534; A CulturalHistorical Introduction (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 34; Das Neuwe Testament Mar. Luthers, printed in Wittenberg 1530/31 (Göttingen: Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek). 87 “Thomas Müntzer to his followers in Halle,” letter of 19 March 1523, in Briefwechsel, 157. Müntzer used this self-description in Latin first in the aforementioned letter to Melanchthon: “nuntius Christi.” 88 Müntzer, Schriften, 140; cf. Luther, “Deutsche Auslegung,” 31. 89 Müntzer, “Of Counterfeit Faith,” Works, 214; “Von dem gedichteten Glauben,” in Schriften, 218.

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Jacques Sadolet, De liberis recte instituendis (Lyon: Seb. Gryphius, 1535), 14. Müntzer, “Hochverursachte Schutzrede,” in Schriften, 327. Müntzer, “Deutsches Kirchenamt,” in Schriften, 139. Müntzer, “Ordnung und Berechnung,” in Schriften, 208, 211. Christian Kiening, “Medialität in mediävistischer Perspektive,” Poetica 39 (2007): 285–352, here 332.

chapter five

“Sing unto the Lord”1: An Anthropology of Singing and Not-Singing in the Late Reformation Era S U S A N C . K A R A N T- N U N N

If I ascend to the proverbial high mountain and survey scholarly developments over the last two generations, I must identify this volume on modes and means of communication as a subset of the grand social, feminist, and theoretical enterprise that historians and others engaged in from at least 1968. In contemplating the “new educational history” in 1971, the prominent British historian Asa Briggs wrote, The history of ideas is beginning to come into its own, not merely the history of “great thinkers” but the history of chains of ideas and their mode of communication through different “media,” the shifting relationships between “minority” and “mass” communication, the significance of “language” and the forms of “control.”2

Not with Marshall McLuhan but rather with Lawrence Stone and Elizabeth Eisenstein in mind, he refers to the “recent ‘communications revolution.’”3 In the intervening two generations, however, we have added to and honed the sources that bear a message to the human awareness, or even sub-awareness. Like Dorothy arriving in Oz, we have emerged into a Technicolor world of media that includes visual and aural semiotics, symbolic language, ritual as the involver of bodies, and deliberately staged sounds and smells. Early modern people received signals from all sides and interpreted these within a familiar cultural matrix. This essay will break off one small piece of the communicative devices of the Lutheran Reformation – one form of effort to alter the mindset of the ordinary people whom the new ecclesiastical authorities attempted to mould into the believing Christians they desired. It will employ ethnographic perspectives in examining congregational singing in the

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Reformation era. Surely as regards music in the German Reformation, Rebecca Wagner Oettinger’s book Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation stands as a monument in the shift from cataloguing hymns, lyrics, and hymnbooks to studying them within a dynamic social and cultural context, one that involves transactions of power and dominant ideology.4 Oettinger provides one framework within which I ask whether it is not helpful to our present collective enquiry into early modern communication if we examine what the singing of parishioners brought to the Reformation and why all but one (Ulrich Zwingli) of the leaders of this significant movement to reform the practice of European Christianity quickly added vocal music to the varied means that they simultaneously tapped in order to persuade5 the laity to accept their views. Both indoctrination and persuasion were necessary, and, as we now realize, entailed a measure of compulsion. I draw some inspiration from the governing concepts of Päivikki Suojanen in Finnish Folk Hymn Singing: Study in Music Anthropology.6 Not her mathematical formulations, but rather her close observation of singers, song, and singing derive from an ethnographic perspective that has not yet been fully exploited in studying communication in early modern ecclesiastical contexts. Yet by now we possess sufficient knowledge of both times and people to speculate profitably along similar lines. I am inspired to return to the theme of hymn-singing by the recurrence in church visitation records of the query, “Do the people sing the hymns?” as well as the occasional notation, “The people will not sing.”7 Evidently, the refusal to sing is sufficiently problematic that parish visitation committees are obligated to ask in every parish, in the second half of the seventeenth century in Saxony, “Whether the listeners also diligently sing the hymns in church.”8 Why did some people not join in as desired?9 Along with Oettinger, Joseph Herl affords an invaluable critique of the pious assumption that the Lutheran Reformation ushered in a new era – one that allegedly contrasted markedly with Catholic liturgical practice – of joyous congregational singing.10 Herl’s main point is that, although practice throughout German-speaking lands was very diverse, congregational singing was not widely prescribed, much less inculcated, and that songbooks were intended more for choirs of schoolboys than for the general laity. The laity were more observers than participants. They had ordinarily been such in Catholic Masses, where some musically inclined souls might have sung along if they wished. As popular a modern compilation as The Oxford Book of Carols makes it clear in its notations that song did exist in the Late Middle Ages. But it does not shed even

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oblique light on the problem of whether, outside of those churches run by monks, friars, and canons – all of whom followed a rule that was likely to obligate them to sing the canonical hours – the laity shared in the liturgy administered by the secular priesthood. Even in those churches, the Mass was likely to be sung, but it is unclear to what degree ordinary partakers sang along. It is likely that they did this only to a limited degree. In the late medieval Catholic scheme, apart from such acts as kneeling and making the sign of the cross, lay attendants at Mass were observers of the Eucharistic drama. Herl agrees that we need to know more than we presently do about the extent of lay singing in the years before the Reformation, especially before Martin Luther wrote his introduction to Johann Walter’s hymnbook of 1524.11 Indeed, whether treating pre- or post-Reformation practice based on his scrutiny of a paucity of direct references to congregational involvement in the liturgy, Herl closely studies the words of hymnbook prefaces, treatises, ecclesiastical ordinances, and visitation protocols and comes away with a far less sanguine conclusion than, say, Christopher Boyd Brown in Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation.12 In Wittenberg itself in the first two territorially complete visitations, 1528 and 1533, the scheme laid down for worship suggests letting clergy and choir temporarily carry more of the weight of song, “until the people become accustomed to joining in the singing of the Te Deum.”13 Late medieval laypeople sang something akin to carols and other clearly secular if not bawdy song in venues such as the tavern. Wassailing would fit into this category. Christmas was a major feastday, one especially of making merry through coming together and eating and drinking more than usual. Christmas was, however, only one holiday, and the vocal participation of ordinary people in the liturgy remains nebulous.14 The Germans were a musical and poetic people. Long, complex doggerel issued from frolicsome or oppositional imaginations within hours of an impelling event. The visitation protocols remark with frequency on Schandlieder, sung in public houses or before the target citizens’ doors, casting their pointed aspersions in sexual or excremental terms. There was, thus, no inherent reason why early Lutherans, or Evangelicals as Luther preferred his followers to be called, should have resisted singing hymns. Herl offers possible explanations such as people’s identification of the clergy with the prerogative of singing the liturgy. The Reformers retained this Catholic responsibility within their own liturgical patterns. Luther, the Augustinian friar, may simply have

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transferred from the monastic setting to the city church the practice with which he himself was intimately familiar, and which, we are told, so appealed to his musical nature. If this is true, then his adoption of liturgical singing for public celebrations, and especially if it was made obligatory, represents one more way in which Bernd Moeller was correct in characterizing the Reformation as a neues Mönchtum.15 Roland Bainton surely helped to disseminate the view that congregations sang from the beginning of the Reformation; he tells of rehearsals that “were set during the week for the entire congregation.” “Luther’s people,” he says, “learned to sing.”16 At the personal, individual level, the Luther who finally knew that God loved him saw in song a way to rejoice in his newfound liberty from the Mosaic law and to express heartfelt praise to his heavenly Father. We must accept his sincerity when he preaches on Psalm 33: Sing to the Lord a new song; sing unto the Lord, all the earth! For God has made our hearts and moods joyful by means of His dear Son, whom he has given for us for redemption from sin, death and the devil. Whoever earnestly believes this cannot cease but must sing and speak of it joyfully, so that others, too, hear it and come to believe.17

Herl would disagree with Bainton even though possibly accepting Luther’s disposition. Likewise, at the conscious level, Luther saw in hymns that were regularly sung or heard sung and soon committed to memory a way of reinforcing the doctrinal lessons that he and his followers were intent on teaching to their congregations. It is important to include hören singen (hear sung) along with the hören lesen (hear read), which researchers often encounter in their sources. Among these were the liturgical pieces “Herr Gott Vater im Himmel, erbarm dich über uns” (Kyrie eleison);”Wir glauben all an einen Gott” (the Creed); “Christe, du Lamm Gottes, der du trägst die Sünd der Welt” (Agnus Dei); “Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin” (Nunc dimittis); and “Nun laßt uns den Leib begraben” (for funerals). Even before the harshly revelatory visitations that began in 1526, the Reformer realized that Johann Bugenhagen’s pastoral charges and likely other laypeople beyond the walls of Wittenberg required the most basic instruction. Through their repetition and mnemonic facilitation, hymns sung or heard reinforced the other media that were being trained on the minds of the Christians in the clergymen’s care.18 Without question they had to be in the language of the people. The rural pastorate itself generally knew only the memorized Latin of

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the core rites but did not comprehend its literal meaning. They were not Latinate, and, occasionally, not even literate in the vernacular. Their level of literacy rose after the Reformation. In the towns, grammar school boys both before and during the Reformation were just becoming Latinate and had to practise their songs in that tongue. German hymns were theirs chiefly when they led their neighbours in divine services, often in alternate verses. Up till this point, Luther would probably accept the principle of the multiplication of media in instructing “new” Christians – that is, of laying hymns upon sermons upon liturgical symbolism upon art upon catechism. Before 1530, Luther and his fellows in Wittenberg presided over a goaloriented heaping of media. Ears, eyes, and tongues are all involved; in Lutheranism there is no simple shift from seeing images to hearing the Word preached. Further, the hearing of hymn lyrics – if Herl is correct that congregational singing was largely lacking – was hoped to be instrumental in conveying core teachings. If the Reformers thought initially that their task was simply to tutor the laity, they soon found, as they would have described conditions, that they had to convert the masses. They were missionaries in their own lands to a sometimes intractable populace, and song was a central implement in what became their campaign. Neither the priests nor the peasants whom they took to task were even informed Catholics! Circumstances were only somewhat better in the towns, where, before 1530, more of the residents, though not a majority, had already displayed an interest in containing the privileges of the Catholic Church. The application of ethnographic analytic perspectives presupposes that historians need not confine themselves, in examining the past, to terminology that Luther himself would have understood, much less accepted.19 Luther might well not sympathize, for example, with our search for the formation and sustenance of communities, for his was a very hierarchical society, and he had absorbed its values. Above all, he sought the triumph of the Gospel in human affairs. But we today might assert that, if we suspend the hierarchical ideology that was manifest in early modern churches, liturgy and specifically music bound hearers together. Possibly even since the age of Neanderthals in Europe – before the triumphant advent of Homo sapiens sapiens – music was a cohesive presence.20 Certainly in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, music performance of any sort was a social occasion. The unison chanting of members of religious orders expressed their faith and underscored it, and it bound the chanters together into a community that was both surrounded by and separate from the outside world.

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Just so, congregational hymn-singing, we may conjecture, enclosed and bound a community of proximity, relationship, and faith. Daniel Levitin has stated this in his studies of the musical (human) brain.21 Membership in the common society outside the sanctuary found additional expression in neighbours’ entering what was very likely the largest edifice among them and in coordinated fashion joining their voices as one. As a collectivity of identity, they affirmed their single-mindedness – or that was the sought-after ideal. Increasingly pews were built into the churches, which, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, possessed them only for the eldest and weakest women of high station (Frauenstühle), for magistrates (Rat- or Herrenstühle), and occasionally, in a balcony, for princes and their families. The advent of pews disciplined the worshipping bodies of the laity even as it supported them. They ordered and held them, hindered their resort to the perennial practice of walking out of the church part-way through the holy rites, and divided them more firmly by station and gender. The best seats went to people of high rank; and in areas where there were no familial box pews, women sat on the north side and men on the traditionally preferred south. As populations grew, young men were often seated in the balcony or gallery (Emporkirche). The intoning of unison and mainly a cappella hymns, then, joined as one that which was in other respects striated and differentiated. It did not allow for spontaneity; it did not engage other parts of the body. If, as Herl thinks, boys’ choirs increasingly drew apart from and performed for their fellow citizens, the people were united in observing the spectacle. Song brought a fiercely hierarchical community, a community of increasingly enforced sumptuary and disciplinary laws, together, if only symbolically and temporarily. It was seen as desirable that the children of God should be unanimous in their invocation. Widespread in that day was the belief that even a minority of discordant lifestyles could bring divine wrath upon all; and fires, pestilence, and war were so interpreted. Unison song may, in the context of the world view of the age and throughout Germany, have conveyed the notion of single-minded, unanimous belief and of prayerful dedication. On the earthly plane, such singing together, or alternatively such listening together, may have reminded each participant that all, all the others present were his and her neighbours in Christ, human beings who were eligible for that demonstration of love-of-neighbour that Luther placed at the centre of spiritual life in the world. In the course of the sixteenth century, two developments in particular embellished the musical scene and may have detracted from the simple

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messages that unison singing of liturgical and doctrinal lyrics was meant to convey. In the first place, organs were desired instruments, and although they were initially mainly the ornaments or urban services, both their physical presence and their use spread. Such communities also had to appoint a man (always a man, though there were women among the popular travelling, and dishonourable, musicians) who was competent to play them. This addition made the religious service more of an aural sensation than it had been before.22 Second, princes and magistrates fostered the founding of more grammar schools, especially from mid-century on. One of the duties of the lads was to sing in church as well as at funerals and weddings if the protagonists’ relatives could afford to pay. They had to perform at Sunday services above all. A striking feature of Paul Grendler’s encyclopedic study of all forms of schooling in Renaissance Italy is that singing was not part of the grammar-school curriculum in all these Catholic lands.23 By contrast, in Lutheran Germany the roles of organist and cantor (instructor of the little boys) came together in one person through much of the Holy Roman Empire. Nearly all boys learned to sing as part of their basic education.24 Simultaneously, a recent musical style advanced within better-off and more populous circles: partsinging or Figuralgesang.25 The Latinate nature of the boys’ curriculum necessitated their demonstrating their prowess in that language. They usually sat apart in the church and at the designated time raised their voices in harmony or even counterpoint, and in Latin, which most of the laity did not understand. What now held the entire congregation together were the familiar melodies, by now in use for one, two, or three generations. Further, a liturgical refrain’s placement in the service indicated its message. The boys sang a verse in Latin, and they then led all attendees in singing either the same verse or each alternate verse in German. The choir became a group apart, perhaps not clad differently in poorer communities – although we should not forget the word Chorrock, which was now what the clerical officiant wore in distributing the Lord’s Supper. The choir’s role was separate from and above that of ordinary parishioners. It led. Within its own ranks, however, a sense of close cooperation must have reigned, for each group had to listen to the other parts and starts in order to render the whole most beautiful. The choir and not the gathered populace rendered unto God the best song. This differentiation ran parallel to the renewed clericalism of mid- and late century, which embodied a heightened clerical sense of the pastorate’s own superior standing. It also ran parallel to the elevation of pulpits and the adoption of grave markers that bespoke the high status of the

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families of the dead. In general, it ran parallel to the more permissive decoration of Lutheran church interiors, even though works of pictorial art had to conform to standards of biblical rectitude. The Evangelical churches were not immune to the currents of their time. Because of Luther’s predilections and his shrewdness in using any medium that might assist him in attaining his conversional ends, Lutheranism was from its inception a denomination of song. This is not the same as saying that it was a denomination of congregational singing. Herl has disabused us of this notion. To a lesser extent this was true of the Reformed churches, for although they dispensed with choirs and musical instruments, nonetheless the congregations sang Psalms in unison. At least, these generalizations are true in the beginning. In these same early years, Catholicism confessionalized the laity with greater intensity than before, preferring the media of hagiography, catechism, teaching, and drama to song. If we consider the act of congregational singing from an ethnographic point of view, we may speculate differently on several factors. Initially, most Catholic laypeople were used to being passive observers of the Mass and indeed derived benefit from simply seeing the transubstantiated Host. The priest intoned, and parishioners acceded to the longestablished verities that his voice and his acts presented to them anew. By custom, men doffed their hats at the passing Body of Christ, or men and women together bent their knees.26 These are signals of the subordination of self, both to the Deity and to the passing cross- and sacramentalbearing clergy. The Reformation quickly eliminated these bodily signs. New acts of humble affirmation were to take their place. If layfolk at the beginning of the Reformation were mainly not accustomed to singing liturgically, is it possible that successive generations, still reluctant, were not yet used to the expectation that they should sing in church? Do they still adhere to a bygone standard of exclusively clerical, including monastic, chanting? This seems odd after the passing of generations. The early Lutheran Church revived a previously Catholic sacrament, now desacramentalized, that in the Middle Ages had fallen into desuetude: confirmation. Now young people had to commit to memory catechism and Bible verses and be able to recite them aloud upon demand before they were admitted to the Eucharist. School curricula for the younger children of both sexes focused upon these texts as well as upon the lyrics of core hymns. By the end of the sixteenth century, even some rural parents were inclined to have their little ones learn how to read and sent them to ABC schools taught by the local sextons (but only

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in winter). Writing was a higher skill, and few households could afford the greater tuition. The churches pressed them to have their children read, and peasant fathers relented in the slow season. Thus, small children all learned basic hymns if they went near such elementary schools, for hymns were included in the curriculum. Why, then, did some still refuse to sing? In song and response, the Reformation substituted new physical acts that entail a somewhat different message from the earlier Catholic ones. If the laity either sings or speaks in unison, it actively affirms; hence the centrality of the Creed, which incorporates all the doctrinal fundamentals. The parishioners attest not merely to the ideational content of a memorized text, which they are able to recite by heart, but to their subscription to that content. For godparents at baptismal services to recite the Apostles’ Creed themselves was evidence of their acceptance of its theologically laden parts. In the medieval liturgy, we may assume that the presiding priest said the words in Latin, speaking for the godparents. But Evangelical Christians demonstrate in sound that they accept and subscribe to the entire truth of what is said. They are no mere passive members of the Gemeinde (parish) but declare themselves publicly to their neighbours, each Seele (soul) to all the others. This bespeaks a higher, firmer, better-informed level of commitment than Catholicism had required. To sing “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”) was to proclaim one’s personal belief in this precept, and not that of the officiating clergyman or the choirmaster. Passive agreement, as shown in attendance at services, was insufficient. Attendance became in any case obligatory. Now that spiritual state (faith) and not deeds alone brought one to salvation, it was imperative that Lutheran leaders forge a connection between outer actions and interiority. In no objective way could pastors verify that what exterior acts signified truly corresponded to what the heart contained.27 Nevertheless, their goal was that very heart, the seat of sincerity and of sought-for ardour. Sermons of all descriptions urge Christians to “sigh to God” (seufzen), a word that connotes yearning.28 Why did the visitors include in their list of stock questions in each parish whether the people diligently sang in church? Why did they find that some people refused to sing? Had these people perchance not attended catechism sermons or school lessons and never absorbed the words? Were these young men who were reluctant to compromise their masculinity in bowing to the commands of clerics whose maleness, despite their being now married, they (the young men) were accustomed to doubt?

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Was resistance of authority – that is, the assumption of “full” autonomy, whatever form that might take in the village setting – part of the peasant definition of being a man?29 But we do not know the sex of those whom the parish visitors criticized for refusing to sing. Young men certainly did act out in other ways in church, sometimes throwing pebbles or other matter from the balcony down on the young women below.30 The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a disciplinary era. Many ordinary people first heard Luther’s message otherwise – as a verbal banner proclaiming freedom in this life. When the Reformer first became a public figure, townsmen and villagers alike were drawn to this perception of his teaching and attempted to apply it creatively to themselves. The various lists of peasant articles associated with the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–6 reveal that ordinary people heard Luther to say that serfdom was not in accord with Scripture and ought to be abandoned. Luther himself baldly, violently refuted this misapprehension. In the towns, people of all ranks gradually began to comprehend that the hostility that Luther and magistrates had directed towards ecclesiastical abuse, clerical privilege, and departure from the Gospels was not intended to produce rectification of the social ills around them. Instead, the Reformation facilitated the consolidation of earthly power in hands that had sought aggrandizement since at least the mid-fifteenth century. Secular and ecclesiastical authority, having created Reformed churches, turned their most concerted attention to subduing the unruly nature of their fellow residents. They became more openly, systematically authoritarian. As this pattern began to show damaging effects on folk traditions that served to glue human bonds, and especially as people became aware that paths of resistance were in vain, some malcontents resorted to small acts of vandalism, such as bashing in the local pastor’s windows, cutting down his fruit trees, leaving ugly notes and caricatures on the pulpit or the church door, and singing derogatory rhymes in the alleyways. People resented the unprecedented harshness of penalties for such customary acts as brides’ and grooms’ having sex between betrothal and the formal wedding; putting on lavish feasts at weddings; drunkenness on festive occasions or to seal pledges; cursing; neglecting the sermon; plowing or harvesting on Sunday; dancing without sexual restraint; holding spinning bees as usual; and crossing into Catholic territories to attend church fairs (Kirmes). An ethnographic study of early modern society informs us that practices such as these were entrenched in the daily life of the populace, which found them to be in the nature of peccadilloes rather than great sins. The Reformation increasingly made

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them targets of corrective discipline. Such discipline took the forms, variously, of derogation by name from the pulpit, imprisonment, stiff fines, banishment, public whippings, tongue-clipping, and humiliation by such means as exposure on a pillory or oral humiliation before the congregation on Sunday mornings.31 Capital punishment pertained officially to more transgressions than before, including, according to Charles V’s law code of 1530 called the Constitutio criminalis Carolina, adultery, homosexuality, and witchcraft. None of these measures had been unknown earlier, but their application expanded now to encompass what were largely moral infractions. Not every jurisdiction adhered to the imperial standard in practice; elites seldom met the executioner for their adulterous dalliances. Under Catholicism, many of these had had simply to be confessed with regret and good intention. After the establishment of the Reformation, magistrates or princes together with high-ranking clergy defined immorality ever more inclusively, bringing it within their own purview. Peter Blickle has asserted firmly that lowly subjects did not simply bear their oppression stoically.32 They resorted to legal channels available to them. They could also draw on more homely measures. Singing in church was symbolic behaviour. Those who did not do as they were told demonstrated by their intransigence that they were not children, not the schoolboys who performed before them, but autonomous adults. Even these nonconformists adhered to the fundamental tenets of the faith as they very crudely grasped them, even if they might not have taken these as movingly to heart as some of their co-residents. Still, they were part of the Christian collectivity, baptized members of the Body of Christ. In the acutely disciplinary atmosphere of the mid- to late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, how might people express their resentment with minimal consequences? Within what venue could they hold themselves aloof without dire penalty? At the same time, more literate people in the towns were purchasing hymnals for use in their homes. It took longer for Lutheran leaders to establish cultural enthusiasm within peasant communities. Indeed, part of rural resentment could have derived from the fact that urban values were increasingly those by which rustics were measured. The newer pastorate, along with cantors and schoolmasters, often came from the towns, where they had grown up and been educated, into the countryside, which they were assigned to bring to heartfelt conversion. Tensions between town and countryside do enter into the context of hymn singing and not-singing in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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The singing of Lutheran hymns in another time and place could become a mechanism of resistance for the counter-reforming Habsburg rulers of the Bohemian mining town of Joachimsthal. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, citizens expressed their opposition to Roman Catholicism partly by continuing to intone Lutheran hymns as they could, until, finally, in 1652, half the population moved across the border into Protestant Saxony rather than succumb to the Jesuits.33 In deciphering communications, context is everything. We cannot penetrate to the core of a given utterance’s significance without, to the fullest extent that a historian can, exploring the social and semiotic nuances of the situation that clasps and embeds a statement – or in this case, that clasps and embeds the refusal to make one. The refusal to sing did contain a message, and it was not a positive one. Some historians have defined the Reformation era as 1517–55.34 But others have seen the desirability of extending the period of religious Reformation till at least the coming of the Thirty Years’ War. I now tend to be among the latter. Until the early seventeenth century, much had not been firmly put in place, and ready congregational singing was one of these. The war itself was, with regional variations, an immensely destabilizing interlude. When it was over, the lands repaired themselves and as soon as possible rebuilt those edifices that are still part of our inheritance in the modern world, the late medieval and early modern sanctuaries. Most people’s religious identities were by then established, including the general Lutheran appropriation of a flourishing musical heritage. The people might yet recall the trauma of the war period, but the discombobulations of the Reformation age itself had become distant history. As far as we know, Lutherans seldom any longer refused to sing along in church – although no one has assessed the body of eighteenthcentury parish visitation records. Before the end of the seventeenth century, the time of rigid, even murderous orthodoxy was past. Although mutually suspicious, Protestant creedal groups slowly entered an age of accommodation. The great witch persecutions declined. Despite clerical reluctance, interfaith marriages became possible, along with extra-faith godparentage. Tolerance, while not encouraged, was pragmatically undertaken. A sign of growing reciprocity was the adoption of hymns by composers outside one’s immediate faith circle. But in the era that I have described, some authorities felt that they had to ensure that pastors did not “have new hymns sung in the church.”35 A new song hinted at nonconformity. By the late sixteenth century, it was preferable in Lutheran lands to sing an old song “unto the Lord.” This concern implies that,

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temporarily, there was only a modest body of music for the layperson to memorize. Under these circumstances, the refusal to sing was definitely an expression of resistance.

NOTES 1 For enjoinders to sing to God, see, among other Biblical passages, Psalms 33, 66, 81, 89, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105, 135, 147, 149. 2 Briggs, “The Study of the History of Education,” History of Education 1 (1972): 8. 3 Ibid., p. 20 contains his specific references to the work of Stone and Eisenstein. 4 Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 5 I deliberately echo Andrew Pettegree’s word in Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See especially chap. 3, “Militant in Song,” 40–75. 6 Suojanen, Finnish Folk Hymn Singing: Study in Music Anthropology (Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere Institute for Folk Tradition, 1984). Suojanen’s settings are very different from the ones I draw on, however. 7 For example, Karl Pallas, comp., Die Registraturen der Kirchenvisitationen im ehemals sächsischen Kurkreise, 7 vols. (Halle: Otto Hendel, 1906–18): I: 98, 227, 580; III: 82, 140, 142. 8 Ibid., III: xviii, question 7. 9 The reluctance in the countryside of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel is noted by Inge Mager, “Geistliches Singen und Musizieren in lutherischen Kirchen – nach ausgewählten norddeutschen Schul-, Kirchen- und Klosterordnungen vom 16. bis zum frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” Singen, Beten, Musizieren: Theologische Grundlagen der Kirchenmusik in Nord- und Mitteldeutschland zwischen Reformation und Pietismus (1530–1750), ed. Jochen M. Arnold, Konrad Küster, and Hans Otte (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2014), 111. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer and Helmut Puff for bringing this to my attention. 10 Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Thanks to my student Adam Hough for originally bringing this book to my attention. 11 See esp. chap. 2, “Catholic Liturgy – Lutheran Liturgy,” 23–35. 12 Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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13 Pallas, Die Registraturen, I: 11. See also Marie Schlüter, Musikgeschichte Wittenbergs im 16. Jahrhundert: Quellenkundliche und sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2010). esp. 289, where the author states that congregational and domestic hymn singing is a topic wholly other than the content of her present book, which contains very few references to lay singing in services of worship: 41, 45, 50, 55, 59, 62, 174, 288. None of these indicate that the laity actually did sing in church but rather specifies that they should. Thanks to an anonymous reader for this reference. 14 Ruth Ellis Messenger, The Medieval Latin Hymn (Washington, DC: Capital Press, 1953). 15 Bernd Moeller, “Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als neues Mönchtum,” in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch, edited by Moeller and Stephen E. Buckwalter, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 199 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 76–91. 16 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: New American Library, 1950), 271. 17 Quoted as a foreword in the East German Evangelisches Kirchen-Gesangbuch for the land of Saxony (East Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), n. p. 18 This is not a fresh insight. See Patrice Veit, “Kirchenlied und konfessionelle Identität im deutschen 16. Jahrhundert,” in Hören, Sagen, Lesen, Lernen: Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der kommunikativen Kultur, edited by Ursula Brunold-Bigler and Hermann Bausinger (Berne: Peter Lang, 1995), 741–54. 19 Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 132–49. 20 “Neanderthal Flute: The Oldest Musical Instrument Ever Found,” Associated Content [online], 17 September 2007; the news of this alleged flute was first announced by the Times of London, 5 April 1997, n.p. The artefact was found in 1995 near Cerkno, Slovenia. For the debate on whether it is in fact a flute, see “Divje Babe Flute,” Wikipedia, n.d., n.p. We do not know yet whether Neanderthals used language. The evidence of flutes made by Homo sapiens sapiens is apparently more convincing to the experts. See “Flute Music Wafted in Caves 35,000 Years Ago,” New York Times (25 June 2009), p. A12. The excavation site is Hohler Fels near Ulm. 21 Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 191–7, here at 192. 22 See Herl, Worship Wars, 130–51. Indeed, Herl’s title derives partly from the sense of competition between choirs and laity and among choirs, organs, and laity. By the eighteenth century, choir performances had

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been separated from congregational singing and had the nature of a performance; the organ could accompany choir and ordinary hymnsinging. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). There is a single mention of the Piarists’ teaching music to the boys in their charge in 1641 (p. 395). I have found one passing reference to convent-educated girls acquiring skills in “vernacular reading and writing, sewing, and singing” (99). Schlüter, Musikgeschichte Wittenbergs, 45, 53–9, 62. Fewer girls enjoyed formal education. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “The Reality of Early Lutheran Education: The Electoral District of Saxony, 1528–1674, a Case Study,” Luther-Jahrbuch 57 (1990): 128–46. Those who did, memorized the hymns of the liturgy so that they could take full part in congregational singing and understand the lyrics. On the confined role of schoolgirls compared to schoolboys in Wittenberg, see Schlüter, Musikgeschichte Wittenbergs, 50. Herl, Worship Wars, esp. 112–13; see also 113–15 on “cantional style,” a combination of choral polyphony and congregational singing. Virginia Reinburg, “Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 526–46. Veit, “Kirchenlied und konfessionelle Identität,” 742. Levitin opines, “Music during ritual is designed ... to evoke a ‘religious experience,’ a peak experience, intensely emotional, the effects of which can last the rest of a person’s life”; The World in Six Songs, 222. He features ecstasy as a religious emotion, but Lutheranism and the Reformed churches discouraged this extreme. At no time had Catholicism dispensed with its efforts to establish the same sort of correspondence between outward and inward. Yet it did give more credit to mere deed than Lutheranism was prepared to do. The original Protestants gave it no credit, in fact, but insisted that only faith, by definition an inner persuasion, could produce heavenly bliss in the end. Their theologians struggled among themselves precisely over the question of whether that faith had to manifest itself in Christian lifestyle, and many continued to insist that it did not (sola fide). See Alexandra Shepard’s exploration of manhood in England: Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Shepard tends to equate obedience with femininity, noting that in many relationships, men were compelled to obey. In a simplistic early modern scheme of gender characteristics, submission was associated with femininity and domination with masculinity. Clearly this varied from relationship to

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relationship, transaction to transaction, and with the life course. Shepard sees this. This recurs in the sources. One example may be found in Pallas, Die Registraturen, II: 250, from the village of Rösa in 1580. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Neoclericalism and Anticlericalism in Saxony,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1994): 615–37, on stocks or pillories, 624; and Karant-Nunn, “”They have highly offended the community of God”: Pastoral Identity and Rituals of Ecclesiastical Discipline in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century German Parishes,” in Festschrift for James D. Tracy, From the Middle Ages to Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, edited by Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 211–29. Blickle, Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal: A New View of German History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). Brown, Singing the Gospel, 130–50. Brown’s view of the Reformation is entirely sanguine. Resentment and resistance have no place in his picture, in which glad Lutheranism conquers every heart. There is, however, no question that the town’s “old pastor,” Johannes Mathesius (1504–65), was an altogether attractive personality and a fluent, down-to-earth preacher who made conversion painless. The presence of a gifted pastor definitely made a difference. Equally gifted was the city’s long-time cantor and hymn-writer, Nicolaus Hermann (c. 1480–1561). Cf. Herl, Worship Wars, 68. This pertains to Oettinger’s magisterial study. For example, Pallas, Die Registraturen, II: xix. This was a general question that the visitors addressed to parish elders concerning the pastor. If a clergyman adopted new hymns, he was suspected of doctrinal infidelity.

chapter six

Reading Images, Printing Voices: Simulation of Media and Epistemic Reflection in German Baroque Literature DA N I E L W E I D N E R

In 1644, near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which had almost completely devastated Germany, three men and three women of different backgrounds and statuses met to discuss Büchsen und Bücher, that is, “rifles and books,” or, more precisely: whether rifles had done greater harm than the art of printing had done good.1 Writing and fighting were radical and crucial alternatives at the time, and numerous poems compared warfare to poetry and tried to convince the warrior to become a shepherd – or, as implied in the bucolic code, to become a poet. This peaceful, ordered, and highly artful conversation may in itself be conceived as an alternative to war and is, thus, presented as a counterimage to the hardship of the current situation. It is, to be sure, a fictive situation, since the discussion is part of the fourth volume of Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele (literally translated as Women’s Conversation Games), which were aimed at improving the art of conversation. The discussion begins with the consideration of printing: Vespasian, one of the discussants, praises Johannes Gutenberg since, due to his invention, everybody can nowadays easily write (literally, “to put on paper,” zu Papier bringen) on one day as much as a hundred copyists could not produce before. Printing results in an abundance of books, as the discussants stress not without ambivalence. If it had been invented much earlier there would be too many books to read, but in its actual state printing not only fosters the arts and sciences but also spreads the Word of God. For in this case, manual copying would be both too expensive and inaccurate. It is thus not by chance that the Reformation and the advent of print coincide as parts of the same salvational economy.

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Figure 6.1 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644, reprint 1968), 411 (455)

However, the Gesprächspiele do not only deal with printing in an abstract way. Julia, one of the female interlocutors, admits that she does not know how printing actually works, and Vespasian then explains the workflow: the casting of fonts, the typesetting, and the printing. He stresses the variety of different fonts – and these fonts are actually displayed in the very layout of the Gesprächspiele (see fig. 6.1), where samples of all these different letter styles are printed on the very same page on which we are reading the discussion. Thus, the advent of print is not only an object of reflection and narrative, a historical event identified by the proper name of Gutenberg, but it also actually happens in the text. On the same surface that presents the discussion, readers are confronted with the materiality of printing. This is, I would contend, an important point: if we talk about media we should always ask when, where, and how they appear as media. Methodologically, print culture might not only be conceived as a social reality but also as a cultural imagination, as a scene configuring and being configured by a specific setting, as a primal scene in the Freudian sense. This scene entails the reader in an essential way, as he or she is not only represented by the fictional participants of the conversation but also addressed even beyond that. It is easy to underestimate the fact that in early

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modern literature, the reader is not conceived as a passive recipient – as in modern literature – but as someone who may become active, who may hold a conversation, or start to write himself or herself. If Harsdörffer mentions print only rarely but very often comes back to the quill as a figure of writing,2 it is more than conservatism. He describes the actual situation of an author for whom every literate reader is a potential writer. In general, the Baroque book is less conceived as a container of a more or less standardized text, but more as a functional device to be used, not as a medium conveying information, but as something that mediates experiences, especially experiences of reading and writing. This relation becomes even more complex as more media get involved. Modern theorists have not only conceptualized the printing revolution as replacing handwriting by printed letters, which is said to have entailed standardization and fixity of knowledge,3 but they have also characterized it as a more general shift from a culture of presence to one of representation, or, put differently, from ritual to text. According to this narrative, in medieval culture meaning was bound to specific bodies and particular spaces, whereas in early modernity it becomes more abstract and mobile by the means of print. It goes without saying that this argument corresponds very well with the emergence of modern science as well as with the new theology of the Reformation, which replaces the actual presence of a priest and the virtual body of Christ with a verbal message.4 In confessional terms, this view may be somewhat misleading, since the Lutheran Protestants polemically stress the real presence in the Eucharist against the Calvinist doctrine. Furthermore, the heavy emphasis placed on the verbal meaning not only entails a certain distance in relation to the older media but also charges the verbal medium with presence. If, for instance, Luther speaks of the living voice of scripture, this unfolds a dialectic of the written and the spoken word that is essential for early modern thought.5 Finally, the new medium of print does not simply replace the older media but constitutes a hybrid, plurimedial form, since not only words but also images and even music can be printed, as we will see shortly. To analyse modern print culture, I will therefore move away from the rather simple opposition of printing versus handwriting to a more complex form of plurimediality. Moreover, it has to be kept in mind that print is neither the only hybrid medium in the seventeenth century nor the most prominent one. The negotiation of presence and absence, which media theory takes as the central conflict in early modernity, usually takes place on the theatrical stage where language, images, and gestures

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come together. Samuel Weber has argued convincingly that theatricality basically has to do with a concrete location that is both present and absent.6 If its principle is the hic et ubique announced by Hamlet confronting his father’s ghost, it is not by accident that this formula also expresses the presence of the sacred in the world as conceived by the mainstream of Protestant Eucharist theology: Christ is present in the actual host, but only in the act of performance. He both permeates the entire world and is encapsulated in the small white piece of bread. If print and theatre are the two paradigmatic media of early modernity, it might be interesting to analyse their intersection, namely, the printed theatre. In order to do so, I will focus on a specific example: the pastoral opera Seelewig, which Harsdörffer published in the fourth volume of his Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele of 1644. After a brief characterization of the play and the Gesprächspiele, I will first analyse the literary tradition of which it is part and its spiritual orientation, and then show how different features of print simulate the absent theatrical performance, and, finally, ask how intermediality is reflected within the play itself and how this reflection in turn is realized on stage as well as on the printed page.

Opera, the Religious, and the Bucolic The eight volumes of the Gesprächspiele, published from 1641 to 1649, are among Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s most successful works.7 As the title suggests, they mainly consist of conversations between three men and three women on a vast range of subjects. Every conversation is formatted as some kind of game, be it a series of puzzles to be solved or tasks to be fulfilled, such as a regular disputation on a given subject, the composition of poems or songs on certain topics, the invention of emblems or devices for certain pictures, or, inversely, the invention of pictures for given texts. They claim to be edifying and entertaining, as their fictional characters belong to the civilized but non-scholarly lay audience who should practise the art of conversation and acquire a considerable amount of knowledge about different subjects in the process. In the fourth volume, while discussing one more time the vices and virtues of the German language, one of the discussants, Reymund, is assigned a task: to prove the suitability of German for pastoral poetry by composing a pastoral play in the Italian manner. During the following 150 pages, he sings his composition entitled Seelewig: Ein geistlich Waldgedicht (The Eternal Soul: A Spiritual Pastoral Play). Meanwhile, the

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other interlocutors comment and reflect on the play in all its dimensions: its actual setting, costumes, and machinery, the poetic and musical means employed, and the allegorical meaning. It is precisely this combination of opera and its theorization that makes Seelewig a particularly interesting text.8 The major topic of Seelewig is, as Reymund stresses in advance, spiritual; it shows “how the evil foe pursues the pious souls in multiple ways and how the soul in turn is protected from eternal punishment by Conscience, Reason, and the Word of God.”9 This is staged as a pastoral play. After a prologue of the allegory of music, the first act introduces Trügewalt, a personification of the evil foe, who plans to seduce the nymph Seelewig (the human soul) with the help of some shepherds (see fig. 6.2). Seelewig promenades with Sinnigunda (the allegory of the senses) by the seashore, where the changing of the tides and a distant shipwreck lead them to reflect on human finitude. In the second act, some shepherds meet Seelewig and give her presents that represent the temptations of the world: a spyglass, a fishing rod, and a bow and arrow. Swissulda (Conscience) and Hertzigild (Dignity) admonish Seelewig, who then becomes frightened by a thunderstorm and decides to turn back to virtue. The third act shows a new plan by the forces of seduction. Trügewalt, who

Figure 6.2 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 50 (94)

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Figure 6.3 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 144 (188)

usually sings basso, turns to a falsetto voice here and manages to deceive Seelewig by a false echo. Seelewig, having lost her trust, is again met by the shepherds, who convince her to play a game, namely blind man’s bluff, which obviously denotes the blindness of earthly love (see fig. 6.3). In the climactic scene, entitled “Conversion,” Seelewig is chosen to be the player, and, with her eyes blindfolded, she runs into Trügewalt, but Hertzigild and Swissulda tear the blindfold away from her eyes and, thus, rescue her from temptation. Seelewig praises God for his power and asks for assistance on her new path, supported by a chorus of angels. The play is closed by an epilogue of the allegory of painting, who stresses her own contribution. Since Harsdörffer’s Seelewig is the first German play for which both the libretto and the score survive, there exists considerable research on this “first German opera.”10 However, as Danielle Brugière-Zeiß has shown, Seelewig is quite different from the emerging form of opera. Harsdörffer does not use the typical madrigal verse, nor is there a coherent deployment of the recitative in this work.11 Rather than being an opera, Seelewig belongs to the separate genre of the pastoral play, which is of eminent importance for Harsdörffer. In his poetics, he conceives the pastoral play as a third major genre beside tragedy and comedy. The pastoral deals with “mixed stories” (Mittelgeschichten), which are neither

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high nor low, neither sad nor comic. One could say that this middle genre may be the paradigmatic Christian genre, as it reflects the genus humile. Harsdörffer explicitly stresses that the most appropriate subjects of the pastoral usually are “meditations on the creatures of God, the vanity of the world, thoughts about death, and the deceit by the hellish sartyrs.”12 This fits very well not only for Seelewig but also for the entire genre. As Mara Wade and others have shown, Seelewig has a direct precursor in the anonymous Ein gar schön geistliches Waldgetichte (A Good Beautiful and Spiritual Pastoral Poem) from 1637, a Silesian Counter-Reformation play that is basically a translation of Nicolò Negri’s Anima Felice: Favola boscareccia et spirituale (The Happy Soul: Pastoral and Spiritual Fable, 1609).13 In a more general sense, all these plays belong to the tradition of the Christian pastoral such as Cavalieri’s Rappresentationze di Anima et di Corpo (Representation of the Soul and the Body, 1600) or Guarini’s Pastor fido (The Pious Shepherd, 1590), a tradition that, in itself, is a countermodel to the secular bucolic literature, elaborating on the idea of Christ as the true shepherd. Both Negri’s Anima felice and its anonymous translation from 1637 depict the way of the soul to God, paved primarily by good works and by the help of several mediators. In Seelewig, however, the Catholic economy of salvation is lacking, and the explicit theological references are much less prominent: the play does not end with an apotheosis of the soul reaching God, but with a simple prayer. Some modern interpreters have seen this as a secularization of the Christian pastoral. However, the fact that the sacred is no longer directly present on stage does not necessarily entail its absence. Seelewig adopts the title of the 1637 play as a subtitle, and it is thus presented as “ein geistlich Waldgedicht,” the latter term being a literal translation of the Italian pastoral into German (as “a spiritual poem of the woods”). The double meaning of this term is revealed by Trügewald, who claims that everything happening in the setting of the woods (Wald) should belong to the profane world (Welt) and be ruled by him. Thus, the generic description of a geistlich Waldgedicht is oxymoronic as it combines the spiritual intention with a profane setting. It will thus not represent the sacred directly, but indirectly, by a play of masks and deceit, which is typical for pastoral literature. As Wolfgang Iser has convincingly argued, the bucolic is the paradigmatic genre of “specular reflection” in early modern literature, which Iser situates between the Foucauldian epistemes of similarity and of representation.14 The Spielraum,

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the “space of play” characteristic of bucolic reflection, is decisive for Seelewig both in respect to its religious content and to its medial practice. For performance and reflection are not opposites here but tend to be combined by being mirrored in another deceit, in another play of masks, or in another media. Thus, it can be shown that the different media used in the play form less a synthesis – some form of “Gesamtkunstwerk,” as the older research on this “opera” tends to assume – than reflect critically on each other.

Symphonia, Simulation, and Print It is quite probable that Harsdörffer’s involvement in musical drama was originally motivated by an interest in combining different forms and media. However, a printed opera is obviously lacking the most operatic element, namely, its performance. Even in the fictitious frame of the Gesprächspiele, Seelewig is not actually performed as a full opera; instead, Reymund sings the songs – and even the choruses – alone, accompanying himself with a lute. We do, however, have a lot of stage directions, descriptions as well as illustrations of the costumes and the stage setting, and finally, the music in a score as well as several comments on instrumentation. It is, for example, discussed whether the choruses may be staged as a dance or should be sung acousmatically (i.e., not being visible on stage). At the end, Reymund gives detailed instructions on how to build the stage, using Periakten, movable parts that allow for a quick change of scenery.15 All these instructions are printed, as if the book functions both as the script and as the reflection of the theatrical performance. This is made possible by the complex printing layout of the Gesprächspiele that Harsdörffer had developed together with his printer, Wolfgang Endter. Nuremberg, where both Harsdörffer and Endter worked, was a centre of printing and the international book trade. But not only books were printed. Even before Gutenberg, Nuremberg printers sold devotional pictures throughout Germany, and in the seventeenth century Nuremberg became an important centre of printed sheet music as well. The Gesprächspiele are richly illustrated and contain quite a few musical scores. Harsdörffer even changes to an oblong “duodez” format in the fourth volume, as he considers this format better suited to the layout of music and images.16 In the case of Seelewig, eleven copper engravings illustrate the imagined settings of the play (see figs. 6.2 and 6.3), and

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Figure 6.4 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 42 (86)

the complete music is printed in an appendix. Furthermore, the actual text contains different indexical sign systems (see fig. 6.4) such as page and paragraph numbers (printed as Arabic numerals in the upper outside margin and at the beginning of each paragraph respectively); the numbering of the Gesprächspiele themselves (in Roman numerals also on the upper outside margin); and the title of the running game in the headline. A second system of marginal notes refers to sources, retranslates Harsdörffer’s terms back to the original Latin, or, using a pointing finger, refers to other Gesprächspiele. All these references are indexed in different registers in the appendices of each volume of the Gesprächspiele, which furthermore list keywords and different genres of plays, as well as the classical authors mentioned. Finally, there is also an emblematical order consisting both of the titles of the respective Gesprächspiel and the emblematical initials by which they are opened. To give an example, the second part of the first act of Seelewig makes up one Gesprächspiel entitled “Sinnbetrug,” as the following four scenes deal with the “deception of the senses.” Each of these scenes is opened by an emblematical letter depicting a ship, an anchor, a concave mirror, and a tent (see fig. 6.5). Sometimes, the scene alludes to these images as when Seelewig and Sinnigunda watch a shipwreck. More often, the conversing commentators

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Figure 6.5 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 73 (117), 67 (111), 77 (121)

invent an emblem proper in their commentary, as in the fourth scene, where Vespasian describes an emblem of a concave mirror meaning that Satan uses the power of destiny (i.e., the light) to condemn men to the eternal fire. Thus, the discussion not only refers to its own beginning, which was the emblematical initial, but also to the allegorical meaning of the play in its entirety. This horizontal movement within the text as well as the vertical movement upwards, to a higher allegorical understanding, is typical for the textuality of the Gesprächspiele. It may be considered as a specific feature of print, since most of the reference instruments belong to that medium. At the same time, they do not entail typographic fixity or transform the book into a container of information, but rather provoke and enable quite different forms of reading. Nor do they exclude other media or other more iconic forms of representation as the interaction of image and text in the emblematic initials shows. Thus, the printed page is not a neutral surface on which standardized symbolic signs represent fixed knowledge, but rather a stage on which different forms and levels of signification interact. In this interaction, the book as a medium is even surpassed somehow by the performance it simulates. To be sure, there is no real performance, but the printed text is more than a mere representation of the lacking performance on stage, since it simulates a supplementary performance not only in Reymund’s (fictional) singing but also in the conversation proper. The play is not simply reprinted or renarrated by an anonymous narrator, but emerges conversationally. On the other hand, the conversation permanently interrupts the play, thus making any form of illusion impossible. In other words, the fictional conversation is both the precondition and the critique of the illusion of the play itself.

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Paronomasia and Ekphrasis In Seelewig the interplay of different media is not an extrinsic device. If the play within the play is paradigmatic for the theatre of the Baroque and particularly of Seelewig, in which the theme of the deception of the senses is doubled by the blind man’s bluff, the plurimediality of the text is also reflected within the play, on the one hand by the classical figures representing mediality in the rhetorical tradition, namely, paronomasia and ekphrasis, and on the other hand by certain media that actually appear on stage. Paronomasia is of course essential for the entire project of the opera. In theoretical terms, it is discussed especially in the prologue by Music, who characterizes herself as the sister, the spouse, or even the double of Poetry, illustrated by an emblematic letter (see fig. 6.6). The relation of sound and speech is further enhanced in paronomastic poetry, one of the favourite features of the Nuremberg school, for instance when Seelewig describes the thunderstorm, singing: “Düstere Wolken, umsausende Winde / brummende Donner, Feuerstralender Blitz / Wässrichte Schlossen, und Hagels Gespitz” (Dark clouds, whirling winds / rumbling thunder, fire-streaming lightning / watery hail, dabbling volley).17 The most prominent form of paronomasia is, however, the echo, which is almost obligatory in pastoral poetry and very important in early opera, starting with the first genuine opera, Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri’s Dafne from 1598.18 For Harsdörffer, however, the echo is not only a mythological motive or a figure of speech19 but also a physical phenomenon, which he explores in his Philosophische und Mathematische Erquickstunden (Philosophical and Mathematical Pastimes), an enormous anthology of experiments and problems in mathematics, optics, and physics. There, he stresses the meaning of the echo in history, referring to the bat kol, the

Figure 6.6 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 173 (217)

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heavenly voice in the Bible, but he also talks about the different surfaces or specific angles that bring forth different forms of echo.20 In Seelewig, we have actually two echo scenes. At the end of the second act, a chorus of nymphs draws a moral conclusion by one of them answering the question of the others: “Was kan unsern Sinn betrüben? – Lieben // Was mag unsre Ruh verstören? – Ehren” (What can darken our mood? – Love // What can disturb our quiet? – Honours).21 On a semantic level, the answers of the echo do not repeat the question but rather counteract the expectation by rhyming “darken” (betrüben) with “love,” and “disturb” with “honours,” following the antithetical mode of the entire play. Even more important is the second scene in which Trügewalt imitates an echo to deceive Seelewig when he answers her question: Wer kann trösten mich Wer höret was ich klag Was bringt mir dann Gunst? Was müssigt grosses Leid

Ich Sag Kunst Freud22

Who can console me Who hears what I lament What brings me favour then? What soothes great sorrow

I Tell Art Joy

This second echo, which is an invention of Harsdörffer that goes beyond the precursors, is an imitation of an imitation that plays on the possibility of deception implicit in any medium. Here, the echo is no longer a figure for natural speech, for pure sound undisturbed by meaning and the intention of the speakers; to the contrary, it becomes deeply ironic. We face, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “the reversal of the pure vocality of creaturely language into meaningful irony resounding from the mouth of the intriguer.”23 The other intermedial figure, ekphrasis, reveals the same reflective nature. In his poetics, Harsdörffer uses the topos of ut pictura poesis, so central to baroque poetry, to characterize theatre as “living painting,” “since speech cannot make images, and the images cannot speak, but both are affected by the living persons of the stage”24 – a formulation that is remarkably similar to the theory of the emblem. In Seelewig, ekphrasis is not only developed in the epilogue of the allegory of painting, but actually determines numerous ekphrastic descriptions both within the play

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Figure 6.7 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 106 (150)

and in the fictitious audience’s comments. In the second act, Hertzigild, admonishing Seelewig, describes two trees so entangled that they died together. As the engraving shows (see fig. 6.7), these trees are actually present on stage and appear also in the emblematic initial (see fig. 6.8). The image thus relates the different levels of the text, its meaning, and its theatrical performance. As in the case of the echo, visual instruments appear on stage, too. The shepherds present Seelewig with a spyglass, stressing that this artful instrument is made of clay but changes the appearance of things seen.

Figure 6.8 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, vol. 4 (1644), 107 (151)

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Much more important is the mirror that appears in the beginning when one of the shepherds, Künsteling (who represents the misuse of art), watches himself in a running river. Moreover, the mirror is omnipresent in the emblematic commentary made up by the initials, which present a shepherd looking into a mirror (the subscription explains that evil persons reciprocally influence each other),25 the concave mirror already mentioned, and finally another concave mirror lighting a torch. Vespasian comments on this last emblem: “I consider these kinds of mirrors as the highest masterpiece of art, which is often misused to harm other people, similar to God’s daily benefit of the dear sunshine being used for our vanity.”26 Mirrors, and especially concave mirrors, obviously fascinated Harsdörffer. In his Erquickstunden, he dedicates an entire section, the “catoptrics,” to the art of making and using mirrors as well as to their allegorical meaning. “Man mirrors the whole world, and if the eye is his highest faculty, it is only the mirror that allows the eye to see itself; if painting is a dead mirror, the mirror is a living painting.”27 As in the case of the echo, Harsdörffer also gives illustrated practical instructions for making and arranging mirrors (see fig. 6.9), which he calls magic

Figure 6.9 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae … Erquickstunden (1636–53, reprint 1990–1), vol. 2 (1651), 258; vol. 3 (1653), 258

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devices. He mentions that the Hebrew prophets may have used mirrors and is quite sure that Prometheus used a concave mirror to bring fire from heaven. The mirror is a meta-medium that exhibits mediality and represents the possibilities and fallacies of the visual – just as the echo does in the case of the verbal. The mirror oscillates between mere reproduction and all possibilities of deception, and even more, it unfolds the kind of specular reflection that is, according to Iser, so characteristic of early modern literature. It is therefore no surprise that for Harsdörffer, the mirror also represents the specific mediality of poetry, namely, as a figure for the “Gleichnis.” This term, denoting parable, metaphor, and simile, is at the centre of Harsdörffer’s poetics and combines different understandings of figurality, since it comprises both (metaphoric) similarity and (parabolic) difference in the expression of content.28 In order to introduce this term in his poetics, Harsdörffer quotes a simile by Augustine: “As the sunshine burns by the means of a concave mirror, the truth reaches and inflames the human mind by the means of parables.”29 As a mirror, poetry depicts the world; as a concave mirror, it influences its addressees. Thus reflection and affection, representation and persuasion can both be figured as a mirror. Poetic literature, conceived as a mirror, is thus far more than mere representation. This holds true for printed poetry as well, since the effect of printing is, at least in this example, much more complex than is usually assumed. For the printed book is neither a container of meaning nor does it entail the fixity of the text printed, as some modern theories assume. Rather it is a complex artefact that simulates the presence of the spoken and sung word as well as the spatial presence of a concrete theatrical performance or of a specific conversation. Moreover, by its different levels of representation and simulation, it is essentially open to very different readings – a feature that is mainly accomplished, as we have seen, by the numerous systems of cross reference specific to print. Finally, the visual surface of the printed page does not disappear and become translucent for a disembodied knowledge as the claim of a radical break between handwriting and print tends to assume. For the different texts, signs, and illustrations presented side by side on the surface of the printed page ask the reader to return to the page again and again. The printed book is thus not a “pure” medium, a mere technical device to spread knowledge, but rather a stage on which information and representation, presence and absence are in constant tension. Accordingly, print does not necessarily entail a secularization of the spiritual, but,

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to the contrary, in a seemingly paradoxical way, the very materiality of printing corresponds to the spiritual and allegorical experience the text tries to evoke. If, according to Benjamin, writing in the baroque period tends to create complex sign-systems, as evidenced by its fascination with hieroglyphs and emblems, the very layout of the page becomes an emblematical scenery that both exposes its own materiality and points to a higher, spiritual meaning that man is not able to represent in direct ways.

NOTES 1 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, reprint ed. Irmgard Böttcher (Nuremberg: Wolfgang Endter, 1644; repr. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), 4:451–61. 2 See, e.g., Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Poetischer Trichter (Nuremberg: Wolfgang Endter, 1648; repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 3:195–7. 3 On this see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and the critique by Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4 See, e.g., Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s distinction between a culture of presence and a culture of representation (Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004]), as well as the media history of Jochen Hörisch (Brot und Wein: Die Poesie des Abendmahls [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992], esp. 113–27). 5 See Stefanie Ertz, Heike Schlie, and Daniel Weidner, Sakramentale Repräsentation: Substanz, Zeichen und Präsenz in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 2012). 6 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), esp. 181–99. 7 As a general introduction, see Rosmarie Zeller, Spiel und Konversation im Barock: Untersuchungen zu Harsdörffers Gesprächspielen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974). 8 On this aspect, see Susanne Bauer-Roesch, “Gesangspiel und Gesprächspiel – Georg Philipp Harsdörffers Seelewig als erste Operntheorie in deutscher Sprache,” in Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Hartmut Laufhütte, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 35 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 1:645–64.

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9 “Wie der böse Feind den frommen Seelen, auf vielerley Wege nachtrachtet, und wie selbe hinwiderumb von dem Gewissen und dem Verstande, durch Gottes Wort, vom ewigen Unheil abgehalten werden,” Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 4:77. 10 See Peter Keller, Die Oper Seelewig von Sigmund Theophil Staden und Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (Bern: Haupt, 1977). 11 Danielle Brugière-Zeiß, Seelewig de G. Ph. Harsdörffer et S. Th. Staden (1644): Un opera? Un projet pastoral original entre musique et littérature (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003). 12 “Die Betrachtungen der Geschöpfe Gottes, der Eitelkeit der Welt, Todesgedanken und des hölischen Satyri Betrug, etc ist der beste Inhalt der wider erneuerten Hirtengedichte.” Harsdörffer, Poetischer Trichter, 2:103. 13 See Mara R. Wade, The German Baroque Pastoral “Singspiel” (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990). 14 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), esp. 46ff. 15 See Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 4:208f; see also Joseph Leighton, “Die Wolfenbütteler Aufführung von Harsdörffers und Stadens Seelewig im Jahre 1654,” in Wolfenbütteler Beiträge 3 (1978): 115–28. 16 On the Nuremberg tradition of printing, see John Roger Paas, “Deutsche Graphikproduktion in Nürnberg zu Harsdörffers Lebzeiten,” in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer und die Künste, ed. Doris Gerstl (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 2005), 127–42. 17 Harsdöffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 4:1156. 18 More generally on the echo, see John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 19 The Gesprächspiele mention the echo at several occasions, e.g., in 2:96, 4:83, and 5:32. 20 See Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and Daniel Schwenter, Deliciae PhysicoMathematicae oder Philosophische und Mathematische Erquickstunden, 3 vols. (Nuremberg: Endter, 1636–53; reprint Frankfurt am Main: Keip, 1990–1), 1:277–306, 2:232–68, and 3:215–76. 21 Harsdöffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 4:159. 22 Ibid., 180. 23 “Das Umschlagen des rein Lautlichen der kreatürlichen Sprache in die bedeutungsschwangere Ironie, die aus dem Munde des Intriganten zurücktönt,” Walter Benjamin, “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 1:383.

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24 “[…] ein lebendiges Gemähl; massen die Rede nicht bilden, das Bild aber nicht reden kann, beedes aber durch die lebendigen Personen deß Schauplatzes ausgewörket wird.” Harsdörffer, Poetischer Trichter, 2:73. 25 Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 4:98. 26 “Dergleichen Spiegel halt ich für der Kunst höchstes Meisterstück, welche doch oftmals anderen zu Schaden mißbraucht werden, nicht anders als die täglichen Wohltaten Gottes, so wir durch den lieben Sonnenschein empfahen, von uns zur Eitelkeit verwendet werden.” Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, 4:133f. 27 See Harsdörffer and Schwenter, Erquickstunden, 3:244, 257f; 4:258f. On the role of the mirror in Harsdörffer’s poetic theory, see Barbara BeckerCantarino, “Ut pictura poesis? Zu Harsdörffers Theorie der Bildkunst,” in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer und die Künste, 9–21. 28 See especially the long section on the “Gleichnis” (simile) in Harsdörffer, Nathan und Jotham, ed. Guillaume van Gemert (Nuremberg: Endter, 1659; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Keip, 1991), 1:8–21. 29 “Wie der Sonnen Strahl vermittels eines Hohlspiegels beffestiget brennet, also dringet und beflammet auch die Gleichniß der Menschen Sinn,” Harsdörffer, Poetischer Trichter, 2:50; he quotes Augustinus, Epistula, 119.

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PART 2 GOING GLOBAL

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chapter seven

Divine Messengers and Divine Messages: Angelic Media in Early Modern Hispanic America ANDREW REDDEN

When asked to think of “media” today a number of things might readily come to mind: publishers, news corporations, the Internet, television, and the like. When asked to place “media” in an early modern context our list would no doubt change with respect to the technologies concerned, but, in essence, our first thoughts would still turn to the communication of information and ideas between groups of people, especially (but by no means exclusively) via the proliferation of literature due to the (relatively) recent invention of the printing press. Other influential media at the time, with particular regard to theology and religious culture, would have been painting, theatrical performance, music, and even building construction as churches were built and decorated as texts to transmit religious ideas to the congregations that used them. Within early modern Catholic culture, however, all of these media would also have been integrated into the liturgy, an overarching medium that transmitted or communicated ideas via performative practice through time and across generations. While this function of the liturgy was extremely important, this was in fact its secondary purpose; its primary purpose was to bring participants directly into contact with God, the saints, and the angels. This belied the Lutheran critique of Catholic mediation depicted in the Pancratius Kempff woodcut in the introduction (see figs. 0.1 and 0.2, pp. 8 and 11). The reality and purpose of the liturgy were by no means “self-centred.” Rather, it was a conduit through which human communication with the divine was possible in communion with the saints and angels. This communion and, in particular, the beings with whom this communion took place will be the subject of the following essay since, when considering “theologies of media,” it would be a major oversight to forget the angels themselves. Angels were messengers of the

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divine with whom, according to historical texts, people interacted with regularity. It is important to remember that while angels are media that are easily forgotten by modernity, they were, for the early modern Catholic, perhaps the media par excellence. The following chapter, therefore, will investigate angels from the perspective of “theologies of media” and, more to the point, will attempt to look at theologies of media from the perspective of angels and the people with whom they interacted. That angels acted as divine messengers is perhaps not altogether surprising (at least to those familiar with the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic faith traditions), but what is sometimes surprising is the fundamental importance of angelic mediation to the early modern religious cultures of the Hispanic world and, by extension, some of the forms that this mediation took. What will be examined here, then, is how the relatively familiar notion (in European terms) of angelic messengers transformed as it moved across the Atlantic and merged with existing autochthonous spiritual traditions and became the fundamental medium of early modern Hispanic and Hispanic American Catholicism.

• “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” But there is something more. Inspired by the Father, each procession of the Light spreads itself generously toward us, and, in its power to unify, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the oneness and deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in. For, as the sacred Word says, “from him and to him are all things.”1

In the early modern Catholic world angels were believed to be intrinsic to the structure of the universe.2 It would have been as bizarre to imagine a world or created universe without angels as it would a body without bones. What would exist would be a mess, without structure or form, without animation or life, again contradicting the Lutheran critique mentioned in the introduction to this volume that Catholic “polymediality” led to disorder and chaos (Introduction, pg. 12). Angels, as conduits of divine grace, regulated and maintained the harmony of the universe. To a large extent, this belief came out of the Neoplatonism that so influenced Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, which, in turn, underpinned angelology in the Christian tradition through to the early modern period and beyond.3 Until the rise of Renaissance humanism, Pseudo-Dionysius was commonly believed to be Dionysius the Areopagite,

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disciple of St Paul.4 Importantly, his devotion continued to be popular in the early modern Hispanic world and he remained the leading authority on angels throughout the colonial period. Using Neoplatonism, his treatise developed an entire framework for the universe in which the angelic hierarchies played an intrinsic part. God, in his eternal omnipotence, was outside of creation and independent of it. Creation (the universe) was, on the other hand, contained and sustained by God – in the words of the Franciscan friar Luis Jerónimo de Oré, writing in Peru at the end of the sixteenth century: “The being of God [is] primary, absolute, independent, eternal, absolutely simple, utterly contemporary, entirely perfect, wholly one, immutable, immense, all-powerful, and completely wise.”5 “God,” he continues, “the one who gave life, awareness, and free will to his creatures, […] contains all things eminently, formally, and perfectly without limit […] Life is his very being, understanding, and will.”6 As we can see from the above quotation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, God’s life-giving grace, which was believed to raise creation to perfection – or, in other words, complete it – was offered freely as a gift to all his creatures. According to the scholastic reasoning of Thomas Aquinas, due to the almost eternal nature of angelic beings, this gift of grace was offered to them first, above all things, only an instant after the universe was created, and their choice to accept it or reject it was immediate, irrevocable, and eternal.7 Humans, however, were lesser beings in which both body and spirit were combined and due to their material nature were caught in time and space. As such, while they were sadly able and, usually, more than willing to compound their failings as life progressed, they also had the good fortune to be able to undo the choices they had made that turned them away from God’s life-giving grace. Turning towards God rather than turning away from him was understood as an ongoing process, but it is important to bear in mind that it was a process that was impossible without God’s help – as St Augustine argued – due to the “corruption at the root” caused by the fall of humankind.8 That divine help, or grace, was constantly being transmitted or mediated by the angels through their hierarchies from the seven seraphim who, according to the Book of Revelation, surrounded the throne of God, on to the cherubim and the thrones, the dominions, powers, and authorities, then finally to the principalities, archangels, and angels. It was the angels, the lowest order of these spiritual beings, who passed this divine grace on to us. As such, each human being was intimately linked with God via his or her own personal guardian angel – a

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devotion championed by the Society of Jesus after 1608 when Pope Paul V inaugurated an annual feast day in their honour – and they were linked by a spiritual ladder climbing all the way up the nine hierarchies. Grace came down and souls went up, and angels mediated the exchange. This, at least, was the theory.

• In ancient times God was behind closed doors, remote there in his Heaven, because when he made the earth, he cut himself off from men […] He lifted himself up with Heaven and gave earth to its children, he raised it so that the soles of men’s feet never soiled its stars. There was so little interaction between that kingdom and this, that neither could the inhabitants of this one enter there, nor did those [inhabitants] of that [kingdom] deign to treat with these here.9

In the light of the Neoplatonic angelogical theory outlined above, this declaration made in the sixteenth century by the Catalan Augustinian Jerónimo de Saona in his own version of the Celestial Hierarchy might come as a surprise. Yet while the colourful imagery in this depiction is arguably somewhat unusual, in essence Saona’s account deviates little (at this point) from St Augustine’s own teaching that at the fall, “Adam forsook God, and was then forsaken by God.”10 Worse yet, Augustine was emphatically pessimistic that from that point on, this divine condemnation affected the entire human race: “man was willingly perverted and justly condemned, and so begot perverted and condemned offspring. For we were all in that one man.”11 For Christians, therefore, and in particular for those who leaned towards Augustinianism, humankind was irrevocably marred from then on and, without God’s saving grace, whatever we tried to do would be meaningless. Humankind could not save itself; this had to be done by God.12 Yet the angels had been instructed not to let humans back into Paradise and cherubim guarded the gates with flaming swords.13 The time for angelic mediation was over; without God’s grace humankind was subject to both spiritual and physical death and the angels would enforce that rift. An act of divine will was needed before spiritual exchange could begin again, and that act was, of course, the incarnation of Christ, his death, and his resurrection. This was the lynchpin in time and space that held everything together and ended the separation between heaven and earth.

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Saona then, in remarkably contemporary and colloquial terms, evoked the artillery sieges of conquest and European conflict together with images of Mediterranean and transatlantic commerce, in order to reinterpret the Passion and Ascension of Christ into heaven: He came, became man, and on returning, threw down a great wall that veiled Heaven: and that is, as it was made of diamond, there was no artillery on earth that could smash it: but in touching it with the blood of a divine Lamb, he threw the wall to the ground. Merchandise began to be exchanged between Heaven and earth: and because God came down to tread on our soil, humans went up to tread on [walk among] his stars.14

Saona’s rendition is a rather eccentric take on the medieval apocryphal account of the Harrowing of Hell, which extrapolated the statement in the Apostles’ Creed that when Christ died on the Cross he “descended into hell and after three days rose again.” The legend of the harrowing put flesh on the skeletal Creed by combining it creatively with a passage in Matthew’s account of the Passion that stated: “the tombs opened and the bodies of many holy men rose from the dead, and these, after his resurrection, came out of the tombs, entered the Holy City, and appeared to a number of people.”15 Working with both the article of faith that Christ had descended into hell and the scriptural tradition that previously dead holy men had risen with Christ, early medieval Christians recounted and celebrated how Christ had not only descended into hell, but how he had also smashed the gates and released all the souls of holy people who had been condemned merely as a result of the sin of Adam rather than any of their own. However apocryphal, the story made complete sense within the medieval Christian world view as reason dictated that God’s justice must prevail and those who had committed no sins of their own would not be condemned for all eternity. In a retelling of this hopeful tradition, Dante, for example, famously described the scene at the gates of Dis where he quailed at the rage of the demons guarding it: “This insolence of theirs is not new, for once they showed it at a less hidden gate, which still stands without a bolt.”16 Of course, the reason for the gates being boltless was that Christ had smashed them when he descended to release the trapped souls. This legend crossed the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, and in a Hispanic American twist, Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs has suggested how the mendicants’ retelling of the tale to the indigenous peoples of the central Andean highlands conceivably gave rise to a belief among

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Andeans in 1564 that the souls of the dead (supay) had returned from the underworld to the earth and were wandering rootless and bodiless ready to possess the bodies of Andean religious practitioners. The purported phenomenon was reported thirty-two years after the Spaniards first set foot in Peru (1532) and hence thirty-two years after the “arrival of Christ.” The original legend, based on scriptural tradition, talks about Christ releasing the souls of the dead but says nothing about what happened to them after he ascended to heaven alone. What happened next, then, could only be inferred by the indigenous congregations, and, of course, inferences can be markedly different depending on particular cultural influences. In an Andean context it made sense for rootless and bodiless Andean souls to take possession of the bodies of indigenous religious practitioners rather than ascend to a Christian heaven (Hananpacha, “the upper world”) with a foreign deity.17 Reworking this apocryphal tale in his own way a few years later, back on the Iberian Peninsula, Saona remarkably redirected the harrowing of hell to heaven itself. Prior to God becoming man and redeeming humankind, we read, all traffic was cut off between the two realms of heaven and earth. An unbreakable diamond-crystal barrier (the proverbial glass ceiling) prevented all interaction, except on the part of occasional (and usually terrifying) angelic messengers. Christ’s blood, however, was the weapon of power that was to shatter that barrier. The Cross of Christ was the siege weapon to bring down the diamond walls of heaven, and, once Christ had toppled the crystal barricade, there were no longer any obstacles to spiritual commerce. With cordial relations re-established, a flow of grace downwards matched by a flow of souls upwards could begin. The angels, of course, were those that carried the merchandise from heaven to earth and back up again. Their hierarchies formed the ladder that would facilitate the exchange. This, in fact, was a key part of the theological importance of Jacob’s ladder, the dream in which the Patriarch, fleeing from the wrath of his brother Esau, whom he had usurped, saw a ladder stretching from heaven to earth and angels ascending and descending by it.18

• This motif of Jacob’s ladder was a common one across the Hispanic world as it was one in which the Neoplatonic structure by which God’s grace emanated to the world was most evident in the Judaeo-Christian scriptural tradition. Apart from being represented in numerous paintings such as the one hanging in the sacristy of the Jesuit Church of San

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Pedro, Lima, it was also referred to in sermons and pastoral letters. In 1649, for example, the bishop of Puebla de los Ángeles, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (1600–59), wrote in celebration of the consecration of the cathedral, that the place where Jacob’s ladder touched the ground was the place of the first church on earth. While Palafox openly admitted that God dwelt in all places, the point of his argument was to highlight the importance of church buildings as he asserted that in them God was present in most majesty.19 By scriptural precedent and by virtue of reason it could be asserted then that the mediation of angels, moving up and down this ladder, was intrinsic to God’s majestic presence in these places. By this reasoning, the mediation of angels was necessary even before a church could be built at all, and, once it was built, the ladder connecting the divine and the terrestrial was firmly in place. The church building was the keystone that stopped the ladder from slipping and crashing down to earth. Or, to follow Saona’s metaphor, if the ladder was the road on which spiritual commerce could move, arguably, the church (at the foot of the ladder) was the market where the transactions took place. Furthermore, it was the Eucharistic rite, the sacrifice of Christ performed in the church, which was the key transaction and the motor for all subsequent exchange. In the Americas, the Eucharistic or sacrificial connection between humans, angels, and the divine could assume somewhat unexpected guises. In 1566, a Franciscan Friar, Fray Diego de Landa, who became infamous for his extremely violent extirpation of indigenous religious activity in the Yucatán Peninsula, compiled a text of information about the religious rites of the indigenous Quiché Maya.20 According to the account, in one particular rite – the rite of Yzamnakauil – the indigenous participants apparently sacrificed either a dog or a man and offered up the heart together with food whilst the old women of the community danced. Landa then writes remarkably: “They used to say that an angel descended and received this sacrifice.”21 Given that the Franciscans had only recently turned their attention to the evangelization of the Yucatán with four friars being appointed from Guatemala and another four from Mexico in 1544, the use of the imperfect tense in this statement tellingly confines the belief in angelic mediation of Mayan sacrificial rites to the past.22 From Landa’s perspective it stood to reason that “they used to say [decían que] [but now no longer say]” this, for how could angels have possibly participated in idolatrous rites? In effect, the past tense implied that whatever errors may have existed previously as a result of the Mayan neophytes misunderstanding what they had been taught had

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been duly corrected. What is interesting for the purposes of this essay, however, is that the correction (whether on the part of Landa or any of his indigenous informers) is merely implied and that the epithet “angel” is allowed to remain in the text at all – something quite remarkable in a work that certainly does not hold back from labelling indigenous deities as demons. According to Landa’s account, angels (and not demons) are permitted to remain as perceived intermediaries in indigenous sacrifices. How is this possible? To further impress on readers the paradoxical nature of Landa’s association, at this point it is worth bearing in mind a parallel example of linguistic controversy in which Jesús García-Ruiz draws our attention to a contemporary (mid-sixteenth century) polemic between the Dominicans and the Franciscans ministering to the Cakchiquiel Maya in Chiapas. The Dominicans argued that the indigenous term “qabahuil” or “qabovil” was a suitable term to use both for “god” (as a label for all gods), and “God” (as a label for the Christian god). To use the Spanish term “Dios,” they asserted, would be meaningless to the Maya. The Franciscans, on the other hand, fiercely rejected this with the argument that confusion would result among the Maya with regard to the one true God and their own gods (which at best were false and at worst were demonic). As such, to use the indigenous term for both would be quite inappropriate, if not blasphemous.23 If, as a rule, the Franciscan Order ministering to the Maya were so stringent with regard to their use of theological terminology and practice – and Landa’s tragic and extremely violent extirpation was a prime example of such rigidity – the appearance of angels in an account of indigenous rites seems rather odd, almost oxymoronic. The oxymoronic appearance of these angelic mediators fades away, however, when we consider this particular description alongside the Catholic Eucharistic prayer that calls on God to command the descent of his angel to take the sacrificial offering of the Mass to his altar in heaven: We most humbly beseech thee, almighty God, command these offerings to be borne by the hands of thy holy angel to thine altar on high, in the sight of thy divine majesty.24

The Canon of the Mass and the description of the Mayan sacrificial rite bear a significant resemblance to each other. Whether by coincidence or design it appears from the chronicle that Landa and/or his informer considered that offerings placed on an altar as a gift to the gods took on

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a Eucharistic significance for the indigenous worshippers. Of course, it is not possible to ever be certain if for any period of time (however brief) the Mayan subjects of the account actually did believe that an angel descended to receive the sacrifice or whether this was simply a reasonable assumption on the part of the chronicler or his informer. The passage may even have been a reworked version of what had been recounted so that it could fit into a framework that Landa’s Hispanic readership could understand. Nevertheless, the point remains that it made sense that at some stage in the sacrificial or Eucharistic process angelic mediation was assumed or believed to be assumed. Evidence does exist to support the argument that angels would have widely been seen to mediate sacrifice in Hispanic America during the colonial period – even if not all groups believed it appropriate or a part of their particular tradition. We might consider, for example, that this direct association of angelic mediation with the Eucharistic sacrifice was not confined merely to invocations of the Latin Canon and the commentaries of colonial clergy, but was instead widely represented in prominently displayed sculpture and paintings in and around church buildings – the keystones or marketplaces for the angelic ladders that connected the world with God. Sculptures of the Eucharist being borne aloft or venerated by angels were often placed above doorways into churches and were represented in imagery within the buildings themselves; and it is important to remember that, in general, these buildings were frequented by peoples of diverse ethno-cultural origins and mixes throughout Hispanic America. By the use of this imagery the idea was rendered a common one, and, for indigenous communities in particular, the sacred nature of the image was reinforced by the Eucharistic host being carried in a sunburst monstrance directly linking it to (and intending to replace) the pre-Hispanic cult of the sun.25 On the entrance to the courtyard of the sixteenth-century Dominican convent church of San Juan Bautista in Coyoacan, Mexico, there can still be seen, on either side of the double archway, a pair of naked angels with the belt of a mendicant friar draped around their necks like priestly stoles, with their arms raised up to heaven. In their arms are what look like fruits and flowers, though the fruits could easily be seen as Eucharistic hosts. Either way, whether the fruits of the earth or the bread of the Eucharist, they are being offered up to God by the angels just as the Canon of the Mass requests as part of a ritual sacrifice (see plates 3 and 4). Evidence that these kinds of representations could be seen across colonial Hispanic America can be found in Arequipa, in the southern

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Peruvian highlands. Above the doorway of the convent church of San Francisco is a sculpted and stylized relief of an angel in baroque dress standing on a plinth and flanked by Our Lady of Sorrows on the left and St Francis on the right. In his arms, the angel holds two scrolled handles which support, above his head, a Eucharistic host at the centre of a sunburst (see plates 5 and 7). The convent itself dates from the mid-sixteenth century but successive earthquakes have caused it to need rebuilding on various occasions, in particular after the earthquake of 1687. The angel’s stylized form and dress would suggest a linkage with the peculiarly intricate Andean Baroque decorative style that (pioneered by the Jesuits) began in Arequipa around this time and spread to the other religious orders and south across the Andean Altiplano.26 Close to the Franciscan convent church, above the side doorway of the church of Santa Marta, another baroque angel can be seen, this time in a much more recognizably European style. Above his head he holds what is now clearly a sunburst monstrance in which the Eucharistic host is contained during the veneration of the Blessed Sacrament (see plate 6). That this type of imagery (and hence, association) long outlived Spanish colonial rule in Hispanic America is evidenced by the fact that in the Jesuit Church of Santiago de Chile hangs a late nineteenth-century Italian painting of Saint Francis Borgia (d. 1572) kneeling on a step in veneration of the Blessed Sacrament. The Eucharist, also in a sunburst monstrance, is being elevated towards heaven by a youthful angel who turns to look questioningly at the priest who is gazing in rapture at the host.27 Thus we can see that the angelic role was considered within HispanoAmerican Catholicism to be that of a Eucharistic mediator, a messenger who carried grace down to earth and the sacrifices of humankind up to heaven (or, in a more indigenous context, up to the gods, as we have seen from Landa’s account). Yet while this was a common belief, divine grace and this type of angelic mediation was, in turn, mediated by the clergy adding another layer of hierarchy to the process. If, in the words of Alan Durston – citing the Directorio espiritual written in 1641 by the Jesuit Pablo de Prado – prayer in early modern Hispanic America (in his specific case, Peru) was tied to a “logic of exchange and sacrifice” and “was a way of activating or ‘charging’ on one’s behalf the accumulated ‘credit’ created by Christ’s sacrifice,” then in the case of Eucharistic mediation, priests were the bank clerks who gave access to the credit that allowed the exchange to take place.28 Yet the importance of the mediation of angels could never be restricted to spiritual bank clerks, especially since the

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Neoplatonic structure of the Celestial Hierarchy filtered grace down to each and every individual. Add to this, of course, the flowering of popular devotion to the guardian angel in the seventeenth century, which was encouraged rather than restricted by Hispanic and Hispanic American clergy. Durston also draws our attention to another Andean pastoral text written by the Franciscan friar Diego de Molina, in which he compares angels “to bees who collect the ‘honey’ of people’s prayers and exchange it for God’s forgiveness for their sins and other blessings.”29 Angels, then, mediated directly between individuals and God, even as they did between the community and God in the church building during the celebration of the Eucharist. Another particularly personal and familial way of gaining access to angelic mediators during the colonial period was by bypassing the Celestial hierarchy entirely via what were essentially “home-made” angels that could intercede directly with God for the family. These “home-made” angelic mediators were nothing less than the children who had died in a state of innocence and who became known as angelitos, or “little angels,” and belief in the efficacy of their mediation was common to the entire Hispano-Catholic world.30 The high infant mortality of the time ensured that most families would have at least one if not more angelitos belonging to their own flesh and blood in heaven, and they could ask these angelchildren to intercede for them before God and pray for their souls and their salvation. In his above-mentioned Hyerarchia Celestial, published in 1603, Jerónimo de Saona explained that this idea developed from the New Testament account of Jesus, who told the disciples to “suffer the little children to come unto me, because they are of the Kingdom of God.”31 Saona, always happy to adapt scriptural tradition to his pedagogical and theological purposes, changed the passage to read “in truth I tell you that they are like the angels in heaven who always look on the face of my Father,”32 and continued by explaining that for this reason children and angels are always placed together. He further described how from this arose a manner of speaking that referred to children as angels, and that this has reached the point that amongst women and ignorant people they no longer say this as a metaphor but think they are of the same nature as Angels: and if a child of theirs dies in the age and state of innocence (which is before they are able to use reason), they say that they have an Angel in Heaven.33

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Saona’s comment that juxtaposed only women and ignorant people in their literal devotion to child-angelitos seems hardly representative or fair. For example, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, an extremely erudite Jesuit contemporary of Saona’s, wrote an epistle to “one who was inconsolable for the death of a son. [The letter] declares the good fortune of those whose children die.”34 He continues: for certain your son is in heaven, he is pure, and beautiful as an Angel, enjoying the presence of God […] There he will commend you to Our Lord. In the house of God, not only do you have an intimate friend, but a son of your own who will petition God with your affairs. Accompanied by many Angels and glorious souls he will come out to receive you when you die.35

Of course, Nieremberg, as a scholar as well as a priest, was careful to maintain the linguistic distance of a simile – “your son,” he said “is pure as an angel [but is not actually an angel].” Nevertheless, it is a fine line to draw between being something and being like something, especially when the child referred in every respect was acting like an angel and in the presence of angels. The “like” or “as” of the simile could very easily be lost in the telling. This “blurring of beings” was aided by the fact that throughout Hispanic America belief in the mediatory powers of these “little angels” was encouraged by standard funerary practices. In 1610, a report from the Jesuit mission of Las Parras in the northern frontiers of New Spain described how many children had been baptised but how the majority had been “taken by Our Lord” after an epidemic had ravaged the population.36 The letter continues by describing how marvellous it was to see how the children’s parents resigned themselves to God’s will “when they heard our [missionaries telling them] that their children would go straight to heaven like little angels as they had died having been baptised and without sin.” As such, the Jesuit narrator wrote, “they were crowned with flowers and roses before taking them to the grave.”37 Angelitos could also be found in the seventeenth- to early eighteenthcentury parish books of the dead, in which priests (in theory) recorded all the burials they had presided over.38 Looking at examples from parishes in Chile, Upper Peru, Peru, New Granada, and New Spain produced widespread evidence that from between 1680 to roughly 1735 it was reasonably common practice for priests to register the funerals of children under the age of four years as the “burial of a little angel,” irrespective of race or social status.39

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In the Book of the Dead from the church of Paucarpata, Arequipa, Peru, it was recorded that on 16 May 1684, Fray Joseph de Villegas buried “a little forastero angel, son of Juan Taco who works on the hacienda of Pablo de Aguirre.”40 In the 1710–27 Book of the Dead from the cathedral of Santiago de Chile, an entry written by the priest Dr Dn Antonio de Yrauazaual in July 1711 records the burial with minor rites in “[the church of] la Merced of a little slave angel who belonged to the Canon Don Joseph de Toro.”41 An entry from 1713 in the Book of the Dead from the Parish of Colina, meanwhile, also in Chile, tells of how in the church of Polpaico (also spelled Puelpaico and administered by the priests of Colina), the priest who signed his name as “Doctor Orrego” interred “the body of a little angel whose parents were unknown because they threw him into the church [where] I found him.”42 An entry from the following year reads: “on 4 November 1714, I buried according to the lesser rite a little angel aged four months, of which I bear witness. Lorenzo de Godoy.”43 Just over half a year later this same priest writes that “in the parish of Colina on 26th May, 1715 I buried with minor rites a little angel aged between two and three years, legitimate son of Alonso Pardo – slave of Maria de Campo [and] Don Juan Baptista Lasitua – and of Maria Parda, free.” In the margin Godoy refers to the child as an Angelito Pardo or a “little dark-skinned angel.”44 Moving north into Alto Peru (present-day Bolivia), in the parish of Yurupana, diocese of La Paz, Joseph Gonsales de Rueda wrote in 1716: “On the twenty-fifth of August I buried the body of a little angel named Patricio in the Church [He was] the son of the Captain Domingo de Calbo.”45 Even further north, in the doctrina of Marcabal of the diocese of Trujillo, Peru, in 1738, Ildefonso de Balderrama recorded that, “On 4 of November the body of Francisco Guaccha [the] little illegitimate angel of Francisco Guaccha and Ysidora Josepha was buried.”46 Returning to Chile, in that same year, on 26 May, in the church of Renca, the priest Ygnacio de Escobar buried “out of charity, the body of a little Angel.”47 So we can see from the few entries documented here that while the registers distinguished racial difference and social standing between children who had died prior to baptism, this did not affect their status as angelitos: children of Spaniards, indigenous people, African Americans (whether free or slaves) were all referred to as angelitos. Even illegitimacy did not affect their role as angelic intermediaries or their being accorded angelito status. By all accounts, the existence or not of these angelito inscriptions in the books of the dead depended on the preferences of individual priests and

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local parish tradition. On the whole, however, as can be seen from the very limited number of examples above, this was a practice widespread throughout the Catholic parishes in Hispanic America. As a point of interest, from 1720 onwards it appears that a series of episcopal visits began to standardize registry entries to “párvulo” or “criatura” and, by 1740, the little angels disappear from the records.48 While these terms still carry connotations of innocence, there are no angelic associations. These changes appear to reflect a growing theological tendency to separate nature and grace and therefore to clarify the boundaries between humans and angels, but in reality, these top-down reforms had little impact on long-established beliefs and practices.49 The devotion to these dead little angels lived on. In 1712, for example, the Actas de Cabildo of the diocese of Antequera (Oaxaca, Mexico) ordered that the “burials of little angels” should be marked with a distinctive chime.50 The Actas forbade mournful funerary tolling on those occasions.51 A distinctive, less sombre bell toll from that of ordinary funerals has survived to the present day in Mitla, an indigenous parish within the diocese of Oaxaca.52 In New Mexico, Martina Will de Chaparro has noted how the angelito tradition, including cheerful bell-ringing instead of mournful tolling, survived well into the nineteenth century, while an archaeological dig in Tucson, Arizona (November 2006–March 2008), unearthed numerous nineteenth-century graves of children buried with garlands of flowers indicating definite continuity of angelito mortuary practice in Hispanic communities.53 In the crypt of Lima Cathedral, meanwhile, recent excavations uncovered a late eighteenth-century casket in which the skull of a child had been carefully placed on a velvet cushion and, just like the sixteenth-century angelitos of Las Parras in New Spain, it had been crowned with white flowers, symbolic of sanctity.54

• The link between children and angelic mediators did not only take place after death, however. In some cases angelic children appeared (in life) to offer consolation or to save people from death or damnation. In 1630a Jesuit letter written to Rome from the province of Chile described a disastrous expedition that set out from the island of Chiloe against the Mapuche of Valdivia.55 As soon as the Spanish left port, a sudden storm drove the ship onto rocks “in the lands of the enemy” with the loss of sixty lives. According to the narrator, one injured Spaniard was cast up onto the beach along with the bodies of many of his comrades, where “he lay for nineteen days more dead than alive.” He managed to keep himself

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from death by “licking a half-eaten pigeon” and praying for aid to God, the saints, and the holy souls in purgatory. Suddenly there appeared before him “a beautiful boy dressed like a little Indian” who consoled him, told him that although he was in enemy territory the indigenous warriors wouldn’t kill him, and named three Spaniards of a squadron that was on its way to rescue him. When the three sailors found him, the boy was nowhere to be seen. According to the narrator, they were amazed to find him on the beach calling their names – he clearly could not see them as his face was so swollen due to exposure, “with which all were persuaded that the [Indian] boy had been an angel sent from Heaven to console him.”56 Thus on a war-ravaged frontier this angelic messenger was bringing a message of hope, not only for the soldier who had survived the shipwreck on enemy shores, but also for all those involved in the conflict. It was a message of hope mediated by an angel-child that Hispanic and indigenous cultures were not irreconcilable; angels did not only appear as Spanish youths, and indigenous peoples were not always demonized. A different kind of hope was brought to Mariana, an indigenous woman of the town of San Francisco Javier de Macaguane in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, as she lay mortally ill during a measles epidemic in 1693. After receiving Holy Communion in preparation for death, she “was found in the middle of the day out of her bed and in a state of terror.”57 When asked what was the matter, she replied that some ferocious men had come in and threatened her with death, but a beautiful boy defended her and would not let them come near her.58 According to the letter, written first to the Father Provincial in Santa Fe de Bogotá and then back to Rome, this happened on two separate occasions until the moment when “the boy caused those monsters to flee at which the Indian woman was greatly calmed and soon healed of her illness.”59 Just as the indigenous boy-angel had consoled and arguably protected the Spanish soldier on the beach near Valdivia, one had also protected Mariana from being killed by these “ferocious men,” who were certainly interpreted by the Jesuit letter writers (and probably, by the time the missionaries had explained this to her and her family, by Mariana herself) as demonic beings that had come to carry her off to hell – a fate much worse than death.60 Through the mediation of this angelic being she had been given another chance at life and another chance for salvation. The message delivered was again one of hope and one of consolation.

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Another somewhat surprising feature of angelic messengers in the Americas was that they did not always take human form (whether living or dead), as might normally be expected. In what she describes as “the talking birds of paradise,” Teresa Gisbert links a relatively obscure European tradition associating birds with the angelic role of God’s messengers with the Andean tradition of talking birds, which similarly carry the words of indigenous deities to their worshippers.61 While the European context for her thesis is based on exegesis of the writings and actions of Solomon, the Andean talking angel birds centre on the figure of the life and sacrificial death (or martyrdom) of the god Tunupa: according to the legend recounted by Fernando Siñani, the cacique of Carabuco, the birds that comforted Tunupa in his last moments were in fact angels.62 At the same time, Gisbert argues, it was not unusual in the Andes for talking birds to transmit divine messages of great import, and she cites the case of the “famous bird Indi” that served as an oracle to Manco Capac and Maita Capac, as documented by the chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in his Historia Indica.63 Such associations between angels and tropical birds were by no means limited to legends and chronicles. Whereas churches painted with and containing images of angels would not necessarily have been unusual in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at the end of the seventeenth century – with the flourishing of the “Andean Hybrid Baroque” – carvings and paintings of tropical birds juxtaposed with angels became relatively commonplace in the churches of the southern Andean highlands and the Altiplano.64 The murals of the chapel of St Ignatius in the Jesuit church of Santiago, Arequipa, are breathtaking in their depictions of angels flying, hovering, and carrying cornucopias while parrots, toucans, and other gloriously coloured birds alight on the branches of vines covered in leaves and flowers and pick the fruit to eat. Traces of paint on the pillars of the main church indicate that the entire church was once painted in this way but only the murals of the chapel survive. Church facades throughout the southern Andean highlands, meanwhile, are covered in relief sculptures of geometrical patterns, flora and fauna, but most significantly, angels and tropical birds. On the facade of the church of Santo Domingo, La Paz (in Alto Peru, present-day Bolivia), for example, parrots can be seen eating pomegranates while cherubs hover close by (see plate 8).65 These Andean angel-bird-messengers in fact had their equivalents throughout Hispanic America. The indigenous Muisca population and other ethnic groups of pre-Columbian and colonial New Granada (especially of the Santa Marta region) used gold pectoral ornaments that

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frequently depicted shamanic totems in the form of tropical birds flying between shamans and their deities to deliver messages and hand over the medicinal secrets of plants and the natural world. Some would take the form of strange two-headed birds while others would be more recognizable.66 Their purpose, nevertheless, was to mediate between the shamans and the deities who wished to communicate with them, and vice versa. Of course, during the colonial period totems could be and were often interpreted along the lines of demons by chroniclers or priests, even if indigenous peoples only assimilated this association to a varying degree. Nevertheless, the approved juxtaposition of tropical birds and angels was not confined to the Andes. In New Spain, in the sixteenth century, the walls of an Augustinian convent in Malinalco were covered with remarkably similar sorts of paradisiacal flora and fauna as could be seen a century later in the Jesuit church of Arequipa, Peru.67 No direct causal connection has yet been made between the decoration of the two religious buildings, and by the time the Jesuit church of Arequipa was being painted, the murals of Malinalco had long been covered over by a lime whitewash.68 What connected the decorations of the two buildings was simply a theological tradition in which angels and tropical birds were commonly associated with each other. As one final case in point from sixteenth-century New Spain, in his Psalmodia Christiana Bernardino de Sahagún deliberately juxtaposed these angels and birds and described them interchangeably in the invocations. On the third day of Christmas, for example, the first psalm reads: The various birds, the precious birds, the birds of springtime, the angels have come warbling as with the finest of jade flutes, have come to make a memorable sound of rattle-bells. Alleluia. All the various precious little birds in Heaven flew like quetzal birds. They said in song: May there be peace on earth. Alleluia.69

For Sahagún and his fellow Franciscans this was a creative response to the problem of how to render these real and yet potentially quite abstract Christian concepts into Nahuatl so that they could be understood by the Nahua neophytes. From a local perspective it made good sense to compare these beautiful and valued creatures with the angels of paradise. At the same time, these analogies were important to integrate indigenous understanding of Christianity with that of the “universal” Catholic Church. If angelic-bird references in Europe were not entirely common

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in the early modern period, by the height of the Hispano-American baroque at the end of the seventeenth century they had spread throughout Hispanic America, drawing of earlier pan-indigenous pre-Columbian traditions in which birds acted as divine messengers. Angels, then, were the mediators of this pan-Hispanic theological unity that in many respects was so culturally diverse.

• Divine messengers in the early modern Americas took on a number of different forms: spirit, human (living or dead), or even avian. Their appearance varied throughout the Hispanic world and depended on patterns that might surface at different times in different locations. Nevertheless, if we can isolate any overall commonality between all these diverse forms we might say that their messages were all salvific in nature as angels were bound to carry grace, knowledge, and, ultimately, life to humankind from the divine. Importantly, these angelic mediators were also intimately linked to death and Eucharistic sacrifice as, once Christ’s own sacrificial death (and resurrection) had broken down the barriers between heaven and earth, an angelic ladder (Jacob’s ladder) could be (re)constructed to allow angels to carry back sacrifices (life) from humanity to the divine. Sometimes, in the case of the angelitos, it was their own deaths that enabled them to become angelic. The deaths of these mediators allowed personal petitions to be made and praise to be given, while other angels would carry back the divine grace in an apparent cycle of emanation and return. In the above-mentioned words of Saona: Merchandise began to be exchanged between Heaven and earth: and because God came down to tread on our soil, humans went up to tread on [walk among] his stars.70

Angels were the merchants that carried this merchandise. They were the early modern mediators par excellence; they were the mediators of eternal life.

NOTES 1 Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Celestial Hierarchy,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 145.

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2 See Fernando Cervantes’s essay, “Angels Conquering and Conquered: Changing Perceptions in Spanish America,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 104–33. For the importance of angels in early modern Europe, see the essays within the same anthology. For a superb analysis of medieval angelology, see David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3 For a complex analysis of the development of early Neoplatonic thought, see Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978). 4 He was also popularly thought to be St Denis, first bishop of Paris and martyr (died c. 275). In the sixteenth century, however, a polemic was generated regarding Pseudo-Dionysius’s real identity and it was established that in fact he lived in the late fifth century. 5 Fray Luis Jerónimo de Oré, Symbolo Catholico Indiano, en el qual se declaran los misterios de la Fe contenidos enlos tres Symbolos Catholics, Apostolico, Niceno, y de S.Athanasio (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1598), fol. 7r. See the facsimile edition by Antoine Tibesar (Lima: Australis, 1992), 91. Unless otherwise stated, this and all other translations are my own. 6 Ibid., fols. 7r–8r (facsimile, 91–3). See also Andrew Redden, Diabolism in Colonial Peru, 1560–1750 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 15–18. 7 See Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, trans. Richard Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Question XVI, Article 3, Replies to the objection 1, and Article 4, Answer, 456, 463–4. 8 Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1984), 13.14, 523. 9 Jerónimo de Saona, Hyerarchia celestial y terrena y symbolo de los nueve estados de la Iglesia militante, con los nueve Choros de Angeles de la Triumphante (Cuenca: por Cornelio Bodan, 1603), 11. 10 Augustine, City of God, 13.15, 523. 11 Ibid., 13.14, 523. 12 This was an argument against the Pelagian notion that humankind could, through its own efforts, attain salvation. 13 Gen. 3:24. 14 Saona, Hyerarchia celestial, 11–12. 15 Matt. 27:52–3. 16 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 1: Inferno, trans. John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), canto 8, line 126, p. 117.

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17 See Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad: la incorporación de los indios del Perú al catolicismo, 1532–1750 (Lima: IFAE, 2003), 104. 18 Gen. 28:10–15. The ladder also represented mystical union with God. 19 David Brading, “‘Psychomachia Indiana’: Angels, Devils and Holy Images in New Spain,” in Angels, Demons and the New World: Spanish America, 1524–1767, ed. Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 20 For discussion of Landa’s extirpation, see Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45–128. See also Dennis Tedlock, “Torture in the Archives: Mayans Meet Europeans,” American Anthropologist 95, no. 1 (1993), 139–52. 21 Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán [1566] (San José.: Editorial San Fernando, 2005), 60–1. See also Redden, “Angelic Death,” 152–3. 22 For the evangelisation, see Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 51. 23 Jesus Garcia-Ruiz, “El misionero, las lenguas mayas y la traducción: Nominalismo, tomismo y etnolingüística en Guatemala,” in Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 77 (1992): 83–110 (91–2), cited in Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 211. 24 “Supplices te rogamus, omnípotens Deus: jube hæc perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime altare tuum, in conspectu divinæ majestatis tuæ: ut quotquot ex hac altaris participatione, sacrosanctum Fílii tui, Corpus et Sanguinem sumpsérimus omni benedictione cœlesti, et gratia repleamur,” from “The Ordinary of the Mass: Oblation of the Victim to God,” in The Ideal Daily Missal: With Vespers for Sundays and Feasts […] from the Missale Romanum [1564] [Latin/English], ed. Sylvester P. Juergens (Mechliniæ/ Belgium: n.p., 1960), 946–7. The same prayer with a slightly different translation can also be found as “The Ordinary of the Mass [Latin/English]: Canon,” accessed 14 October 2011, http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ lmass/ord.htm. 25 See Jaime Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 194–9. For the association of Christ with the sun in Mesoamerica, see also Louise M. Burkhart, “The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts of Early Colonial Mexico,” Ethnohistory 35, no. 3 (1988): 234–56. For the Andes, see Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte (La Paz: Gisbert y CIA, 2004), 33–4. 26 See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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37 38

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Press, 2010), passim. For a description of the design and construction of the fourth Jesuit Church, see pp. 61–8. It was commissioned by the Jesuits along with a number of other paintings for the church in 1872 and was painted in Rome in 1877 by Francesco Grandi. I am grateful to Peter Downes and Ana María Yevenes for these details. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 281, citing Pablo de Prado, Directorio espiritual en la lengua española y quichua general del Inga (Lima: n.p., 1641), fols. 159r–v. Durston, Pastoral Quechua, 281, citing Diego de Molina, Sermones de la quaresma (manuscript, 1649), fol. 130v. See also Redden, “Angelic Death,” 165–7. Mark 10:14. Saona, Hyerarchia celestial, 99. Ibid., 99–100. Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Obras Philosophicas […]: Ethicas, Politicas, y Phisicas, Que contienen lo principal de la Filosofia Moral, Ciuil, y Natural, todo conforme a la piedad Christiana: Tomo Tercero de sus Obras en Romance (Madrid: En la Imprenta Real, 1654), fol. 108v. Ibid. ARSI, Provincia Mexicana (hereafter Prov Mex) 14, Litt. Ann. 1574–1614, “1610: Annua de la Prov de la Nueva España de 1610,” fols. 558–87, (fol. 576r). Ibid. See also Redden, “Angelic Death,” 166. I am grateful to D. Fernando Ryan of the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Santiago de Chile (hereafter AHAS) for the initial idea to search the books of the dead. Prior to 1680 parish records across Hispanic America are extremely scant and mostly destroyed or too fragile to handle or read. As a result, unfortunately, I was unable to prove beyond doubt that the practice was widespread before then, although Saona’s mention of the association as early as 1603 and the Jesuit letter from Las Parras in 1610 would suggest that it was. Archivo Arzobispal de Arequipa (AAA), Libro de Entierros de esta Yg[lesi] a de Paucarp[a]ta, 1683–1788, fol. 81r. By his designation as a forastero, this angelito was indigenous and not from one of the local ayllus native to the area. For a seminal work on forastero movements, see Ann M. Wightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570–1720 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). AHAS, Libro de defunciones – El Sagrario (Santiago Catedral), Libro 1, 1710–27, entry 144. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a consistent approach

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to pagination in the archive. Some books of the dead are paginated (p.), others are folios (recto and verso) (fols. r–v), while in the case of this particular book the number of each entry is recorded. AHAS, Libro de defunciones – Colina, 1705–1732, 286. Ibid., 289. Ibid., 290. Archivo Eclesiástico del Arzobispado de La Paz (AEALP), Libro de Defunciones – Yurupana, 1702–37, fol. 12v. Archivo Arquidiocesano de Trujillo (AAT), Marcabal 1739–1786: Bautismos, Matrimonios, Entierros, FF.3.1, fol. 157r. AHAS, Libro de defunciones – Renca 1695–1774, fol. 144r. Párvulo means “young child” and comes from the Latin parvulus/parvus, meaning “small child/little”; criatura similarly means “young child,” often “newborn child.” For a discussion of the intellectual historical context for this theological development with regard to the devil, see Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 19–29. Actas de Cabildo roughly translates as “Minutes of the Cathedral Chapter.” Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Oaxaca (AHAO), Actas de Cabildo, 1712, fol. 260r. I am grateful to Berenice Ybarra for drawing this to my attention. My thanks are due to Berenice Ybarra and Sergio Navarrete for providing me with a recording of the angelito bell ringing. Martina Will de Chaparro, Death and Dying in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 96–9. The dig was part of the “Joint Courts Complex” project and was carried out by Statistical Research, Inc. My thanks are due to Damien Huffer for this personal communication. The journal Artes de México dedicated a special edition to the tradition’s survival in art and folklore in Mexico from the late eighteenth century to the present: Artes de México: El arte ritual de La Muerte Niña 15 (1992). The edition was republished in 1998. The excavations took place in 2004. I am grateful to Don Fernando LópezSánchez, curator of the cathedral museum, for showing me the casket. Archivo Histórico Nacional de Chile (hereafter AHNC), Fondo Jesuita, vol. 93, Letras annuas desta vice Provincia de chile del año de 1629 y 30, fols. 18v–19r. Ibid. ARSI, Provincia Novi Regno et Quitensis (hereafter Prov NR&Q), 13.2, Litt. Ann. 1694–1698, fol. 455v. Ibid.

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59 Ibid. 60 One letter would have been written by the Jesuit on the mission, and the second – our source – was written by the Provincial to Rome in a long account that collated the stories and letters of his priests in the missions. 61 Teresa Gisbert, El paraíso de los pájaros parlantes: la imagen del otro en la cultura andina (La Paz: Plural-Editores, 2001), 152–4. 62 Ibid., 153. 63 Ibid. 64 See Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque, 324–5, 334–8, and passim. 65 See Gisbert, El paraíso, 154; and Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque, 324. 66 A collection of these golden birds can be seen in the Museo de Oro in Bogotá. 67 See Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), passim. See also Jaime Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 78–9. 68 I am grateful to Iris Montero Sobrevilla and Daniela Bleichmar for first drawing my attention to Malinalco and the fact that the murals were subsequently whitewashed. 69 Bernardino de Sahagún, Psalmodia Christiana (Christian Psalmody), trans. Arthur J.O. Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), 372–3. For an analysis of other angelic bird examples from Sahagún, see also Cervantes, “Angels Conquering and Conquered,” 121–2. 70 Saona, Hyerarchia celestial, 11–12.

chapter eight

On Reading Missionary Correspondence: Jesuit Theologians on the Spiritual Benefits of a New Genre MARKUS FRIEDRICH

If we think about how and why the unprecedented experiences of early modern globalizing Catholicism shaped and influenced the history of media, the Society of Jesus surely deserves a special place. Current research agrees that the Jesuits pioneered, for instance, the deployment of images for missionary purposes among the non-European cultures. They were also masters of multimedia spectacles intended to capture religious sentiments through “sensuous worship.”1 Most famously, perhaps, the Society created new uses for epistolography and employed correspondence on a hitherto unprecedented scale in order to coordinate and promote their activities. Letter writing, one might say, was part of the cultural DNA of the Society of Jesus. It was a defining aspect of the Society of Jesus. To conceive of the Society without letters would be entirely impossible. Letter writing was, of course, not invented by the Jesuits. Quite to the contrary, they consciously inherited a deep and complex tradition of epistolography, both secular and sacred. Moreover, the sixteenth century, when the order was founded (1540), can be said to be an era rich in epistolary dynamics. This was, after all, the heyday of European humanism, an intellectual and social movement that, among other things, rediscovered and feverishly imitated ancient letter writing as exemplified by Cicero. The great Dutch scholar and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam spun a pan-European network of erudite friends that was connected and integrated mostly via copious correspondences. As the century moved on, such practices only became more widespread. The sixteenth century also opened new horizons for the European culture of letter writing on a more technical level. This was the time when the first organized postal services were created in Europe. The Jesuits already took this

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development for granted. Transcontinental expansion also gave correspondences an entirely new framework, although its implications were ambiguous. On the one hand, imperial aspirations almost by necessity had to rely on paper-based, that is, “lettered” forms of political organization. Empires, but also trading companies – and the Church – used letters to integrate and connect their far-flung possessions. On the other hand, however, infrastructural limitations at times seemed to make letter writing almost comically absurd. Even years after Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, had died in Macao in 1552, Jesuits back home in Europe continued to write letters to him because they had not yet received news of his untimely death. Jesuit epistolography shared, acknowledged, or presupposed all these developments. There were many Jesuit individuals who conducted humanistic or erudite correspondences much in the tradition of Erasmus, at least in spirit if not in literary style. Athanasius Kircher, for instance, the famous Jesuit polymath based in seventeenth-century Rome, was well connected to myriads of European scholars by his abundant correspondence.2 Official Jesuit thought about epistolography, on the other hand, was concerned more with administration than with scholarly issues. By far the biggest portion of letters by Jesuits was written in the service of governance. Administrative letters conveyed orders, transported requests, and helped to keep the order’s headquarters in Rome informed about local affairs. To an astonishing degree, the Jesuits thus relied on “lettered governance” to coordinate activities on a global scale. Even though implementation of these ideas was naturally limited for both practical and structural reasons, the Jesuits’ trust in paper-based administration nevertheless is highly significant. Only few other early modern social bodies – whether trading companies or global empires – imagined and attempted bureaucratic governance to such a degree as the Jesuits did.3 Another typical aspect of Jesuit correspondence – and one with only few precedents4 – was missionary epistolography, which came to occupy the crossroads of administrative, informative (“curious”), and spiritual letter writing. Almost from the start, Jesuits were active in bringing Christianity to peoples overseas who were deemed to be “heathens.” From very early on, Ignatius of Loyola solicited letters from Jesuit missionaries abroad and many of them willingly complied with this demand. Francis Xavier in particular, who went to India in 1542 and later to Japan and Macao, sent home many letters that became crucially influential. With Xavier’s correspondence as an early template,

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the Jesuits soon started to turn missionary letters into a distinctive literary genre. Written communication among members of Christian orders had a long tradition, harking back at least to Benedict of Nursia (d. 547) and his important Regulae Benedicti, where correspondence is treated in chapter 54. The Jesuits acknowledged this tradition and often attempted to situate their own literary activities within this tradition, although their missionary reports should be considered largely an innovation. First, and this goes back to what has been said above, extra-European missionary activities reached unprecedented intensity in the sixteenth century. The sheer amount of what could and should be reported gave such communications a new dimension. Second, the Society of Jesus seized the infrastructural possibilities available to them once imperial and commercial integration on a global scale had started – if only tentatively. Communications became fairly regular and reliable, at least in theory. Eventually, the Jesuits decided that spiritual letters should be sent and distributed annually (litterae annuae).5 This allowed for a systematic use of recent missionary reports in the process of global identity construction. Contemporary spiritual news – and we will see that “recentness” was considered highly beneficial and important in this regard – could be made accessible to Europe relatively speedily and could thus be harnessed almost instantaneously to whatever purposes metropolitan Jesuits thought important. This conscious dependence on up-to-date information about faraway places, in turn, necessitated the constant and regular production of pertinent writings by the missionaries. Thus, an entire infrastructure of missionary letter writing and circulation eventually was set up. In fact, the production of edifying correspondence, including missionary texts, became heavily bureaucratized. Third, the Jesuits clearly started to create a recognizable “voice” for these reports. Part of this attempt to turn missionary correspondence into a recognizable genre therefore was a drive to standardize the letters with regard to content, form, and production. Back home in Europe, too, incoming reports were often translated, modified, and edited. What are known today as “Jesuit missionary relations,” therefore, are by no means the spontaneous product of impartial observers. Rather, these writings served functions that were spelled out very explicitly by official norms. One of the most well-known intentions of missionary reports was to provide Europe with interesting and entertaining information about faraway places. Letters should be “curious,” to use the early modern key

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phrase. Such content would help to market the missionary enterprise in Europe. In their letters, the missionaries accordingly reported on a broad range of topics, from geography to botany to ethnography. Providing information about these themes catered to a growing interest of Europe’s reading elites in “exotic” places and peoples.6 Here, the Jesuits’ missionary correspondence, too, departed from most previous monastic traditions insofar as it enthusiastically adopted many features of early modern travel writing and scientific literature. This aspect of Jesuit missionary letter writing has been widely commented upon in recent historiography. Much research on Jesuit missionary reporting is therefore biased in two ways: it focuses on the letters as a conduit for “non-religious” content such as ethnographically or politically relevant information, and it is, accordingly, particularly interested in how the missionaries’ letters were targeting non-Jesuit audiences.7 In this essay, I want to shift the focus of analysis away from these customary approaches by highlighting the religious framework and the internal functions of missionary correspondence. In particular, I want to remind us of the fact that Jesuit missionary correspondence – notwithstanding its important scientific or propagandistic functions – was surrounded by a thicket of spiritual ideas. Letter writing was, after all, an ascetic practice. Jesuits certainly based their media practices upon a solid foundation of spiritual ideas. As we will see, they can even be said to develop a theology of letter writing. Missionary communications were also meant to be “edifying,” as the Jesuits insisted. While there is nothing wrong with focusing on Jesuit missionary letters as evidence of scientific ideas or as expressions of Jesuit religious and social agendas, we should keep in mind that the Society of Jesus considered its internal correspondence from a spiritual point of view, too. Two dimensions seem to be particularly noteworthy: First, as mentioned explicitly in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, regular exchange of news-letters was meant to contribute to spiritual unity and coherence among the members of this global order. Missionary letters as a spiritual genre, thus, fulfilled a highly important function for the social life of the order. Second, missionary correspondence was also part of individual ascetic practice since it could contribute to remodelling individual spiritual and moral behaviour by presenting exemplary role models. Missionary correspondence clearly was considered a contribution to the honourable genre of exempla literature. Thus missionary letters fulfilled a spiritual function for an individual Jesuit’s spiritual and moral life.

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Correspondence, Caritas, and the Problem of Jesuit Unity The Jesuit fascination with letter writing cannot be understood adequately without taking into account how Jesuits themselves conceived of their own globality. The Society of Jesus, as a social body, was from very early onwards a global player and Jesuits were highly conscious about this fact – and they were equally aware of the problems and challenges that came with such a decidedly global outlook. The Jesuits quickly realized that there was an inverse relationship between social coherence and global dispersion. While social cohesion is, of course, a key problem for all kinds of social bodies, the Jesuits’ turn towards globalization certainly brought new urgency to questions of social integration and spiritual cohesion. The more global the order became, the harder it was to maintain internal unity. Ignatius himself had singled this out as a major spiritual and organizational problem. When drafting the Constitutions after several years of practical experience with an ever-expanding social community, he openly addressed the spiritual (as well as the organizational) difficulties inherent in his vision of a global field of activities. In the first chapter of part 8 of the Constitutions, written with the help of Juan de Polanco in the 1540s and 1550s, he stated: The more difficult it is for the members of this congregation to be united with their head and among themselves, since they are so spread out in diverse parts of the world among believers and unbelievers, the more should means be sought for that union. For the Society cannot be preserved or governed or, consequently, attain the aim it seeks for the greater glory of God unless its members are united among themselves and with their head.8

This paragraph became a famous point of reference for discussions of the dangers inherent in global expansion. The Spanish author Gil González Dávila, when remarking on the same issue a couple of decades later, drew heavily on the Constitutions, yet added a few ideas of his own, including a potentially antihumanist attack on Jesuit erudites that were overenthusiastically committed to erudition. The order’s cohesion and unity was in great danger, he thought, because the Society of Jesus is spread out over the entire world. […] And since the Jesuits are so far apart from each other, it is more complicated to communicate and to know one another. Also, the order comprises different

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nations, among many of which there is mistrust and conflict and it is never easy for any man to overcome the antagonism into which he was born. […] Another reason is that many Jesuits are men of letters. Knowledge is not good for brotherly connection [hermandad] since knowledge creates selfesteem. […] This is the reason why these men rarely fraternize and usually every single one wishes to follow his own opinion. A third difficulty is that these very same people are also people of great influence who are close to princes and cities. […] From this follow several complications […]. All of this is detrimental for the union and brotherly connection which we have mentioned earlier.9

Social coherence and globalization were thus declared to be potentially contradictory goals. The Jesuits were by no means naive about the tremendous problems inherent in their globalized approach to Christian life. Geographical overstretch contributed significantly to the many internal frictions that led recent historiography to portray the Society of Jesus as a “divided Company” encompassing “multiple identities” fighting among themselves in a “field of tension.”10 It was not least out of such an explicit diagnosis that the Jesuits turned to epistolary media as a means to counter and roll back the negative consequences of geographical (and functional) openness. Regular correspondence was initiated, among other reasons, as a powerful remedy against the dissipation of unity among the geographically disconnected Jesuits. Edifying letters should overcome not only geographical and social but especially spiritual isolation. They should, as Nicolaus Orlandini, official historian of the Society, suggested around 1600, “conglutinate” the global Jesuit community.11 This was highly charged language, for the metaphor of conglutination was deeply rooted in medieval Christian mysticism. Luther and Erasmus, among many other early modern authors, had used it, too, to describe the intimate relationship among believers and Christ. Orlandini thus integrated writing and print media in this metaphorical and mystical language of “spiritual glue” and used it with a specifically social connotation.12 That Jesuits would use such a decidedly spiritual language to discuss the social functions of correspondence should come as no surprise. Social relationships for them, as for every religious body, were first and foremost a question of spirituality. The whole language of spiritual unity, in fact, went back to the New Testament to a very large degree. Saint Paul, in his letters, had frequently touched upon the question of how to spiritually integrate the diaspora of Christians that he was facing. His

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itinerant, “missionary” lifestyle as well as his spiritual language was crucially influential for the Jesuits who, at least in part, conceived of themselves as early modern implementers of Paul’s intentions. Jerome Nadal, for instance, maybe the most influential early interpreter of Ignatius’s thought, insisted that Paul’s version of Christianity was the key template for Jesuit identity.13 Other authors, too, discussed the social effects of global activities from such a point of view while putting more emphasis on issues of globalization. Eusebius Nieremberg, for instance, writing around the same time as Orlandini and strongly echoing Ignatius, called for additional spiritual efforts precisely because of physical separation between the globally dispersed Jesuits: “Ignatius has commended union and peace and brotherly love among Jesuits not only for those living next to each other but especially among those who are separated by wide distances and live among different nations.”14 What was needed for social coherence, endangered through global overstretch, and provided in part by letters, was, according to Nieremberg, fraterna charitas. This was another crucial spiritual concept with strong social implications harking back, once again, to St Paul (1 Cor 10:17). This Pauline topic was taken up and accommodated to Jesuit needs at length by the Spanish Jesuit Gil González Dávila, who explained the basics of Jesuit spirituality to young Jesuit novices at the end of the sixteenth century.15 For him, as for Jesuit discourse in general, social coherence and unity consisted of a free and voluntary alignment of each individual with the goals of the entire organization. This alignment of wills was not to be founded on a coincidence of interests or on hierarchies of power, but was credited to a feeling of mutual caridad (spiritual love) among the order’s members. Spiritual love, of course, is the Christian virtue of social relationship par excellence, yet it is particularly well suited for a religious body such as a Catholic order. Caritas fraterna (fraternal charity) has long been considered a key virtue for monastic communities, and the Jesuits followed that well-established spiritual tradition. Social coherence among Jesuits, then, was achieved by turning a group of men into a community of brotherly spiritual love. When making caritas the dominant social attitude for Jesuits, González Dávila and others tied the order’s social well-being to individual spiritual perfection, since one of most obvious features of spiritual love is the abrogation of self-interest and selfishness. As a spiritual virtue with strong social implications, caridad included rules for social behaviour and communication. Jesus Christ’s entirely unselfish way of life is the ultimate model for caridad.16 “Respect and reverence” and mutual high esteem are

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signs of caridad as are “gravity” and a willingness to solicit help without bitterness.17 Mutual love is opposed to gossip and to denouncing publicly individual errors. It is opposed to seeking out failures only for exploiting them.18 The most important social and communicative implication of mutual love is a call for forgiveness and for patience with the shortcomings of fellow Christians.19 Spiritual love is, thus, one of the most important means to overcome spiritually or counter the socially negative implications of sin and human anthropology. Mutual love brings back some of the paradise lost by Adam. Only where this kind of love reigns, can the divisions of human life be overcome.20 Caridad is, according to González Dávila, a divine grace. It is explicitly set apart from carnal love and also from simple human friendship since it has its model in God’s love of his Son.21 Accordingly (and this is important), caridad as a requirement of individual behaviour and as a precondition for social coherence is not tied to physical presence: “love as caridad is not connected to co-presence in space or time, it is not subject to this.”22 It is, quite contrary, an attitude that, in the Jesuit case, can connect the members of the order globally and regardless of their specific workstation. While Nieremberg insisted that mutual love was especially necessary because of Jesuit globality, González Dávila insisted that globality per se was no barrier against caridad. From both perspectives, however, all came down to the question of how best to incite this crucially necessary emotion in individual Jesuits. As we have seen already, letter writing was considered a powerful means to provide the spiritual glue for social relationships. According to modern media theory, there are two ways in which the letters can intensify and support human relationships. First, the very act of writing and receiving letters helps to integrate any community. The “action” of producing (and receiving) a letter is in itself socially significant. Second, the “content” of the letters is also considered important to enhance social relationships.23 The Jesuits connected both aspects with their spiritual thought about globalization and unity. The action of writing and receiving letters from missionaries all over the globe was first encouraged and then made mandatory because it bridged the social hiatus potentially caused by the geographical distance between Jesuits living in separate parts of the world. González Dávila insisted (in line with the Constitutions) that the “edifying letters,” or annual letters, were created “to alleviate the failure of [direct personal] communication.”24 They demonstrated, supported, and supplied what was strained due to geographical overstretch: loving concern among the

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Jesuits for each other’s fate. Letters, according to some Jesuits, even came close to fulfilling the same spiritual functions as face-to-face communication. Indeed, as Pelletarius seemed to imply when he wrote to Canisius in Cologne in early 1545 from Paris, written epistles approximated oral conversations. Letters “speak” and can be “heard”: “What sweeter, more pleasant, or more joyful message can reach the ears of friends and brothers, bound to you by indissoluble love, than the news of your good health transmitted in your recent letter? […] Often, physical separation makes mutual love dwindle or even end. Your love, however, looms brightly in your letters and shines all the way to us here [in Paris], as long as God the Unifier himself pours his light out over you.”25 Letters, thus, were meant to demonstrate the writer’s spiritual connection with the recipient and his life and, thus, contributed to overcoming physical and, more importantly, spiritual isolation. In a way, then, the relevance of communication for social unity was defined in a circular way. Letters were both demonstrating and producing mutual spiritual love; they were necessitated by global dispersal and were, at the same time, decreasing the danger of spiritual separation among the globally dispersed Jesuits. Considering letters as (material) tokens of mutual affection was not without precedent. Cicero, the humanist point of reference par excellence when it came to letter writing, had of course considered epistles to be “silent speech” bringing together distant people.26 Letters also had long been understood as “visible” expressions and surrogates for the “intangible” and fragile caritas.27 The spiritual relationship between correspondence and caritas goes back at least to the Early Middle Ages. Alcuin of York in the ninth century, for instance, famously proclaimed on several occasions that letter writing was “officium caritatis.”28 But if some of these ideas had a long pedigree, the Jesuits talked about them with unprecedented urgency. Spiritual (re)integration through letters, an old topos, became relevant in a newly pressing way once the Jesuits had decided to become a global social body. Just how pressing the topic had become is best illustrated by the fact that the Jesuits created a new form of epistolary media meant to cope with these difficulties: the spiritual or edifying missionary correspondence. The letters among Jesuits contributed to mutual love and social unity not only by being symbols or tokens of spiritual commitment, but also because of their content. The Jesuits understood that caritas could not exist in a purely abstract way. Rather, it was dependent on mutual knowledge. Conocimiento [“knowledge” or “awareness”],” as González Dávila noted, is important for a religious order to function as a community of people united in spiritual

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love. “Because superiors and inferiors are so far apart,” however, this is rendered problematic. Edifying letters, according to Jesuit thought, were able to overcome this problem because they disseminated “knowledge about the Society” internally.29 Making the unknown fellow Jesuits better known, other authors too insisted, was a means of increasing mutual affection. Giovanni Antonio Valtrini, for instance, who edited the first volume of printed Annual Letters in 1583, claimed that better information helps to enhance mutual affection.30 Or, as another Jesuit author stated: “Mutual and circular communication of things done by Jesuits provides a bond among Jesuits and connects Jesuits with their Superiors.”31 Knowledge of what is simultaneously happening elsewhere to members of a social group increases the bond among that group and contributes significantly to transforming personally unacquainted humans into an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson famously argued a generation ago.32 Raising the level of mutual knowledge increases unity. The Jesuits, although approaching social thought from a spiritual perspective, were highly aware of this mechanism and supported the circulation of news media, when they saw the spiritual ties among themselves in danger of weakening.33 In addition, they masterfully tuned the style and content of what was circulating to fit the prescribed religious and spiritual identity and rhetoric of the order. In order for (missionary) correspondences to fulfil these social and spiritual goals, the Jesuits put huge effort into their production and supervision.34 Many resources went into controlling and organizing the numerous individual steps that lay between initial writing in the missions and publication in Europe. In order to contribute to unity, letter writing itself had to be standardized. As General Tamburini wrote, a “uniform method of letter writing” was desirable.35 Correspondence should not depend on individual judgments about when and how an act of communication might be helpful or necessary. Rather, the when and how of writing was prescribed by generalized rules. Content, style, and form of these texts were scrutinized more and more carefully, and the final products were carefully crafted results of complex editorial processes. At least in theory, the flow of correspondence should become automatized and detached from situational context. This required elaborate mechanisms for distributing, translating, and reproducing the texts. All of this happened, as González Dávila can remind us once again, in order to create, support, and promote the “conformity of will and behavior” among Jesuits, which in turn rested upon mutual knowledge

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and spiritual love. The missionary letters’ role must be seen against this highly charged spiritual background. They supported and incited proper spiritual relationships among personally unacquainted Jesuits and thus ultimately contributed to foster Jesuit unity. It seems, in other words, that the Jesuits created a largely new genre of religious media – the edifying missionary letter – not least as a reaction to and a remedy for the growing impact of globalization on spirituality and hence on social organization. This is not the occasion to discuss if and to what degree such a media strategy could and did have any chances for success. What counts here is the spiritual framework of social thought and, hence, the spiritual character that missionary letters acquired.

Giulio Negroni: Epistles and Exempla in the Theory of “Spiritual Reading” So far, we have discussed how, according to Jesuit authors, edifying letters were spiritually and socially important on a communal level. Giulio Negroni, a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit who was a seasoned administrator and ex-missionary in Transylvania who turned to spiritual writing late in his life, can illustrate how and why missionary reports could also play a significant spiritual role on an individual level. Negroni insists that Jesuit edifying correspondence can instigate individual efforts to moral betterment. In his stately volume entitled Ascetic Treatises there are two long sections: “Sacred Reading at the Dinner Table” and “Spiritual Reading of Books.” The missionary letters feature prominently in a long list of relevant reading material. He subsumes these recent publications under the vast rubric of “historia ecclesiastica,” which comprises not only church history proper, but also the histories of individual religious orders.36 Negroni treated the Jesuit missionary letters as a subgroup of the latter genre. In considerable detail, Negroni describes the production and circulation of the litterae annuae.37 He then constructs a long and detailed (and, from a modern point of view, entirely fictitious) prehistory of this genre, starting with the Apostles and their attempts to publicize their activities38 – all of this to make sure that this body of Jesuit texts could be declared worthy of spiritual reading. His discussion of spiritual reading, although not targeting the litterae exclusively, is thus helpful to explore the “ascetic” potential inherent in these publications according to leading Jesuit authors. That a spiritual approach to missionary reporting (and church history at large) was by no means self-evident at the time can be demonstrated by comparing Negroni’s enthusiasm with the

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much more sceptical attitude of the Benedictines. Jean Mabillon, for instance, the great Maurist scholar, in his well-known Treatise on Monastic Studies from 1691, felt obliged to cautiously defend his interest in church history at large and in extra-European events in particular. Reading such materials, it seems, was not entirely self-evident among Mabillon’s fellow monks.39 What is, for Negroni, the point in consuming spiritual literature, including missionary reports? To answer this question, Negroni creates an entire theory of spiritual reading.40 He sees many benefits, such as preparation for prayer and meditation, intimacy with God, protection against vice, sin, and demons, and refreshment for the soul.41 Throughout his discussion, Negroni insists that the final goal of such reading is not “knowledge” (cognitio) but rather the reshaping of human behaviour. He stresses time and again that spiritual reading should incite action and set in motion processes of internal self-evaluation in the reader. Spiritual reading, he concludes, is a practical affair, not a speculative or contemplative one: spiritual books “are not read for school or for the people or for our mind, but for our soul and life.”42 They contribute, as Negroni said with a reference to Bernard of Clairvaux, to “one’s edification.” In order to be practically effective, spiritual reading relies on a combination of powerful stimuli. It is, in fact, conceived of as a holistic experience: spiritual reading, as an ascetic practice, must affect the intellect, the emotions, and morality, and it must also improve self-awareness.43 Spiritual reading should provide the recipient with “precepts, examples, and emotional determination (praecepta, exempla, motum).”44 Throughout his discussion, Negroni is particularly clear on the emotional and affective dimensions of spiritual reading. The texts should “inflame” and capture the reading mind.45 Picking up on a medieval metaphor prominent among Jesuit spiritual writers, Negroni insists that spiritual texts should attract the reader not so much with information but with their “flavour and taste.”46 Although not going into detail regarding the narrative and rhetorical construction of this “flavour and taste,” Negroni provides at least a very general idea of how spiritual literature can maximize its impact. Spiritual literature is most tasteful for the Christian reader, and thus most efficient, Negroni claims, if it exhibits a “superior perfection” regarding Christian affairs.47 While not being a how-to manual for aspiring authors of spiritual texts, this general assessment nevertheless indicates that missionary letters, too, should follow a “religious” rhetoric and narrative setting. As we have seen already, the Society of Jesus, by providing

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specific norms for authors and by installing a multilayered system of editing and censorship, made sure that (published) missionary narratives would have the appropriate “taste.” Among Negroni’s different subgenres of spiritual writing – preceptive, exemplary, moving – missionary reports fall in the category of exempla. Therefore, they have the power to affect and shape the reader.48 It is of extraordinary importance to Negroni – and modern historiography should pick up on this – to consider missionary letters as collections of exempla.49 As exempla, these texts fulfil specific functions and work according to specific rules. Readers who seek only secular knowledge in such books miss the authors’ and the genre’s intention.50 Instead, they should turn to such letters with an eye on spiritual improvement. Negroni is very precise on how exempla acquire the power to alter behaviour. Exempla are powerful tools for moral and spiritual self-improvement, according to Negroni, because they function as a “mirror”: in reading, for instance, about the lives of exemplary Jesuits in Asia or America, their fellow Jesuits learn about themselves since they start to compare themselves against the heroic missionaries’ higher standards and thus reach an understanding about their own shortcomings.51 Studying exemplary lives, then, contributes to self-assessment, a key requisite for self-improvement. The spiritual appropriation of missionary literature ultimately moves from learning about the fellow Jesuits and their peculiar activities and lives to an enhanced understanding of one’s own station in life and one’s own habits of living. Using missionary literature as a “mirror” against which to compare and evaluate one’s own behaviour makes the reading of Jesuit correspondence a distinctively ascetic activity. Negroni was fully aware of the fact that other Jesuits had written extensively on self-cognition as a part of spiritual improvement. Diego Alvarez de Paz, for instance, had declared the classic “Nosce te ipsum” a key spiritual maxim and had recommended “comparison” as a major road to self-knowledge.52 In Alvarez’s version, spiritual self-evaluation could benefit most from comparing the human condition with higher and lower beings, i.e., with God, angels, and animals. No mention was made by Alvarez of comparing humans with humans as a way of “knowing yourself.” Also Bernardino Rossignoli, another near contemporary often quoted by Negroni, had much to say about self-knowledge in the mirror of “the holy scriptures and books” without discussing any particulars regarding exempla.53 Negroni was filling in the details for these rather general statements. He inserted missionary letters and other forms of spiritually

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relevant “historical” examples into an emerging Jesuit theory of spiritual self-assessment via comparison through ascetic reading. In doing so, he made the general precepts provided by Rossignoli, Alvarez, and others much more practical and specific, and he produced detailed routines and regimes of reading.54 With Negroni’s treatise, we have an elaborate theological reflection on why and how historical examples, in particular missionary letters, could be spiritually used by Jesuits striving for religious improvement. For spiritual literature, including the missionary reports, to be effective, author and reader must enter a tacit pact, Negroni wrote. The former produces his writing in anticipation of the latter’s needs, while the latter promises to read the former’s product especially with regard to spiritual benefits.55 Readers must approach texts such as missionary letters in the right mood and with a specific intention. According to Negroni, it is a “law” of spiritual reading that the recipient must consume this literature with a “desire to imitate and emulate.”56 If (and only if) read in the right way, the Jesuit missionaries’ exemplary life stories will incite the readers to remodel their own lives. The authors, in turn, must anticipate their texts’ spiritual function. This kind of literature is only effective if produced according to specific rules and narrative conventions: “spiritual books are written in such a fashion that they heal our souls either by expulsing evil or by preserving our strength.”57 Negroni does not say much about the narrative conventions supporting the missionary letters as spiritual literature, yet the Society of Jesus did provide elaborate rules for this purpose, as we have seen above. At this point, a final issue arises for Negroni. Is there a correlation between the spiritual effectiveness of exempla and their age? Are recent examples more or less easily emulated than ancient or medieval ones? And, more specifically, are the contemporary examples from litterae annuae more or less helpful than those of more traditional and timeless genres?58 In this regard, Negroni clearly was a modernist. He considered contemporary examples particularly suitable for spiritual reading. Contemporary events, for instance, are much more potent in shaming us into action than historical episodes. Stories about long-ago events work only through memory and are therefore considered much less efficient in inciting action. Edifying events and activities, Negroni seemed to suggest, should and could be employed most efficiently as long as they are still fresh and new. Other Jesuits, too, thought along these lines. In 1589, for instance, a Jesuit in India complained that his college only received outdated

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reports that were read with less “gusto” than more recent ones.59 And Belgian Jesuits, in 1610, similarly asked that the litterae annuae be forwarded to them more quickly because “older news has less power to engage the mind.”60 Among the most outspoken defenders of “modern” examples as more efficient than “ancient” ones was Mabillon, whom we have encountered already as an admirer of missionary literature. He stated: But we must admit that narrating or reading events that occurred long ago does not make the same impression as the recital of current events. Since the latter fire men’s passions, they easily engage those concerned with them to take sides; and since most men make them the topic of their conversations, for us too it is impossible not to talk about them. It is not exactly the same regarding past events. Since our contemporaries are no longer participating in them, passions are totally extinguished, and few people take an interest in knowing and talking about them. Consequently, such reading does not cause much commotion in our imagination, and we find practically nobody with whom we can strike up a conversation on such topics.61

Therefore, Mabillon declares, it is not only unharmful, but even advisable that monks turn their attention to contemporary church history, including news about missionary endeavours. Timeliness, it seems, was in itself a spiritually valuable aspect of missionary epistolography. For Mabillon, then, just as for Negroni and the Jesuits at large, the huge body of contemporary news about missionary activities could and did have a strictly spiritual dimension. Producing and reading this literature was not only useful for propagandistic, scientific, or historical purposes,62 but was equally conducive to spiritual and ascetic purposes. The letters’ currency as well as their focus on Jesuit everyday life, far from being detrimental, was instead a specific condition of the genre’s function. González Dávila and Negroni seem to address two distinct, yet correlated aspects of Jesuit edifying letters as spiritual literature. The Spanish author considers them spiritually relevant in a discussion of the Society of Jesus as a social body. With this approach, González Dávila closely follows the Constitutions, which had talked about the letters mostly in this respect, too. For Negroni, on the other hand, missionary literature plays a slightly different role, as the letters are discussed here as media that can play a part in the order’s ascetic practice. While for González Dávila

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missionary correspondence is enhancing social cohesion, for Negroni it enhances individual spiritual well-being. González Dávila was mostly interested in the letters as a prompt to emotion, while Negroni highlighted their ability to spark action. Both aspects, though, are closely related. Together they exemplify the Jesuit attempts to combine contemplation and activity, to be “contemplative in action,” as the key phrase went. For González Dávila, as we have remarked, social cohesion was at least partially also a problem of individual moral and spiritual achievement. Aligning the wills of all Jesuits and making them love each other implied influencing their mindsets. If the letters were meant to support the Society as a social body, this functioned first and foremost by “inflaming” each and every Jesuit for the fate of his fellow members. This would have sounded familiar to Negroni. Other Jesuits also combined individual and social dimensions of the letters’ spiritual potential. The above-quoted Belgians, for instance, easily integrated the two spiritual goals discussed here in one sentence: the annual letters were meant to “contribute to mutual love and to ignite all Jesuit minds to virtuous and charitable acts by means of examples of fellow Jesuits.” Providing social cohesion meant creating positive emotions for each other in the hearts of all Jesuits – by presenting them with information about the difficult circumstances and the exemplary behaviour of their fellow brethren at home and abroad. Whether read for individual or social reasons, it is obvious that the litterae annuae did have a significant spiritual importance for the Society of Jesus. This might seem a trivial or, at least, self-evident thing to say; yet research on these texts has not always paid sufficient attention to this point. While scholars increasingly turn to the literary mechanisms at work in scientific or purely informative sections of the letters, we still know very little about how the literary and narrative construction of missionary writings functioned as a spiritual genre. Even less is known about the spiritual appropriation of such texts by their readers. All too often what the Jesuits meant to be spiritual is understood by researchers as being apologetical targeted at external enemies. But this might miss the point since these texts also fulfilled a strongly spiritual and internal function. Religious bias existed in these texts, which were often stylized to sound more pious – yet it is far from clear that this was only intended as a defence against outside enemies and detractors. In the future, research should pay even more attention to the fact that many Jesuit authors from Ignatius onward reflected extensively on the spiritual benefits of creating,

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cultivating, and sharing this new form of media that came to life not least as a consequence of and reaction to the communicative difficulties of an increasingly globalized Catholic world.

NOTES 1 The term comes from Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 2 On Kircher see, for instance, Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (London: Routledge, 2003). 3 I have discussed the administrative aspects of the Jesuit system of information management in Markus Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitenorden 1540–1773 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011). 4 The closest parallel to the Jesuits’ missionary enterprise and literary reporting was the fourteenth century’s Franciscan missions to Central Asia, India, and China. The Franciscans did report quite extensively on their activities and some of their letters seem to have had some impact on contemporaries; see, for a brief overview, James D. Ryan, “European Travelers before Columbus: The Fourteenth Century’s Discovery of India,” Catholic Historical Review 79 (1993): 648–70; and, for a detailed case study, see Folker Reichert, “Odorico da Pordenone and the European Perception of Chinese Beauty in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History (25 (1999): 339–55. I have not, however, been able to find any clear references to the Franciscan literature either in Jesuit norms on missionary writing or in any of the letters themselves. Most of the medieval documents, as Ryan mentions (668), had dropped from memory after the fifteenth century and were therefore practically unknown. I would, thus, venture that the Franciscans did not provide a template for Jesuit epistolography, at least not an explicit point of reference. The exact relationship (if there is any) still awaits further examination. 5 While missionary relations are not the same as the litterae annuae, both are closely related and share many of the same spiritual characteristics. 6 The sources describing early Jesuit missionary correspondence have frequently been cited; see, e.g., Steven J. Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996): 287–318; Harris, “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Science, and the Geography of Knowledge,”

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Configurations 6 (1998): 269–304; Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000), 212–39. For a great new example, see Bronwen Catherine McShea, “Cultivating Empire through Print: The Jesuit Strategy for New France and the Parisian Relations of 1632 to 1673” (PhD Diss., Yale University, 2010). George E. Ganss, ed. and trans., The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 315. Gil González Dávila, Pláticas sobre las Reglas Ignatius de Loyola: Constitutiones Societatis Jesu de la Comañía de Jesús, Espirituales Espanoles A 13 (Barcelona: J. Flors, 1964), 594f: “La primera es, por ser la Compañía esparcida por todo el mundo; que no es religión para una provincia o un reino, mas la vemos derramada por todas partes; y por estar tan lejos unos de otros, es más difícil el conocerse y comunicarse. Juntamente abraza diversas naciones; en muchas de ellas hay oposición y contrariedad, y no es tan fácil quitar la aversión con que el hombre nace y se cría perpetuamente: 22 lenguas diferentes he visto en el Colegio Romano. Ved cuán difícil será unir tanta diversidad: que mire el español al francés, y no como a francés, sino como a hijo de su madre, de la Compañía, hermano de nuestro hermano mayor Cristo Nuestro Señor. En la misma fundación de la Compañía unió Nuestro Señor diversas naciones; y el Padre Ignacio, en todas las empresas nuevas que comenzaba, seguía este mismo espíritu. La segunda dificultad es que los de la Compañía, por la mayor parte, será gente de letras; y no os maravilléis que esto sea dificultad para la hermandad que se pretende, porque la ciencia hincha, cría en el hombre estima de sí mismo, dureza de juicio. Por la misma razón, Santo Tomás dijo que los letrados noveles no eran tan aplicados a devoción como los sencillos. Por la misma se ve que no se hermanarán entre sí como otros; cada uno querrá seguir su opinión y echar por su camino y querer la estima para sí. La postrera dificultad es, que estos mismos serán personas de prendas, que tendrán cabida con príncipes y ciudades; y es cosa muy hacedera que se les peguen los humores de sus príncipes y que se hagan dolientes de ellos, según aquello del salmo: «Commixti sunt inter gentes et didicerunt opera eorum». De esta privanza se siguen diversas parcialidades entre los mismos; entra también la singularidad, privilegio y exención, y no vivir como los demás; que todo esto perjudica a la unión y hermandad de que hemos hablado.” See, e.g., Michela Catto, La compagnia divisa: Il dissenso nell’ordine gesuitico tra ’500 e ’600, Storia 32 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2009); Antonella Romano, “Multiple Identities, Conflicting Duties and Fragmented Pictures: The

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Case of the Jesuits,” in Le monde est une peinture: Jesuitische Identität und die Rolle der Bilder, ed. Elisabeth Oy-Marra and Volker R. Remmert, Beiträge zu den Historischen Kulturwissenschaften 7 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 45–70. Nicolaus Orlandini, Historia Societatis Iesu: Nunc primum in Germania in lucem edita (Cologne: Sumptibus Antonij Hierat, 1615), 201. See Michael Egerding, Die Metaphorik der spätmittelalterlichen Mystik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), 2:339–45; and Bardo Weiß, Ekstase und Liebe: Die Unio mystica bei den deutschen Mystikerinnen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 411f. for examples. See, e.g., John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 73, 271, and 349 on Paul as a crucial point of reference for Jesuit thought. Clearly, early modern Europe’s renewed fascination with Paul went beyond the Protestant camps. Eusebio Nieremberg, Doctrinae Asceticae, sive Spiritualium institutionum pandectae juxta Religiosa instituta, maxime ordinum mendicantium, & constitutionum Societatis Iesu (Cologne: Joannem Busaeum, 21664), 553: “Ideo noster Parens S. Ignatius unionem commendaturus & pacem, non iis tantum, qui prope sunt, sed qui longe, interque diversas nationes, quibus noster Ordo constituitur, concordiam animorum, charitatemque fraternam quae decus & ornamentum est nostrae Religionis, imo totius Religionis Christianae, prius dicta & scripta moderatus, uniformitatem doctrinae sermonisque praescripsit. Sic in nostris institutionibus circa unionem & confirmitatem mutuam caveatur.” González Dávila, Pláticas. The relevant sections of his sermons are full of implicit and explicit allusions to and quotations of Paul’s letters. Ibid., 601–4. Ibid., 606f., 610. Ibid., 620. Ibid., 586f. Ibid., 585. The role of “friendship” for monastic epistolography has been widely discussed for medieval authors; see, e.g., Julian Haseldine, “Friends, Friendship, and Networks in the Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux,” in Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 57 (2006): 243–80. González Dávila, Platicas, 601. See Jürgen Herold, “Die Interpretation mittelalterlicher Briefe zwischen historischem Befund und Medientheorie,” in Text – Bild – Schrift: Vermittlung von Information im Mittelalter, ed. Andres Laubinger, Brunhilde Gedderth, and Claudia Dobrinski, MittelalterStudien 14 (Munich: Fink, 2007), 101–26,

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26 27

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esp. 117–26 on letter writing as a social action (Handlungsebene) and as a means of conveying information (Gegenstandsebene). González Dávila, Platicas, 597: “Suplió el Instituto la falta de comunicación y conocimiento, que, por estar tan lejos unos [sc. superiores] de otros [sc. inferiores], era difícil, con estas cartas de edificación, que, al principio, eran más frecuentes: -ahora se han reducido a ‚annuas‘ con las cuales se toma noticia de la Companía; -exhortándonos a la conformidad en la doctrina, y opiniones, en lo exterior, en las mismas ceremonias, en la misma manera de vestido, cuanto sufiere la diversidad de las naciones.” Joseph Hansen, ed., Rheinische Akten zur Geschichte des Jesuitenordens 1542–1582 (Bonn: Hermann Behrendt, 1896), 27: “Ex quibus [sc. an earlier letter just received] non mediocrem profecto cepimus voluptatem. Quid enim unquam dulcius, quid iucundius, quid vero suavius ad amicorum fratrumque aures pervenire poterat, praeterquam epistola prosperae valetudinis eorum nuncia, qui vinculo amoris indissolubili coniunguntur? Ita me deus bene amet, tam iucunda est vestri recordatio, quam iucunda foret consuetudo. Nec tantum forte animos apostolorum exhilaravit amicorum praesens convictus quantum nostros memoria vestri per epistolas refricta. Mutuum amorem saepe dissolvit vel minuit corporum disiunctio. Vestris literis vestra charitas magis illustratur ac illucescit, dum radii quos in vos transfundit concolator ille sanctissimus, etiam ad nos usque penetrarunt.” See Klaus Thraede, “Einheit – Gegenwart – Gespräch: Zur Christianisierung antiker Brieftopoi” (Diss., Bonn,1968). See Sita Steckel, Kulturen des Lehrens im Früh- und Hochmittelalter: Autorität, Wissenkonzepte und Netzwerke von Gelehrten, Norm und Struktur 39 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 170–84, 329–37 (esp. 334), and passim. See Mary Garrison, “Les correspondants d’Alcuin,” in Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 111 (2004): 326f. See quote in note 24 above. See the introductory statement to the first volume of printed Litterae annuae, ed. 1583: “Cum omnes fraternae charitatis vinculo adstricti sumus; qua nostri fratres tot locorum intervallo disiuncti a nobis gerant, ea cognoscere iucundißimum est: animique hac rerum communione, tum coniungitur inter se magis, tum vero ad eadem aemulanda acrius inflamantur,” as quoted in Giulio Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, qui ab auctore recogniti, et aucti, nunc primum in unum collecti, in gratiam Magistrorum Spiritualium, omniumque profectus spirit[u]alis amantium, prodeunt in Germania, cum Indice quadruplici (Cologne: Kinchius, 1624), 133.

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31 Ibid.: “Nam scriptionem hanc mutuam et circularem rerum a Societate gestarum locat inter ea vincula, quae sociorum inter se et subditorum cum capite animos vinciunt.” 32 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), chap. 1. Anderson himself has insisted upon the fact that there were many other types of “imagined communities” besides the modern nation. 33 Unity, for the Jesuits, always had a complex relationship with uniformity. While the first should ideally be total and all encompassing, the latter was only necessary to a certain degree, as González Dávila stated (see note 24 above) when saying that the litterae annuae “exhort us to conformity in opinions and teaching, in external affairs, in ceremonies, in dressing as far the difference of costumes allows.” For more on the Jesuits’ nuanced perception of uniformity, see also Markus Friedrich, “Theologische Einheit und soziale Kohärenz: Debatten um die Homogenität von doctrina im Jesuitenorden um 1600,” in Vera Doctrina: Zur Begriffsgeschichte der Lehre von Augustinus bis Descartes, ed. Philippe Büttgen, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 123 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 297–324. 34 For this and other practical aspects of Jesuit edifying correspondence, see Markus Friedrich, “Circulating and Compiling the Litterae Annuae: Towards a History of the Jesuit System of Communication,” in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu (2008): 1–39. 35 See Tamburini’s circular letter on epistolary norms, 14 September 1709, clm 24076, fol. 123r–124v. 36 Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 129f. 37 Ibid., 130–5. 38 Ibid., 131f. 39 Jean Mabillon, Treatise on Monastic Studies, 1691, intro. and trans. John Paul McDonald (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), 148. 40 Only a very brief treatment of lectio spiritualis with regard to Negroni is available; see Dictionnaire de la spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire (Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1974–6), vol. 8–9, cols. 464–6. 41 Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 214–25. 42 Ibid., 173f.; the quote on p. 174: “ut non scholae, non populo, non ingenio, sed animae ac vitae legimus.” 43 Ibid., 145. 44 Giulio Negrone, Regulae communes S.I. commentariis asceticis illustratae (Cologne: 1617), 155. Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 179 has roughly the same distinctions, yet is less clear in its exposition. Negroni seems to imply that these different goals can be achieved by distinctive types of literature.

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50 51 52

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55 56 57 58

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E.g., Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 223. Ibid., 180: “sapor et gustum.” Ibid., 180f. Ibid., 193. I have discussed the relationship between edifying correspondence and the tradition of Christian exempla more fully in Markus Friedrich, “Beispielgeschichten in den Litterae Annuae: Überlegungen zur Gestaltung und Funktion einer vernachlässigten Literaturgattung,” in Das Beispiel: Epistemologie des Exemplarischen, ed. Jens Ruchatz, Stefan Willer, and Nicolas Pethes (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 143–66. Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 208. Ibid., 218f. Jacob Alvarez de Paz, De humilitate virtutum fundamento liber, desumptibus ex tomo secundo operis de vita spirituali (Ingolstadt: Gregor Haenlin, 1619), esp. 254–75. There is only very little in Bernardino Rossignoli, De disciplina christianae perfectionis: Pro triplici hominum statu, incipientium, proficientium, & perfectorum, ex sacris scriptis et patris (Venice: 1604), 275f., specifically on history and its spiritual relevance. The passage on books as “speculum” is on p. 151. This was quoted in Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 218. Both the treatises on public and on private reading in Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, contain very elaborate discussions of many practical matters and could thus have served very well as guides and manuals if someone was unsure about how to initiate spiritual reading-session in praxi. Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 208: “Itaque cum auctor affectu curandi lectoris scripserit, & affectu sui sanandi lector legat, quod est scriptum.” Ibid., 210. Ibid., 208: “libri spirituales ideo scripti sunt, ut nostris animabus, vel expulsione morborum, vel conservatione virium medeantur.” Ibid., 192: “Nec vero novitas obest, ut quidam opinantur, dictitantes, non moveri animos recentibus exemplis, quae, quia recentia sunt, contemnuntur; sed antiquis, quae magnam habent ab antiquitate ipsa venerationem: non, inquam, exemplorum recentium novitas sine maximo proventu est; quia, Quae nostra memoria facta creduntur, illa multo acrius piorum mentes ad virtutis decus aemulandum inflamant.” The quote comes from Niceta David and is supported by a similar quote from Petrus Damiani (MPL 145, col. 361C). Mon Ind XV, 466f. ARSI Congr 53, fol. 225r: “Denique eundem R.P.N. totius Congregationis nomine rogandum censuere Patres providere dignetur, ut annuae literae,

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quae adeo ad mutuam caritatem et ad omnium animos ad p[rae]clara car[ita]tis virtutumque opera fratrum suorum exemplo inflammandos conferunt, citius frequentiusque ad Provincias transmittantur. Fit n. dum tam raro afferuntur ut quae illae continent antiqua censeantur, neque tantam vim habeant ad animos excitandos.” 61 Mabillon, Treatise on Monastic Studies, 148. 62 On “utilitas historica,” see Negrone, Tractatus Ascetici, 133.

chapter nine

Early Modern Translation Theories as Mission Theories: A Case Study of José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute (1588) R E N AT E D Ü R R

“Omnia nova, nullae consuetudines certae” – everything is new, the Jesuit provincial José de Acosta (1540–1600) wrote of his experiences in Peru.1 Nothing could be taken for granted as certain, for something unexpected was always happening. Ways of life changed, and laws and the dictates of justice (with the exception of natural law) had to be adapted accordingly. There were no traditions to rely upon, since they were either non-existent or despicable. For the Spanish native, who had lived in Peru for fifteen years and explored the entire viceroyalty during several visitations, the question of juxtaposing experience and tradition, or more precisely, his own experience and learned knowledge, represented the key to grappling with conditions in the New World.2 For Acosta, wisdom (sapientia) arose from what he had experienced with his own eyes (oculata experientia), as he referred to it.3 With his 1588 treatise on mission theory, De procuranda indorum salute (On Procuring the Salvation of the Indians), which became influential well beyond the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Acosta fundamentally changed his order’s concept of mission.4 By stressing experience as the basis of mission, he conceived of missionary activity for the first time as a fundamentally communicative process. The emphasis on experience as a means of overcoming “dead book-learning” had its own tradition in the sixteenth century: as an instrument for confronting the limits of ancient knowledge in the course of the “discovery of the New World,”5 and, in the Reformation, as a mode of cognition in the confrontation with scholastic biblical exegesis and tradition.6 Acosta picked up both strands of the debate by elevating “experience” to an important means of certification as well as by understanding “experience” as an element of the translation of Christian revelation knowledge.7 In my contribution, I would therefore

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like to begin by briefly recapitulating European translation theories with respect to the question of the translatability of divine revelation, and then go on to explore the extent to which these questions were significant for José de Acosta’s mission theory.

Translation and Experience: Some Aspects of Humanist and Reformation Translation Theories Ever since antiquity, linguists have been well aware that translations face an essentially insoluble problem, one that is more intractable the more significant the source text appears to be. The fundamental dilemma consists in the tension between word-for-word translation and equivalent content – that is, in the attempt to remain as faithful as possible to the source text and at the same time to produce an understandable and, where possible, rhetorically excellent text in the target language. In the Western tradition up to the end of the medieval period, a distinction was made, going back to St Jerome, between profane texts and Holy Scripture. To be sure, Jerome was essentially committed to providing the gist of the original, with the exception, however, of Holy Scripture, which he translated as closely as possible, since here the very syntax reflected the divine mystery.8 Revelation knowledge was accordingly deemed to be actually untranslatable. For that reason, the Latin Middle Ages regarded St Jerome’s Vulgate as quasi-original, and by as late as 1546, the Council of Trent pronounced it an authentic text.9 With humanism and the rediscovery of countless ancient texts beginning in the fifteenth century, however, the debate on translation acquired renewed relevance.10 The demand “ad fontes” did not stop at a preoccupation with the Hebrew and Greek Bible, a preoccupation that revealed Jerome’s numerous translation errors. Especially prominent here was the 1516 critical edition of the New Testament by Erasmus, in which he compared the original Greek text, based on the reconstruction of several Greek manuscripts, with a new Latin translation.11 The many corrections of the Vulgate, which had previously been accepted as the only valid text, added up to a lasting critique of Jerome. Although they predated the Reformation, the debates on Erasmus’s version of the New Testament already underlined that a translation of the Bible was always also an exegesis – different translations could consequently lead to different theological propositions. These questions were all the more important for contemporaries since the “questione della lingua” debate of the fifteenth and sixteenth

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centuries saw fundamental reflections on the relative importance of the vernaculars and the classical languages.12 While proponents of the thesis of the pre-eminence of classical languages and cultures stressed their universality, those who supported an equal status for the vernaculars argued primarily in terms of the historicity of language. In so doing, they turned to research on language as it was actually spoken as well as to the communicative situation in which speakers found themselves. Meanwhile, the Reformation itself made the question of translating the Bible especially explosive. By so eloquently propagating the translation of the Bible into the various vernaculars, the Reformers took up where the two humanist debates had left off. After all, the principle of sola scriptura implied an especially high esteem for Holy Scripture as the sole source of divine revelation. Here, too, the demand for a translation was accordingly associated with the call for the most faithful translation possible. Thus in the late eighteenth century, Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible could still be considered a word-for-word translation consonant with revelation.13 At the same time, greater attention was also paid to the vernaculars, because the Reformation principle of the “priesthood of all believers” promoted putting the laity in a position to study the Bible on their own, which meant that it had to be understandable for all. Among both humanists and Reformers, the debate accordingly vacillated between two diametrically opposed positions. Thus, on the one hand, divine revelation was believed to be tied to particular words and sentence structures and therefore essentially untranslatable. On the other hand, people began to conceive of revelation more in terms of communication between God and the faithful, which lent the individual realm of experience greater importance for the reception of Holy Scripture. Both elements ultimately also played an outstanding role in discussions of the prerequisites for a successful mission in the New World, the exploration of which is the focus of the present essay. The question of the translatability of Holy Scripture thus rests on the far more fundamental questions of the divine truth present in certain terms and how the divine message can reach humanity. Translation theories reveal their respective, specific theological positions: orthodox Catholics stressed a divine message that arose from the words, which human beings had to discover, while Martin Luther sought to understand the divine message far more strongly from the perspective of communication between God and man. The debate on the four senses of scripture helps to illustrate this. According to the idea of the four senses of scripture, ever since Augustine, scholars had sought to locate, alongside the

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literal meaning of the words, various figurative meanings in which God’s message was revealed. This led to a detail-obsessed search for potential word meanings – through allegory, etymologies, and church tradition – because divine truth cannot simply be found in the text, but rather in a second, purely divine language. Martin Luther contrasted a sensus literalis with the four senses of scripture: “therein is life, strength, and doctrine; all other methods are nothing but foolishness,” as he put it forcefully in one of his table talks.14 According to the linguist Andreas Gardt, Luther’s approach could almost be regarded as a “use theory of meaning,” since for Luther the meaning of the words arises exclusively from their specific use in the text, which accordingly attained all the more outstanding significance. Martin Luther’s translation theory, which has become known primarily as a theory of “free translation,” consequently also encompasses the demand for a word-for-word translation, which keeps the divine message pure. Thus he had translated a few central passages literally, Luther wrote in the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (Open Letter on Translating) of 1530, although they were scarcely comprehensible in German.15 On the other hand, the “Open Letter” makes a passionate case for analogous or free translation, because Martin Luther interpreted Holy Scripture as part of a communicative fabric. Just as Jesus acted through the spoken word, and the Gospels actually have an oral character – Luther once referred to them as “good rumours” (gut Geschrey) – the words of the Bible are, on the whole, not “reading words” (lesewort), but “living words” (lebewort).16 Martin Luther thus sought to translate not simply into “good German,” but into the everyday spoken language of the German people, for only then could the text hope to be truly understood.17 In some cases, translating the Bible also entailed adapting historical circumstances to modern customs, as when Martin Luther translated the Roman “lying at the table” as “sitting at the table.”18 Luther’s translation theory thus reflects the communicative and relational approach of his understanding of scripture. If the meaning of words emerges from their use within the text, but becomes understandable only to the degree that it can be made to coincide with the everyday usage of the readers or percipients of the Bible, this ultimately means that human experience is central to the understanding of divine revelation. Luther’s translation theory therefore arises from his theology and his fundamentally communicative understanding of faith as a relational occurrence between God, the individual believer, and the world. According to Gerhard Ebeling, this experience was the sole root and aim of Luther’s theology.19 Accordingly, for Martin Luther, a good translation of

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the Old and New Testaments must pair divine revelation with the world of human experience, which few were equipped to do, since “translating is not a skill given to everybody as mad saints believe. It takes a proper, pious, honest, diligent, God-fearing, Christian, learned, experienced and trained heart.”20 In other words, in order to translate the word of God, a person must have a broad contemporary education and an educated heart – that is, both book learning and experience. Fifty years later, when he was grappling with the problem of translating the Christian message into the indigenous languages of South America, the Jesuit Spaniard José de Acosta would doubtless have agreed wholeheartedly with such a description.

Mission and Experience: The Meaning of Language in the Mission Theory of José de Acosta, SJ The Jesuit José de Acosta received a careful humanist education influenced by a plurality of schools in a way that was no longer possible in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which may well explain some of his new insights and theses.21 In addition to a close acquaintance with classical authors and medieval scholastic theology of all stripes, as well as the school of Salamanca and the humanist authors of his day, this education also resulted in a profound penchant for a positive theology emphasizing lived piety. According to Claudio Burgaleta, Acosta’s thinking can be briefly summarized as “Jesuit theological humanism,” to the extent that it was marked by a fine rhetorical style and references to humanist and scholastic questions and methods, and took up essential elements of Ignatian spirituality.22 This “hybrid way of doing theology”23 was characterized by an eclecticism that was probably more typical of the humanist age than scholars were long prepared to accept.24 After all, the point of departure for Acosta’s own thinking was the confrontation with the tide of events in his world, with all of its pressing problems. In Ibero-America, this primarily meant confronting the situation of the indigenous population in the Spanish realm. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Indians were becoming increasingly estranged from the Spanish conquistadors and representatives of royal power, and their growing resistance to forced baptism and violent excesses was all too apparent. Acosta responded to this situation in three closely related writings in which he combined critiques of the Conquista and the previous practice of Christianization with alternative suggestions. In his Historia natural y moral de las Indias, he used a detailed description of the natural world of

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the Andes as well as the customs of the Incas and Aztecs, in particular, to identify the inherent rationality of the customs, including the different religious cults, although he fundamentally rejected the latter.25 In his missionary handbook De procuranda indorum salute, with which he addressed potential Christian intermediaries, he stressed the necessity of an exact knowledge of the other culture for a successful mission.26 Finally, with the trilingual catechism adopted at the third Council of Lima, Acosta published a concrete aid for evangelizing in the language of the native population.27 The background to this was Acosta’s idea that the various peoples lingered at the different stages of world history.28 In contrast to the widely accepted Aristotelian notion of the barbarian, which assumed that barbarianism was “natural” and therefore ultimately inevitable, Acosta’s concept, like that of Bartolomé de Las Casas, implied the potential for change. This meant that even “barbarians” at the so-called third stage (like the Caribs or Tupinambà), who, according to Acosta, were nomadic and had no firmly institutionalized political rule, could be “civilized” and Christianized through settlement in village communities, and thus potentially lose the status of barbarians.29 With his innovations, the Jesuit provincial of Peru also blazed new trails within his order in at least two respects. At the beginning of his provincialate in 1576, only a handful of the seventy-seven Jesuit brothers there spoke some of the local languages.30 At the end of his five-year term, in contrast, nearly half of the 113 Jesuits in the province of Peru claimed a fluent command of the indigenous languages. Acosta was also involved in the founding of the first reduction of Juli, which would become the model for the Paraguay reductions. Such reductions represented Indian settlements that, while Christian, were to be held as free as possible from Spanish influence (of the encomenderos and conquistadors). Over the course of his provincialate, he visited the reduction of Juli two more times, praising it extravagantly in his reports. He had to argue passionately on behalf of the emerging model of coexistence between Jesuits and the indigenous population, for it was no easy task to convince his brothers in the Society of “this type of permanent apostolate among the Amerindians in the Peruvian hinterlands.”31 This reminds us that the model of the missionary that began to assert itself in the seventeenth century remained to be developed.32 Well into the sixteenth century, the term missio or missus, too, was actually reserved for Christ alone as the emissary. The people we now refer to as missionaries were at first known as apostles. Later, different names were used, referring back to the “propagatio Christianae fidei,” “doctrina,” or more generally to teachings.33

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Thus at first the central aspect was conveying Christian dogma. What was absent was the notion of Christianization as a comprehensive civilizing process, which was in turn based on the coexistence of the missionaries with the population and the imbedding of Christian doctrine in an overall concept of life and the world. That, however, was precisely Acosta’s project, for which he already explicitly used the term missio, which was consequently gradually adopted beginning in the late sixteenth century, and not only in the course of the seventeenth century.34 With direct reference to the reduction of Juli, at any rate, Acosta wrote in his missionary text De procuranda indorum salute that because of their experiences there and knowledge of the local customs, the few brothers of the small Society of Jesus who had been engaged in missions in Peru (or led parishes) for eight years had accomplished a good deal more than they had ever imagined they would.35 As was already mentioned above, it was thus Acosta’s experience in the New World, more specifically his experiences during visitations and with the reduction of Juli, that led him to rethink Christian mission. The dramatic situation made old responses appear obsolete, so that in the mission stations, too – as everywhere in Europe in the face of the challenges presented by awareness of a “New World” – people began to confront traditions and emphasize the conflict between scholarly learning and experience as the true path of knowledge.36 For that reason, José de Acosta juxtaposed tradition and experience in a quite similar way with respect to learned theology (as Francis Bacon was to do a short while later in his Novum organum with regard to the study of nature),37 stating that all Spanish theologians, however learned and famous, made errors when they wrote about conditions in the West Indies because they were unfamiliar with them. Theologians who lived there, in contrast, even if they were far less illustrious, were more frequently on the mark because they had seen the matters they wrote about with their own eyes and touched them with their own hands.38 Personal experience was thus contrasted with dead book-learning, which was still very highly prized at the time, as Acosta wrote in his preface, but would surely not be for long.39 Experience, he believed, helped one to overcome bias and get to the truth of matters as they are, the res ipsa.40 Unlike the nineteenth-century concept of objectivity, according to which the aim of human knowledge was to discover the truth in things,41 for Acosta this truth in the “thing itself” was a means of studying Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers. After all, he wrote, his experiences in the New World had given him a keener eye for how the teachings of Holy

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Scripture and the Church Fathers could be applied to the New World.42 Much like Luther, experience with and in the world offered Acosta a key for understanding the Bible. Experience, in turn, rested on communication with people on the ground, that is, on language as a means of knowledge. It is thus no wonder that the confrontation with language and language acquisition was a central theme of his writing on mission.

The Significance of Language Acquisition for Mission, or Different Interpretations of the Miracle of the Pentecost In what follows, I would like to examine the text De procuranda indorum salute from the perspective of the meaning of language for mission. Acosta had completed this work in the course of 1576,43 but censorship problems delayed its publication, so that it only appeared eleven years later, in an abridged version of 1588.44 This did not impede its rapid reception well beyond the Society of Jesus, however. It was apparently precisely the reference to experience that made this work interesting even beyond the narrower (Catholic or Jesuit) missionary context. Thus the educational theorist John Amos Comenius explicitly mentions Acosta’s missionary text three times in a Latin textbook on language. Comenius apparently found the central passages from Book 6 of Acosta’s work so significant that he quoted from them verbatim, albeit in abbreviated form, over nearly an entire column.45 It was by no means self-evident for a Protestant theologian with an affinity for mystic theology and the Rosicrucians to cite a Jesuit provincial in the New World so extensively and with so much positive reinforcement.46 It is very much in keeping with the basic views on Comenius’s experience-based didactics that he printed Acosta’s passionate argument for studying the American languages in a Latin grammar, pointing to the common theological background: the Christian Gospel is efficacious as long as it resonates in the many languages of the peoples.47 The zeal with which Acosta emphasized the importance of studying the indigenous languages in his mission manual, and with which Comenius in turn referred to Acosta, shows that this viewpoint was by no means self-evident in the second half of the sixteenth century. First of all, the American languages were considered barbaric, and consequently did not appear worth the effort of learning. Second, well into the seventeenth century, the plurality of languages was generally viewed negatively in the Western tradition, since it was understood as a result of building the Tower of Babel and thus as divine punishment.48 According to this interpretation, it took the miracle of the Pentecost, that is, the operation

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of the Holy Spirit, to overcome the so-called confusion of tongues and permit communication across linguistic boundaries.49 The implications of such communication facilitated by the Holy Spirit were extremely diverse, however. Erasmus, for example, saw divine power only in the three classical languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. That is why the miracle of the Pentecost gave the twelve apostles the gift of preaching in only the three dominant languages of their day, a divine gift that he also explicitly contrasted with human language study.50 Martin Luther, in turn, believed that after the miracle of the Pentecost, the apostles, who had previously “only spoken their mother tongue,” could now speak “all languages.”51 In keeping with tradition, however, Luther was also mainly interested in the miracle of the Pentecost as a response to the consequences of building the Tower of Babel and thus as an admonition to the faithful not to turn away from the word of God.52 Some Jesuits, in contrast, referring to Ignatius of Loyola’s language prescriptions, also explicitly derived demands to study indigenous languages – “barbaric languages,” from a contemporary European perspective – from the miracle of the Pentecost.53 Thus Alfonso Salmerón SJ (1515–85) attributed the failed construction of the Tower of Babel to the deficient grasp of languages at the time, while the New Jerusalem would be built on linguistic knowledge. A linguistic boon such as that at the Pentecost, however, no longer sufficed, so that preachers in the New World should study the languages of the people there instead.54 And Diego González Holguín SJ, too, who was among the most important representatives of the so-called school of Juli and himself compiled a Quechua grammar and dictionary,55 emphasized that the study of these languages corresponded to the apostles’ miracle of the Pentecost and was consequently equally valuable.56 Clearly, it took great effort to persuade contemporaries of the worth of such language study. Acosta was also well aware that many Europeans rejected and ridiculed the study of these languages. It was no accident that he, too, therefore began by citing the miracle of the Pentecost, mentioning at the start of his central chapter on language that the apostles also only set forth after they had learned to speak the languages of the peoples.57

Mission as Communicative Action, or an Eccentric Interpretation of the Story of Joseph The centrality of the language question for José de Acosta can be measured by the elaborateness with which he reflected on language and language acquisition in the context of his mission theory.58 In systematic

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terms, he located this matter on the same level as the missionaries’ way of life and sufficient knowledge; after all, Acosta stressed that knowing the local languages was one of the three prerequisites for a successful mission.59 For Acosta, learning the indigenous languages was not merely an aid to preaching the word of God, but was also based on a very specific understanding of mission as communicative action, which I shall now explore in more detail. Interpreting mission against the backdrop of a communicative situation on the ground meant not merely describing mission as an act of the missionaries but also – at least to some extent – seeking to convey the perspectives of both communication partners, a view also by no means self-evident around 1600. For that reason, Acosta had to spend four long-winded chapters grappling with the notions that had dominated up to his time. On the one hand, he argued on the level of the content of communication when he rejected the idea that one could avoid learning the indigenous languages by using interpreters, as had occurred above all in the early days. As a rule, he noted, the interpreters did not understand Christian dogma.60 Examples of the resulting misinterpretations were familiar to most missionaries at this time, so that Acosta could dispense with the details. In the “Royal Commentaries” composed not much later, for example, Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), a distant descendant of the Inca Huayna Capac, related how Felipillo, the first interpreter during the conquest of the Inca empire, translated the triune God by adding three and one, or how after the famous discourse of P. Vicente de Valverde, Atahuallpa concluded that the Christians believed in five gods: God (the Father), Adam, Jesus Christ, the pope, and Emperor Charles V.61 On the other hand and above all, however, Acosta discussed those on the receiving end, whose perceptions decisively affected mission communication. Here, too, he made a dual argument, first in terms of pedagogy and didactics, when he emphasized the experience that Indios were far more willing to listen to a sermon in their own language,62 and second with regard to the acknowledgment of certain power relations. It is here above all that we see what it meant to proceed from the actual situation on the ground, which manifested itself, for instance, in the prevailing relative numbers. Acosta responded to the frequent calls for the enforcement of Spanish as a means of representing authority with the assertion that one cannot force a majority to speak the language of the minority, especially not an unpopular one.63 On the contrary, the story of Joseph shows that one must always adapt to the language of the majority, for

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Joseph had become so fluent in Egyptian over the years that he nearly forgot his mother tongue.64 Acosta’s interpretation of the story of Joseph and his gifts of prophecy (Gen 42:23) is thus quite a wilful one, since, according to the Bible, Joseph by no means lost his native language, but rather only pretended to do so. And Joseph’s linguistic abilities play no part in the accounts in Genesis. By referring at the beginning of his central chapter on language to Joseph of all people, whose story was generally interpreted in the Christian tradition as prefiguring the later story of Jesus,65 Acosta implicitly stresses linguistically adept missionaries’ discipleship of Christ. Elsewhere Acosta explicitly adjures the priests in the New World to accept the cross of the difficult study of indigenous languages in the sense of an imitation of Christ, all the more so because the world disdained these things.66 Not coincidentally, the loss of one’s mother tongue therefore became a popular image of complete assimilation to foreign conditions, one revisited in numerous accounts by Jesuit missionaries.67

Mission and Cultural Translation, or Critical Approaches to Ancient Theories of Language Communication is the precondition for mission and is based on language acquisition, as Acosta stressed. If he thereby emphasized the perspectives of the “receiving end” more than was usual in Europe and elsewhere around 1600, in Acosta’s work, too, the content of communication appears to have consisted first and foremost of spreading the Christian religion and European culture. This corresponded to the missionaries’ mandate in the New World and was consequently a virtually inescapable prerequisite for any action, at least in the missionaries’ understanding of themselves. And yet the further remarks of the Jesuit provincial of Lima show that he was well aware of the profound complexity of the situation there. For according to Acosta, communication was based on language acquisition, which in turn was a consequence of communication. One must face reality, writes José de Acosta, and cultivate serious and frequent conversation with the Indios, since it is by listening and speaking that one becomes familiar with the language.68 He distinguishes between two phases: while at first one can do no more than learn concepts and the words used to express them by heart, later the words automatically follow the concepts.69 Language acquisition, it becomes clear here, means grasping the concepts behind the words, and thus rests on knowledge of the other culture. Quite casually, Acosta marks an essential difference

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with medieval Aristotelian reception here, which proceeded from the assumption that the concepts behind the words were natural and thus the same for all peoples.70 For that reason, Acosta also supported long sojourns and genuine coexistence with the Indios. For it was only with the resulting “long experience” that one came to know and understand their rituals and customs as well as their “superstitions.”71 Language acquisition is thus the precondition for and the result of engaging with the alien culture. Such engagement in turn facilitated the dismantling of traditional (pre)conceptions. Doubtless Acosta, too, found the indigenous languages – his remarks refer mainly to Quechua – barbaric, to the extent that they lacked terms for spiritual and philosophical questions and had an extremely simple grammar, based primarily on infixes and suffixes.72 Yet Acosta goes on to compare them to the affixes in Hebrew, thereby emphasizing a cross-linguistic commonality behind the barbarism of the indigenous languages, which he intensifies still further with regard to their “barbaric pronunciation” when he notes that it has more in common with Castilian Spanish than any other language.73 Finally, he lauds the beautiful and elegant figures of speech, the consummate formulations and admirable concision of these languages, thereby suggesting that the indigenous languages, too, correspond to the ideals of classical aesthetics, and indeed frequently even surpass Spanish or Latin in this respect.74 Their rhetorical exaggeration notwithstanding, these comments show how communication-based knowledge changed the European view of the indigenous languages. While at first the classical and the “barbaric” indigenous languages could hardly have been conceived as farther apart, a universal commonality was now revealed, which facilitated language acquisition and thus offered a foundation for communication. Acosta went further, reflecting not just on possible common ground between the indigenous and classical languages, but also stressing the usefulness for one’s own language of knowing foreign tongues. In contrast to most authors of his day, and a century before Leibniz, for the Spaniard Acosta the plurality of languages as such did not have fundamentally negative connotations.75 Instead, he regarded languages as expressions of their respective cultures, in which different realities were manifested. For that reason, the individual languages have words for things that are absent in others. By knowing the foreign culture, one became familiar with previously unknown things, whose names one could integrate into one’s own language, just as all nations – especially the Spanish – had always enriched their own language with foreign words.76

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Translation Theories as Mission Theory: A Brief Conclusion As I have tried to show in this cursory sketch, “experience” became a central category in the confrontation with ancient traditions and scholastic learning in two respects. “Personal experience” offered a key to the reinterpretation of Holy Scripture by the Reformers and to the questioning of ancient concepts of nature and culture in the wake of the discovery and conquest of the New World. Both elements were of decisive importance for José de Acosta’s development of mission theory. Thus his experience with conditions in Peru taught him the importance of a close knowledge of indigenous cultures as a prerequisite for communication with the local population. He believed that communication, in turn, was the true basis of a successful mission. Finally, communication required translation, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. After all, experience showed that human concepts were not universal and thus directly transferable from one language to another. Accordingly, language acquisition was based on knowing the other culture and thus on many years of experience living within it. For Acosta, experience became a (not further scrutinized) justification for his new approaches to missionary work. By comparing the learning of indigenous languages and therefore the engagement with indigenous cultures to the miracle of the Pentecost and, referring to the story of Joseph, classifying it as a central element of an imitatio Christi, Acosta and many other Jesuits made language acquisition and thus experience in the world a key to knowledge of divine revelation. To summarize the common ground between Luther’s and Acosta’s theories of translation, the medium of salvation is ultimately rooted in a translation that draws upon one’s own experience. In this regard, contemporary theories of language should be understood as the heart of contemporary missionary theory. NOTES This article was completed in 2010. I wish to thank Pamela Selwyn for the translation and Philip Hahn, Fabian Fechner, and Ulrike Strasser for their comments. 1 José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, ed. and trans. Luciano Pereña et al., 2 vols., Corpus Hispanorum de pace 23–4 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1984–7), 1:406.

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2 Iñigo Álvarez de Toledo, “Acosta, José de,” in Bio-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 17, Herzberg 2000, 4–13, accessed 15 December 2009, http://www.bbkl.de/lexikon/artikel.php?art=./A/Ac-Ad/acosta_j.art [04.05.2014); Claudio M. Burgaleta, José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600): His Life and Thought (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1999). 3 José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:94. 4 Youssef El Alaoui, Jésuites, Morisques et Indiens: Étude comparative des méthodes d’évangélisation de la Compagnie de Jésus d’après les traités de José de Acosta (1588) et d’Ignacio de las Casas (1605–1607) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006); Bartomeu Melià, La lengua Guaraní en el Paraguay Colonial: Que la creación de un lenguaje cristiano en las Reducciones de los Guaraníes en el Paraguay (Asunción: CEPAG, 2003); Graciela Chamorro, Auf dem Weg zur Vollkommenheit: Theologie des Worts unter den Guaraní in Südamerika, trans. Bettina Lichtler-Steck (Münster: LIT, 2003); Jennifer D. Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 117–36; Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, Práctica y Semántica en la Evangelización de los Guaraníes del Paraguay (S. XVI–XVIII) (Asunción: CEPAG, 2006). 5 Renate Dürr, Gisela Engel, Johannes Süssman, eds., Expansionen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ZHF Beiheft 34 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2004); Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous, Studies in Early Modern History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 6 Thomas Kaufmann, “‘Erfahrungsmuster’ in der frühen Reformation,” in Paul Münch, ed., “Erfahrung” als Kategorie der Frühneuzeitgeschichte, HZ Beiheft 31 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2001), 281–306. 7 For this concept, see Graduiertenkolleg 1662 Religiöses Wissen im vormodernen Europa (800–1800), accessed 2 December 2011, http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/forschung/forschungsschwerpunkte/ graduiertenkollegs/gk-religioeses-wissen/forschung.html. 8 Gerhardus J. M. Bartelink, ed., Hieronymus: Liber de Optimo Genere Interpretandi (Epistula 57) (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 13, no. V/2; cf. Andreas Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland: Vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 78; Kevin Windle and Anthony Pym, “European Thinking on Secular Translation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7–22, here 8. 9 Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 81; Werner Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation: Some Reformation Controversies and their Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 10.

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10 For this debate in general and further references, see Renate Dürr, “Sprachreflexion in der Mission: Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation in den sprachtheoretischen Überlegungen von José de Acosta S.J. und Antonio Ruiz de Montoya S.J.,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 161–96. 11 Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, “In Novum Testamentum Praefationes,” in Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus: Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Hajo Holborn (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1933), 137–74, here 152–3; Cornelis Augustijn, “Erasmus,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), 10:1–18, here 9–10; Schwarz, Principles, 126, 160–2; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided; 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 99–100. 12 Jürgen Trabant, “Mithridates im Paradies,” in Sprache und Sprachen in Berlin um 1800, ed. Ute Tintemann and Jürgen Trabant (Hanover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2004), 84–106; Theo Hermans, “Concepts and theories of translation,” in Übersetzung – Translation – Traduction: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung / An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies / Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, ed. Harald Kittel et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 2:1420–8; Andreas Gardt, Sprachreflexion in Barock und Frühaufklärung: Entwürfe von Böhme bis Leibniz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994). 13 Cf. the view of Johann David Michaelis (1717–91), Protestant Orientalist in Goettingen, in his Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des Neuen Bundes (Göttingen 1777), vol. 1, 319–20; see the quotation of the first edition in: Martin Heide, Der einzig wahre Bibeltext? Erasmus von Rotterdam und die Frage nach dem Urtext (Nuremberg: VTR, 2005), 236–7. 14 Quoted in Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 83. 15 Martin Luther, “Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen,” WA 30.2:627–46, here 640. 16 All quotations from Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 83. 17 Luther, “Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen,” 637–9. 18 Andreas Gardt, “Übersetzungstheorie Martin Luthers,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 111, no.1 (1992): 95. 19 Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: Einführung in sein Denken, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 179, 219–38 and passim. 20 “Ah es ist dolmetzschen ja nicht eines iglichen kunst, wie die tollen Heiligen meinen, Es gehöret dazu ein recht, frum, trew, vleissig, forchtsam, Christlich, geleret, erfarn, geübet hertz.” Luther, “Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen,” 640, quoted in Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 86. 21 Burgaleta, José de Acosta, 18–21. 22 Ibid., 73–5. 23 Ibid., 73.

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24 Gerrit Walther, “Humanismus,” in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, ed. Friedrich Jaeger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 5:665–92, here 668; with a focus on Acosta, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 151–7. 25 José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. José Acina Franch, Crónicas de América 34 (Madrid: Historia 16, 1987); cf. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 149–52. 26 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, passim. 27 Cf. Francesco L. Lisi, El tercer concilio limense y la aculturación de los indigenas sudamericanos: Estudio crítico con edición, traducción y comentario de las actas del concilio provincial celebrado en Lima entre 1582 y 1583 (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1990); Hans-Martin Gauger, “Los concilios limenses desde un punto de vista lingüistica,” in Catequesis y derecho en la América Colonial, ed. Roland Schmidt-Riese (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2010), 119–29. 28 Acosta, Historia natural y moral; cf. also: Burgaleta, José de Acosta, 93. 29 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, “Dedicatoria,” 1:48; and, in more detail and with direct reference to Aristotle, “Proemio,” 54–70, here 60–70. For a general account, see Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Humanismus und neue Welt (Weinheim: VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, 1987); Wolfgang Reinhard, Missionare, Humanisten, Indianer im 16. Jahrhundert: Ein gescheiterter Dialog zwischen Kulturen? (Regensburg: Pustet, 1993); Selwyn, Paradise, 125–35; for similar ideas in the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, see Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 119–45. 30 Burgaleta, José de Acosta, 43. 31 Ibid., 45. 32 Cf. Michael Sievernich, “Vision und Mission der Neuen Welt Amerika bei José de Acosta,” in Ignatianisch: Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu, ed. Michael Sievernich and Günter Switek (Freiburg: Herder, 1990), 293–313; Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Roland Schmidt-Riese, “Gramática y territorialidad del discurso: Espacios mesoamericano y andino, época colonial,” in La cultura escrita en México y el Perú, ed. Rosa Yáñez Rosales (Guadalajara: Secretaría de Cultura de Jalisco, 2010), 87–119, here 98; Galaxis Borja González and Ulrike Strasser, “The German Circumnavigation of the Globe: Missionary Writing and Colonial Identity Formation in Joseph Stöcklein’s Neuer Welt-Bott,” in Early Modern Missionary Publications, ed. Markus Friedrich and Alexander Schunka (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, forthcoming).

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33 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 12–13. 34 For further evidence of the use of the term “missio” in the sense of a civilizing mission, albeit with reference to circumstances in Naples, see Selwyn, Paradise, 75–6. 35 José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 1:232. 36 Sievernich, “Vision und Mission,” 301; Selwyn, Paradise, 124; more generally, Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 42; Lorraine Daston, Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit (Munich: Carl-Friedrich-von-Siemens-Stiftung, 2001); Richard van Dülmen and Sina Rauschenbach, eds., Macht des Wissens: Die Entstehung der modernen Wissensgesellschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). 37 Francis Bacon, Novum organum, vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Krohn (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), preface, 69–79. 38 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:94; cf. Burgaleta, José de Acosta, 78. 39 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, “Proemio,” 1:54. 40 Ibid., “Dedicatoria,” 48. 41 Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007). 42 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, “Dedicatoria,” 1:50. On the eclectic use of numerous classical and patristic texts, cf. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 151–7. 43 The dedication to the Superior General of the Jesuits dates from 24 February 1577; cf. Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 1:52. 44 Sievernich,”Vision und Mission,” 298. 45 John Amos Comenius, Novissima Lingvarvm Methodus: Fundamentis Didacticis solide superstructa (1648), in J. A. Comenii Opera didactica omnia (Amsterdam: Laurentius de Geer, 1657), vol. 2, chap. IV, 46, section 27 (on the peculiarities of each individual language, including the nonEuropean ones); chap. VI, 66, section 7 (on the political meaning of language, here that of the Incas); chap. XXVII, 270, section 11 (on the importance of language learning for the mission); cf. Peter Hartmann, preface to Johann Amos Comenius, Methodus Linguarum Novissima und andere seiner Schriften zur Sprachlehrforschung, ed. Peter Hartmann and Miloslav Káña (Konstanz: Archiv für Fremdsprachenvermittlung, 1978), 12–34. 46 On Comenius, see Veit-Jakobus Dieterich, Johann Amos Comenius: Ein Mann der Sehnsucht, 1592–1670; Theologische, pädagogische und politische Aspekte seines Lebens und Werkes (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2003). 47 Comenius, Methodus, chap. XXVII, 270, section 11.

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48 Opposition to this interpretation has already been voiced by a few authors, including Bartolomé de Las Casas, for whom the building of the tower of Babylon was the origin of idolatry, but not of the plurality of languages; cf. Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über den Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker, 4 vols., (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1957–63), vol. 3.1 (1960), here 1156–7. 49 For a more detailed treatment, including references, see Dürr, “Sprachreflexion in der Mission.” 50 Summarized with a number of quotations and examples in Arno Borst, Turmbau, 3.1:1089–90. 51 Martin Luther, “Hauspostille 1544: Die erste Predigt am heyligen Pfingstag,” WA 52:315. 52 Borst, Turmbau, 3.1:1068–9. 53 Ibid., 3.1:1148–9. 54 Ibid., 3.1:1156. 55 Diego González Holguín, Gramática y arte nueva de la lengua general de todo el Perú, llamada lengua qquichua, o lengua del inca (1606; repr., Vaduz: Cabildo, 1975); Diego González Holguín, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú llamada lengua quichua o del incao (1608; modern ed., Lima: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1989); see also, with additional references, Renate Dürr, “Übersetzung als Wissenstransfer: das Beispiel der Guaraní-Wörterbücher von Antonio Ruiz de Montoya S.J. (1639–1640),” in Sprachgrenzen – Sprachkontakte – kulturelle Vermittler: Kommunikation zwischen Europäern und Außereuropäern (16.–20. Jahrhundert), ed. Mark Häberlein and Alexander Keese (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 31–45, here 37–8. 56 Diego González Holguín, Gramática y arte nueva de la lengua general de todo el Perú, llamada lengua qquichua o lengua del inca …, 2nd ed. (n.p., 1842), vii. 57 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:46. 58 Bartomeu Meliá, La lengua Guaraní del Paraguay: Historia, sociedad, y literatura (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992), 48–52; the following remarks are based on Dürr, “Sprachreflexion in der Mission,” 168–76. 59 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:46. 60 Ibid., 66–8. 61 Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, trans. Harold V. Livermore, ed. Karen Spalding (Cambridge: Hackett, 2006), 99–104; for a biography and a discussion of the writings of Garcilaso de la Vega, cf. Mercedes Serna, “Introducción” to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega: Comentarios reales, ed. Mercedes Serna (Madrid: Castalia, 2000), 9–81. 62 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:50. 63 Ibid., 62.

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64 Ibid., 46. 65 For the interpretation of Joseph as an exemplum Christi, cf. Rüdiger Lux, Josef: Der Auserwählte unter seinen Brüdern (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 165–75. 66 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 70, 76. 67 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, ed. C.J. McNaspy (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993), 30; Der Neue Welt-Bott mit allerhand nachrichten deren Missionarien Soc. JESU (Augsburg 1726), vol. 1, pt. 7, no. 169, 62–6, here 62; Rainald Fischer, ed., P. Martin Schmid SJ 1694–1772: Seine Briefe und sein Wirken (Zug: Kalt-Zehnder, 1988), 135. 68 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:76. 69 Ibid. 70 Lia Formigari, A History of Language Philosophies (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004), 63. 71 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:86. 72 Ibid., 72–4; cf. Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo: La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale; dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1976), 378–80; Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 266ff.; Selwyn, Paradise, 127–8. 73 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:72. 74 Ibid. 75 Cf. Jürgen Trabant, who points out that Leibniz was the first European to regard the plurality of languages as something positive. Trabant, “Mithridates im Paradies,” 187. 76 Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, 2:74.

chapter ten

Apocalyptic Times in a “World without End”: The Straits of Magellan around 1600 S U S A N N A B U R G H A RT Z

From the beginning, intensive production in a plethora of media accompanied the opening of new worlds and the exploration of new spaces and routes by Europeans – the Portuguese, Spaniards, Germans, French, and Dutch. Relaciones, travel accounts, pamphlets, (world) maps, and pictures processed the experiences of new places while creating new pictorial and literary worlds for an increasingly numerous European public. Thanks to printers, publishers, engravers, and cartographers, this process intensified greatly in the second half of the sixteenth century in various European centres. Antwerp in particular, and increasingly Amsterdam after its conquest by the Spanish in 1585, became print and representation markets of European significance, whose enormous multimedia productivity in the form of pictures and maps would help to decisively shape Europe’s world view, especially in the visual realm.1 Around the same time (c. 1580) the process of European expansion reached the next phase. With the appearance of England, and soon thereafter the Netherlands,2 as Spain’s and Portugal’s new rivals on the high seas, interest in the discovery of new routes and the control of known passages intensified. Thus in South America, the Straits of Magellan, already discovered in 1520, became the focus of national as well as confessional rivalries. The new political topicality was reflected in a corresponding presence of the Straits of Magellan across a range of media. The Straits, however, were not represented as simply a point of passage for travellers but rather as a powerful site of confrontation with human desires and their limits. A place at the far ends of the earth, the Straits of Magellan seemed to hold an important key to the world geopolitically, economically as well as epistemologically and spiritually. Cartographic, iconographic, and narrative media portrayed them as always beset with hopes that extended far beyond the concrete, feasible possibilities of a single voyage. Such hopes

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were nourished not least by the fact that the Straits of Magellan proved to be a place of persistent danger to those who attempted to traverse them, and that survival was repeatedly described as contingent upon a combination of extreme human effort and unexpected divine aid. The Straits of Magellan thus also became a place of experience in which immanence and transcendence promised to be intensely linked, a virtual portal or medium for encountering the divine. There was an increasing number of mediated representations of these encounters in accounts, images, and maps of the Straits, illustrating the degree to which the circulation of “mimetic capital” was accelerating around 1600. Representation were – to quote Stephen Greenblatt – “not only products but also producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being.”3 This essay probes a series of maps of the Straits of Magellan for the layers of mediated experiences – real and imagined – of this potent place at the far end of world. Taking a cue from Sybille Krämer, maps and cartography are understood here in a dual sense, reconciling two seemingly contradictory positions: the naturalistic perspective of the “transparent map” and the constructivist position of the “opaque map.” From a naturalist-oriented perspective, for which exactitude is decisive, the “transparent map” as an image transmits highly precise information on an external territory to the map user, thereby becoming a messenger. From the instrumentalist-constructivist viewpoint, the object of the map itself and the conditions of mapping – including technology, politics, power, and faith – become the focus. This “opaque map” may be read for such traces and become itself a trace. In this model, reality and representation or object and sign become inseparable.4 Applied to accounts, images, and maps of the Straits of Magellan, Krämer’s reflections allow for a reading that permits us to explore these simultaneities, which constitute something new altogether: an “in-between” or “third space” in which experience and representation, knowledge and belief, immanence and transcendence refer to each other and are transformed. We discover in these media an amalgamation of the religious, scientific, and colonial that is key to their trans-confessional appeal to seventeenth-century European consumers of print culture.

Belief, Knowledge, Politics: The World of the Miles Christianus As a daunting obstacle, the Straits of Magellan were by no means located in some indeterminate Nowhere, but in a world in which their control and meaning were both concretely and abstractly contested.5

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In 1596 or 1597, Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam published the socalled Christian Knight Map (see plate 9), which occupies an important place in cartographic history.6 It underscores the extent to which a commitment to scientific precision and knowledge, questions of copyright and intellectual property, the latest geographic information, political propaganda, religious positions, and issues of individual and national identity can be simultaneously present in a single map.7 The map shows the entire world and fills the lower third with a representation of a gigantic southern continent, which serves as the site of the Christian knight’s struggle for dominion on earth. In the sixteenth century, ever since Erasmus and Charles V, high expectations of a religiously united, peaceful world had been associated with the Miles Christianus as a unifying figure.8 Nevertheless, as Peter Barber has shown, the portrayal of the Christian knight surrounded by the world, the devil, and death, helmeted by the Holy Spirit and standing on the “Tierra del Fogo” in combat with sin and the flesh, also contains a political appeal on behalf of the French king and his struggle against Philip II and the Spanish in the southern Netherlands that was quite topical in 1597.9 Elsewhere, too, Hondius aspired to be as topical as possible, in some cases at the expense of others, for example, in mathematics, cartography, and topography. With a method of representation he borrowed from the English mathematician Edward Wright – an improved form of Mercator projection – he violated the Englishman’s copyright. Not mollified by the dedication to himself and his colleagues, Wright still expressed anger years later. With its combination of political theology and up-to-date cartographic knowledge, the map was clearly interesting to contemporaries as well. Alongside other objects of study such as skeletons, a copy hung in the anatomical theatre of Leiden University,10 where, referring back to the vanitas discourse, it formed part of a staging of world knowledge in which transience and transcendence were closely linked with the immanence of the production of exact knowledge.

Claesz’s 1602 Map of America and the Straits of Magellan as a “Third Space” The title of Cornelis Claesz’s 1602 map (see fig. 10.1) explicitly claims to assemble the latest and best information, thereby eliminating previous errors: “Americae tabula nova multis locis tam ex terrestri peregrinatione

Figure 10.1 Cornelis Claesz, Americae tabula nova multis locis tam ex terrestri peregrinatione quam recentiori navigatione ab exploratissimis naucleris emendata et multo quam antea exactior edita (1602) [Bibliothèque Nationale de France, GE B 1115 Rs]

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quam recentiori navigatione ab exploratissimis naucleris emendata et multo quam antea exactior edita” (“A new map of America with many places, improved by terrestrial expeditions as well as recent navigation of the most well travelled ship pilots, and much more exactly edited than before”).11 With its detail maps, individual and grouped figures, cartouches and text inserts, Claesz’s map integrates diverse bodies of knowledge, media, images, and thematic discourses from different national contexts, documenting the intense circulation of mimetic capital and its accumulation around 1600.12 It portrays the Straits in three different images, thus producing paradoxical effects – at least from the standpoint of modern cartography. The map itself features an implicit competition for the most precise representation. Thus the heading of the detail map, which is based on the latest information from Oliver van Noort, the first Dutchman to successfully circumnavigate the globe, reads: “Precise representation of the Strait of Magellan, explored and discovered in 1600 by the Hollanders on a very bold voyage.”13 While here boldness is associated with precision, the adoption of another detail map, whose information came from the voyage of Cavendish and John Davis, is explained in terms of the existence of contradictory information and the superior quality of the Englishman Davis’s cartographic observations: “There are various topographical descriptions of the Strait of Magellan, but they differ so greatly from each other that they correspond in name only. We have kept to the description given to us for inspection by Th. Caundish in London before the engraving. (He is the one who sailed through the Strait for some considerable time and sailed around the world.) As afterwards John Davis also explored it, we thought it best, for those interested in geography, to add a second drawing of the strait to our map, based on the description by Davis.”14 The adoption of three different drawings at once made good on the title’s promise of improving the map yet also nolens volens increased its ambiguity and undercut its evident precision. At the same time, the peregrinatio mentioned in the map’s title recalls the topos of pilgrimage, with its orientation towards penitence and sanctification and thus transcendent concerns in this world.15

Mortal Danger and Knowledge Acquisition: John Davis and the “World without End” The aspect of religiously based self-knowledge invoked in the notion of the peregrinatio becomes clearer when we return to John Jane’s account of the voyage of Captain John Davis, which appeared in 1600 as part of

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Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations. Davis’s ship, the Desire, was part of Cavendish’s fleet, which set sail in 1591 for the second voyage around the world. The detail map that Claesz deemed particularly exact owed its existence to Cavendish’s second, failed attempt to circumnavigate the globe. While Cavendish was forced to turn back before reaching the Straits of Magellan and died during the return journey, he and John Jane ultimately succeeded in escaping the Straits of Magellan after a desperate struggle and returned home with a few survivors thanks to the extraordinary precision of the cartographic information gathered by John Davis. John Jane’s account of the experience clearly (also) invokes religious motifs, tightly intertwining nautical skill, precise empirical observation, the resulting knowledge, and divine intervention. Jane vividly describes the desperation that the Desire’s crew felt at their hopeless situation in the spot where the Straits of Magellan opened into the Pacific. At the same time, he stresses that not only was their physical survival at stake, but that fear and melancholy imperilled the salvation of the captain’s soul: The tenth of October being by the accompt of our Captaine and Master [John Davis] very neere the shore, the weather darke, the storme furious, and most of our men having given over to travell, we yeelded ourselves to death, without further hope of succour. Our captaine sitting in the gallery very pensive, I came and brought him some Rosa solis to comfort him; for he was so cold, that hee was scarce able to moove a joint. After he had drunke, and was comforted in heart, hee began for the ease of his conscience, to make a large repetition of his forepassed time, and with many grievous sighs he concluded in these words: Oh, most glorious God, with whose power the mightiest things among men are matters of no moment, I most humbly beseech thee, that the intollerable burthen of my sinnes may through the blood of Jesus Christ be taken from me: and end our daies with speede, or shew us some mercifull signe of thy love and our preservation. Having thus ended, he desired me not to make knowen to any of the company his intollerable griefe and anguish of minde, because they should not thereby be dismayed. And so suddenly, before I went from him the Sunne shined cleere; so that he and the Master both observed the true elevation of the Pole, whereby they knew by what course to recover the Streights.16

Thanks to this sign from above, the Straits of Magellan were transformed from a place at the end of the world, and thus the epitome of godforsakenness, to a place of special divine presence and closeness – a presence

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that transformed and transcended the world for the survivors after their return: “In this maner our small remnant by Gods onely mercie were preserved, and restored to our countrey, to whom be all honour and glory, world without end.”17 The continuation of Jane’s narrative also makes it clear how closely allied survival thanks to divine grace and the production of exact knowledge was in such a world. Once back in the Straits of Magellan with their stormy narrows, it was only Captain Davis’s superior powers of observation that allowed them to overcome the tribulations they faced: But our capitaine, as wee first passes through the Streights drew such an exquisite plat of the same, as I am assured it cannot in any sort be bettered: which plat hee and the Master so often perused, and so carefully regarded, as that in memorie they had every turning and creeke, and in the deepe darke night without any doubting they conveyed the ship through that crooked chanell: so that I conclude, the world hath not any so skilfull pilots for that place as they are: for otherwise wee could never have passed in such sort as we did.18

Elevated again by the religious imagery of light and dark, the fact that they escaped the darkness of the Straits alive owed everything to unwavering and bright intellect, made concrete in cartographic precision; and this precision, so necessary for survival, entered into Claesz’s map of America with its overdetermined significances, continuing the story beyond Jane’s account. Mortal danger and survival, cartographic precision and the gaining of knowledge, thus interacted intensively here.

Visitation and Elevation: The Straits of Magellan as Non-Place In The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama describes the “transformation, under divine guidance, of catastrophe into good fortune” as a characteristic typical of the nascent Dutch nation. “Survival in the teeth of calamity” became the “beginning of self-respect” and “a recovery of identity.” 19 Accordingly, seventeenth-century Holland developed its own successful “shipwreck tales featuring intrepid nautical heroes.”20 Accounts of the first Dutch circumnavigations of the globe, like those by Van Noort and Spielberghen, or Barent Jansz Potgieter’s history of the failed attempt of Sebald de Weert to cross the Straits of Magellan, are among the early examples of the genre, which addressed the fears of the

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Dutch and their demand for tales of misfortune, and served the middleclass public’s need for moral edification. In this context, it is hardly surprising that the return of the Geloof (Belief ) under Sebald de Weert had scarcely made the rounds than the author and publisher Zacharias Heyns21 left his books and hastened to the harbour in July 1600, eager to learn of any wonders (om eenighe vreemdigheydt te hooren).22 The first Dutch voyage through the Straits of Magellan incurred extraordinarily heavy losses. In keeping with Schama’s observations, this did nothing to dampen the interest of the Amsterdam public. Thus only two months after the Geloof returned home as the only ship from the fleet of Mahu and Cordes, Heyns published an extensive travel account by Barent Jansz Potgieter,23 which he had augmented and polished based on discussions with Potgieter. In competition with Spain (the declared enemy of the Netherlands) and Portugal, which were joined at that time in personal union, the Dutch set out in 1598 to catch up with those nations that had sailed around the world and claimed colonies. No sooner had Linschoten completed the first great Dutch voyage of discovery than five ships set sail from Rotterdam in June 1598 under the leadership of Mahu and Cordes, bearing the names Belief, Love, Unity, Hope, and Good News.24 These programmatic appellations notwithstanding, only the Belief returned home. Just one year later, the Dutch edition, which Heyns supplied with woodcuts, was published in German and Latin in Frankfurt in Theodor de Bry’s America series, embellished with a new map of the Straits of Magellan by Hondius. The voyage was portrayed as one endless exercise in survival from beginning to end, an odyssey in which colonial political rivalries, human discord and malice, indigenous savagery, tribulations and the perils of nature alternated in an unbroken series, and sheer survival could be considered a great national success. While the difficulties of the voyage – sickness, death, and divine deliverance – began immediately after departure and continued on the African coast with almost insurmountable supply problems and an accordingly large number of deaths, the trials reached a nine-month-long peak in the Straits of Magellan. The Dutch ships repeatedly tried to overcome the challenges that beset them by wind, storm, hunger, and lost anchors – in vain, for despite all efforts the Straits of Magellan remained the ultimate obstacle for Sebald de Weert and the Belief. As a passage and thus a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific, the Straits were actually a non-place [Un-Ort]25 in a Foucauldian sense.26 Foucault has referred to the ship in particular as “the heterotopia par excellence,” noting that “it

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has been not only and obviously the main means of economic growth ..., but at the same time the greatest reserve of imagination for our civilization from the sixteenth century down to the present day.”27 Here, in the Straits of Magellan, the ship became a site of endless fear and nightmare. For the Dutch ships, the Straits proved a fateful non-place: an impassable passage, shores that permitted no secure position or safe anchor, a wilderness inimical to life, which constantly imperilled not just the men’s civilized nature but their very existence. Two concrete locations in the Straits, whose toponyms are marked on the early maps of the seventeenth century, illustrate this in exemplary fashion: Knights’ Bay and the Penguin Islands.

Knights’ Bay: Commemoration, Destruction, and Disturbance After the Dutch ships had been at sea for more than one year, General Simon de Cordes decided, on the wishes of the officers, to erect a plaque in the middle of the Straits of Magellan to commemorate their achievements thus far.28 To that end, he gathered his entire crew on 24 August 1599 and founded the “Brotherhood of the Liberated Lion.” Tribulations, hardship, and mortal danger notwithstanding, the six captains of the fleet pledged to do nothing to imperil their honour, the good of their country, or the ultimate success of the voyage (the circumnavigation of the globe). Instead, they would risk life and limb to harm their sworn enemies and plant the Dutch flag where the king of Spain collected the treasures he used to finance his protracted war against the Netherlands. In a ceremony designed for the occasion, the bay where the plaque was to be erected was christened Knights’ Bay and the plaque brought on land, where it was inscribed with the names of the brotherhood’s members and attached to a pillar. It was to be visible to all passing ships as a memento of the “splendid Dutch fleet,”29 reminding them that the Dutch, despite all efforts and dangers, were allegedly the first “among all nations / to venture this undertaking / with so many and large ships.”30 The Dutch were thus erecting a monument that would not merely pass on their names and their identities to posterity, but also broadcast their claim to participate in world expansion to their colonial rivals as well as take a stand in the national struggle for liberation – a struggle they intended to continue in the New World, as they clearly signalled by founding the Brotherhood.31

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Scarcely had the Dutch left Knights’ Bay, however, when the choice of site proved unfavourable and they resolved to turn back, fetch the plaque, and erect it in a more suitable location. Back on the shores of Knights’ Bay, de Weert and the armed men in his party found traces of indigenous cruelty. The savages had not merely exhumed the corpses of the Dutch dead buried there, but had “most inhumanly and cruelly wounded and dismembered them.” The body of Master Ian Iansz, the general’s barber, “had had his cheeks sliced / his head knocked off with a bludgeon / an arrow shot through his side into his heart / and his male member cut off and mutilated ...” – “O grouwelijke daedt!” (Oh monstrous deed), as the Dutch original noted with a shudder.32 They found the grave of another Dutchman opened and the body removed – a clear indication of indigenous cannibalism, or so their horrified suspicions went. They desperately combed the entire area for the grave desecrators, but had to return to their ship without having achieved anything. All they found were a few pieces of the plaque, which the savages had taken down and hacked to pieces. Here, at the ends of the earth, savages threatened even memoria itself. What was endangered was not merely the attempt of a dignified commemoration in the form of a plaque, or sheer physical survival. Even beyond death, they were threatened with the most dishonourable desecration of their bodies and thereby the endangerment of their transcendental salvation. Only transformation through the written word offered comfort. Recorded, printed, and disseminated in Europe, the memoria of the brotherhood could be secured at least on the collective (and thus national) level by publishing the story, which took over the function of the destroyed plaque. This succeeded to an astonishing degree, as is evident from the fact that in the years that followed, the name “Knights’ Bay” quickly appeared on not just Dutch but also Spanish maps, although all lasting traces of the Dutchmen, their commemorative act, and their colonial claim had vanished soon after the plaque was erected.33

False Loyalties? Between South Sea Paradise and Hunger Cannibalism In the Straits of Magellan, however, the founding of the brotherhood did not significantly alter the actual situation of the Dutch fleet, and the constant problems, precarious provisions, and unfavourable weather conditions persisted. Discontent and despair spread and on 5 December 1599 the Belief lost its last anchor and – as would become evident only

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in retrospect – its contact to the other ships as well.34 Once again, de Weert and his crew hoped to improve their situation significantly when on 18 December they encountered another Dutch ship commanded by Captain Oliver van Noort, who for his part was trying to cross the Straits of Magellan on his way around the world. They noted with envy the plentiful supplies on board the other ships and heard from van Noort how he had succeeded in acquiring provisions on the Penguin Islands. When it became obvious that he would be unable to keep his promise to “give them all necessary aid”35 and the crew began to grumble, Captain de Weert tried one last time to keep his men from giving up and embarking on the return journey. He reminded them that he was in the bloom of youth, declared how much he valued his life, and warned them that with only their existing provisions, they were sure to perish on the way home. He expressed himself convinced that their situation would improve once they reached the South Seas, “since every form of nourishment, both meat and all sorts of fruits, is to be had there.”36 He urged them to eat birds and shellfish to save bread, so that they might be spared the fate of the wasteful Spaniards under “Petri Mondosa in Rio del Plata,” who, having only rats, mice, and snakes to eat, ended up as cannibals, consuming the flesh of three of their compatriots who had died on the gallows. He referred here to the travel account of the German Ulrich Schmidel, who had served with the Spanish in the 1530s and participated in the exploration of the Rio Plata region and the founding of Buenos Aires. His account was widely read, especially in Germany, and appeared as volume seven of de Bry’s America series in 1597, embellished with an engraving that memorably dramatized the scene of the Spanish cannibalizing the hanged men.37 De Weert sought to mobilize all available energies by drastically recalling the Spaniards’ definitive loss of civilized behaviour and most terrible endangerment of their salvation by violating the greatest taboo, the cannibalization of Europeans by Europeans. If we are to believe the account presented by Zacharias Heyns, it was not empirical observation and his own experience that were the ultima ratio of de Weert’s argument, but book learning, which passed off cultural patterns as experience. The intention was to ensure the continuation of the enterprise amidst the greatest misfortune. Read as a trace in Krämer’s definition, Heyns’s text, with its intertextual reference, shows above all the significance of mimetic circulation and its productive quality. On the ground in the Straits, however, even this rhetoric of extreme horror scenarios no longer had the desired effect, and the promised land of meat and fruit in the South Seas failed to persuade such an

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experienced old helmsman as Jan Outghersz. He was the last to speak after Sebald de Weert, and argued that they should turn back and gather provisions on the Penguin Islands. He explicitly warned de Weert against exaggerated loyalty towards his employers in the Netherlands, branding his “indescribable fidelity” towards the ship owners as “blind zeal” that caused him to risk life and salvation.38 De Weert finally resolved to change course and stock the ship with five thousand or six thousand birds as provisions for the return journey. In fact, this was a decision to halt the circumnavigation of the globe and set sail for Europe.

Forsakenness and Deliverance: The Penguin Islands The sojourn on the Penguin Islands was characterized by destruction and survival, forsakenness and deliverance (see fig. 10.2). It reflected the basic tenor of the entire voyage and possessed cathartic potential. As an existential trial, it represented an astonishing turn in the relationship between self-experience and world knowledge, which nonetheless remained implicit. Having arrived on the smallest of the Penguin Islands, de Weert and his men began hunting full of “desire and greediness,” after first – fearing acts of vengeance – searching the islands for possible survivors of the massacre that, as we learn in passing, van Noort and his soldiers had committed in response to the killing of three Dutchmen. They found nobody however, “except for a dog.” And thus they began their work of destruction until a still greater misfortune befell them than they had already survived. A mighty gust of wind cast their bark adrift, thus cutting off their means of returning to the ship.39 They spent the night full of dread, wet, freezing cold, terrified, and deeply worried about the fate of their ship, which they had left with a skeleton crew of three. Despairing that everything seemed to have taken a turn for the worse, all of a sudden, they called upon God, asking him “to mercifully help them again, as He had before / since no human aid was forthcoming.”40 And indeed they managed to help themselves, recovering and repairing the damaged vessel and returning with it to their ship with a cargo of penguins. If we follow the account of Potgieter and Heyns, God’s aid had once again averted their certain demise in this merciless environment. But not everyone here at the end of the world was offered help and mercy. Before the Dutchmen could board their boat, they found an indigenous woman lying wounded in a penguin hole. As the sole survivor

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Figure 10.2 Johann Theodor and Johann Israel de Bry, America (IX/2, plate 24) [University Library of Basel, E.U. I, 17]

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of the Dutch massacre, she became a witness for the Europeans in several respects. Full of astonishment, they noted signs of civilization in her: She was dressed in a coat made of skins “very finely joined and sewn with thread made of gut” that fell to her knees. Her pubic area was covered with a special fur, giving the Dutchmen the impression “that the people on the northern side / are more modest and sociable / than those on the southern side.” This impression was also confirmed by a dead indigenous man they found, whose head was “adorned with all manner of fine feathers / his body too was surrounded by the same / and had a little net drawn over them / upon which a number of dried little bones and stones hung as proper adornment.”41 Potgieter’s account clearly mentions gradual differences of civilization between the indigenous inhabitants of the Straits of Magellan. They could be readily reconciled with the latest ethnographic theories concerning the history of human development and the settlement of South America formulated by the Jesuit José de Acosta, which appeared in the same volume of de Bry’s America series in German and Latin. In the context of Acosta’s theory of development, such observations of gradual differences inscribed the Straits of Magellan into a world history of salvation.42 According to this theory, the indigenous witness to the massacre and the natives massacred by the Dutch did not merely fall out of history, but were instead part of a common history of humankind, which conceived of the plan for salvation and progressive civilization as one. And yet de Weert did not act upon this insight, and the inhabitant of the Straits of Magellan became at once a victim of and a witness to Dutch ruthlessness. When the woman was brought to de Weert, he presented her, to her great delight, the account expressly notes, with a knife, which may be considered the epitome of technological, material superiority and European civilization. He did not, however, accede to her request to take her with them to the mainland. Instead, he left her to her fate – a fate that the Dutch themselves had so desperately feared not long before. In text and image, the woman on Penguin Island thus affirmed the possibility of a divided history of humanity as well as European cruelty and mercilessness. For the Dutchmen, the Penguin Islands became clear proof of divine grace and at the same time, in regard to their own greed and lack of mercy, a sign of extreme forsakenness, a forsakenness the indigenous woman was forced to experience. The clear dividing line between them and savages appeared to have been drawn, and the tales from the Straits of Magellan could be read as a warning; mortal danger, worldly wisdom, and self-knowledge proved inextricably linked – but sometimes it was too late to change course.

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Apocalyptic Scenarios: Danger, Worldly Wisdom, and Self Knowledge On 13 July 1600, the Belief returned home with 36 members of its original crew of 109.43 Thus ended the account of Barent Jansz Potgieter. Once it entered into the circulation of mimetic capital, it made its way through the various media in the years that followed. Potgieter’s story was not over yet, though, nor had interest in the Straits of Magellan and its messages come to an end. Nearly a generation after de Weert and Potgieter returned, Hondius’s son Jodocus published another map of the Straits of Magellan, which in 1630 became part of the so-called Atlas Appendix Maior,44 where it was, remarkably enough, the only representation of a passage with its own map (see fig. 10.3).

Figure 10.3 Jodocus Hondius, Freti Magellanici ac novi Freti vulgo Le Maire exactissima descriptio / J. Grijp sculpsit, 1620 [Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Cartes et plans, GE D-15641]

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The new map did not merely show the Le Maire Strait, only discovered in 1617, but also the Straits of Magellan according to the information Potgieter had risked his life to attain, as a Latin-Dutch double inscription on the map expressly emphasizes: Lectori meo. Descriptionem hanc novam freti Magellanici nobis communicavit clarissimus vir Bernardus Joannis Monasteriensis qui novem menses in peregratione huius freti impendit sub duce Sebaldi de Waertd. Afbeelding der Straet Magallanes. So als de selve van Mr. Barent Iansz Potgieter van Munster door en weder door bevaren en met syn Capiteyn Sebald de Waerd met groot pericul syns levens seer naerstig ondersocht is.45

It points out Potgieter and de Weert’s perilous exploration of the Straits of Magellan, referring to it in the Latin inscription as a peregrinatio, recalling the religious-transcendental dimension of their enterprise as well. Potgieter himself settled in Amsterdam as a surgeon, joined the guild in 1602, and served as its “overman, proef- en bosmeester” from 1604 to 1611. In 1625 he addressed the public again in a zinneprent, an edifying symbolic broadsheet (see fig. 10.4). The print, of whose production the exact circumstances are unknown, shows Potgieter as a true Catholic and “preserver of the faith” standing on a rock amidst apocalyptic threats from a many-breasted dragon, an eight-headed monster, a basilisk, a lion, a tiger, a steer/ox, a wolf, a bear, and a hyena as symbols of the Devil, the Antichrist, and the Seven Deadly Sins, all against a steep mountain backdrop. This landscape recalls the engravings in Potgieter’s account of the Straits of Magellan and suggests an association with Hondius’s map of the Straits, which appeared soon thereafter. In strange contrast to the apocalyptic signs the symbols of hope and peace are visible only in the background: the cross, the fortress, and the rainbow. Potgieter wrote on the reverse that he had had the engraving made in connection with a legal case involving the bankrupt Gerrit Jacobsen Bell, at a time when the Roman church had been represented as the whore of Babylon and the devil and the Catholic Mass disgracefully mocked. Thus his print was apparently responding to confessional conflicts that were not uncommon in Amsterdam in the 1620s and that reached into the circles of the politicians and merchants who led Dutch expansion policy.46 Two years later Potgieter commissioned a portrait engraving that portrayed him as a fifty-three-year-old “friend of peace” with the motto “I place my hope firmly in Jesus Christ crucified” (Mijn hoope staet vast in Iesum Christum den gecruysten) and was

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Figure 10.4 Zinneprent door Barent Jansz Potgieter [Reproduced in F.C. Wieder, De reis van Mahu en de Cordes door de Straat van Magalhães naar Zuid-Amerika en Japan, 1598–1600, vol. 1, (’S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1923, Plate 2)]

perhaps intended to mark his twenty-fifth anniversary in the guild.47 In his verses on the reverse of the zinneprent he calls himself an “Erasmian,” lamenting the sin of God’s church, and particularly stressing the great risks he took for the good of Holland. In this way he drew a line back to his experiences in the Straits, that place of existential, liminal experience, which had become both a symbol of the end of days and a monument to his own return and a sign of the justified hope of divine deliverance. Peril and salvation, hostility and hope were closely allied – in Amsterdam as in the Straits, as is evident from the personal story of Barent Jansz Potgieter. As Simon Schama has shown, however, in Dutch culture the threat of downfall and immanent as well as transcendental deliverance were also closely allied. The Straits of the accounts, images, and maps were a good example. That it was the stories of the Catholic Potgieter, of all people, that expressed this quality so clearly was (at

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first) a surprising and ironic turn. On closer scrutiny, however, this very detail proves to be a trace pointing to the circumstance that, in the use of diverse media, colonial knowledge, worldly wisdom, and moral-religious edification and identity creation, could be closely connected and ultimately form an amalgam across confessional boundaries, one that, despite all moral-theological propositions, was capable of conveying to the Dutch producers and their European readers a thrilling sense of their own superiority. That apocalyptic fear and divine deliverance at the end of world would continue to reverberate in Dutch and European print culture but do so across confessional divides indicates that even after the heated media-theological debates of the Reformation period had quieted down, the long-term repercussions of this earlier crisis in mediation were still unfolding and shaping the complex process of socalled secularization. NOTES 1 Susanna Burghartz, “Mimetisches Kapital und die Aneignung Neuer Welten: Zur europäischen Repräsentationspraxis um 1600,” WerkstattGeschichte 37 (2004): 24–48. On the long-term influence of early texts on and images of the Straits of Magellan, see Burghartz, “Vermessung der Differenz: Die Magellanstraße als europäischer Projektionsraum um 1600,” Historische Anthropologie 19, no.1 (2011): 4–30; and Peter Mason, The Lives of Images (London: Reaktion, 2001), chap.1. 2 Cf. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 5. Seed stresses the production of highly precise maps as a particular Dutch achievement. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6. 4 Sybille Krämer, Medium, Bote, Übertragung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 300–2. For the recent history of cartography, see J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 5 The actual or assumed geopolitical significance of this passage between Atlantic and Pacific is evident from the – ultimately fruitless – attempts of the colonial powers Spain, England, and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to control the Straits, whether with fortresses, as the

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6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

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Spanish did at Philippsburg/Port Famine, or by erecting signs and placing toponyms on maps. J.B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An Interpretative Guide to the Travelling Exhibition (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin, 1990), 125–7. Günter Schilder, Jodocus Hondius (1563–1612) and Petrus Kaerius (1571–c.1646), Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica VIII (Alphen aan den Rijn: Uitgeverij Canaletto, 2007), 241–52. Andreas Wang, Der “Miles Christianus” im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert und seine mittelalterliche Tradition: Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von sprachlicher und graphischer Bildlichkeit (Berne: Herbert Lang; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1975). Peter Barber, “The Christian Knight, the Most Christian King and the Rulers of Darkness,” The Map Collector 52 (Autumn 1990), 8–13. Schilder, Jodocus Hondius and Petrus Kaerius, 246. Cornelis Claesz, “Map of America 1602,” Bibliothèque Nationale Paris: GE B 1115 Rs. Burghartz, “Mimetisches Kapital,” 40–3. Claesz, “Map.” Ibid. Jörg Dünne, “Pilgerkörper – Pilgertexte: Zur Medialität der Raumkonstitution in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit,” in Von Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten: Raumpraktiken in medienhistorischer Perspektive, ed. Jörg Dünne, Hermann Doetsch, and Roger Lüdeke (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 79–98, 92. Dünne points out, however, that in the Spanish Siglo de Oro, the term is applied to all manner of voyages in a clearly desacralised manner. John Davis, The Voyages and Works of John Davis, the Navigator, ed. A.H. Markham, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., no. 59 (London: printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1880), 114–15. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 117–18. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987), 25. Ibid., 28. See Hubertus Meeus, “Zacharias Heyns, Sometime Apprentice to Moretus, Becomes the First Merchant/Publisher in Amsterdam,” Quaerendo 38 (2008): 381–97. F.C. Wieder, De reis van Mahu en de Cordes door de Straat van Magalhães naar Zuid-Amerika en Japan, 1598–1600, vol. 1 (’S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1923), 147 (cited henceforth as Wieder I). Barent Jansz Potgieter, a Roman Catholic, born in 1574 in Munster, was surgeon on board of the Faith, which travelled through the Straits of

The Straits of Magellan around 1600

24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33

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Magellan in 1598; he settled in Amsterdam as a surgeon, joined the guild in 1602, and served as its “overman, proef- en bosmeester” (foreman) from 1604 to 1611. In 1625 he addressed the public in a zinneprent, an edifying symbolic broadsheet in 1627 he commissioned a portrait of himself by H.L. Rogham as an “Erasmian”; Wider, I, 84–6; N. de Roever, Jan Harmensz. Muller, Oud Holland 3 (1885), 272. Wieder I, 29–31. This Un-Ort (non-place) was thus remarkably similar to that described by Pedro de Sarmiento. Cf. Burghartz, “Vermessung der Differenz,” 8–9. Michel Foucault, “Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 350–6, here 352. Literally a mere obstacle for the circumnavigation of the Dutch as well as many other crews, it becomes a Foucauldian heterotopia: a site “in relation with all the others, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relationships designed, reflected or mirrored by themselves,” a place which is something like a counter-arrangement, “of effectively realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements, all the other real arrangements that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable.” Foucault here uses the analogy of the mirror to reflect the functions of such heterotopia: “it makes the place that I occupy, whenever I look at myself in the glass, both absolutely real – it is in fact linked to all the surrounding space and absolutely unreal, for in order to be perceived it has of necessity to pass that virtual point that is situated down there.” Ibid., 356. Johann Theodor and Johann Israel de Bry, Neundter und Letzter Theil Americae, cited as America vol. IX/2, 1601, 33. On comparable public acts of inscription as attempts at fixing, revising, or imposing public meanings, see also Mary Fuller, “Writing the Long-Distance Voyage: Hakluyt’s Circumnavigators,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (March 2007): 37–60. Wieder I, 194. De Bry, America IX/2, 34. On the specifically Dutch context of “discovery and description,” see Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 160ff. For a general account, see Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Wieder I, 195. Thus, for example, the Nodal brothers’ 1621 map “Reconocimiento de los estrechos de Magallanes,” the topographical product of an extremely

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34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43 44

45

46 47

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successful voyage of discovery in response to Schouten and Le Maire, explicitly includes the “B. de los Cavalleros” in the western segment of the Straits of Magellan. See Early Spanish Voyages to the Strait of Magellan, trans. and ed. Clements Markham, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., no. XXVIII (London: Hakluyt Society, 1911), 188–9. See de Bry, America IX/2, 40ff., esp. 49. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 58. Ulrich Schmidel, Reise in die La Plata-Gegend (1534–1554), ed. Franz Obermeier (Kiel: Westensee, 2008), xxvii–viii. De Bry, America IX/2, 57. It is remarkable to find such an assessment explicitly expressed in an account of a failed shipping enterprise, which cost those who financed it dearly. De Bry, America IX/2, 59. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 63. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 194–7. See also Susanna Burghartz, “Aneignungen des Fremden: Staunen, Stereotype und Zirkulation um 1600,” in Elke Huwiler and Nicole Wachter, eds., Integrationen des Widerläufigen: Ein Streifzug durch geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungsfelder (Münster: Lit, 2004), 109–37, 117–18. Captain de Weert was killed in 1603 in Ceylon after diplomatic disputes with the king and an argument during a banquet. Wieder I, 91–5. On Atlantis Maioris Appendix, see Cornelis Koeman, “Atlas Cartography in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Images of the World: The Atlas through History, ed. John A. Wolter and Ronald E. Grim (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1997), 73–107, 86. “The famous Bernard John of Munster, who spent nine months under the command of Sebald de Weert travelling the Straits of Magellan, communicated this new depiction of the Fretum Magellanicis. Depiction of the Straits of Magellan. Such the same was trafficked again and again by Master Barent Jansz Potgieter and was eagerly examined together with Capitain Sebald de Weert at the peril of their lives.” Jodocus Hondius, Freti Magellanici ac novi Freti vulgo Le Maire exactissima descriptio / J. Grijp sculpsit, 1620. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 61; J.G. van Dillen, Mensen en Achtergronden (Groningen: Wolters, 1964), 448–65. Reproduced in Wieder I, Plate 2.

Contributors

Susanna Burghartz is professor of early modern history at the University of Basel. Together with Lucas Burkart and Christine Goettler, she is the editor of Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650 (2016). She is working on a book project entitled Worlds on Paper around 1600. A recent article entitled “Covered Women? Veiling in Early Modern Europe” appeared in History Workshop Journal in 2015 and marks the beginning of a next project on Materialized Identities. Renate Dürr is professor of early modern history at the University of Tübingen. She specializes in the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of the early modern period. Her last book was about Lutheran church spaces in Northern Germany from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century: Politische Kultur in der Frühen Neuzeit: Kirchenräume in Hildesheimer Stadt- und Landgemeinden, 1550–1750 (2006). Her current work focuses on Jesuit missions with a special interest in Latin American history, and she is co-authoring a book with Ulrike Strasser on the German missionary journal The Neue Welt-Bott (under contract with Brill Publishers). In this recent work, she focuses on the organization and transfer of knowledge and its impact on the Enlightenment. Markus Friedrich is professor of early modern history at the University of Hamburg. He is currently completing an overall presentation of the history of the Society of Jesus up to 1814. His expertise on Jesuit history as well as history of science and knowledge has led to publications such as Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitenorden (1540–1773) (2011) and Die Geburt des Archivs: Eine Wissensgeschichte (2013).

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Contributors

Susan C. Karant-Nunn is Regents’ Professor of History and Director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, with an emphasis on the German-speaking lands during the Reformation. She is the author of many articles and books. Her monographs include the award-winning The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (1997) and, most recently, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (2012). She has completed a book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Personal Luther about aspects of the Reformer’s less well known self. Christian Kiening is professor of Germanic studies at the University of Zurich. He is the director of the long-term National Competence Centre for Research Mediality and co-editor of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Historische Semantik, and Philologie der Kultur. Among his recent books are Zwischen Körper und Schrift (2003), Das andere Selbst (2003), Das wilde Subjekt (2006), Urszenen des Medialen (2012), and Das Mittelalter der Moderne (2014). He has (co-)edited a dozen collections of essays, among them: Mittelalter im Film (2006), Text – Bild – Karte (2007), SchriftRäume (2008), Der absolute Film (2012), and Figura (2013). Lee Palmer Wandel is professor of history, religious studies, and visual culture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (1990), Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (1995), The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (2006), The Reformation: Towards a New History (2011), and Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion (2016). She has edited A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (2014) and with Walter Melion she has co-edited Early Modern Eyes (2009) and Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image (2015). Helmut Puff is professor of German studies, history, and women’s studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His scholarly profile focuses on German literature, history, and culture in the medieval and early modern periods. He is the author of Von dem schlüssel aller Künsten / nemblich der Grammatica: Deutsch im lateinischen Grammatikunterricht, 1480-1560 (1995), Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland 1400–1600 (2003), and Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (2014). Together with Scott Spector and Dagmar Herzog, he co-edited After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault (2012). Recently, he has

Contributors

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started a new project on waiting as a mode of experienced temporality between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century. Andrew Redden is senior lecturer in Latin American history at the University of Liverpool. Together with Fernando Cervantes he is currently completing a project on angels and demons in the Hispanic world sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, and his first two books, Diabolism in Colonial Peru 1570–1750 (2008) and Angels, Demons and the New World, co-ed. Fernando Cervantes (2013), form a part of this. His open-access book The Collapse of Time: The Martyrdom of Diego Ortiz (1571) in the Chronicle of Antonio de la Calancha [1638] (2016) marks the beginning of his next project on martyrdom. Marcus Sandl is assistant professor of mediality in pre- and early modern eras at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is the author of Ökonomie des Raumes: Der kameralwissenschaftliche Entwurf der Staatswirtschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (1999) and Medialität und Ereignis: Eine Zeitgeschichte der Reformation (2011). His academic interests include Reformation history, history of political and economic knowledge in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe, history and anthropology of game and risk during this period, and history of historiography from 1500 to 1900. Currently, he is working on a history of decision-making using the example of Piedmont-Savoy at the time of Duke Victor Amadeus II (c. 1700). Ulrike Strasser is a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. She held previous appointments at the University of California at Irvine and as a Clark Professor at UCLA. Strasser is the author of the award-winning monograph State of Virginity: Gender, Politics, and Religion in a Catholic State (2004), a co-editor of Gender, Kinship and Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (1996) and of Germans and Pacific Worlds: From the Early Modern Era to World War I (forthcoming with Berghahn Books). She has published numerous articles on early modern religion and politics, gender and sexuality, global history, and questions of theory. Strasser is currently working on a monograph entitled Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: Iberian Models, German Jesuits, and Pacific Spaces. She is also co-authoring a book with Renate Dürr on the German missionary journal The Neue Welt-Bott (under contract with Brill Publishers). Daniel Weidner is professor of cultural studies and religious cultures at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and

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Contributors

associate director of the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL). He is author of Gershom Scholem: Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben (2003), Bibel und Literatur um 1800 (2011), and (together with Stefanie Ertz und Heike Schlie) Sakramentale Repräsentation: Substanz, Zeichen und Präsenz in der Frühen Neuzeit (2012) and has published numerous articles on the interplay of literature and religion, on German-Jewish literature, and the history of philology and theory. Among his edited volumes is Profanes Leben: Walter Benjamins Dialektik der Säkularisierung (2010), co-edited with Hans Peter Schmidt, Bibel als Literatur: Eine Anthologie (2008) with Stefan Willer, and Prophetie und Prognostik: Verfügungen über Zukunft in den Religionen, Wissenschaften und Künsten (2013). He is also the co-editor of the journals Weimarer Beiträge, Naharaim. Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Litertur- und Kulturgeschichte, and Benjamin-Studien. He is currently working on a study on the rhetoric of secularization and contributes to a project on philology and biblical criticism in the late nineteenth century and another one on the relation of German language and the humanities. Christopher Wild is associate professor of Germanic studies, theatre and performance studies, and the College, as well as associated faculty in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theater der Keuschheit – Keuschheit des Theaters: Eine Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (2003) and has published numerous articles on the history of German theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is also the co-editor, with Stefanie Diekmann and Gabriele Brandstetter, of Theaterfeindlichkeit (2012) as well as, with Juliane Vogel, Auftreten: Wege auf die Bühne (2014). He is currently completing a booklength study of the role of spiritual exercises in Descartes’s work with a particular focus on his Meditationes de prima philosophia.

Index of Names

Acosta, José de, 26–7, 209–10, 213–21, 241 Adam, 69, 166–7, 193, 218 Aindorffer, Kaspar, 37 Alberti, Leon Battista, 42 Alcuin of York, 114, 194 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alvarez de Paz, Diego, 198 Aquinas, Thomas (Saint), 56, 67, 165 Aristotle, 45, 62, 214, 220, 224n29 Atahuallpa, 218 Augustine of Hippo (Saint), 61, 71, 156, 159n29, 165–6, 211 Bacon, Francis, 215 Balderrama, Ildefonso, 175 Bell, Gerrit Jacobsen, 243 Benedict of Nursia (Saint), 188 Bernard of Clairvaux (Saint), 197 Borgia, Francis (Saint), 172 Bugenhagen, Johann, 129 Calvin, John, 63–4, 67–71, 74n24, 144 Campo, Maria de, 175 Canisius, Petrus, 194 Capac, Huayna, 218 Capac, Maita, 178

Capac, Manco, 178 Cavalieri, Emilio de’, 148 Cavendish, Thomas, 232–3 Charles V, 136, 218, 230 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 186, 194 Claesz, Cornelis, 230–4 Clemens of Alexandria, 113 Comenius, John Amos, 216 Cordes, Simon de, 235–6 Cranach, Lucas (the Elder), 7, 9, 16, 88 Cusa, Nicholas of, 21–2, 36–50 Damiani, Petrus, 207n58 Dante, 167 Davis, John, 232–4 De Bry, Johann Israel and Johann Theodor, 235, 238, 241 Descartes, René, 49, 59 Dionysius the Areopagite. See PseudoDionysius Dürer, Albrecht, 57 Eck, Johann, 83 Endter, Wolfgang, 149 Erasmus, Desiderius, 57, 59, 186–7, 191, 210, 217, 230, 244, 247n23

254

Index of Names

Ernst von Mansfeld, 109 Esau, 168 Escobar, Ygnacio, 175

Karlstadt, Andreas, 14 Kempff, Pancratius, 163 Kircher, Athanasius, 187

Flacius, Matthias (Illyricus), 9 Francis of Assisi (Saint), 10, 172 Franck, Sebastian, 112 Frederick V of Saxony (the Wise), 109, 115

Landa, Diego de, 169–72 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 214, 224n29, 226n48 Lasitua, Juan Baptista, 175 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques, 115 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 227n75, 230 Linschoten, Jan Huygen van, 235 Loyola, Ignatius of, 5, 15–16, 187, 217 Luther, Martin, 4–5, 7, 9, 12–14, 23–4, 27, 29n13, 29n17, 30n18, 57, 59, 62–4, 67–8, 70, 77–9, 82–3, 86–95, 97n16, 98n30, 99, 101–2, 104, 107–10, 114–17, 122n36, 124n75, 128–31, 133, 135, 144, 163–4, 191, 211–12, 216–17, 221

Godoy, Lorenzo de, 175 González Dávila, Gil, 190, 192–5, 200–1, 206n33 Gonzalez Holguín, Diego, 217 Gottschalk, Heyno, 99–104, 118 Guaccha, Francisco, 175 Guarini, Battista de, 148 Gutenberg, Johannes, 3, 24, 77, 142–3, 149 Hakluyt, Richard, 233 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp, 24, 142, 144–5, 147–50, 152–3, 155–6 Harvey, William, 59 Hausmann, Nicholas, 109 Heyns, Zacharias, 235, 238–9 Hondius, Jodocus, 230, 235, 242–3 Iansz, Ian, 237, 243 Ickelsamer, Valentin, 112

Mabillon, Jean, 197, 200 Mahu, Jacques, 235 Mary (Saint), 56, 72n1, 114 Matthew (Saint), 111, 167 Melanchthon, Philipp, 104, 109, 112 Michaelis, Johann David, 223n13 Molina, Diego de, 173, 183n29 Müntzer, Thomas, 14, 23–4, 30n18, 99–118, 119n4, 122n38

Jacob, 168–9, 180 Jane, John, 232–4 Jerome (Saint), 57, 115, 210 John the Baptist (Saint), 13, 14 John the Evangelist (Saint), 14 Jonas, Justus, 91 Josepha, Ysidora, 175

Nadal, Jerome, 15, 30n19, 31n26, 192 Negri, Nicolò, 148 Negroni, Giulio, 196–201, 205n30, 206n44 Nicholas of Lyra, 114 Nieremberg, Eusebio, 174, 192–3 Noort, Oliver van, 232, 234, 238–9

Index of Names Oré, Luis Jerónimo de, 165 Orlandini, Nicolaus, 191–2 Our Lady of Sorrows. See Mary Outghersz, Jan, 239 Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de, 169 Parda, Maria, 175 Pardo, Alonso, 175 Paul (Saint), 26, 31n26, 43–4, 111, 114–15, 123n59, 165, 191–2, 204n13, 204n15 Paul V (Pope), 166 Pelletarius, Hugo, 194 Peri, Jacopo, 152 Philip II, 230 Pius V (Pope), 65 Polanco, Juan de, 190 Potgieter, Barent Jansz, 234–5, 239, 241–4, 246–7n23, 248n45 Prado, Pablo, 172, 183n28 Pseudo-Dionysius, 164–5, 181n4

255

Sahagún, Bernardino de, 179, 185n69 Salmerón, Alfonso, 217 Saona, Jerónimo de, 166–9, 173–4, 180, 183n39 Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro, 178 Schmidel, Ulrich, 238 Siñani, Fernando, 178 Spalatin, Georg, 83, 97n18 Steinhöwel, Heinrich, 113 Tamburini, Michelangelo, 195 Toro, Joseph de, 175 Valtrini, Giovanni Antonio, 195 Valverde, Vicente de, 218 Van der Weyden, Rogier. See Rogier van der Weyden Vega, Garcilaso de la, 218 Vermeer, Jan, 49 Vesalius, Andreas, 59 Villegas, Joseph de, 175

Rinuccini, Ottavio, 152 Rogier van der Weyden (Roger), 36, 40 Rossignoli, Bernardino, 198–9, 207n53 Roth, Simon, 112 Rueda, Joseph Gonzales de, 175 Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio, 223n10, 227n67

Walter, Johann, 128 Weert, Sebald de, 234–5, 237–9, 241–3, 248n43, 248n45 Wright, Edward, 230 Wycliffe, John, 114

Sadolet, Jacques, 116

Zwingli, Ulrich, 63, 67, 127

Xavier, Francis, 187 Yrauazaual, Antonio de, 175

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THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES General Editor: Barbara Fuchs 1. Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, edited by Joseph Bristow 2. Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, edited by Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak 3. Culture and Authority in the Baroque, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman 4. Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern British and European Cultures, edited by Lorna Clymer 5. Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, edited by Peter N. Miller 6. Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism, and the Common Good, edited by Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonetti 7. Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein, edited by Robert S. Westman and David Biale 8. Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Enlightenment, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Clorinda Donato, and Peter Hanns Reill 9. The Age of Projects, edited by Maximillian E. Novak 10. Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience between Exclusion and Inclusion, edited by David N. Myers, Massimo Ciavolella, Peter H. Reill, and Geoffrey Symcox 11. Defoe’s Footprints: Essays in Honour of Maximillian E. Novak, edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher 12. Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600−1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf 13. Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600−1800, edited by Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox 14. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, edited by Susan McClary 15. Godwinian Moments, edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers 16. Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death, edited by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall 17. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, edited by Lowell Gallagher 18. Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures, edited by David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska 19. Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, edited by Joseph Bristow

20. Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities, edited by Marc André Bernier, Clorinda Donato, and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink 21. Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini 22. Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd 23. Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution, edited by Michael Meranze and Saree Makdisi 24. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs 25. Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, edited by Helmut Puff, Ulrike Strasser, and Christopher Wild