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NAMES AND NAMING IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY
SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association
Series editor: David M. Luebke, University of Oregon
Published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, Spektrum offers current perspectives on culture, society, and political life in the German-speaking lands of central Europe—Austria, Switzerland, and the Federal Republic—from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Its titles and themes reflect the composition of the GSA and the work of its members within and across the disciplines to which they belong—literary criticism, history, cultural studies, political science, and anthropology. Recent volumes: Volume 20 Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington Volume 19 Views of Violence Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger Volume 18 Dreams of Germany Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor Edited by Neil Gregor and Thomas Irvine Volume 17 Money in the German-Speaking Lands Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley Volume 16 Archeologies of Confession Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 Edited by Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz
Volume 15 Ruptures in the Everyday Views of Modern Germany from the Ground Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Leonard Schmieding, et al. Volume 14 Reluctant Skeptic Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture Harry T. Craver Volume 13 Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000 Edited by Jason Coy, Jared Poley, and Alexander Schunka Volume 12 The Total Work of Art Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations Edited by David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Anthony J. Steinhoff Volume 11 The Devil’s Riches A Modern History of Greed Jared Poley
For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/spektrum
Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany
Edited by MARJORIE ELIZABETH PLUMMER and JOEL F. HARRINGTON
berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Plummer, Marjorie Elizabeth, editor. | Harrington, Joel F. ( Joel Francis), editor. | German Studies Association. Title: Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany / edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association; 20 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019003800 (print) | LCCN 2019008441 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202113 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202106 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Names, Personal—Germany—History. | Names, Personal— German—History. | Onomastics—Germany—History. | Names, German. Classification: LCC CS2541 (ebook) | LCC CS2541 .N346 2019 (print) | DDC 929.40943—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003800
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78920-210-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-211-3 ebook
CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables
vii
Notes on Text
x
Introduction. The Dynamics of Early Modern Naming Joel F. Harrington
1
Part I. Naming the Past 1. Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians: (Re)Naming the Early Eucharistic Controversy Amy Nelson Burnett
15
2. From the Council to the Founding Myth: How the Spirit of Trent Came to be Named Birgit Emich
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3. Triplets: The Holy Roman Empire’s Birthing of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed in 1648 David Mayes
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Part II. Naming and Organizing Knowledge 4. Naming and Singing the Psalter in Counter-Reformation Germany Alexander J. Fisher
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5. Naming the Ambiguous: Income and Royal Service in the Seventeenth Century Heiko Droste
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6. The Mystery of the St. Sebastian Lazareth: Mapping Place-Names and Contagious Disease Hospitals in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg Amy Newhouse 7. Global Goods in Local Languages: Naming Cotton Textiles in the Swiss Cantons John Jordan and Gabi Schopf
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149
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Contents
Part III. Naming the Other 8. Naming the Turk and the Moor: Prehistories of Race Carina L. Johnson
173
9. Denouncing the Spendthrift: Debating Social Identity in the Court of Law and Public Opinion Ashley L. Elrod
204
10. Confessionisten, Calvinisten, Tibben: Nomenclatures of Legal Exclusion in Northwestern Germany, 1535–1650 David M. Luebke
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Afterword. Names All the Way Down: Naming Practices in Early Modern Germany and Early Modern Historiography Randolph C. Head
250
Index
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1 FIGURES AND TABLES 2
Figures Figure 1.1. Published exchanges concerning the Lord’s Supper, 1524–25. Courtesy of the author.
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Figure 1.2. Published contributions to the eucharistic controversy, January 1526–June 1527. Courtesy of the author.
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Figure 2.1. The General Congregation of the Council of Trent in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in 1563. Anonymous, copperplate engraving (etching/engraving), 33.5 × 49.7 cm, Venice, originally published by Claudio Duchetti in Venice in 1563; here, a 1565 copy of Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae. Metropolitan Museum. Accession number: 41.72(3.70), Rogers Fund, transferred from the library, 1941. Public domain, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).
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Figure 2.2. Pasquale Cati, Il Concilio di Trento e il Trionfo della Chiesa cattolica sull’Eresia (The Council of Trent and the triumph of the Catholic Church over heresy), 1590–93, Rome, Basilica Santa Maria in Trastevere, Cappella Altemps. Photo by Anthony Majanlahti. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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Figure 4.1. Kaspar Ulenberg, “Warum empören sich die Heiden.”
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Figure 4.2. “Adieu ma voix j’ay haussée,” from the Genevan Psalter.
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Figure 4.3. Martin Luther, “Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich” (initial phrase).
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Figure 6.1. Hans Bien’s 1625 city map denotes the plague hospital as the Lazareth and the syphilis hospital with its later designation as St. Sebastian. Stadtplan von Hans Bien, 1625. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg A 4/IV Nr. 23.
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Figure 6.2. Paul Pfinzing’s 1594 map labeled the plague hospital as the Lazareth and the syphilis hospital as the Franzosenhaus. Pfinzing-Atlas, 1594. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg Reichsstadt Nürnberg Karten und Pläne 230 S. 23.
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Figures and Tables
Figure 8.1. Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528). Ecce Homo, ca. 1498. From the series “The Large Passion.” Woodcut with transparent and opaque watercolor, heightened with gold and silver. Sheet: 400 × 288 mm. (15 3/4 × 11 5/16 in.). The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchased as a gift of Charles W. Newhall III, and Todd Ruppert, Baltimore; and with exchange funds from Garrett Collection, and Gift of Theodore W. Strauel, Pound Ridge, New York, BMA 2000.91. Photography by: Mitro Hood. 175 Figure 8.2. Dervis ein Turckischer Orden Person (Dervish, a member of a Turkish order). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 200. Boston Athenæum.
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Figure 8.3. Calender ein Turckische Orden Person (Qalandar, a member of a Turkish order). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 197. Boston Athenæum.
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Figure 8.4. Jost Amman (Swiss, 1539–91) and the workshop of Georg Mack the Elder, Costumes of the Nations of the World, 1577. Color etching with gilt, 352 × 455 mm. From the New York Public Library, Print Collection.
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Figure 8.5. Walbruder oder Pilgram von Mecha (Pilgrims from Mecca). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576). Heidelberg University Library, A 3542 RES, 214.
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Figure 8.6. Walbrüder oder Pilgram von Mecha (Pilgrims from Mecca). Nicolas de Nicolay, Der Erst Theil. Von der Schiffart vnnd Raisz in die Türckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Nuremberg, 1572). © British Library Board, C.55.i.4.(1.), facing fol. LXXII.
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Figure 8.7. Sacquaz Pilgram von Mecha die den Leuten zu trincken gebem [sic] (Water-carrier pilgrim from Mecca, who gives people water to drink). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576). Heidelberg University Library, A 3542 RES, 218.
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Figure 8.8. Sacquaz Pilgram von Mecha die den Leuten zu trincken geben (Water-carrier pilgrim from Mecca, who gives people water to drink). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 218. Boston Athenæum.
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Figures and Tables
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Figure 8.9. Die Turckischen Ringer (Turkish wrestlers). Nicolas de Nicolay, Der Erst Theil. Von der Schiffart vnnd Raisz in die Türckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Nuremberg, 1572). © British Library Board, C.55.i.4.(1.), facing fol. LVIII. 190 Figure 8.10. Die Turckischen Ringer (Turkish wrestlers). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Schiffart unnd Raisz in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 173. Boston Athenæum.
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Figure 8.11. Wie die Turckischen Ringer vor vnnd nach dem Ringen bekleidet sein (How the Turkish wrestlers are clothed before and after the ring). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576). Heidelberg University Library, A 3542 RES, 174.
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Figure 8.12. Wie die Turckischen Ringer vor vnnd nach dem Ringen bekleidet sein (How the Turkish wrestlers are clothed before and after the ring). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 174. Boston Athenæum. 193
Tables Table 5.1. Terms used by diplomats in Swedish services in order to describe Verdienst.
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Table 5.2. Terms used by Gyldenklou in order to describe Verdienst.
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Table 7.1. Printed cotton terms in the Bernese bankruptcy inventories (by decade).
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Table 7.2. Printed cotton terms in the Basel Avisblätter (by year).
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Table 7.3. Plain cotton terms in the Bernese bankruptcy inventories (by decade).
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Table 7.4. Plain cotton terms in the Basel Avisblätter (by year).
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NOTES ON TEXT
In order to emphasize the use of words as terms and to avoid confusion with quotations, the editors have italicized these names, concepts, and terms, with consideration for individual author preference. To make this distinction apparent, we have not italicized foreign words at first usage, choosing instead to give the translation and use roman font style throughout for everything except names, terms, and titles of texts. If the foreign-language word is used as a term or name on first usage, it will be italicized. Quotations marks are used exclusively for quotations of text or titles of poems and songs. In addition, authors have translated non-English titles into English in the text of their respective chapters; the original titles are given in the footnotes. Two exceptions are titles already translated in the sources used and originallanguage titles where use has become commonplace (e.g., Erasmus’s Enchiridion). Finally, in many places words and names have been rendered into modern German, French, Italian, or Latin spelling for ease of reading. All translations of quotes from original sources in the text are those of the chapter author unless otherwise indicated.
INTRODUCTION
The Dynamics of Early Modern Naming JOEL F. HARRINGTON
T
he human tendency to experience and understand the world through names is an epistemological imperative as old and universal as language itself. As the Hebrew Bible tells us, one of the first things Adam did was give names to all the wild beasts and birds of Eden (Gen. 2:18–20). The study of names, known as onomastics, likewise has a long pedigree. Many ancient philosophers—among them Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—closely examined the relationship between names and their referents, in the process posing many fundamental and profound linguistic and epistemological questions that continue to inspire debate today. Later Christian thinkers, most notably Saint Augustine, viewed all creation in terms of the logos (divine word), revealed to humans in the Book of Nature as well as in the canonical scriptures and the person of Christ himself. During the past century the broader field of onomastics has witnessed the traditional subfields of toponymy (or toponomastics, which is the study of place-names) and anthroponomastics (the study of names given to individuals or groups of people), enhanced by new subfields such as literary onomastics and socio-onomastics, the latter an area of study particularly important for historians. These and other subfields, like onomastics itself, have developed rich and sophisticated new methodologies and scholarly literatures, ranging from linguistic theories over the inherent semantic features of names to detailed local prosopographies and comparative studies.1 Social historical field research on naming, on the other hand, lags far behind, thus inspiring in part this current volume. For the authors of this collection and other early modern scholars, the phenomenon of naming represents both an exciting and a daunting subject for historical study. On the one hand, it allows us to analyze diverse changes (social,
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political, religious, scientific) through specific naming practices. On the other hand, it poses many inherent obstacles to historians’ goal of making coherent sense of the past. While aspiring to limit and to stabilize meaning, names just as often have the opposite effect. Old and new names alike can be variously interpreted or appropriated by different people in different contexts. Naming is, in a word, fluid. How can a scholar who wishes to analyze continuities and changes over time make use of such slippery, unstable human artefacts as names? One answer, the premise of our collective endeavor, is to focus on the elusive act of naming (and renaming) itself. The thinking and intentions of namers, even when using the same terms in dramatically different ways, provides an important entry for the modern observer into the thoughts and experience of the past. This is virtually virgin territory among scholars of onomastics, even for those working the relatively new field of socio-onomastics.2 Whereas most of these researchers focus on a sociological consideration of various factors (e.g., age, gender, profession), we consider our approach to naming in early modern Germany to be more than “a natural continuation of typological research.”3 The term Sozioonomastik (socio-onomastics) itself still carries a heavy structuralist legacy since its coinage by the East German scholar Hans Walther in 1971.4 The focus of our contributors, by contrast, is on a broader social and cultural context of new acts of naming that nevertheless acknowledges the dynamic agency of various namers. In that respect, we share a greater affinity with early modern social and cultural historians who have begun to explore the dynamics of naming in early modern cartography,5 in scientific taxonomies,6 in the self-fashioning of scholars,7 in nicknames,8 in confessional formation of children,9 in cursing and obscenities,10 in slang dialects,11 in the world of clothing and fashion,12 and so on. In many ways, the chronological and geographical parameters of this volume provide a fertile field for testing this approach. All of the diverse social and cultural developments in German lands between 1450 and 1750 were characterized by an explosion of new names and the appropriation or redefinition of existing names, in each instance shaping individual and collective understanding of those very changes. Understanding more about the dynamics of naming in this period allows us to view many received ideas about early modern Germans in a different light. The following chapters represent a broad and interdisciplinary approach to the book’s central question. They explore the dynamics and impact of this naming process in a variety of contexts: social, religious, artistic, literary, theological, scientific, and of course historiographical. How and why were specific names chosen, contested, and ultimately accepted or rejected? What was the relationship of these naming processes to larger cultural or political developments? How do these findings enhance our understanding of individual and collective experiences during this period of German history? And how might we as
Introduction
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historical scholars adjust our own use of early modern names in describing the past? This last question is especially important for today’s scholars. The connection between early modern and twenty-first-century naming in fact lies at the heart of the chapters in part I. The larger historiographical discussion revolves around the controversial notion of confessionalization. As originally described by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling forty years ago, confessionalization represented a church-state alliance in German territories where religious confessions were generally imposed on subject populations, largely for reasons of good social discipline. Many historians have since challenged the evidence for such a phenomenon and instead view the formation of confessional identity as a much more complex, multifaceted, and gradual process.13 Still, the legacy of traditional religious categorizations remains influential, in turn shaping our overall understanding of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. In chapter 1, Amy Nelson Burnett calls into question our modern acceptance of Martin Luther’s disparaging term sacramentarians and how it has led historians to overestimate both the centrality of Huldreich Zwingli in early evangelical opposition to Luther as well as the overall coherence of that same opposition. Luther, she reveals, had very specific political motivations for lumping together such opponents better known at the time as Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians. So, too, modern historians, particularly in Switzerland, had their own polemical reasons for perpetuating the familiar Luther-Zwingli characterization of the early Reformation. In both cases, as Burnett clearly illustrates, our own uncritical acceptance or misunderstanding of early modern names (and their origins) has significantly affected our historical understanding of the Reformation itself.14 In chapter 2, Birgit Emich makes a similar argument about the origins and long perpetuation of the Tridentine Church. Naming early modern Catholicism, particularly after the Protestant Reformation, was from the beginning a polemical exercise, particularly in the case of the Protestant characterization of a Counter-Reformation, suggesting a reactionary, siege mentality from the Council of Trent on. Yet more than seventy years after Hubert Jedin’s famous proposed alternative use of the term Catholic Reformation,15 and following much recent scholarship on the diverse (and often negligible) impact of Trent, the monolithic term Tridentine Church continues to be used widely by historians.16 Emich, like Burnett, finds powerful sixteenth-century motivations behind this name, chiefly at the service of the papacy, a process that really declined only after the reforms of Vatican II (1962–65). Once more, the politically motivated naming of the past was adopted uncritically by subsequent generations until the present day. David Mayes, in chapter 3, complements the other two chapters of this part perfectly in his careful study of the terms Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed, before and after the Peace of Westphalia. All three names, he writes, “carried
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a powerful charge because they were disputed, mutually invoked, contested, rejected, purposely not used, or used pejoratively as terms of abuse.” In other words, the sheer variability in term usage before 1648 underscores their very fluidity. Yet here, too, modern scholars continue to apply such names uncritically to sixteenth-century individuals, and also use anachronistic terms like Protestant and Catholic. Like Burnett and Emich, Mayes challenges us not just to be more scrupulous in our own writing, but also to imagine what this instability says about the nature of religious confession and identity in the sixteenth century. He does not go as far as Frauke Volkland who urges us to drop the entire notion of early modern “confessional identity,” but he does counsel more caution in applying confessional names.17 If we truly understand the significance of naming in the past, our current use of names and other mental categories cannot remain unaffected. The second part of the volume deals with naming as a means of organizing knowledge. Like confessionalization, this topic has received much attention during the past thirty years, particularly among cultural historians of science (albeit rarely with a specific focus on naming).18 As in part I, the arguments of each chapter in part II have important implications for our current naming practices in making sense of the past. In each instance the authors underscore both the resilience and the fluidity of early modern naming, often flummoxing modern attempts to establish uniformity and order. In chapter 4, for instance, Alexander Fisher describes early Protestant appropriation of the preReformation psalter to the extent that all psalm songs became widely identified as Protestant. Yet even this apparent confessionalization of sacred music, Fisher reminds us, was not straightforward or stable. Lutheran and Calvinist vernacular translations and paraphrases of the psalms also strongly influenced later Catholic versions, even in some aspects of melody.19 Defining and categorizing Protestant music remains difficult. In chapter 5, Heiko Droste similarly resists our ready application of the name early modern to all developments of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. In his analysis of the correspondence of seventeenth-century Swedish diplomats (diplomat itself an anachronistic term), Droste demonstrates that the status of such individuals, particularly in terms of the development of an absolutist modern bureaucracy, was far from stable or pointed toward modernity. The very variety of names for royal service and compensation, he argues, suggest a distinctive culture that defies linear notions of state development. To understand the dynamics of this period, which Droste prefers to name Baroque, we must cast off our teleological Weberian spectacles and attempt to understand such developments on their own terms.20 Amy Newhouse examines the difficulty of categorical naming and other attempts by both contemporaries and modern scholars to impose order in a
Introduction
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dynamic world. In chapter 6 she describes the frequent confusion in names for the city of Nuremberg’s two plague hospitals—a confusion that she argues stems from the palimpsest nature of place-names, where function and location are often mixed in different forms. Thus both the plague hospital and the syphilis hospital, located in different parts of the city, were sometimes referred to by their location and other times by their function. At times, for instance, each hospital was referred to as the Lazareth or St. Sebastian, with usage going back and forth over the course of the sixteenth century. Some onomastic scholars would describe this phenomenon in terms of toponymic attachment, a newly identified and relatively unexamined phenomenon, especially for this period.21 While the logic of Nuremberg’s city councilors and citizens often remains opaque, Newhouse reminds us that all modern attempts to standardize names may give us a semblance of stability, but in fact they distort the protean nature of such institutions within their lived contexts. In chapter 7, John Jordan and Gabi Schopf echo this theme of the oftenunpredictable durability and uncontrollability of some names. Using the evidence of Swiss bankruptcy records and newspaper advertisements from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jordan and Schopf analyze patterns among the various names used for cotton, a newly revitalized staple of European manufacturing. Like the other authors in this part of the book, they find deliberate attempts to steer this naming process repeatedly frustrated, and old names difficult to replace. Building on the pioneering work of such scholars as Lisa Jardine, Paula Findlen, and Harold Cook, they situate the history of cotton within a broad and tangled web of global commerce, knowledge production, and colonialism.22 As in part I, then, we see that the history of naming, an intentional individual or group action, remains quite distinct from the history of names, a more spontaneous and often unpredictable process, reflecting the nature of language itself. In the final part of the book, three scholars address the naming of others, an intentional process that often appears to have more staying power than attempts at self-naming. In chapter 8, Carina Johnson analyzes various terms and images for non-European others—particularly the terms Turk and Moor over the course of the sixteenth century—within the context what she calls “prehistories of race.” In closely examining various visual portrayals of individuals from different parts of Africa and Asia Minor, Johnson discovers that the printing press played a pivotal role in stabilizing and standardizing images of people perceived as being inferior that reinforced the cultural superiority of Latin Christendom. Most intriguingly, she suggests that the early-sixteenth-century tendency to underscore diversity in skin tones in support of imperial power gradually gave way to portrayals of universally darker complexions that stressed both cultural and racial inferiority. At the same time, the charged names of Turk and Moor
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likewise became less ethnically specific and more generalized in application to all Muslims and other non-European others.23 Ashley Elrod, in chapter 9, adopts more of a local perspective in examining applications of the ostracizing legal designation of prodigus or Verschwender (spendthrift) over the course of the sixteenth century. Whereas Johnson emphasizes the collective, almost unconscious, emergence of a new type of racial naming, Elrod focuses on the very deliberate and variable interpretations of a newly revitalized category from Roman law in German communities. Like all of the authors in this volume, she recognizes the “fluid process of articulating social identities.” In the instance of designating someone a spendthrift, though, she stresses the process of social negotiation between the intentions of jurists and governmental authorities on the one hand, and families and villages on the other. Sometimes individuals applied the legally disempowering term along the lines intended by their rulers; other times they manipulated the designation for their own purposes. Names such as spendthrift, Elrod argues, “drew their power from the communities who enforced them.” Whether or not pejorative naming had any lasting power ultimately depended not on the courts, but on popular reputation and self-interest. In chapter 10, David Luebke returns us to the centrality of the Reformation in sixteenth-century German life, particularly the emergence of new names for the competing Christian denominations. As in David Mayes’s argument in chapter 3, Luebke finds considerable fluidity in the usage of such names as Lutheran and Calvinist before the Peace of Westphalia. Yet he also argues for a logic and structure in the emergence of new names, particularly in the attempts to discredit members of rival denominations, most notably the people denounced as Anabaptists or Tibben, both derogatory terms he examines in depth. Many individuals, Luebke finds, had a very elastic notion of the Augsburg Confession, capable of encompassing a variety of beliefs and practices that subsequent confessionalists and historians would unambiguously designate as Evangelical, Reformed, or Catholic.24 Like all of the authors of chapters in part I, Luebke believes that we are often guilty of projecting backward a consistency and conformity that simply did not exist among sixteenth-century Christians. Until we recognize the actual dynamics of their naming, our own naming practices will remain hopelessly anachronistic. In his afterword, Randolph Head addresses directly both the challenges and the opportunities resulting from the fluidity of naming practices. Scholars of the past, he observes, are hardly immune to changing interests and priorities, evident in the continually changing names and categories we apply to this period in German history. As Head’s own important work on archival history has demonstrated, the past is forever open to reconceptualization and new categorizations—in other words, new naming.25 What he and all of the scholars in this volume propose is that these modern choices be ever more informed by the
Introduction
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realities of the past, as opposed to the polemics or other lazy generalizations of the present. Stability in naming may be a chimera, but careful attention to the voices of those we claim to study is not. The other conclusion to come out of this collection is that the dynamics of early modern naming needs both more historical field work and greater familiarity with the theories and methods of onomastics among historians. While the editors of this volume intentionally sought a deeply interdisciplinary approach, there is room to broaden still further to include linguistic and anthropological discussions of our topics in different geographical and chronological contexts. The same is true of onomastics, which has also become increasingly interdisciplinary but has not fully engaged with the latest work in social and cultural history. “Do name changes reflect changes in identity, or do they bring them about?”26 This chicken and egg question from onomastist Emila Aldrin identifies just one of many areas of common concern. If our collected contributions help spur further research and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization in early modern naming, we will be gratified. Joel F. Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He has published seven books on various social, legal, and religious aspects of premodern Germany, including Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within (2018) and The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (2013). He served as president of the Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär from 2012 to 2015 and hosted the society’s triennial conference at Vanderbilt in 2015.
Notes 1. For an overview on the state of onomastic theory, see Van Langendonck and Van de Velde, “Names and Grammar”; Nyström, “Names and Meaning”; and De Stefani, “Names and Discourse.” See also Debus, Namenkunde und Namengeschichte. 2. For a similar approach to the early modern Netherlands, see Cook and Dupré, Translating Knowledge. 3. Ainiala, “Names in Society,” 372. 4. See the overview of Aldrin, “Names and Identity.” See also Bucholtz and Hall, “Identity and Interaction”; and Taylor and Spencer, Social Identities. 5. Lupher, Romans in a New World; Dym and Offen, Mapping Latin America; and Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain. 6. For a discussion of the topic of new scientific names in the German age of discovery, see Johnson, The German Discovery of the World. See also Pavord, Naming of Names; Schiebinger, “Names and Knowing.” 7. Nauert, Humanism; Furdell, Publishing and Medicine. 8. For an introduction to the onomastics of nicknames, see McClure, “Nicknames and Petnames”; and Bylla, “Bynames and Nicknames.” For an initial foray into early mod-
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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17. 18.
19. 20.
21. 22.
23. 24. 25. 26.
Joel F. Harrington
ern German nicknames, see Schindler, “The World of Nicknames,” esp. 57–62. For an older historical approach to the topic, see Bock, “Nürnberger Spitzname.” See, e.g., Balbach, “Name—Geschlecht—Individuum.” See also Balbach, “Jakob, Johann, oder Joseph?”; and Eichler et al., Namenforschung. The broader context of late medieval and early modern cursing is masterfully discussed in Schwerhoff, Zungen wie Schwerter. See, e.g., the fascinating discussion of the social context of Rotwelsch in Jütte, Abbild und soziale Wirklichkeit. For an exploration of the changing vocabulary of fashion, see Rublack, Dressing Up. See especially Forster, Catholic Revival; Forster et al., “Forum.” For a fuller treatment of Karlstadt’s role in the early Reformation, see Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins. Jedin, Katholische Reformation. The naming of the Catholic response to the Reformation has been a lively issue over the past twenty years. See esp. O’Malley, Trent and All That; Ditchfield, “Tridentine Catholicism”; Wassilowsky, “Das Konzil von Trient”; and Reinhard, “Mythologie des Konzils von Trient.” Volkland, “Konfession, Konversion.” See also Mayes, “Divided by Toleration.” See, e.g., the recent Fransen, Hodson, and Enenkel, Translating Early Modern Science. For an earlier work, see Campbell, Wonder and Science. For a specific focus on naming in early modern science, see Egmond, “Names of Naturalia”; and Dijkstra, “Translating Astronomy.” See also Danckwardt, “Konfessionelle Musik?” On the term absolutist, see Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism; and Duchhardt, “Absolutismus.” The word Baroque has been traditionally used to denote any kind of contorted and complicated process of thought, and until the late nineteenth century was applied to any odd, grotesque, exaggerated, and overdecorated style, as an antonym of sorts to the Renaissance. See the discussion in Kostanski, “Toponymic Attachment.” See also Montello, “Cognitive Geography,” esp. 162–63. Thomas, Entangled Objects; Jardine, Worldly Goods; Smith and Findlen, Merchants & Marvels; Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century; Cook, Matters of Exchange; Bleichmar and Mancall, Collecting Across Cultures; and Findlen, Early Modern Things. See also a recent special issue of Art History, Bleichmar and Martin, “Objects in Motion.” See also Leitch, Mapping Ethnography; Smith, Images of Islam; and Harper, The Turk and Islam, 41–66. For more on this topic, see Jörgensen, Konfessionelle. See also Luebke, Hometown Religion. Head, “Knowing Like a State.” Aldrin, “Names and Identity,” 389.
Bibliography Ainiala, Tehri. “Names in Society.” In Hough, Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 371–81. Aldrin, Emilia. “Names and Identity.” In Hough, Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 382–94.
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Balbach, Anna-Maria. “Jakob, Johann, oder Joseph?—Frühneuzeitliche Vornamen im Streit der Konfessionen.” In Konfession und Sprache in der Frühen Neuzeit: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, edited by Jürgen Macha, Anna-Maria Balbach, and Sarah Horstkamp, 11–30. Münster, 2012. Balbach, Anna-Maria. “Name—Geschlecht—Individuum: Konfessioneller Einfluss auf die Vornamengebung im frühneuzeitlichen Bayerisch-Schwaben.” Beiträge zur Namenforschung 2 (2014): 127–63. Bleichmar, Daniela, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Philadelphia, 2011. Bleichmar, Daniela, and Meredith Martin, eds. Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World: Art History 38, no. 3 (2015): 598–805. Bock, Friedrich. “Nürnberger Spitzname von 1200 bis 1800: Ein Verzeichnis mit Einführung.” Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 45 (1954): 1–147. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies 74, no. 5 (2005): 585–614. Burnett, Amy Nelson. Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the Circulation of Ideas. Oxford, 2011. Bylla, Eva. “Bynames and Nicknames.” In Hough, Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 237–50. Campbell, Mary Blain. Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY, 1999. Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT, 2007. Cook, Harold J., and Sven Dupré, eds. Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries. Münster, 2012. Danckwardt, Marianne. “Konfessionelle Musik?” In Die katholische Konfessionalisierung . . . des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1993, edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, 371–83. Gütersloh, 1995. De Stefani, Elwys. “Names and Discourse.” In Hough, Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 52–66. Debus, Friedhelm. Namenkunde und Namengeschichte: Eine Einführung. Berlin, 2012. Dijkstra, Arjen. “Translating Astronomy in Dutch, Latin and Frisian: Adriaan Metius’s Textbooks of Mathematics in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In Cook and Dupré, Translating Knowledge, 269–96. Ditchfield, Simon. “Tridentine Catholicism.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, edited by Alexander Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven, 15–31. Farnham, UK, 2013. Duchhardt, Heinz. “Absolutismus—Abschied von einem Epochenbegriff ?” Historische Zeitschrift 258 (1994): 113–22. Dym, Jordana, and Karl Offen, eds. Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader. Chicago, 2011. Egmond, Florike. “Names of Naturalia in the Early Modern Period: Between the Vernacular and Latin, Identification and Classifications.” In Cook and Dupré, Translating Knowledge, 131–61. Eichler, Ernst, Gerold Hilty, Heinrich Löffler, Hugo Steger, and Zgusta, Ladislav, eds. Namenforschung: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Onomastik, 3 vols. Berlin, 1995–96. Findlen, Paula. Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800. New York, 2012.
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Forster, Marc. Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany 1550–1750. Cambridge, MA, 2001. Forster, Marc, “Forum: Religious History beyond Confessionalization.” German History 32, no. 4 (2014): 579–98. Fransen, Sietske, Niall Hodson, and Karl A. E. Enenkel, eds. Translating Early Modern Science. Leiden, 2017. Furdell, Elizabeth Lane. Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England. Rochester, NY, 2002. Harper, James G., ed. The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery Before Orientalism. Farnham, UK, 2011. Head, Randolph. “Knowing Like a State: The Transformation of Political Knowledge in Swiss Archives, 1450–1770.” Journal of Modern History 75, no. 4 (2003): 745–82. Henshall, Nicholas. The Myth of Absolutism: Continuity and Change in Early Modern European Monarchy. London, 1992. Hough, Caroline, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming. Oxford, 2016. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York, 1996. Jedin, Hubert. Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? Ein Versuch zur Klärung der Begriffe nebst einer Jubiläumsbetrachtung über das Trienter Konzil. Lucerne, 1946. Johnson, Christine R. The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous. Charlottesville, VA, 2008. Jörgensen, Bent. Konfessionelle Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen: Zur Terminologie der Religionsparteien im 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 2014. Jütte, Robert. Abbild und soziale Wirklichkeit des Bettler- und Gaunertums zu Beginn der Neuzeit: Sozial-, mentalitäts- und sprachgeschichtliche Studien zum Liber Vagatorum (1510). Cologne, 1988. Kostanski, Laura. “Toponymic Attachment.” In Hough, Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 412–26. Leitch, Stephanie. Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture. New York, 2010. Luebke, David M. Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia. Charlottesville, VA, 2016. Lupher, David A. Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. Ann Arbor, 2006. Mayes, David. “Divided By Toleration: Paradoxical Effects of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and Multiconfessionalism.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 106 (2015): 290–313. McClure, Peter. “Nicknames and Petnames: Linguistic Forms and Social Contexts.” Nomina 5 (1981): 63–76. Montello, Daniel R. “Cognitive Geography.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, vol. 2, 160–66. Oxford, 2009. Mundy, Barbara E. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geogáficas. Chicago, 2000. Nauert, Charles G. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, UK, 2006. Nussbaum, Felicity A., ed. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, 2003. Nyström, Staffan. “Names and Meaning.” In Hough, The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 39–51. O’Malley, John W. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, UK, 2000.
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Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. New York, 2005. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Mythologie des Konzils von Trient.” In Trent and Beyond: The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures, edited by Michelo Catto and Adriano Prosperi, 27– 43. Turnhout, 2017. Rublack, Ulinka. Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Germany. Oxford, 2012. Schiebinger, Londa. “Names and Knowing: The Global Politics of Eighteenth-Century Botanical Nomenclatures.” In Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt, 90–105. Chicago, 2007. Schindler, Norbert. “The World of Nicknames: On the Logic of Popular Nomenclature.” In Rebellion, Community, and Custom in Early Modern Germany, translated by Pamela E. Selwyn, 48–92. Cambridge, UK, 2003. Schwerhoff, Gerd. Zungen wie Schwerter: Blasphemie in alteuropäischen Gesellschaften 1200– 1650. Constance, 2005. Smith, Charlotte Colding. Images of Islam, 1453–1600: Turks in Germany and Central Europe. London, 2014. Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York, 2002. Taylor, Gary, and Steve Spencer. Social Identities: Multidisciplinary Approaches. London, 2004. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA, 1991. Van Langendonck, Willy, and Mark Van de Velde. “Names and Grammar.” In Hough, Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, 17–38. Volkland, Frauke. “Konfession, Konversion, und soziales Drama: Ein Plädoyer für die Ablösung des Paradigmas der ‘konfessionellen Identität.’” In Interkonfessionalität— Transkonfessionalität—binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese, edited by Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred Jakobowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann, and Hartmut Lehmann, 91–104. Gütersloh, 2003. Wassilowsky, Günther. “Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur.” In Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur (1563–2013), edited by Peter Walter and Günther Wassilowsky, 1–29. Münster, 2016.
PART I
Naming the Past
CHAPTER 1
Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians
(Re)Naming the Early Eucharistic Controversy AMY NELSON BURNETT
E
very textbook treatment of the Reformation describes the division of the early evangelical movement into Lutherans and Zwinglians, fostering the impression that there were two equal parties, one dominant in central and northern Germany, the other strongest in Switzerland and southern Germany. Summaries of the Lutheran position focus on Martin Luther, and descriptions of the opposing view rely almost exclusively on the writings of Huldrych Zwingli. The exception that confirms the rule is the first volume of Walther Köhler’s Zwingli und Luther, the definitive treatment of the early Eucharistic controversy since its publication almost a century ago. One of the strengths of Köhler’s work is his discussion of the many other contributions to the debate over the Lord’s Supper. As the longtime editor of Zwingli’s correspondence, however, Köhler was chiefly concerned with the Zurich reformer, and he regarded other contributors to the debate as “satellites who orbited around the two suns” of Zwingli and Luther.1 In taking this approach, Köhler followed in the footsteps of generations of church historians who considered only the ideas of these two reformers. The textbook description of one position as Lutheran can be justified, since Luther’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper was at its core and defined its periphery. Luther’s followers differed on matters of detail and emphasis, but they agreed with Luther that Christ was bodily present in the bread and wine, and they regarded the Wittenberg reformer as the ultimate doctrinal authority. It is more problematic for modern historians to label the opposing party as Zwinglians. No single individual within this group held the same authoritative position as Luther, and Zwingli was not in fact its most influential theo-
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logian. The Bohemian Brethren, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and the Basel reformer Johannes Oecolampadius were all significant contributors to what became known as Zwinglianism. Participants in the debate over the Lord’s Supper through the late 1520s recognized these other contributors, calling those who rejected Christ’s bodily presence Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians,2 while Erasmus acted quickly to distance himself from the Swiss reformers when the latter began to claim his support for their views.3 Luther dubbed his opponents sacramentarians, because they understood the sacrament as only a sign of Christ’s body.4 Recognizing the diversity of argumentation within this group, he compared them to the beast in the book of Revelation, which had one body but many heads.5 The importance of contributors other than Zwingli would be downplayed in later accounts of the controversy, however, as Heinrich Bullinger and his colleagues in Zurich focused on defending the reputation of the founder of their church. Their histories of the controversy helped name a movement and promoted the idea of Zwingli as Luther’s equal. The problem of naming the party opposed to the Lutheran understanding of the sacrament reflects the difficulties that the sacramentarians faced in developing a cogent and coherent statement of their position. When the evangelical debate over the Lord’s Supper began, Lutherans could draw on a long theological tradition to defend the substantial presence of Christ’s body in the consecrated elements. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther rejected only the precise definition of transubstantiation as the conversion of the substance of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, not the actual presence of that body and blood. He firmly believed that Christ’s substantial and corporeal presence was as essential a component of the Christian faith, going back to the early church, as was belief in the Trinity and in the existence of Christ’s divine and human natures in one person. In contrast to this established position, Luther’s opponents had to begin almost from scratch in explaining the relationship between Christ and the elements of bread and wine. It is possible to follow the emergence and propagation of several arguments against Christ’s corporeal presence through the later Middle Ages and into the early years of the Reformation, despite the fact that for much of this time these arguments could only circulate underground. The Fourth Lateran Council’s official endorsement in 1215 of transubstantiation meant that those who rejected substantial conversion were condemned as heretics and burned at the stake—not the best circumstances for working out the fine points of a theological position. The evolution of Lollardy in England provides an illuminating example of the consequences of persecution. John Wyclif ’s eucharistic theology rested on a solid philosophical base, and discussions of the sacrament in early Lollard treatises reflect these philosophical subtleties. But as persecution of Lollards increased and the movement lost its
Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians
17
following among the university-educated, Lollard teaching about the Eucharist was both simplified and radicalized.6 The only place where Wyclif ’s eucharistic theology could be studied, taught, and further developed before the Reformation was fifteenth-century Bohemia, where the Hussite revolution ended the ability of church and crown to enforce acceptance of transubstantiation. The Hussites themselves were not united in their understanding of the Eucharist, and by the early 1420s there was a range of views, from the conservative Utraquists, who could accept transubstantiation, to the radical Picards or Adamites, who regarded the Eucharist as mere bread and wine.7 The Taborites, who fell between these two poles, elaborated on Wyclif ’s arguments against the substantial conversion of the elements into Christ’s body and blood.8 Wycliffite-Taborite views would in turn shape the eucharistic teaching of the Unitas Fratrum or Bohemian Brethren in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. In early sixteenth-century Germany this branch of the Hussite movement was called the Waldensian Brethren, reflecting the links between Taborites and Waldensians that had developed in the 1430s. A more polemical name used for them was Picards, although the Brethren had no connection with the earlier radical Picards. The relative security of the Bohemian Brethren enabled a fairly high level of theological reflection, particularly with regard to the Eucharist. In the early sixteenth century, the Brethren presented their position in several different confessions. These confessions became known in Germany not only through their inclusion, with refutation, in works by Catholic theologians such as Hieronymus Dungersheim von Ochsenfurt and Jacob Ziegler,9 but also in the anonymously published Apology from Sacred Scripture of 1511.10 In 1523 three confessions of the Waldensian Brethren were included in Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s description of the Council of Basel.11 And this publication brings us to the eve of the Reformation debate over the Lord’s Supper. A number of Hussite (or Picard) arguments against transubstantiation would be taken up by the early sacramentarians. The Hussites had asserted, for instance, that Christ’s body had ascended into heaven and was now located at the right hand of the Father and so could not be found in the consecrated host. Taborite theologians cited a number of scriptural proof-texts to argue that Christ’s body was now in heaven, and some went further to reject adoration of the consecrated host as idolatry.12 They also developed a number of other arguments against Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist on the basis of early church practice and common sense. They asserted, for instance, that Christ had never commanded his disciples to worship his body in the bread, and that there was no indication in the New Testament that the first Christians had done so.13 These ideas would spread underground through western Europe, and the Dutch humanist Cornelis Hoen incorporated several of them into his Most Christian Letter on the Lord’s Supper, which circulated in manuscript in the
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early 1520s before being printed in 1525. Hoen also argued that Christ’s words, “This is my body,” should be understood as “This signifies my body,” an interpretation that Zwingli would endorse in his first published contribution to the eucharistic controversy.14 Andreas Karlstadt’s 1521 pamphlet On Both Forms of the Eucharist suggests some exposure to Hussite arguments in favor of the lay chalice.15 It is possible that Karlstadt read Hoen’s pamphlet before it was published. After moving to Orlamünde in 1523, he may also have had access to Hussite manuscripts through his friend Martin Reinhart, the Jena pastor who published a German translation of the four Hussite articles in 1524.16 Whatever Karlstadt’s sources were, his eucharistic pamphlets from 1524 used several Hussite arguments against Christ’s bodily presence.17 Just as important was Karlstadt’s exegesis of key scripture verses—not just “This is my body,” but several other passages concerning the Lord’s Supper as well. Karlstadt’s understanding of these verses was strongly influenced by Erasmus’s annotations on and paraphrases of the Greek New Testament. This linked him with the circle of Swiss and south German humanists, most notably Johannes Oecolampadius, Wolfgang Capito, and Huldrych Zwingli, who also opposed Christ’s bodily presence.18 The publication of Karlstadt’s pamphlets prompted Zwingli to make public his own rejection of Christ’s bodily presence. Zwingli published three works in 1525 that attacked belief in that presence: an Epistle to Matthaeus Alber Concerning the Lord’s Supper and the Commentary on True and False Religion in the spring of 1525, and his Subsidium . . . on the Eucharist in August.19 In comparison to the works of Hoen and Karlstadt, Zwingli’s early pamphlets were limited and superficial, with one central argument: John 6:63 (“The flesh is of no use”) meant that Christ’s body could not be in the bread and wine, and therefore “This is my body” could not be understood literally.20 Far more important for the further development of the sacramentarian position, however, would be Oecolampadius’s treatise On the Genuine Exposition of the Words of the Lord, “This is my Body,” also published in August 1525. This learned treatise argued that the church fathers had not taught Christ’s corporeal presence; it also repeated many of the same arguments as the Hussite confessions, Hoen and Karlstadt.21 By the fall of 1525, then, a number of pamphlets had been published attacking belief in Christ’s corporeal presence. These formed the basis of the position that Johannes Brenz first called “sacramentarian” in his Syngramma on the Words of the Lord’s Supper.22 The most cogent arguments were contained in the works of Oecolampadius, Karlstadt, and Hoen, all of whom drew from the Hussites. In comparison, Zwingli’s contribution to this position was limited. The significance of Karlstadt’s pamphlets can be seen from the responses to sacramentarian works published through the end of 1525. Figure 1.1 makes clear that Lutheran authors were far more concerned with responding to Karlstadt than to Zwingli.23
Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians
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Both Urbanus Rhegius and Martin Luther published immediate refutations of Karlstadt’s ideas.24 Theobald Billican also criticized Karlstadt’s position in his defense of the liturgical innovations adopted by the Nördlingen church.25 In striking contrast, the only Lutheran response to Zwingli published in 1525 was Johannes Bugenhagen’s Against the New Error Concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood. In this brief work, Bugenhagen repeatedly linked Zwingli’s name with that of Karlstadt, thereby reducing the Zurich reformer to Karlstadt’s follower.26 Nicolaus von Amsdorf believed it was more important to publish two pamphlets against the Magdeburg physician Wolfgang Cyclops than to write against Zwingli.27 In response, sacramentarian authors defended Karlstadt or relied on his arguments to attack the Lutherans. Soon after Karlstadt’s pamphlets were printed in October 1524, Wolfgang Capito wrote a pamphlet downplaying the differences between Luther and Karlstadt but endorsing the latter’s rejection of the elevation of the Host. Capito tried to forestall any division among the evangelicals, but by not asserting the necessity of believing in Christ’s substantial presence, he was in essence supporting Karlstadt’s position.28 At the end of that year, Capito’s colleague Martin Bucer published a defense of the changes to worship in Strasbourg. Bucer was critical of Karlstadt’s polemical language, but his discussion of the Lord’s Supper owed as much to Karlstadt and Hoen as it did to Zwingli.29 Karlstadt himself would respond to Luther in two different pamphlets in the spring of 1525, and he criticized Billican as well.30 The schoolmaster Valentin Ickelshamer was prompted by Luther’s treatises to pen
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a Complaint of Some Brothers to all Christians against the Great Injustice and Tyranny Shown to Andreas Karlstadt by Luther.31 At the end of the year Conrad Ryss published a response to Bugenhagen’s pamphlet that repeated many of Karlstadt’s arguments.32 Last but not least, Karlstadt’s quasi-retraction of his views, first published in September, would be relativized by the anonymous preface to the Strasbourg reprint, which would be printed the following year as a separate pamphlet, The Rejoicing of a Christian Brother Due to the Agreement Between Luther and Karlstadt.33 As the controversy over the Lord’s Supper raged over the next two years, Zwingli continued to play a subordinate role (see figure 1.2).34 Oecolampadius was instead the central figure in the public debate, since his Genuine Exposition provoked an international response from Catholics and Lutherans alike. Both the number of different responses and the number of times each of these works was reprinted indicate how much of a threat Oecolampadius’s opponents regarded his work to be. Refutations began to appear in print at the beginning of 1526 and continued to be printed over the next few years. The Sorbonne theologian Josse Clicthove published his treatise on the Sacrament of the Eucharist Against Oecolampadius in Paris in 1526; it would be reprinted in Cologne the following year.35 From England, John Fisher attacked Oecolampadius in The Truth of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist, a Latin work published in five imprints in 1527 and whose prefaces were translated into German in 1528 by Johannes Cochlaeus.36 Closer to home, Johannes Brenz wrote the Syngramma on the Words of the Lord’s Supper in the name of fourteen fellow Swabian pastors. The Latin Syngramma would be translated three different times, and Luther provided prefaces for two of these translations.37 The Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer penned his own Response to Oecolampadius on the True Flesh and Blood of Christ.38 Urbanus Rhegius published an exchange of letters with Theobald Billican as On the Variety of Opinions Concerning the Words of the Lord’s Supper. In this pamphlet Billican compared the way Karlstadt, Zwingli, and Oecolampadius each understood the phrase “This is my body.” He devoted the greatest amount of space to discussing Oecolampadius’s “This is a figure of my body,” which he found more persuasive than Zwingli’s “This signifies my body.”39 Each of these works prompted a reply from Oecolampadius, and the Basler’s exchange with Pirckheimer eventually consisted of five treatises.40 In addition, in the summer of 1526 Oecolampadius took on Luther himself in his Reasonable Answer to Luther’s preface to the first Wittenberg translation of the Syngramma.41 These publications were substantial works, all but the last written in Latin, that discussed the theological and exegetical issues seriously and at length. In contrast to Oecolampadius’s involvement in a broad, scholarly debate over the Lord’s Supper, Zwingli’s publications were oriented to a popular audience
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within Switzerland and were more polemical in tone. Although the Zurich reformer originally wrote against Lutherans, his attention gradually shifted to his Catholic opponents. In the fall of 1525 Zwingli responded to Bugenhagen’s Against the New Error. He followed this in the spring of 1526 with a response to the pamphlet of Billican and Rhegius. At about the same time he published A Clear Instruction on Christ’s Supper . . . for the Sake of the Simple in German.42 This latter work was intended for those who were literate only in the vernacular, but Zwingli’s Swiss dialect limited its effectiveness outside Switzerland. Moreover, by the spring of 1526 Zwingli’s attention was drawn to a more pressing and specifically Swiss situation: Johannes Eck’s offer to hold a disputation with him. In the months before that disputation, Zwingli would be attacked by the Franciscan Thomas Murner, the former vicar-general of Constance Johann Fabri, and the Zurich under-secretary Joachim von Grüdt.43 Because his safety could not be guaranteed, Zwingli did not attend the disputation that opened in Baden in May. He was kept informed of the proceedings, however, and all of his publications on the Lord’s Supper over the next several months were related in some way to the disputation.44 One of these pamphlets, The First Short Answer to Eck’s Seven Theses, prompted the Lutheran pastor Jacob Strauss to write Against the Impious Error of Master Ulrich Zwingli; Zwingli published his Answer to Strauss’s Pamphlet at the beginning of 1527.45 As brief vernacular contributions to a polemical exchange with largely Catholic opponents, Zwingli’s pamphlets were not best suited to the development of a constructive theology of the Lord’s Supper. This circumstance meant that Oecolampadius’s pamphlets were more influential as contributions to the formulation of a sophisticated and coherent understanding of the sacrament. Moreover, Zwingli himself would profit from the writings of others. One of the most striking aspects of the Zurich reformer’s 1526 pamphlets is the growing number of arguments advanced against Christ’s bodily presence. In his earliest works Zwingli had distanced himself as much as possible from Karlstadt, stating that he had read only one of Karlstadt’s pamphlets. In contrast, his 1526 pamphlets used several of Karlstadt’s arguments, most of them found in the latter’s Whether One Can Prove from Holy Scripture that Christ is in the Sacrament.46 Zwingli also profited from reading Oecolampadius’s treatises, which the Basler sent to Zurich for publication. Zwingli adopted and elaborated on several ideas first used by Oecolampadius, most famously the argument that Christ’s human body was seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven and so could not be present in the elements of the Supper.47 Other writers contributed to the defense of the sacramentarian position as well. In the first half of 1526, Konrad Pellikan and Leo Jud got caught up in an exchange with Erasmus.48 From Strasbourg, Martin Bucer worked behind the scenes to support a symbolic understanding of the bread and wine, sending copies of Oecolampadius’s Genuine Exposition (which was printed in Stras-
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bourg) to several colleagues. Brenz’s published response to a private letter from Bucer caused the Strasbourg reformer to publish his own Apology . . . Concerning Christ’s Supper.49 This activity was sufficient for Lutheran opponents to link that city with Basel and Zurich in a “Satanic triad.”50 Other sacramentarian authors published pamphlets as well. Johann Schnewyl, for instance, attacked Strauss’s polemic against Zwingli, and both Eitelhans Langenmantel and Johannes Landsperger responded to Luther’s Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics.51 This brief overview of early sacramentarian publications highlights the fact that Zwingli was in fact not the central figure in the early debate over the Lord’s Supper. It also suggests that the term Zwinglian is too narrow to cover the range of positions taken by those who rejected Christ’s bodily presence. When seen in the context of the larger public debate, Zwingli’s contributions were neither as original nor as influential as is assumed by modern scholars. His most significant contribution to the debate was an explanation of the “communicatio idiomatum” (the relationship of Christ’s two natures), using “alloiosis,” a figure of speech that meant applying the properties of one thing to another.52 Zwingli began to develop his Christology in his Clear Instruction of early 1526, but it was most fully expressed in the Friendly Exegesis of 1527. Luther would respond to it at length in his 1528 Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, but Luther responded to the arguments of Oecolampadius as well in that work. Luther’s contributions to the debate also differed in one important respect from the works of others on both sides. While most participants in the controversy wrote responses to specific works by their opponents, Luther took on all the sacramentarians without distinguishing between them. But a careful reading of his first full defense of his position, the 1527 treatise That These Words of Christ Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, indicates that he regarded Oecolampadius, not Zwingli, as posing the most dangerous threat to belief in Christ’s bodily presence.53 If Zwingli played only a secondary role in the early years of the eucharistic controversy, how and why did the sacramentarian position come to be labeled Zwinglian? The answer has as much to do with polemics as is does with theology.54 Applying an individual’s name to a religious group was a time-honored way of highlighting that group’s deviation from the consensus of the church. In the early years of the Reformation, Luther’s followers rejected the label of Lutheran, claiming that they were Christians or evangelicals, followers of the Gospel. Responding to his Catholic critics in 1523, Zwingli endorsed Luther’s preaching of Christ but asserted that he wanted to be associated with Christ, rather than with Luther or any other person.55 By the end of the 1520s Lutherans were using the same strategy that had been used against them: in labeling their opponents Zwinglians, they were in effect identifying them as sectarians or even heretics.
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Significantly, Lutherans were unwilling to use Oecolampadius’s name in the same way. Oecolampadius’s earlier reputation as a learned and pious humanist scholar gave him a certain standing that even his opponents respected. He had formed friendships with several future Lutheran reformers during his student days in Tübingen and Heidelberg, and he was associated with humanist sodalities in Basel, Augsburg, and Nuremberg. He had worked closely with Erasmus on editions of the church fathers and on the Greek New Testament. He was also one of the earliest humanists to publish pamphlets in support of Luther. It was therefore more strategic for Lutherans to discredit the sacramentarian position by associating it with Zwingli, who was relatively little known outside of Switzerland before 1525.56 Zwinglian could also be used in a more positive way, however, to champion Zwingli’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper in the face of Luther’s attacks.57 Luther expressed his negative judgment of Zwingli in several works published through the 1530s and early 1540s, but his polemic reached its most extended and vitriolic form in his 1544 Short Confession. In that work he condemned Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Karlstadt, and Schwenckfeld as “enemies of the sacrament” whom he excluded from Christian fellowship.58 Karlstadt had no defenders. His reputation had been so thoroughly damaged by Luther’s 1525 Against the Heavenly Prophets that no one wanted to be associated with him. By the 1540s Schwenckfeld, too, was persona non grata among the Swiss reformers. In the hope of maintaining concord with the German Lutherans, Basel’s church leaders chose to ignore Luther’s insults to Oecolampadius, the founder of their church, and both they and the Strasbourgers encouraged the Zurichers to ignore them as well. But Heinrich Bullinger saw it as his duty to defend the orthodoxy of both his church and his predecessor.59 Bullinger responded to Luther with an Orthodox Confession of the Faith of the Ministers of Zurich’s Church. The treatise reveals both the negative and the positive use of Zwingli’s name. On the one hand, Bullinger prefaced the confession of the Zurich church with the statement that its ministers “were not Zwinglians but Christians and taught only holy Scripture and the true, old, undoubted Christian faith based on it.”60 On the other hand, the entire work was a defense of Zwingli against Luther’s charges of heresy. Throughout the treatise, Bullinger presented Zwingli’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper as both static and fully formed from the beginning of the controversy. He asserted that Zwingli and Oecolampadius held the same view of the Lord’s Supper, and he explained that view on the basis of their late works, especially Zwingli’s 1531 Exposition of the Faith, which Luther had explicitly condemned in his Short Confession.61 As a consequence, Zwingli’s role was emphasized, and the contribution of others to the debate was downplayed. In other works on the abuse of the mass and on the origins of Anabaptism, Bullinger was keen to highlight the historical development of erroneous teachings, but it did not
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serve his purpose in the Orthodox Confession to discuss the opening phase of the public debate over the Lord’s Supper. Bullinger was not alone in highlighting Zwingli’s theological significance and orthodoxy in the mid-sixteenth century. Other Zurich writers did so as well in their histories of the eucharistic controversy. Johannes Stumpf, a pastor in Zurich’s rural territory and a close friend of Bullinger, wrote a description of the controversy that focused almost entirely on Luther and Zwingli.62 Although he acknowledged Karlstadt’s role in beginning the public debate, Stumpf quickly shifted to a discussion of Zwingli’s publications, his reform of the Zurich church, and his role in the Marburg Colloquy, mentioning Oecolampadius only a few times.63 Even more important for establishing Zwingli’s reputation was Stumpf ’s younger colleague and Bullinger’s son-in-law, Ludwig Lavater, whose account of the eucharistic controversy would become the most important source, whether directly or indirectly, of every later account up to the twentieth century. Like Stumpf ’s chronicle, Lavater’s History of the Origin and Development of the Sacramentarian Controversy Concerning the Lord’s Supper, published in 1563, was intended as a defense of the Zurich reformer. In the preface, Lavater discussed the controversy exclusively as a debate between Zwingli and Luther. He opened his narrative of the controversy itself with a presentation of Zwingli’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper based on the reformer’s later works. After describing Karlstadt’s break with Luther, he summarized Zwingli’s earliest published works on the sacrament. Although Lavater discussed the contributions of Oecolampadius and others to the public controversy as well, he gave the impression throughout the work that Zwingli’s theology was fully formed and that it shaped the views of others from the beginning of the debate. Again, there was no way to see the dynamic nature of the public controversy or to recognize Zwingli’s debt to others in formulating his own position.64 The Zurich theologian Rudolf Hospinian continued this historiographic approach to the eucharistic controversy in his 1602 work On the Origin and Development of the Sacramentarian Controversy on the Lord’s Supper between the Lutherans, Ubiquitists, and the Orthodox, who are called Zwinglians or Calvinists. The title reflects the work’s purpose: to defend Zwingli’s orthodoxy against the Lutherans. In the prolegomenon Hospinian focused on the controversy between Luther and Zwingli, and his narrative began with a presentation of the position of each reformer. Hospinian criticized Luther’s inconstant and contradictory teachings about the Lord’s Supper, evident through a comparison of the Wittenberger’s earliest discussions of the sacrament with what he wrote after the outbreak of the eucharistic controversy. In contrast, Zwingli’s doctrine was summarized on the basis of his last works and presented as a model of steadfast teaching.65 Hospinian’s account of the controversy’s development relied heavily on that of Lavater, often directly copying long passages from it without attribution. Hospinian also incorporated passages from the works of Luther, Zwingli,
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and others into his text, which increased its length significantly but also added to its value as a source for later authors. Like Lavater, he described Karlstadt’s break with Luther and discussed Oecolampadius’s treatises, but Zwingli and the Zurich church remained at the center of developments through Zwingli’s death in 1531. Like his Zurich predecessors, Hospinian firmly linked the orthodoxy of Zurich’s Reformed church with the orthodoxy of its founder, Huldrych Zwingli.66 Both Zurich authors avoided extended polemic in their works, and the apparently objective and moderate tone of these histories stands in striking contrast to the approach taken in Lutheran accounts of the eucharistic controversy written at about the same time. In That These Words of Christ Still Stand Firm (1527), Luther had attributed the controversy over the Lord’s Supper to the devil and compared it to the Trinitarian and Christological heresies that had caused turmoil in the early church.67 Lutheran writers in the later sixteenth century would follow Luther in seeing the hand of Satan in stirring up the eucharistic controversy, and they felt little need to address that controversy’s origin and development.The rejection of Christ’s bodily presence was a heresy, and the history of a heresy was not worth describing—but if it was going to be addressed, accounts had to begin with the early church. In his History of the Sacramentarian Controversy published in 1593, the Göttingen pastor Theodosius Fabricius used parallel columns to compare the “pure teaching on the Lord’s Supper” with “erroneous teachings” from the early church through the sixteenth century. For the critical years of the early Reformation, Fabricius contrasted Luther first with Karlstadt and the papists (through 1524), and then with the Zwinglians.68 According to this approach, Zwingli was just another in a long list of heretics that went back to Arius and Nestorius. This stance caused difficulty for German writers trying to understand the development of the controversy from a more secular perspective. One of the first to do so was Johannes Sleidan, who published his Commentaries on the State of Religion and the Republic Under Charles V in 1555. Reflecting the mediating policy of his adopted home of Strasbourg, Sleidan downplayed the disagreement with the Swiss by placing the blame elsewhere: Karlstadt, who associated with clandestine teachers claiming to have visions from God, was responsible for beginning the controversy. Zwingli “agreed with Luther in almost everything,” and differed only concerning the Lord’s Supper. Luther insisted that the phrase “This is my body” must be understood literally, but Zwingli argued that these words contained a trope, and he understood them to mean “This signifies my body,” while Oecolampadius interpreted them as “This is a sign of my body.” Sleidan upheld the Strasbourg position, but he misrepresented the issue debated during these early years by shifting attention away from disagreements concerning Christ’s bodily presence and highlighting instead the agreement concerning spiritual communion: “The one view of them
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all is that the body and blood of Christ is partaken spiritually, not corporally, not by the mouth but by the heart.”69 Sleidan’s very brief account was not much use as a historical source for those interested in the eucharistic controversy, and so his younger and more outspokenly Lutheran colleague Johannes Marbach had to rely on other works when he described the controversy in his Christian and Trustworthy Instruction on the Words Instituting the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ, published in 1565. Marbach cited Lavater’s history of the eucharistic controversy, but he put his own spin on events. Marbach first described Karlstadt’s attacks on Luther and Müntzer’s rebellion against authority. Turning to developments in Zurich, Marbach acknowledged that Zwingli did not accept Karlstadt’s understanding of “This is my body,” but in all other respects the Zurich reformer “taught in uniformity with Karlstadt regarding the Lord’s Supper.”70 Marbach’s goal was to discredit Zwingli by this association with Karlstadt and so with sedition, and he did not mention Oecolampadius at all. Another factor shaping Lutheran histories of the eucharistic controversy was the conflict through the third quarter of the century between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans. The two sides disagreed about the authoritative text of the Augsburg Confession—whether the original version submitted to the emperor in 1530 or the version revised by Melanchthon in light of the 1536 Wittenberg Concord—and about the relative authority of Luther and Melanchthon. In this context, developments before 1530 were less important and so were glossed over. In his History of the Augsburg Confession, the Nuremberg jurist Christoph Herdesianus attributed the origin of the eucharistic controversy to Luther’s meeting with Karlstadt in 1524, but he then jumped ahead to the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the discussions that followed.71 The lack of serious historical interest among the Lutherans concerning the opening years of the eucharistic controversy left the naming of the parties to be determined by the works of Lavater and Hospinian. The passage of time only strengthened the focus on Zwingli, since the Zurich reformer’s works were readily available to scholars, while those of others became increasingly hard to find. In his Orthodox Confession, Bullinger defended the reprinting of Zwingli’s works, which allowed others to read them and see the falsehood in Luther’s charges of heresy.72 In contrast, only one of Oecolampadius’s late eucharistic treatises, and none of Karlstadt’s contributions to the eucharistic controversy, was reprinted in the sixteenth century.73 Without easy access to the sixteenth-century treatises, later historians relied on the Zurich accounts and their own reading of Zwingli’s works, whether in reprint or as excerpted in the Zurich histories. The Reformed theologian Abraham Scultetus, for instance, cribbed extensively from both Hospinian and Lavater in his 1618 history of the Reformation, as did the Reformed historian Samuel Diest in his 1663 Historical-Irenical Dissertation on the Religious Peace and Quarrels of Evangelicals.74
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It was partly to counter the narrative established by Lavater and Hospinian that the Lutheran theologian Valentin Ernst Löscher wrote his own Detailed History of the Disturbance between the Evangelical-Lutherans and the Reformed (1724). Löscher characterized Lavater’s account as “a short work written to the great prejudice of the church, although it acts far more uprightly and mildly with us than those that followed.” He recognized Hospinian’s close dependence on Lavater’s account, noting laconically, “whether this should be called plagiarism I leave to everyone’s judgment.”75 Löscher rejected Reformed charges of Luther’s inconstancy and placed the blame for the eucharistic controversy squarely on Luther’s opponents. By devoting separate chapters to Karlstadt, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, the Strasbourg reformers Wolfgang Capito and Martin Bucer, and the Silesians Kaspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Krautwald, Löscher emphasized the multiple origins of the Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper. He further highlighted the plurality of origins by classifying Karlstadt with Thomas Müntzer, the Zwickau prophets, and others “who attacked not only the papacy but the church itself ” and so “fell into the coarsest form of fanaticism.” Löscher conceded that Zwingli and Oeolampadius did not go as far as these radicals, but he claimed that “to speak truly, these [two] were similar” to them.76 Löscher’s view of the diverse origins of the Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper would influence later Lutheran accounts of the eucharistic controversy, but it would not change the narrative significantly. The same could be said about the publication of Johann Georg Walch’s eighteenth-century edition of Luther’s works, which included a few of the contributions to the eucharistic controversy written by Oecolampadius and Karlstadt.77 Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, the Lutheran Gottlieb Jakob Planck made use of these sources in his History of the Development, Changes, and Formation of our Protestant Doctrines, but his narrative was shaped by the works of Lavater, Hospinian, and Löscher. The result is an account of the early eucharistic controversy that is familiar to modern ears. Planck discussed Karlstadt in conjunction with the Zwickau prophets, Thomas Müntzer, and the Peasants’ War, then turned to the eucharistic controversy proper. Calling Zwingli the Luther and Oecolampadius the Melanchthon of Switzerland, he focused on the Reformation in Zurich and then summarized the key contributions to the public debate, with the exchange between Zwingli and Luther in 1527–28 receiving the greatest attention.78 The most detailed study of the eucharistic controversy in the nineteenth century was written by J. H. A. Ebrard, who was at that time professor of theology in Zurich. Following his Zurich predecessors, Ebrard placed Zwingli at the center of his account, but his presentation was distorted by factual errors and preconceptions that led to serious misreadings. His discussion of the Reformation debate began with chapters on the early Reformation in Zurich
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and on Zwingli’s criticisms of the mass, on the basis of which Ebrard found the “main features of later Calvinist doctrine” in Zwingli’s pre-1525 works.79 Ebrard briefly summarized the conflict between Luther and Karlstadt, based more on Planck’s account than his own reading of Karlstadt’s pamphlets, and then turned to Zwingli’s four publications on the Lord’s Supper from 1525.80 This was followed by a summary of Oecolampadius’s Genuine Exposition which (in contrast to Planck) Ebrard judged to fall far short of Zwingli’s works.81 According to Ebrard, Luther’s harsh criticism of Zwingli and Oecolampadius from early 1526 could be explained only by the assumption that Luther had not read the works of the Swiss reformers and so knew their position only through reading the works of their opponents, Brenz and Pirckheimer.82 Flawed as it was, Ebrard’s work was important for reinforcing the view that Zwingli was the central figure in the early debate over the Lord’s Supper. It is therefore regrettable that August Wilhelm Dieckhoff ’s The Evangelical Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper in the Age of the Reformation discussed only works written through the end of 1525, since Dieckhoff had a far better understanding of the controversy than did Ebrard. In addition to a chapter on Zwingli, Dieckhoff discussed both Karlstadt’s conflict with Luther and Oecolampadius’s major works.83 He was as partisan a defender of the Lutheran position as Ebrard was of the Swiss, but his detailed summaries were based on a careful reading of the relevant publications and so were more reliable than those of Ebrard. At the end of the work Dieckhoff promised to continue his history of the controversy in a second volume, but that volume was never published.84 When Walther Köhler set out to write his account of the conflict between Zwingli and Luther, then, he was following a well-worn path, and one that was particularly familiar in Zurich. In the introduction to his first volume, Köhler pointed out that studies going back to Lavater’s account had been concerned chiefly with explaining the conflict over the Lord’s Supper and so had not done justice to Zwingli’s theology.85 It could be argued, however, that with his focus on Zwingli Köhler did not do justice to other contributors to the public debate, since he said virtually nothing about Karlstadt and persistently subordinated Oecolampadius to Zwingli, even while recognizing differences between them.86 Köhler’s detailed study of the conflict between Zwingli and Luther has shaped all subsequent accounts of the early eucharistic controversy, but historians of doctrine have also contributed to the focus on Zwingli. Written in the early twentieth century, Paul Tschackert’s The Development of Lutheran and Reformed Church Doctrine along with their Inner-Protestant Differences discussed Karlstadt in a short section of the chapter on “the doctrinal system of the spiritualist opponents of Luther,” which also covered various other Anabaptist and Spiritualist figures. Tschackert’s chapter on Zwinglianism, in contrast, was devoted entirely to the Zurich reformer, and Oecolampadius is mentioned only in passing.87 The same focus on Zwingli is evident in the contributions of Bern-
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hard Lohse and Wilhelm Neuser to the Handbook of Dogma and Theology History written at the end of the twentieth century. Lohse’s discussion of Luther describes the evolution of both Luther and Zwingli up to the outbreak of the eucharistic controversy in 1525 and says nothing about Karlstadt, Oecolampadius, or anyone else.88 Neuser’s presentation of the evolution of Reformed theology begins with two chapters on Zwingli, and he discusses Oecolampadius only briefly as a Zwinglian, alongside Leo Jud, Oswald Myconius, the “early” Bullinger, and Wolfgang Capito.89 It is emblematic of the narrowing focus on Zwingli that Karlstadt and Oecolampadius receive only passing mention in the most detailed account in English of the early eucharistic controversy, Hermann Sasse’s This is my Body. There is considerable irony in the fact that this conservative Lutheran account follows the Zurich interpretation by presenting the eucharistic controversy entirely as a conflict between Zwingli and Luther.90 Historians have a powerful influence in the naming of movements. The Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper developed out of a complicated cross-fertilization of ideas from a number of sources, but that origin has been obscured by historians’ naming of the movement as Zwinglian. In writing histories of the eucharistic controversy, Zurich’s theologians ensured a dominant place for the founder of their church, even if Zwinglianism ultimately owed as much if not more to other contributors. Uncovering the history of that naming moves us away from older stereotypes and allows us to see the complexities of the early Reformation debate over the Lord’s Supper. Amy Nelson Burnett is Paula and D. B. Varner University Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches early modern European history. Her research focuses on the dissemination of the Protestant Reformation through print, preaching, and educational reform. She is the author of Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation (2019) and coeditor with Emidio Campi of The Companion to the Swiss Reformation (2016).
Notes Research for this essay was completed at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and I thank the library’s staff for all their assistance. 1. Köhler, Zwingli und Luther, viii. For an alternative to Köhler’s account of the controversy, see Burnett, Debating the Sacraments. 2. Picards: Pirckheimer, De vera Christi carne . . . responsio, in Reicke et al., Willibald Pirckheimers Briefwechsel [hereafter WPBW] 6: 445; Karlstadtians: Billican and Rhegius, De verbis coenae dominicae, fol. C3v; and Oecolampadians: Fisher, De veritate corporis, fol. 113r.
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3. Burnett, “Things I Never Said.” 4. Burnett, “Luther and the Schwärmer.” Luther first used the term Schwärmer (usually translated as fanatics) for those who separated the inspiration of the Spirit from the written scripture. The sacramentarians were a subset of the fanatics who rejected belief in Christ’s substantial presence. The meaning of sacramentarian is related to the definition of sacramentum as “a sign of a holy thing” in Peter Lombard’s Sententiae IV, dist. 1, cap. 2. The Zurich theologians objected to this label, but there is no other name that conveys the breadth of positions within the one party. 5. Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke [hereafter WA] 19: 458–59; English translation in Luther, Luther’s Works [hereafter LW] 59: 157. 6. Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 281–90. 7. Bartos, “Picards et Pikarti.” 8. Perett, “A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy.” 9. Dungersheim, Reprobatio; Ziegler, Duplex Confessio. 10. [Lukas of Prague], Apologia Sacre scripture. 11. Piccolomini, De Concilio Basileae. 12. The most important of these were Matt. 24:23 (cf. Mark 13:21 and Luke 17:23) and John 16:7. 13. Burnett, Karlstadt, 77–90. 14. Spruyt, Cornelius Henrici Hoen, 127–65. Spruyt suggests that the letter is in fact an older, heretical text with interpolations by Hoen. Hoen’s Epistola Christiana is edited in Spruyt, Cornelius Henrici Hoen, 226–35. An English translation of most of the letter is in Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation, 268–76. 15. Cf. the full title of Karlstadt’s Von beiden gestaldten. 16. Reinhart, Anzaygung wie die gefallene Christenhait; and Hoyer, “Martin Reinhart.” 17. Burnett, Karlstadt, 16–21, 84–85. 18. Burnett, “Things I Never Said”; and Lindberg, “The Conception of the Eucharist.” 19. Zwingli, Ad Matthaeum Alberum in Egli et al., Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke [hereafter Z] 3: 335–54; Zwingli, De vera. . . religione in Z 3: 773–820 (section on the Lord’s Supper); and Zwingli, Subsidium, in Z 4: 191–231. 20. Karlstadt, Ob man . . . erweysen, fol. F3r–v; and Karlstadt, Eucharistic Pamphlets, 140– 41. The argument could be seen as a radicalization of Erasmus’s views in Canon V of his Enchiridion. 21. Oecolampadius, DE GENVINA . . . Expositione; and Burnett, Karlstadt, 85–87, 97. 22. Brenz, Werke, 1/1: 254. Luther endorsed the term in his letter to Johannes Herwagen, 13 Sept. 1526; WA 19: 471, 473 [English: LW 59: 169, 172]. 23. Figure 1.1 shows only those publications on the Lord’s Supper through 1525 that provoked published responses or that attacked or defended an earlier work. 24. Rhegius, Wider den newen irrsal, in Walch, Dr. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften [hereafter W2] 20, col. 110–32; Luther, Eyn brieff, WA 15: 380–97; and Martin Luther, Das ander Teil, WA 18: 134–214 [English: LW 40: 144–223]. 25. Billican, RENOVATIO ECCLESIAE NORDLINGIACENSIS, esp. 298–300. 26. “Atque hic ridemus magnum illum Theologum cum suo Carlstadio.” Bugenhagen, Contra novum errorem, A2r; German translation in W2 20, col. 500–6. 27. Amsdorf, Vermanung; and Amsdorf, Auff Ciclops antwort replica. Each of Amsdorf ’s pamphlets would elicit a response: Cyclops, Antwortt, and Cyclops, Von dem . . . Nachtmal. 28. Capito, Waß man halten.
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29. Bucer, “Grund und Ursach,” in Bucer, Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften, vol. 1, 205–30, 242–54 (sections on the Lord’s Supper). Zwingli had not yet published his Epistola to Alber, but he had sent a copy of it to Strasbourg in December 1524. The Dutchman Hinne Rode was in Strasbourg in November 1524, and it is evident from the letters of the Strasbourg reformers to Wittenberg, Basel, and Zurich that Rode had shown them Hoen’s Epistola; and Bucer, Correspondance de Martin Bucer, vol. 1, 281–87 (to Zurich and Basel); vol. 1, 288–97 (to Luther); vol. 1, 298–315 (Zwingli to the Strasbourgers). 30. Karlstadt, Erklerung des x. Capitels; Karlstadt, Von dem Newen . . . Testament; translations in Karlstadt, Eucharistic Pamphlets, 219–57. 31. Valentin Ickelshamer, Clag etlicher brieder, in Laube et al., Flugschriften vom Bauernkrieg [hereafter FSBT] 1: 74–86. 32. Ryss zu Ofen, Antwort; and Burnett, Karlstadt, 125–27. 33. Karlstadt, Erklerung wie Carlstat; translation in Karlstadt, Eucharistic Pamphlets, 258– 69; and Frolockung eins christlichen bruders, in FSBT 1: 102–15, where it is attributed to Wolfgang Capito. 34. Again, only those works that provoked a response or responded to an earlier work are included in figure 1.2. 35. Clicthove, De Sacramento Evcharistiae. 36. Fisher, De veritate corporis; and Fisher, Funff Vorredde. 37. Brenz, Syngramma, in Brenz, Werke, 1/1: 234–78. Each of the three German translations had a different title: Brenz, Clare . . . antwortung; Brenz, Gegrundter . . . beschlus, with a preface by Luther; and Brenz, Genotigter . . . schrifft, with a new preface by Luther. 38. Pirckheimer, Responsio, in WPBW 6: 80–85, 435–502. 39. Rhegius and Billican, De verbis coenae dominicae; German translation in W2 17, col. 1547–70. 40. Oecolampadius’s response to Billican and the Syngramma was included in Oecolampadius, APOLOGETICA. For Oecolampadius’s response to Pirckheimer, see Oecolampadius, Ad Billibaldum . . . responsio. Pirckheimer’s Responsio secunda provoked Oecolampadius’s Responsio posterior, which in turn led to Pirckheimer, De convitiis. On these works, see Burnett, “According to the Oldest Authorities.” 41. Oecolampadius, Billiche antwortt (Basel, 1526); W2 20, col. 582–635. 42. Zwingli, Ad . . . Epistolam Responsio, in Z 4: 546–76; Zwingli, Ad Epistolas . . . Responsio, in Z 4: 880–941; Zwingli, Eine klare Unterrichtung, in Z 4: 773–862. 43. Murner, Responsio; Fabri, Epistola; and Grüdt, Christenlich anzeygung. 44. Zwingli, Über den ungesandten sendbrieff, in Z 5: 43–94; Zwingli, Die erste kurtz Antwort, in Z 5: 177–95; and Zwingli, Die andere Antwort, in Z 5: 213–35. 45. Strauss, Wider den vnmilten Jrrtum; and Zwingli, Anwurt Huldrichen Zwinglins, in Z 5: 464–547. 46. Karlstadt, Ob man; and Karlstadt, Eucharistic Pamphlets, 116–43. 47. Burnett, Karlstadt, 86–90. 48. Burnett, “Things I Never Said.” 49. Brenz, Epistola; and Bucer, Apologia. 50. The phrase in Oecolampadius, Ad Billibaldum . . . Responsio, fol. a5v. 51. Schnewyl, Wider die . . . verdammung. Verzeichnis der . . . Drucke assumes “Schnewyl” was a pseudonym of Haug Marschalk, an identification that is doubtful. Langenmantel, Ain kurtzer anzayg; Landsperger, Eyn brüderliche Supplication; and Luther, Sermon, in WA 19: 474–523.
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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.
64. 65. 66. 67. 68.
69. 70. 71. 72. 73.
74. 75.
33
Cross, “Alloiosis.” Burnett, “Rhetoric and Refutation.” See Brecht, “Was war Zwinglianismus?” Zwingli, Auslegen und Gründe der Schlussreden, in Z 2: 144–50. See also Chrisman, Conflicting Visions, 186–87. Still useful because of its many examples of how names were applied is Heppe, Ursprung und Geschichte, 1–12. Burnett, “Oekolampads.” Gordon, “Remembering Jerome.” WA 54: 141; English translation in LW 38: 287. The Zurichers’s strong defense of Zwingli is all the more striking in view of the omission of the reformer’s name in the prefaces to the Latin Bible published in Zurich in 1543. Moser, Die Dignität, 1: 238–46. Bullinger, Warhaffte Bekanntnuß, fol. 41v. Ibid., 6r–41v. Henrich, “Zu den Anfängen.” Most of Stumpf ’s work was written in the late 1530s; some twenty years later Stumpf extended his account of the controversy into the 1550s. Büsser, Beschreibung, 26–55. Stumpf said nothing about Oecolampadius’s publications, other than that the Basler and Zwingli together published a response to Luther’s 1528 Confession (30). He also mentioned that Oecolampadius attended the Marburg Colloquy (46, 49), acknowledged that Luther and his followers attacked both Zwingli and Oecolampadius (55, 56, 140, 141), and protested against Luther’s linking of Oecolampadius, who was pastor and theology professor in Basel, with the Catholic controversialist Hieronymus Emser (58–59). Lavater, Historia, fol. 1r–21r. A German translation was published in 1564. Hospinian, Historiae, fol. 4v–15r (Luther); 27r–31v (Zwingli). Hospinian, Historiae, fol. 3r–127r, covers the period up through Zwingli’s death. Köhler, Zwingli und Luther, 8, characterizes Hospinian’s work as presenting Zurich theology “in the mode of Bullinger.” WA 23: 65–73. Fabricius, Historia. Part II describes “how the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament was disputed from 1521 to 1546” ( J2v). From fol. J2v– K1v, the columns are headed with the terms Luther, Karlstadt, and papists. For the years 1525–29, the term “Karlstadt” is replaced with either Zwingli or Zwinglians, used for Oecolampadius and Bucer, fol. K1v–N1r. I used a later reprint of this work: Sleidan, De statu religionis (Basel, 1562), 58–59; and Kess, Johann Sleidan, 50. According to Kess, Sleidan presented Zwinglianism as “a marginal phenomenon” throughout his work. Marbach, Christlicher . . . vnderricht, 15–29 (quote at 15). Dingel, “Ablehnung.” Hardesianus published his book under the pseudonym of Ambrosius Wolf (Wolf, HISTORIA, fol. D4v–E4v). Bullinger, Warhaffte Bekanntnuß, fol. 40r. Oecolampadius, Quid de Eucharistia. This work was reprinted in Heidelberg in 1573 and in Basel in 1590. English translations of Karlstadt’s pamphlets are now available in Karlstadt, Eucharistic Pamphlets, which also describes their publication history. The Genvina Expositione has been reprinted only once, in Pfaff, Acta, 44–154. Scultetus, Annalium Evangelii, 227–36, 242–56; and Diest, Dissertatio. Löscher, Ausführliche Historia, separately paginated “Vorbericht,” first quote on 5, second quote on 7.
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76. Löscher, Ausführliche Historia, 3. In Löscher, Ausführliche Historia, see the chapter on Karlstadt, 5–55; on Zwingli, 55–112; on Oecolampadius, 112–131; on the Upper Germans, 131–37; and on the Silesians and others, 137–43. 77. The Walch edition was reprinted in St. Louis in the nineteenth century; see Michael Beyer, “Luther Ausgaben,” in Luther Handbuch, ed. Albrecht Beutel (Tübingen, 2005), 2–8. 78. Planck, Geschichte der Entstehung, vol. 2, 190–327. Planck cited Lavater, Hospinian, and Löscher in his work. Köhler discusses the works of both Löscher and Planck, Zwingli und Luther, vol. 1, 11–14. 79. Ebrard, Das Dogma, vol. 2, 105–6. 80. Ebrard, Das Dogma, vol. 2, 123–26, quote at 124. Ebrard explicitly referred his readers to Planck’s “admirable and faithful presentation”; his own discussion of Karlstadt was limited to brief summaries of a few works. 81. Ibid., vol. 2, 167. 82. Ibid., vol. 2, 213, 217, 236–37. 83. Dieckhoff, Die evangelische Abendmahlslehre. Dieckhoff begins with Karlstadt’s earliest writings on the Eucharist in 1521 and continues through his so-called retraction published in 1525 (299–428); he also discusses Oecolampadius and his opponents (514–654). Particularly noteworthy is his comparison of Zwingli and Oecolampadius, which points to differences between the two reformers (560–66). 84. Dieckhoff, Die evangelische Abendmahlslehre, 654–55. 85. Köhler, Zwingli und Luther, vol. 1, 8. 86. See his analysis of Oecolampadius’s Genvina Expositione (Köhler, Zwingli und Luther, 122–25). 87. Tschackert, Die Entstehung, 121–28, 228–57. 88. Lohse, “Dogma und Bekenntnis,” 46–64. Karlstadt is discussed only in the context of the disturbances in Wittenberg in 1521–22; see Lohse, 27–33. 89. Neuser, “Dogma und Bekenntnis,” with Zwingli’s discussion of the sacraments at 192–96; Oecolampadius’s contribution to the eucharistic controversy is limited to one paragraph (201). 90. Sasse, This Is My Body.
Bibliography Primary Sources Amsdorf, Nicolaus von. Auff Ciclops antwort replica. Wittenberg, 1525. Amsdorf, Nicolaus von. Vermanung an die von Magdeburg wider den rotten vnnd secten gayst D. Ciclops. Augsburg, 1525. Billican, Theobald, and Urbanus Rhegius. De verbis coenae dominicae et opinionem varietate. Augsburg, 1526. Billican, Theobald. RENOVATIO ECCLESIAE NORDLINGIACENSIS, ET RATIO OMnibus redditur, de quorundam institutione, per Diaconos ibidem. In Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, vol. 12: Bayern. II. Teil: Schwaben, edited by Ernst Sehling, et al. Tübingen, 1963. Brenz, Johannes. Clare vnd Christliche antwortung etlicher hochgelerten dienern deß Euangeliums vnd predicanten so zu Hall in Schwaben versammlet gewest, auff doctor Johann Oecolampadi biechlin. Augsburg, 1526.
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Brenz, Johannes. Epistola de uerbis Domini, Hoc est Corpus meum, opinionem quorundam de Eucharistia refellens. Hagenau, 1526. Brenz, Johannes. Gegrundter vnd gewisser beschlus etlicher Prediger zu Schwaben vber die wort des Abentmals Christi Jesu . . . von newem durch Johannem Agricolam verdeutscht. Hagenau, 1526. Brenz, Johannes. Genotigter vnd fremdt eingetragener schrifft auch mislichens dewtens der wort des abentmals Christi. . . . Oecolampadio prediger zu Basel. Wittenberg, 1526. Brenz, Johannes. Werke: Eine Studienausgabe. Tübingen, 1970–86. Bucer, Martin. Apologia qva fidei suae atque doctrinae circa Christi Caenam . . . rationem simpliciter reddit. Strasbourg, 1526. Bucer, Martin. Correspondance de Martin Bucer. Vol. 1: Jusqu’en 1524 (Martini Buceri Opera Omnia, Series 3), edited by Jean Rott. Leiden, 1979. Bucer, Martin. Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften. Vol. 1: Frühschriften 1520–1524 (Martini Buceri Opera Omnia, Series 1), edited by Robert Stupperich. Gütersloh, 1960. Bugenhagen, Johannes. Contra novum errorem de Sacramento Corporis & sanguinis domini. Wittenberg, 1525. Bullinger, Heinrich. Warhaffte Bekanntnuß der dieneren der kirchen zuo Zürych. Zurich, 1545. Capito, Wolfgang. Waß man halten, vnnd antwurten soll, von der spaltung zwischen Martin Luther und Andres Carolstadt. Strasbourg, 1524. [Capito, Wolfgang]. Frolockung eins christlichen bruders von wegen der vereynigung zwischen D.M. Luther vnd D. Andres Carlostat. Speyer, 1526. Clicthove, Josse. De Sacramento Evcharistiae, contra Oecolampadium, opusculum. Cologne, 1527. Cyclops, Wolfgang. Antwortt auf Nickel Amßdorffs Replica. Leipzig, 1526. Cyclops, Wolfgang. Von dem aller hochwirdigsten Nachtmahl Jesu Christi. Magdeburg, 1525. Diest, Samuel. Dissertatio Historico-Irenica, De Lite et Pace Religiosa Evangelicorum Tribus distincta segmentis. Duisberg, 1663. Dungersheim, Hieronymus. Reprobatio orationis excusatorie picardorum: regie maiestati in Ungaria misse. Leipzig, 1516. Egli, Emil, et al., ed. Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke (Z), 21 vols. Leipzig, 1905–present. Fabri, Johann. Epistola Doctoris Iohannis Fabri ad Vlricum Zuinglium magistrum Thuricen. de future disputatione Baden. Tübingen, 1526. Fabricius, Theodosius. Historia Certaminis Sacramentarii. Das ist, Historia des Streits Uber der gegenwart und Niessung des Leibes und Bluts Christi, unter Brodt und Wein im Heiligen Abendmal des Herrn. Magdeburg, 1593. Fisher, John. De veritate corporis et sangvinis Christi in Evcharistia, per reuerendum in Christo patrem, ac dominum D. Iohannem Roffensem Episcopum, aduersus Iohannem Oecolampadium. Cologne, 1527. Fisher, John. Funff Vorredde des Hochwirdigen vatters vnd Herren H. Johan, Bischoffs von Roffa in Engellandt, vff V. bücher . . . Durch Jo. Cochleaus verteutscht. Cologne, 1528. Grüdt, Joachim von. Christenlich anzeygung Joachims von Grüdt, das im Sacrament des altars warlich sey fleisch vnd blut Christi wider den schedlichen verfüerischen irtumb Vlrich Zwinglins zu Zürich. Freiburg/Breisgau, 1526. Hoen, Cornelis. Epistola Christiana Admodvm . . . tractans coenam dominicam. Strasbourg, 1525.
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Hospinian, Rudolf. Historiae Sacramentariae Pars altera: De Origine Et Progressv Controversiae Sacramentariae De Coena Domini inter Lutheranos, Vbiquistas, & Orthodoxos . . . deducta. Zurich, 1602. Ickelshamer, Valentin. Clag etlicher brieder: an alle christen von der grossen vngerechtigkeit vnd Tyranney: So Endressen Bodenstein von Carolstat yetzo vom Luther zu Wittenberg geschicht. Augsburg, 1525. Karlstadt, Andreas. Erklerung des x. Capitels Cor. I. Das brot das wir brechen: Ist es nit ein gemeinschaft des Leybs Christi. Antwurt Andresen Carolstats: auf Luthers schrift Vnd wie Carolstat widerriefft. Augsburg, 1525. Karlstadt, Andreas. Erklerung wie Carlstat sein ler von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament vnd andere achtet vnd geachtet haben will. Wittenberg, 1525. Karlstadt, Andreas. The Eucharistic Pamphlets of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, edited and translated by Amy Nelson Burnett. Kirksville, MO, 2011. Karlstadt, Andreas. Ob man mit heyliger schrifft erweysen müge, das Christ mit leyb, blut und sele im Sacrament sey. Basel, 1524. Karlstadt, Andreas. Von beiden gestaldten der heylige Messze. Von Czeichen in gemein was sie wirken vnd dewten. Sie seind nit Behemen oder ketzer, die beide gestaldt nhemen sonder Ewangelische Christen. Wittenberg, 1521. Karlstadt, Andreas. Von dem Newen vnd Alten Testament. Antwurt auff disen spruch Der Kelch das New Testament in meynem blut etc. Augsburg, 1525. Landsperger, Johannes. Eyn brüderliche Supplication vnd vermanung. Worms, 1527. Langenmantel, Eitelhans. Ain kurtzer anzayg, wie Do. Martin Luther ain zeyt hör hatt etliche schriften lassen außgeen, vom Sacrament die doch stracks wider ainander, wie wird dann sein vnd seiner anhenger Reych bestehen. Augsburg, 1527. Laube, Adolf, et al., ed., Flugschriften vom Bauernkrieg zum Täuferreich (1526–1535), 2 vols. Berlin, 1992. Lavater, Ludwig. Historia de Origine et Progressv Controversiae Sacramentariae de Coena Domini, ab anno nativitatis Christi MDXXIIII usque ad annum MCLXIII deducta. Zurich, 1563. Lombard, Peter. Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis episcopi Sententiae in IV libris Distinctae, 3 vols. Grottaferrata/Rome, 1971. Löscher, Valentin Ernst. Ausführliche Historia Motuum Zwischen den Evangelisch=Lutherischen und Reformierten . . . Warheit Wider Hospinianum, Becmannum, G. Arnoldum und andere gerettet wird. Frankfurt, 1724. [Lukas of Prague]. Apologia Sacre scripture. Nuremberg, 1511. Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (WA), 73 vols. Weimar, 1883–1993. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. American Edition (LW), edited by Helmut T. Lehmann et al., 65 vols. St. Louis, MO, 1955–present. Luther, Martin. Sermon von dem Sacrament des leibs vnd bluts Christi wider die Schwarmgeister. Wittenberg, 1526. Marbach, Johannes. Christlicher, vnd warhaffter vnderricht, von den worten der einsatzung . . . sampt gründtlicher widerlegung der Sacramentierer hieuon jrrigen Lehr, vnd meynung. Strasbourg, 1565. Murner, Thomas. Responsio libello cuidam insigniter & egregie stulto Vlrici Zvuyngel apostate. In E. Roterodami de sacro sancta synaxi . . . expostulatio. . . Lucerne, [1526]. Oberman, Heiko A. Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought Illustrated by Key Documents. Philadelphia, 1981.
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Oecolampadius, Johannes. Ad Billibaldvm Pyrkaimervm, de Eucharistia, Ioannis Husschin, cui ab aeqalibus a prima adolescentia Oecolampadio nomen obuenit, Responsio posterior. Basel, 1527. Oecolampadius, Johannes. Ad Billibaldum Pyrkaimerum de re Eucharistiae responsio. Zurich, 1526. Oecolampadius, Johannes. APOLOGETICA IOANN. OECOLAMPADII. DE DIGNITATE EVCHARISTIAE Sermones duo. . . . AD ECCLESIASTAS SVEVOS Antisyngramma. Zurich, 1526. Oecolampadius, Johannes. Billiche antwortt Johan Ecolampadij auff D. Martin Luthers bericht des sacraments halb, sampt einem kurtzen begryff auff etlicher Prediger in Schwaben gschrifft die wort des Herren nachtmals antreffendt. Basel, 1526. Oecolampadius, Johannes. DE GENVINA Verborum domini, Hoc est corpus meum, iuxta uetutissimos authores expositione liber. Strasbourg, 1526. Oecolampadius, Johannes. Dialogus quo Patrum sententiam de Coena Domini bona fide explanat. Basel, 1590. Oecolampadius, Johannes. Ad Billibaldum Pyrkaimerum de re Eucharistiae responsio. Zurich, 1526. Oecolampadius, Johannes. Quid de Eucharistia Veteres tum Graeci, tum Latini senserint, Dialogus, in quo Epistolae Philippi Melanchthonis et Ioannis Oeclampadij insertae. [Basel], 1530. Pfaff, Christoph Matthaeus. Acta et Scripta Publica Ecclesiae Wirtembergicae tum quae cusa dudum fuere, tum quae e situ et Tenebris nunc demum in Dias Luminis Auras Prodeunt. Tübingen, 1719. Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius [Pope Pius II]. Commentariorum de Concilio Basileae celebrato libri duo, . . . cum multis aliis nunquam antehac impressis. [Basel, 1523]. Pirckheimer, Willibald. De convitiis Monachi illius, qui graecolatine Caecolampadius, germanice uero Ausshin nuncupatur, ad Eleutherium suum epistola. Nuremberg, 1527. Pirckheimer, Willibald. De vera Christi carne & vero eius sanguine, ad Ioan. Oecolampadium responsio. Nuremberg, 1526. Pirckheimer, Willibald. De uera Christi carne & uero eius sanguine, aduersus conuicia Ioannis, qui sibi Oecolampadij nomen indidit, responsio secunda. Nuremberg, 1527. Planck, Gottlieb Jacob. Geschichte der Entstehung, der Veränderungen und der Bildung unsers protestantischen Lehrbegriffs vom Anfang der Reformation bis zu der Einführung der Concordienformel, 6 vol. Leipzig, 1781–1800. Reicke, Emil. et al., eds. Willibald Pirckheimers Briefwechsel (WPBW), 7 vols. Munich, 1940–2009. Reinhart, Martin. Anzaygung wie die gefallene Christenhait widerbracht müg werden in jren ersten standt in wölchem sie von Christo vnnd seynen Aposteln erstlich gepflantzt vnnd auff gebawet ist. Augsburg, 1524. Rhegius, Urbanus. Wider den newen irrsal Doctor Andres von Carlstadt des Sacraments halb warnung. Augsburg, 1524. Ryss zu Ofen, Conrad. Antwort dem Hochgeleerten Doctor Johann Bugenhage auß Pomern Hyrt zu Wittemberg auff die Missiue so er an den Hochgelerten Doctor Hesso Leerer zu Preßlaw, geschickt das Sacrament betreffend. Augsburg, 1525. Schnewyl, Johann. Wider die vnmilte verdammung. Augsburg, 1526. Scultetus, Abraham. Annalium Evangelii Passim Per Europam Decimo Quinto Salutis Partae Seculo Renovati. Decas Prima, Ab Anno M.D.XVI. Ad Annum M.D. XXVI. Heidelberg, 1618.
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Sleidan, Johannes. De statu religionis et reipublicae Carolo Quinto Caesare Commentarii. Basel, 1562. Strauss, Jacob. Wider den vnmilten Jrrthum Maister Vlrichs zwinglins, So er verneünet, die warhafftig gegenwirtigkait dess allerhailligsten leybs vnd bluts Christi im Sacrament. Augsburg, 1526. Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD16). http://www.vd16.de. Walch, Johann Georg, ed., Dr. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften (W2), 23 vols. St. Louis, MO, 1881–1910. Wolf, Ambrosius. HISTORIA Der Augspurgischen Confession. Neustadt/Hardt, 1580. [Ziegler, Jacob]. In hoc volvmine haec continentvr, Duplex Confessio Valdensium ad Regem Vngariae missa. Leipzig, 1512.
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Cross, Richard. “‘Alloiosis’ in the Christology of Zwingli.” Journal of Theological Studies N.S. 47 (1996): 105–22. Dieckhoff, August Wilhelm. Die evangelische Abendmahlslehre im Reformationszeitalter. Göttingen, 1854. Dingel, Irene. “Ablehnung und Aneignung: Die Bewertung der Autorität Martin Luthers in den Auseinandersetzungen um die Konkordienformel.” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 105 (1994): 35–57. Ebrard, Johann Heinrich August. Das Dogma vom heiligen Abendmahl und seine Geschichte, 2 vols. Frankfurt, 1846. Gordon, Bruce. “Remembering Jerome and Forgetting Zwingli: The Zurich Latin Bible of 1543 and the Establishment of Heinrich Bullinger’s Church.” Zwingliana 41 (2014): 1–33. Henrich, Rainer. “Zu den Anfängen der Geschichtsschreibung über den Abendmahlsstreit bei Heinrich Bullinger und Johann Stumpf.” Zwingliana 20 (1993): 11–51. Heppe, Heinrich. Ursprung und Geschichte der Bezeichnungen “reformirte” und “lutherische” Kirche. Gotha, 1859. Hoyer, Siegfried. “Martin Reinhart und der erste Druck hussitischer Artikel in Deutschland.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 18 (1970): 1597–1615. Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford, 1987, 281–90. Kess, Alexandra. Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History. Aldershot, 2008. Köhler, Walther. Zwingli und Luther: Ihre Streit über das Abendmahl nach seinen politischen und religiösen Beziehungen, vol. 1: Die religiöse und politische Entwicklung bis zum Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529. Gütersloh, 1924. Lindberg, Carter. “The Conception of the Eucharist According to Erasmus and Karlstadt.” In Les Dissidents du XVIe siècle entre l’humanisme et le catholicisme, edited by Marc Lienhard, 79–94. Baden-Baden, 1983. Lohse, Bernhard. “Dogma und Bekenntnis in der Reformation: Von Luther bis zum Konkordienbuch.” In Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte. Vol. 2: Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahmen der Konfessionalität, 2nd ed., edited by Carl Andresen and Adolf Martin Ritter, 1–166. Göttingen, 1998. Moser, Christian. Die Dignität des Ereignisses: Studien zu Heinrich Bullingers Reformationsgeschichtsschreibung. 2 vols. Leiden, 2012. Neuser, Wilhelm H. “Dogma und Bekenntnis in der Reformation: Von Zwingli und Calvin bis zur Synode von Westminster.” In Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte. Vol. 2: Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahmen der Konfessionalität, 2nd ed., edited by Carl Andresen and Adolf Martin Ritter, 167–352. Göttingen, 1998. Perett, Marcela K. “A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy: The Afterlife of John Wyclif ’s Eucharistic Thought in Bohemia in the Early Fifteenth Century.” Church History 84 (2015): 64–89. Sasse, Hermann. This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. Minneapolis, MN, 1959. Spruyt, Bart Jan. Cornelius Henrici Hoen (Honius) and his Epistle on the Eucharist (1525). Leiden, 2006. Tschackert, Paul. Die Entstehung der lutherischen und der reformierten Kirchenlehre samt ihren innerprotestantischen Gegensätzen. Göttingen, 1910.
CHAPTER 2
From the Council to the Founding Myth
How the Spirit of Trent Came to be Named BIRGIT EMICH
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onsidering how to name epochs and movements has been a traditional aspect of research in church history.1 In a famous 1946 essay, Hubert Jedin first suggested that scholars stop talking only about the Counter-Reformation, and instead also consider the Catholic Reformation. Extending the mostly polemic term Counter-Reformation to include the complementary concept of reform, he stated, required that the traditional reduction of events to the aspect of military–political defense be overcome in order to achieve a more comprehensive picture.2 More than fifty years later, the American Jesuit John O’Malley, one of the most important church historians of his generation, once again called for a terminological term connected to a topical extension of the perspective. In his book Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, O’Malley recommended speaking plainly and simply using the term early modern Catholicism. He argued that the advantage was that this umbrella term did not completely replace other terminological variants. Instead it overarched them and brought them together, so elements could come into focus, whereas more-specific terms tended to ignore or obscure those elements. For O’Malley, the idea of a Tridentine Reform, for example, demonstrated such a narrowing of term and view. As he put it, those scholars focusing on the Tridentine Reform hardly considered the worldwide mission, which, after all, was a crucial aspect of early modern Catholicism. And what is more, this view overlooked movements not in accordance with the ideal of Trent, such as the non-monastic women’s congregations of the Ursulines. Most of all, the term Church of Trent created the myth of centralized, hierarchical Roman Catholicism with popes, bishops, and inquisitors at the center, while neglecting con-
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sideration of the majority of church membership, such as the rural population and their religious practices, simple women and men reading devotional works, and praying indigenous people in the New World. O’Malley said that those who speak of the Tridentine Church must be aware of such reductions, and that those who want to grasp the whole range of early modern Catholicism would be better advised to use a different term. Nobody, of course, could object to this. Perhaps not only giving up on the term Tridentine Church but also looking back at this term and its history might stimulate the future research of early modern Catholicism and allow for new views. The following analysis reviews the conceptual history of the term by focusing on the history of the name and its connected ideas. The first section of this chapter will give a short overview of how church historians and other scholars discuss the name Tridentine Church in their research. The second section will explore how the church came to be named Tridentine at all precisely because of the current predominant critical voices. In the conclusion, a short overview of this look back at the history of the term as well as the prospects of its conceptual consequences will suggest more analysis of the Council of Trent as a myth and an argument.
Was There a Tridentine Church? On the State of Research To start with a definition: The term Church of Trent simply refers to the church whose dogmas and organization were shaped at a place called Tridentum, or Trent. To put it more precisely, the Council of Trent that happened at this border town between Italy and the Holy Roman Empire between 1545 and 1563, with long breaks in between, finally passed a compilation of decrees. The doctrines fashioned in the decrees provided the crisis-ridden papal church with renewed strength. Thus, behind calling the church the Church of Trent, or postTrent, some traditional scholars assert the conviction that only the council provided the church with its early modern nature.3 Many historians and church historians of all denominations have embraced this view that imbues the council with epoch-making significance. They argue that the council made two main achievements: First, it offered the clear delimitation of dogma from the doctrines of the Protestants in a way that could be grasped by theological determinations and experienced daily through the liturgy and the church buildings. Second, it developed the concept of a reform with the ideal of the bishop as the shepherd of his flock at its heart.4 The bishops were supposed to be the actual pillars of Catholic reform.5 That is why the council stipulated that from then on they were supposed to reside permanently in their dioceses; the council punished the holding of several dioceses, which
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had been common up to then. The intentions of the council provided the bishops with sufficient tools for such a reform: Major seminaries were established to improve the education of the clergy, visitations held at regular intervals were intended to make it easier for the bishop to control his diocese, and synods were supposed to make certain that an exchange happened among the clerics of the diocese. The laity believed the impact of the new spirit of reform as well. The council firmly asserted church control over marriage, and church activities from the cradle to the grave were almost always accurately recorded. We need not, with Hubert Jedin, feel the breath of the Holy Spirit when imagining the passing of these decrees at the final session of the council in December 1563.6 That the council put together an extensive package of reforms, with the local bishops as the crucial pillars of the new spirit, is obvious even to less religiously sensitive minds. And if anyone should need an additional reverberation of this claim, images like the painting in figure 2.1, were and still are helpful in seeing such changes.7 This engraving influenced the tradition of images of the council, and not only because this piece of art, published by a French publisher by the name of Claudio Duchetti (or Claude Duchet) in nearby Venice in 1563, was cheap to buy, easy to transport, and thus the perfect souvenir for departing council members. Rather, what was crucial for the attractiveness of the motif was its clear message. According to the iconographic staging of this engraving, the collegial meeting of the bishops led the church out of its crisis. This image emphasized a collective group achieving unity by using a seating arrangement resembling an amphitheatre, where a free and strong counterpoint existed between the papal legates on their own bench and the council fathers sitting at eye level. Such images, and most of all the measures decided by the council, may be supposed to explain why the church of those days is still called the Church of Trent in handbooks and encyclopaedias of today. In 2010 Paolo Prodi, one of the greatest historians of papacy and the papal states, even identified a paradigm tridentino.8 By way of delimitation and reform, the proud council established the foundations for the renewal of Catholicism, and this resolute and dignified meeting finally gave an answer to the crisis of Reformation. The idea of a Trent era as decisively influenced by the council has come under fire in recent scholarship.9 Two main arguments can be identified in this debate. The first line of criticism is that the effect of the decisions has been grossly overestimated. Critics have pointed out that for a long time none of the Trent reform program was implemented in vast parts of Europe, with only some parts put into practice later.10 Scholars such as Simon Ditchfield further argue that even if something like Trent Catholicism existed, then it should be considered only one variant among others of the culture of the Catholic denomination.11 After all, as Volker Leppin has stated, the universal church was
Figure 2.1. The General Congregation of the Council of Trent in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in 1563. Anonymous, copperplate engraving (etching/engraving), 33.5 × 49.7 cm, Venice, originally published by Claudio Duchetti in Venice in 1563; here, a 1565 copy of Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae. Metropolitan Museum. Accession number: 41.72(3.70), Rogers Fund, transferred from the library, 1941. Public domain, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).
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much too varied to be terminologically lumped together, and the role of the lay people was too strong to believe in an exclusively top-down reform. In the second line of criticism, even Protestant Church historians such as Leppin state that the dogmatic rejection of the Reformation had not been nearly as harsh as scholars have long claimed.12 Moreover, neither did a uniform Catholic liturgy remain unchanged or float unaffected by historical events through the subsequent three centuries only to be changed as late as in the 1960s at the Second Vatican Council.13 Of course, nobody denies changes in the Catholic world. Yet, the real pillars of the reform were not the bishops who had been in the focus of the Council of Trent. Some recent scholars consider the papacy and the new orders, starting with the Jesuits, as being much more important than the bishops in these reforms.14 As a matter of fact, the papacy did not only confirm the decrees of the Council of Trent en bloc, but also obliged itself to them. At the same time, the popes undertook and assailed those tasks that the council fathers at Trent had been unable to embark on in the years following the council. As desired by the council, the pontiffs at first presented the creed often called Tridentine that in fact originated in Rome in 1564. The index of banned books followed that same year, the catechism in 1568, and the liturgical books in the years from 1568 to 1614. Thus, if something like a Tridentine Mass existed, it is due primarily to efforts of the popes who kept working on the liturgy over the decades, and not to the efforts of the exhausted council.15 Speaking of a Tridentine period of Catholic Church history whose typical features are a result of the Council of Trent and its spirit is, at the very least, a vulnerable position given this multifaceted criticism. John O’Malley spoke out precisely in favor of giving up this narrow view of a Tridentine reform and pointed consideration toward the broad variety of early modern Catholicism. Even if the image of a church decisively influenced by the Council of Trent has been deconstructed, and other images are predominant today—a critical view at Roman centralism and repression, the global perspective on the universal Catholic Church with its variety, the view at the lay people, even the women— one question stays unanswered: How could the name Tridentine Reform or Tridentine Church spread at all?16 Obviously the name Tridentine refers to a complex of events. The term places a very one-sided, if not wrong, emphasis on certain features in light of the current state of research. But, true or false are not suitable criteria for such names. After all, it is a fact that the names Tridentine Reform, Tridentine Church, and Spirit of Trent developed and prevailed in church history in the long run, even if current historic research believes the significance of the council to have been grossly overestimated. Thus, we should not judge the term using these criteria; instead we should analyze the process responsible for the development and establishment of this name.
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How the Tridentine Church Got Its Name Let us start with a simple question: Who among the contemporaries spoke of the Council of Trent at all? The short answer is, both friend and foe. The databases VD 16 and VD 17 record the printed publications from the German-speaking countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including a number of texts on Trent. This list includes the decrees themselves, of course, but also critical commentaries such as the 1574 Examen Concilii Tridentini (the examination of the council’s decrees) by the Brunswick superintendent Martin Chemnitz. His criticism of the individual regulations supplied German Lutheranism with theological arguments against the council well into the nineteenth century. He made the name of Trent widely and consistently known in this way.17 This evaluation applied no less to critics from the Catholic camp, who indeed existed. The most famous of them, the Venetian Servite monk Paolo Sarpi, breathed fire and brimstone at the popes who, in his opinion, had kidnapped the council. The popes, he stated, had taken possession of the council not in order to strengthen the position of the bishops, but to improve their own. What the elites at the papal court sought to prevent was a reform of the Curia including its financial practices, and this was precisely what the popes succeeded in, due to permanently perfidiously influencing the council. The only possible outcome under such circumstances, Sarpi concluded, was not a reform but rather a deformation of the church.18 After its first printing in London in 1619, Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent was republished in a number of editions and translations over the subsequent decades and centuries. In a religiously divided and increasingly church-critical Europe, his obviously trenchant and malicious criticism of Rome fell on sympathetic ears. On the one hand, this widespread interest guaranteed that the council itself as well as the place of its meetings became wellknown. And on the other hand, what was at the heart of Sarpi’s criticism had no effect whatsoever on the audience. This failure becomes obvious most of all in the anti-Sarpi publication the popes finally put on the market. The widely distributed printed history of the council by the Jesuit Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, first printed in 1656–57, was supposed to help spread a certain image of the council: the Roman one.19 Sforza Pallavicino agreed with Sarpi in one crucial point, and that was that the popes had steered the course of the council from a distance and that they had explicitly taken the lead after its end in 1563. In the service of Rome, the Jesuit argued that this intervention had not been a distortion of the church at the expense of the bishops but rather simply a political prudence in the service of the Holy Spirit. Obviously, the admission that the popes had taken over the council was not at all a blow to its reputation. Certainly any council or church meeting, especially one whose meetings happened completely without
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the pope, as was the case at Trent, was always a potential danger for Rome. All sides were aware of this conceivable risk for the papal power since at least the great reform councils of the fifteenth century. Whereas Sarpi regretted loss of the critical potential of a council over the Roman central authority, most Roman commentators believed that such a rebellious attitude following the tradition of conciliarism was no longer desirable. They stated that it was a good thing that the papacy had taken matters in its own hands at Trent and, with the help of the papal legates present, maintained control over what was happening. It was an even better thing that the popes monopolized the implementation of the council as a project of the Holy See and aggressively took up the cause of the Tridentine Reform after 1563. This interpretation of the progression of reforms is what we read in Sforza Pallavicino, and basically what we read in Hubert Jedin’s four-volume modern history of the council, which is still relevant. Obviously the council itself benefitted from this takeover in many ways, including how it was judged by contemporaries. In the seventeenth century the church meeting was increasingly praised in word and deed. In 1655 Queen Christine of Sweden, a recent convert to Catholicism, went on a pilgrimage to Trent to confess her new faith and its basic order at the place of holy decision-making.20 Historiography, which generally had mentioned the council only in passing in the first decades, spoke increasingly about the significance of the meeting at Trent and eventually of the successful implementation of its decisions.21 In other words, we already encounter a scholarly opinion in the seventeenth century that presented the council as a milestone of church history and definitely included something like a Tridentine Reform when describing its effects. That Antoine Ravaille Regnault published a theological pamphlet in 1607 that—for the first time, as far as I can see—mentioned the spirit of Trent (and its opinion) fits the mold.22 No matter how justified the objections by current researchers may be when it comes to the worldwide effect of the council, contemporaries marked the term Trent as connected with reform of the church, which was viewed as positive (from a Catholic point of view) and whose feature and shape were attributed to the council. But how could that be? How could a council become the epitome of successful reform when it was taken over by the pope and thus rendered irrelevant, whose successes were actually not due to itself but to other factors, and whose actual model of church reform by the local bishops had mostly been a failure?23 According to one thesis, strongly supported in this chapter, the answer is simply that the papacy monopolized the council and appropriated its terms Trent and Tridentine.24 At the very least, a council praised as the epitome of the church’s spirit of reform possessed a strong legitimating power for reform. Because the popes staged themselves as the executors of the council and called their own measures Tridentine, they redirected the legitimating power of the council and exploited it for its monarchic counterpart, the pontiff as the abso-
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lute master of the church. In doing so, the papacy felt no need to be topically tied to the original model of Trent. After all, terms can always be provided with new content and connotations as they develop over time. Thus, from then on Tridentine was what Rome called Tridentine.25 In the following section of this chapter I will sketch how this monopolization could be successful, which media and mechanisms were used in this context, and what the effects of such processes of renaming and reinterpretation were. In this context it must be noted that although they had not answered every question, the dogmatic decisions of the council were widely accepted.26 The oath that church office bearers had to swear from then on concerning the dogmatic decisions of the Council of Trent was soon widespread. Now every office bearer within the universal Catholic Church had to swear an oath on the Council of Trent as a foundation of the Roman Church. In this way, the council would always be connected to the image the church made of itself. Work on the liturgical books went just as smoothly. That the council desired, and in a way ordered, the standardization of the divine office, the missal, and the rituals was something the popes always explicitly emphasized in the bulls by way of which they put the reformed works into force. Already the fact that these documents appeared under the names “breviarium,” “missale,” or “rituale Romanum” made clear who had taken over control here.27 Normative texts such as the oath or the liturgical books contribute to keeping the name Trent present within the collective memory of the church, modifying the contents also connected this term to Rome’s interests. But also in the Curia’s daily correspondence with its nuncios and envoys, we encounter the term Trent again and again.28 This emphasis on the term hardly comes as a surprise since Rome’s diplomatic representatives to the European princes were considered one of the pope’s most important tools when it came to enforcing the Tridentine Reform. It was not a council that informed the nuncios about what they were expected to do—rather, such instructions were handed out directly from Rome. The pope himself decided how the spirit of Trent was to be assisted, whether the measures commanded were in accordance with the wording of the decrees or not. Thus, Trent as a term appeared permanently in the diplomatic correspondence, with its topical interpretation in the hands of Rome.29 That Rome decided from then on about what was considered Tridentine is not at all polemic, but rather can be understood literally. The bull “Benedictus Deus,” where Pope Pius IV fully accepted all the decrees of the council and obliged the papacy to execute these decisions, included a clause making any comment or interpretation of the council’s decrees forbidden and punishable. The pope thereby reserved the exclusive right to interpret the decrees. The papacy added two additional mechanisms to guarantee this monopoly of interpretation in practice. First, all sources such as letters, records, theses, memoirs,
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or other documents concerning the work of the council on the development of the decrees and the intentions of their originators were collected in Rome and closed away in a special Fondo Concilio (council fund) in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The published decrees were now to stand on their own without any hints as to how the council fathers might have expected them to be interpreted. Second, the papacy established a committee that was supposed to provide binding interpretations of the thus decontextualized decrees. Already in 1564 Pius IV delegated the papal monopoly of interpretation to the Congregatio pro executione et interpretatione Concilii Tridentini. This congregation—a governing board of several cardinals, a secretary, and other members—was in charge of executing the reform decisions all over the world and answering every question that might arise in this context. Anyone who wanted to know how the council had meant a certain sentence, a certain decree, and how a specific case was to be interpreted appropriately had to ask Rome directly.30 The congregation of the council in Rome now decided if a marriage in faraway Mexico was binding, if the Madonna on a painting in southern Italy actually might have rolled her eyes, if a priest with a disfigured face was still capable of executing his office and his parish should be expected to tolerate the sight of him, along with thousands of other questions.31 Thus, the members of the congregation determined what was Tridentine and what was not, and they continued to write, and even partly rewrote, the history of the council. This Rome-centered process did not change the label Tridentine because the Council of Trent became part of the name of the agency. Thus, anybody turning to Rome with a request received an answer on behalf of the congregation. In a way, this organization made the council and its authority sustainable even as it brought the council’s decrees and intentions fully under Rome’s control. The authority of the congregation of the council was not limited to dealing only with such matters of interpretation and implementation. Soon other tasks were added. In 1585, for instance, Sixtus V renewed the almost forgotten obligation that required bishops to travel ad limina (to the threshold), thus to the graves of the apostles in Rome and to report all matters in person and in writing to Rome. The congregation of the council dealt with all these reports.32 By the same process, the board soon was given the task of controlling the statutes of the diocesan and provincial synods. The Council of Trent had advocated for such meetings as a tool for the local churches and bishops to resolutely and independently bring on the reform. When reading the pages-long corrections required by the Roman board of the synods from Breslau to Toulouse, there is hardly anything left of this independence.33 That the Roman boards and procedures indeed preserved the name of Trent becomes overwhelmingly evident in the rich records left by the congregation of the council. Nonetheless, new communication methods, jurisdictions, and hierarchies developed under this
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label that diametrically contradicted the Tridentine ideal of the quasi-autonomous reformed bishop. Even Carlo Borromeo, the epitome of the Tridentine ideal of a bishop, believed this. As the archbishop of Milan he reshaped his diocese into a Tridentine model church in the decades following the council and produced a handbook outlining this Tridentine episcopal reform, in the narrowest sense, in his “Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis.”34 Even so, Rome’s appraisal of this work made obvious the degree of ambivalence with which the papal court still viewed the bishops’ initiatives. In 1602 the pope canonized Carlo Borromeo, but allowed him to be venerated only in the robes of a cardinal rather than those of a bishop. That is why we almost always encounter Saint Carlo Borromeo wearing the purple of the Curia elite rather than in his bishop’s robes in which he gained his actual historic significance.35 It swiftly becomes evident that not only normative texts and everyday speech could be used for reinterpretation. New interpretation of terminology and meaning emerged for ways of proceeding and authority structures, for hierarchies, for channels of communication and conventions of speech, as well as for religious rituals such as the veneration of saints and its interrelated production of images. As Roberto Pancheri has shown, the iconographic image of Trent was subject immediately to such efforts to control meaning while at the same time contributing to this process.36 Figure 2.2 demonstrates this shift of visual meaning. The basic pattern of this painting from the early 1590s in the Roman Church of Santa Maria at Trastevere is easily recognized. Depictions of the council beginning in 1563 expressed the self-confidence of this church meeting (see figure 2.1). This image, however, is preceded by an allegoric depiction of the church where the true church has defeated unfaith, symbolizing the intended message. In this Roman version, the true church wears a tiara, as does the pope; the coats of arms of both church and pope are displayed above the now clearly hierarchically organized council theatre. This arrangement emphasized the papacy as the actual organizer of the meeting at Trent, and thus it and not the council as such had led the reform of the church to victory. The image of Trent, which is here iconographically made concrete, is no longer that of a strong church meeting. It is the image of a strong, victorious papacy that has taken the reform into its own hands, though certainly in a somewhat modified way, and has finally enforced it in a much better and more uniform way than the local bishops, whom the council had originally intended for this work, had ever been capable of doing. The way in which this image interpreted the council was spread and succeeded with the mass of the believers deserves a closer analysis.37 For the moment, the findings here are sufficient to show that at the conclusion of a long process, an image of Trent prevailed that no longer bore a resemblance to the
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Figure 2.2. Pasquale Cati, Il Concilio di Trento e il Trionfo della Chiesa cattolica sull’Eresia (The Council of Trent and the triumph of the Catholic Church over heresy), 1590–93, Rome, Basilica Santa Maria in Trastevere, Cappella Altemps. Photo by Anthony Majanlahti. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
image of the council communicated by the sources. At first this transition was unproblematic, and it would stay that way for a long time. In the course of the debate on opening up the church held at the Second Vatican Council, Trent ultimately became the epitome of the early modern church. Some interpreted Trent to mean the true church, while others understood the term to mean an old, outmoded, outdated church. Conservatives cried, and continue to cry,“Back to Trent, to the Tridentine Mass.” Reformers, on the other hand, demanded a farewell to Trent. By this, they meant farewell to that kind of church that, as the critics projected in retrospect, had already looked more or less the same
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under Pius V as it did under Pius X.38 The course of the debate revealed very different interpretations of what was meant by Trent. For all sides, however, the term uniformly referred to the Roman version of the Council of Trent, thus the label that had developed over time. That understanding of the Tridentine Reform, although revering the memory of the council, put its implementation and interpretation into the hands of papacy, and thus opened the floodgates to a reinterpretation of the reform in the papal sense. On this discursive foundation, the above-mentioned naming of the Catholic Church as the Tridentine Church was able to push through in scholarship, as is evident in the research literature published since the 1950s.39 Strangely enough, this acceptance happened precisely at that moment the Tridentine era came to its end.40 Vatican II changed both the doctrine and the shape of the church to such an extent that it could no longer be recognized as the Tridentine Church. Perhaps the term Tridentine Church could be handled again only as a result of this historical distance. After the debates on the shape of the church, the term was hardly used anymore. Thus, nothing prevented its neutral use in historiography. This new use of the term became an invitation for scholars to call the term as such into question. The result has not only brought about fundamental reconsiderations of the concept of the era, such as O’Malley’s above quoted objections, but it has also led, not coincidently, to studies on the council itself. O’Malley, again not coincidently, published the most recent complete reconsiderations of the council, Trent: What Happened at the Council. Indeed, his title promised a depiction of what happened at Trent during the council there. At the same time, O’Malley unmasked what he called the real Trent. He argued that the myth of Trent has obscured the council, blocking rather than revealing what the council had really been about. He concluded that Rome had changed the council into this myth by monopolizing and reinterpreting it. To distinguish between these two developments, O’Malley introduced two terms he would use if he could: the real Trent for the council, and Trent (in quotation marks) for the image of the Council that the outlined process had produced over time.41 Even earlier, Giuseppe Alberigo separated the council as such from the later interpretation and implementation, which he called tridentinismo.42 In quite a similar way, Günther Wassilowsky suggested that scholars distinguish the terms Trent-like or Trentish, for the council itself, and Tridentine, for the myth Rome made of it.43 Against this background, one can understand why calling the church Tridentine has come under attack. The council, which has recovered its own history after the opening of the Vatican Archive after 1881, demanded its right.44 It wanted to be taken seriously without, perhaps indeed precisely against, its later reinterpretation. Without this reinterpretation, the price to be paid will be that it would be unable to maintain its world-historical significance.
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Conclusion What is the result of our analysis? In the terminological history of the semantic field Trent/Tridentine, several reinterpretations and shifts can be observed, the most significant being the monopolization of the council by the papacy. The de-historicizing of the council became a much easier task because the lack of access of the files left little more than the wording of the decrees remaining. With its absolute monopoly of interpretation, Rome made sure it supported the reinterpretation of the council and its intentions. This step-by-step romanization and papalization of the council used a variety of media to accomplish this monopolization. In addition to historiography, we encounter normative texts and the daily discourses of diplomatic affairs, as well as structures of authority, official communication paths, newly created procedures, religious rituals, and artistic visualizations. Together these genres and media contributed to what might be called the myth of Trent, the Roman variant of a narrative originally started in faraway Trent. The keyword myth brings us to the future research directions. John O’Malley and others have done much to unmask the myth of Trent. As a result of their work, it is now possible to go beyond unmasking and the sheer reconstruction of the here-sketched reinterpretation and to make the myth itself, its functions, and most of all its historical power, the focus of attention. The ideas connected to the term Trent served as a founding myth for the Roman Church of the modern age.45 The term was capable of providing the church with renewed strength and self-confidence after the crisis of the Reformation precisely because it reduced the complexity of the events. It also made a few core statements, such as successful renewal and the leading role of papacy in the context of the reform, the focus of attention. That the Catholic Church was able to lean on a common way of seeing itself in the self-image of a church united by the spirit of Trent, notwithstanding all the conflicts in detail, may be supposed to have allowed for the unity it claimed for itself. At the same time, this myth and its meaningful power was concentrated in the hands of the popes. Now formally the pontiffs were in charge of reforming daily life right down to the level of the parish. They claimed the exclusive right to decide about the guidelines of this reform. It is doubtful that the papacy of the Tridentine era was interested predominantly in realizing the reform in the sense of the council. Much more likely is that the Curia elite aimed at permanently claiming their own decision-making power through the centralization of the reform at the all-powerful congregation of the council, thereby symbolically presenting and factually creating papal sovereignty.46 Initially the founding myth maintained Rome’s power only in the back and forth resulting from a successful self-renewal. In the long run, the myth itself contributed to the recognition of Rome’s central position.
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Even below the highest levels of authority, the myth of Trent demonstrated its impact. The fact that the majority of German bishops did not adopt the reform decrees was doubtlessly due to, among other things, the unwillingness of these powerful territorial princes to make their undertakings subject to interpretation by Rome. Seen this way, the monopoly of interpretation held by the Roman congregation may have contributed to Germany only fully adopting the decisions of Trent in the nineteenth century.47 Nonetheless, Trent certainly served as a forceful point of dispute even among dioceses and parishes where the decrees were never officially promulgated. Some bishops in the Holy Roman Empire were willing to resign from their positions rather than passing decisions whose implementation they considered unthinkable, justifying their action as due to reason of conscience.48 Other bishops pointed their clerics to Tridentine decrees without ever having to formally publish them.49 The word Trent served as an effective short-hand explanation—whether one referred in the Trentish or Trent-like way to how the council and its decrees had to be strengthened against claims by Rome or made an argument in the Tridentine Way about the mythos of a council whose will was executed by the strong central power in Rome. The council served more than as guiding principle. Its decrees supported a normative direction worth emulating as a model.50 Thus, we cannot call the myth of Trent just an ideology, or a coolly calculated reinterpretation of a term by interested parties. Nevertheless, Trent also served as a strategic position in the context of debates by which one’s own interests could be enforced against local competitors by using the congregation in Rome to help reject those claims. A thorough analysis of how Trent was used as an argument at all levels of the church could reveal how broad the range of strategies and possibilities were. Such an analysis could also show how fundamentally the use of Trent to bolster one’s own cause contributed to rooting this founding myth in all spheres of the church. Such an analysis using the files of the congregation of the council would provide a fruitful starting point. These files might reveal how often this highest authority of interpretation sought compromises, how much latitude the ecclesiastical provinces could assert, and how long local resistance against Roman centralization lasted.51 Perhaps the outcome will be that the image of a strong center of power in Rome, which drove on the Tridentine reforms with bureaucratic efficiency and an iron hand, is just part of the myth. Indeed, this image was the foundation of Rome’s claims to supremacy and a means to centralize the decision-making power in Rome. We may suppose that the myth helped support this development. The image of a Roman superior power that, by way of its central authorities, determined the life of the church as far as to every topic and region may be supposed to turn out as being exaggerated, as a myth within the myth of Trent. On the whole, the myth of Trent presents itself as an
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extremely powerful factor of the Catholic world in the Early Modern Age and the opinions and actions of actors shaped its reality. That Trent is a real image of this reality might be as exaggerated as it is with any other myth. Yet, when researching the culture of the Catholic confession we should not underestimate how powerful this myth was and how much it contributed to shaping things. Methodically speaking, we should not only take care of objects and protect them from false names, but we also should take the names seriously: Whatever the spirit of Trent may have been, it was definitely very powerful. Birgit Emich is professor for early modern history at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. She researches early modern political and confessional cultures, particularly in Rome and the papal states. Her first book examined papal patronage and nepotism in seventeenth-century Roman Curia and their unexpected contributions to modernizing papal bureaucracy. Another monograph is concerned with the mechanisms of territorial integration in early modern state building. Currently she works on plurality in premodern Christianities.
Notes An Italian version of this chapter was previously published in Birgit Emich, “Dalla Chiesa tridentina al mito di Trento. Una rilettura storico concettuale,” Storica, vol. 21, issue 63 (2015): 39–66. Used with permission. 1. Wassilowsky, “Das Konzil von Trient”; and Wassilowsky, “The Myths.” The following was influenced as well by conversations with Günther Wassilowsky. We are currently planning a joint research project on the myth of Trent in cooperation with colleagues from a variety of countries. 2. Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? 3. See, e.g., Schatz, Allgemeine Konzilien, 211. Post-Trent, as it is occasionally found in the German-speaking countries, means the same as Church of Trent. 4. On the classical view at the Council of Trent, see Jedin, Geschichte des Konzilsvon Trient. Other important overviews include Prosperi, Il Conciliodi Trento; and Tallon, Le Concile de Trente. For another pivotal study, see Prodi and Reinhard, Das Konzil und die Moderne. Also see notes 26 and 42 in this chapter. 5. On the Council of Trent’s ideal of a bishop see Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils; and Braun, “Das tridentinische Bischofsideal.” 6. Jedin, “Das Konzil von Trient in der Schau des 20. Jahrhunderts,” 572. 7. On the changing visualizations of the council, see Pancheri, Il concilio di Trento. 8. Prodi, Il paradigma tridentino. 9. The current state of research moved ahead by a number of big congresses happening in Budapest, Freiburg im Breisgau, Löwen, and Trent on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the end of the council. The appropriate conference proceedings are: Catto and Prosperi, Trent and Beyond; François and Soen, The Council of Trent; and Wassilowsky and Walter, Das Konzil von Trient.
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10. Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Hersche speaks of Baroque Catholicism instead of Tridentine, and locates it most of all in Italy. 11. See, e.g., Ditchfield, “Carlo Borromeo.” 12. Leppin, “Spätmittelalterliche Theologie und biblische Korrektur.” 13. Ditchfield, “Giving Tridentine Worship Back its History.” 14. See, e.g., Ferlan, Dentro e fuori le aule. 15. On the codification work done by Rome, see Maron, “Die nachtridentinische Kodifikationsarbeit.” On the implementation of the liturgical reforms, see Kranemann, “‘In omnibus universi.” 16. In his recent work Simon Ditchfield is revising the picture of how the church functioned. The findings will be published under the title Papacy and People: The Making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion, 1500–1700 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). In the meantime, see Ditchfield, “Decentering the Catholic Reformation Papacy.” For a focus on Trent, see Ditchfield, “De-centering Trent.” 17. See Jedin, Das Konzil von Trient, 61–63. 18. On Sarpi and his work, see ibid., 83–93 19. On Sforza Pallavicino, see ibid., 104–18. 20. On Christina at Trent, including hints to other prominent visitors to these places of remembrance, see Wassilowsky, “Trient,” 405. 21. Jedin, Das Konzil von Trient. By a number of examples, Jedin demonstrates “that the Catholic historiography of the age of the Counter-Reformation had not yet realized the significance of the Council for the inner renewal of the Church” (46). The first scholar to fully realize the significance of all was Sarpi. However, he did not yet attribute to it “the removal but the confirmation of existing grievances” (136). The first to give up on this judgment and to admit “that the Council has bettered much in the Church” (137) was the French translator of Sarpi’s writing, Pierre Francois Le Courayer (1681–1776) in his London 1736 edition of Sarpi. 22. Regnault, Quaestio theologica, historica et iuris pontificii; later editions Toulouse (1644) and Antwerp (1706); this work resulted from the quarrel about grace. See Jedin, Das Konzil von Trient, 141n43. 23. Smolinsky, “Die Kirchen.” Today this contradiction is no longer overlooked but still rather tacitly accepted. For example, Smolinsky writes about the Council of Trent: “Its effect was highly estimated, so that the common language adopted the term Tridentine Catholicism. However, this way the Council’s power to reform is overestimated” (21). 24. Apart from the already mentioned works by Günther Wassilowsky, see also Ditchfield, “Trent Revisited”; Ditchfield, “Tridentine Catholicism”; and Reinhard, “Mythologie des Konzils von Trient.” This is not at all a unique thesis. After all, already Jedin admitted the papalization of the council. Under the keyword myth of Trent, however, some studies now pursue the development and purpose of this myth in detail. 25. For another description of a Tridentine ideology, see Alberigo, “From the Council of Trent to ‘Tridentism’.” Alberigo described such a Tridentine ideology, however, without discussing the mechanisms of spreading them, which are the focus here. 26. Of course, this is not meant to say that the dogmatic decrees had given clear answers to all questions; the quarrel about grace should be a warning of such assumptions. In this context we not only witness that the access to the documents at the Fondo Concilio was finally closed (Prosperi, Il Concilio di Trento, 93), but also what seems to be the first mentioning of the spirit of Trent as an argument in the theological debate (see note 22). This may have its functional counterpart in the use of the category spirit of
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27.
28.
29.
30. 31.
32. 33.
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Trent in the field of the reform debate. As the real message of the council, the spirit may be brought into position against understanding the decrees literally, both in the context of dogmatic debates and when it comes to implementing the reform decrees that sometimes, despite obvious violations of the decrees, was understood as being in accordance with the spirit of Trent. See, e.g., Braun, “Das tridentinische Bischofsideal.” Braun notes that on the reform attempts of the prince-bishops in the Holy Roman Empire: “These ways were not always what had been predetermined by the Council Fathers of Trent, however they could definitely be in accordance with the spirit of the Tridentinum” (319). Finding out more details of the history of the term spirit of Trent than it was possible in the here presented sketch is an urgent desideratum. Ditchfield, “Giving Tridentine Worship,” 216–19. That the establishment of relevant authorities such as the congregation for rites and ceremonies in 1588 must be understood as Rome’s answer to requests from the church all over the world and must thus rather be interpreted as the formalization of a proceeding demanded by the lower ranks instead of the intended establishment of an authoritarian control institution, as it is emphasized by Ditchfield, is no contradiction. For analyses of the role of Trent for diplomatic language refer most of all to the main instructions to the nuncios and less to the everyday correspondence with the nunciatures, see Fattori, “Vos romani urgetis”; Reinhard, “Kirchendisziplin”; and Ganzer, “Die Trienter Konzilsbeschlüsse.” On the correspondence with the nunciatures as a source on the implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent, see Jedin, “Nuntiaturberichte und Durchführung des Konzils von Trient.” On the role of the reform decrees for the correspondence with the nunciatures, see Reinhard, “Katholische Reform und Gegenreformation.” On the significance of the nunciatures in our context, see Ganzer, “Die Trienter Konzilsbeschlüsse.” Ganzer writes, “When it came to realizing the spirit of Trent, the nunciatures played quite a significant role” (33). Appropriate examples are necessary to demonstrate that sometimes the spirit of Trent was more important than the literal formulation of the decrees. Unfortunately, such a study is not possible here. On the significance of the congregation of the council in our context, see Wassilowsky, “Posttridentinische Reform.” There one also finds information about fundamental literature on the congregation of the council. This arbitrary list is the result of first impressions of the records from the Vatican Secret Archive [hereafter as ASV] SCC Positiones (Sess.). The example of a valid marriage in Mexico is found in Albani, “In universo christiano,” 71. I owe the citation about the disfigured priest to Brendan Röder who works on the topical field of irregularity in the project “Die Regierung der Universalkirche nach dem Konzil von Trient: Päpstliche Verwaltungskonzeptionen und -praktiken am Beispiel der Konzilskongregation zwischen früher Neuzeit und Zeitgeschichte,” headed by Benedetta Albani at the Max Planck Institut für Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt. The status relations are found in the records of the ASV, Congreg. Concilio, Relat. Dioc. As an almost arbitrary example from the registers of the congregation of the council, see ASV, Congreg. Concilio, Liber Lit. 8, fol. 14, letter to the Archbishop of Toulouse, 9 Apr. 1592, as well as “Nota ad Synodu Provincialem Tholosan,” 14v–24r, a detailed statement by the congregation of the council to the handed-in synod files, including demanded corrections. ASV, Congreg. Concilio, Liber Lit. 8, 298r–303r, appropriate material on the Diocese of Breslau of August, 1594.
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34. Borromeo, “Acta Ecclesiae.” On Carlo Borromeo, see Alberigo, “Carlo Borromeo”; and Alberigo, Karl Borromäus. For a compilation from the Swiss point of view, see Delgado and Ries, Karl Borromäus. 35. See Sallmann, “Reformatoren und Heilige,” 329. 36. See note 7. On the image theology of the council itself and its consequences, see, e.g., O’Malley, “Trent, Sacred Images.” 37. In this context e.g., the judicial and administrative reforms of the Innocentian Age around the year 1700 and their consequences for the image of papacy as well as the papalist offensive of the Pian era, including the first celebration of an anniversary of the council in 1863 need to be explored. These aspects will be taken into consideration in our intended research project (see note 1, this chapter). 38. Conceptually crucial was Bielmaier, Abschied von Trient. See also Ditchfield, “In Sarpi’s Shadow.” 39. Jedin is exemplary in discussing the Tridentine Church. At first Jedin never speaks of a Tridentine Reform, not even in his study of 1946 that deals explicitly with the question of naming. Then, however, in a lecture from 1963 that was published in 1964, he mentions “what we call the ‘Tridentine Reform’” ( Jedin, “Das Konzil von Trient,” 574). 40. For Jedin the Tridentine era was over in the 1940s: “Gia iniziando il mio lavoro sulla storia del concilio ero convinto che l’epoca tridentina della Chiesa era tramontata” ( Jedin, Storia della mia vita, quoted in Prodi, Il paradigma tridentino, 6n3). This insight, he states, had then become common knowledge with the Vaticanum II: (“è stato solo il concilio Vaticano II a trasformare quest’intuizione in patrimonio comune”). (Ibid.) 41. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened. O’Malley gives as the intention of his book “to make a little clearer the crucial distinction between ‘Trent’ and the closely related phenomenon, the Council of Trent.” (275). See also O’Malley, “The Council of Trent.” 42. Alberigo, “Du Concile de Trente au tridentinisme.” See also note 25. 43. See Wassilowsky, “Das Konzil von Trient.” 44. Fink, Das Vatikanische Archiv, 4–5. Of course, here one must also point to the editorial work of the Görres Society which, under the title Concilium Tridentinum, opens up the files of the council and publishes them in a scientific manner. 45. On the function of such a founding myth for institutions, see esp. Rehberg, “Die stabilisierende”; and Rehberg, “Weltrepräsentanz.” 46. Wassilowsky, “Posttridentinische Reform,” 157. This is the thesis by way of which, Wassilowsky advocates the intensive research of the files of the congregation of the council. 47. See Molitor, “Die untridentinische Reform.” 48. On the bishops of Münster, Wilhelm von Ketteler (1557) and Bernhard van Raesfeld (1566), see von Oer, “Münster,” 122–23. 49. See, e.g., the decree by Elector Ferdinand of Cologne for the diocese of Münster issued on 9 Sept. 1616 in Luttenberger, Katholische Reform, 467–72, source no. 104. 50. For a recent look at the emphasis of the ideal of a bishop as a role model, see Braun, “Das tridentinische.” Although the question of the council as an argument may connect here, the emphasis would be different. 51. First results by Philipp Zitzlsperger and Arne Karsten on the way in which the board dealt with the decree on images are a fine illustration of the board’s readiness to compromise, including the board members’ willingness to take local needs into consideration even if these were not completely in accordance with the wording of the decrees. See Zitzlsperger, Trient und die Kraft. For an exemplary study of the leeways and resistance
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in ecclesiastical provinces, see Cavarzere, La giustizia del Vescovo, 100–5. Cavarzere explicitly discusses the role of the congregation of the council here. He analyzes how the dioceses knew how to defend their autonomy by using the network of courts and appellations. In addition, he also demonstrates the local attempts to defend a varied religious landscape against the Tridentine pyramid of parish priest—bishop—pope by exploring examples of the matters handled locally. Given his findings, Cavarzere convincingly suggests that centralization and pluralization should not be understood as a contradiction but rather as a kind of dualism that requires nuance. For this purpose, he also proposes to grasp the role of Trent in a different way: not as a norm or reality, but rather as a horizon of expectation used by various actors and institutions to orient their behavior.
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Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. “Die stabilisierende ‘Fiktionalität’ von Präsenz und Dauer: Institutionelle Analyse und historische Forschung.” In Institutionen und Ereignis: Über historische Praktiken und Vorstellungen gesellschaftlichen Ordnens, edited by Reinhard Blänkner and Bernhard Jussen, 381–407. Göttingen, 1998. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. “Weltrepräsentanz und Verkörperung: Institutionelle Analyse und Symboltheorien—eine Einführung in historischer Absicht.” In Institutionalität und Symbolisierung: Verstetigung institutioneller Ordnungsmuster in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, edited by Gert Melville, 3–49. Cologne, 2001. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Katholische Reform und Gegenreformation in der Kölner Nuntiatur 1584–1621.” Römische Quartalschrift 66 (1971): 8–65. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Kirchendisziplin, Sozialdisziplinierung und Verfestigung der konfessionellen Fronten: Das katholische Reformprogramm und seine Auswirkungen.” In Lutz, Das Papsttum, 1–13. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Mythologie des Konzils von Trient.” In Catto and Prosperi, Trent and Beyond, 27–43. Sallmann, Martin. “Reformatoren und Heilige als Brennpunkte konfessioneller Gedächtniskultur: Martin Luther, Karl Borromäus und Johannes Calvin im Vergleich.” In Delgado and Ries, Karl Borromäus, 321–38. Schatz, Klaus. Allgemeine Konzilien—Brennpunkte der Kirchengeschichte. Paderborn, 1997. Smolinsky, Heribert. “Die Kirchen in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts: Kräfte und Mächte im Ringen um Glauben und Leben.” In Rom in Bayern: Kunst und Spiritualität der ersten Jesuiten, edited by Reinhold Baumstark, 19–29. Munich, 1997. Tallon, Alain. Le Concile de Trente. Paris, 2000. Wassilowsky, Günther. “Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur.” In Wassilowsky and Walter, Das Konzil von Trient, 1–29. Wassilowsky, Günther, and Peter Walter, eds. Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur. Münster, 2016. Wassilowsky, Günther. “The Myths of the Council of Trent and the Construction of Catholic Confessional Culture.” In François and Soen, The Council of Trent, vol.1: 69–98. Wassilowsky, Günther. “Posttridentinische Reform und päpstliche Zentralisierung: Zur Rolle der Konzilskongregation.” In Reformen in der Kirche: Historische Perspektiven, edited by Andreas Merkt, Günther Wassilowsky, and Gregor Wurst, 138–57. Freiburg im Breisgau, 2014. Wassilowsky, Günther. “Trient.” In Erinnerungsorte des Christentums, edited by Christoph Markschies and Hubert Wolf, 395–412. Munich, 2010. Zitzlsperger, Philipp. “Trient und die Kraft der Bilder. Überlegungen zur virtus der Gnadenbilder.” In Wassilowsky and Walter, Das Konzil von Trient, 335–372.
CHAPTER 3
Triplets
The Holy Roman Empire’s Birthing of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed in 1648 DAVID MAYES
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tandard histories have stated that Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed populated the territories of the Holy Roman Empire from the later sixteenth century onward. This chapter argues that, instead, Christians populated those territories until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and that Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed did so in the wake of it.1 Although these three terms circulated in the territories prior to 1648, they did so typically in adjective form and carried a powerful charge because they were disputed, mutually invoked, contested, rejected, purposely not used, or used pejoratively as terms of abuse. Similar patterns apply to the terms evangelical and Protestant, whose post1648 status, like that of the other three, has been projected anachronistically onto the pre-1648 empire and thereby distorted its history. Moreover, pre1648 evidence suggests that those in governing, ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and urban circles trafficked in the terms frequently, if not regularly, while others, especially in rural areas, did so seldomly, if not rarely. Not until the empire officially transitioned from a polity of Christian monism to Christian pluralism in 1648 did the three names gradually become naturalized and codified and also penetrate farther into common discourse. This chapter is based principally on records from Hessian landgraviates, the county of HanauMünzenberg, and imperial abbey of Fulda, with supporting evidence from elsewhere. Whether the conclusions apply throughout the empire remains to be seen, yet these territories’ circumstances resembled those in other territories and perhaps other European polities. This foray may thus hold broader heuristic value.
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Terminology in Creeds, Publications, and Policies The three parties today called Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed had formed by the later sixteenth century as pressures compelled each to compose a confessio (confession of faith). Although the confessions are now known by these denominational names, at the time each was simply Christian in name, exclusive of other claimants, and formulated to denote and fashion true Christians. Those called Catholics by people today spoke of themselves as Catholische Christen (Catholic Christians), their religion as “the true Catholic religion founded in Christ,” and their church as “the holy Christian Catholic Church.”2 But adherents of the 1530 Augsburg Confession and 1531 Apology of the Augsburg Confession invoked the name Catholic as well. For them, persons who belonged to the “universal, Catholic, Christian, holy Church” were those across the world who truly believed in Christ.3 As the two parties drafted the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg, neither let the other call itself Catholic because of the word’s superior connotation of holy and universal.4 Those outside the empire operated similarly. Bruce Gordon has asserted that John Calvin “would have hated the idea of Rome being called Catholic” and Peter Marshall has noted that, in England, “‘Protestants’ . . . as subscribers to the ancient creeds . . . were professedly Catholic, and they formally denied their opponents any legitimate share in the ancient title.”5 Zurich minister Johann Jakob Breitinger, in a 1640 publication concerning what he called the Reformed-Catholic faith, stated, “In Greek and Latin the word is ‘Catholic.’ . . . The word Catholic means universal in our German language. As it is translated into German, so we say: I believe [in] one holy universal Christian church.”6 At Augsburg in 1555 the two sides settled on identifying the one as “the estates adhering to the old religion” and “the old church” and the other as the “adherents of the Augsburg Confession.”7 Names they used away from Augsburg, however, were a different matter. While adherents of the Augsburg Confession tried to prevent adherents of Rome’s religious authority from claiming Catholicity by derisively calling them Papists and Romanists, Roman authorities after 1555 grieved that a German prince adhering to the Augsburg Confession could no longer be prosecuted for heretical wickedness. Undeterred, Rome’s adherents kept pressing their religion’s exclusive claims to sacred terms. In 1576 the archbishop of Mainz affirmed his as the “true, ancient Christian and Catholic religion.”8 In 1582 Emperor Rudolph II demanded that all subordinates in Upper Lusatia confess “the holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman church” and also “damn, reject, and curse” as “heresies” that which opposed it or the decrees of the Council of Trent.9 Four years later, officials in Habsburg Austrian lands had to do likewise to “dangerous and misleading religions and doctrines” and to “confessions and sects, whatever they
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be called,” that had been damned by the holy councils.10 Near Fulda, in 1576, Simon Ruppert repented of having “given myself to the fleshly lusts of Lutheran teaching” and “led my lambs [at the Thulba cloister] astray” from “the correct, true Catholic (doctrine)” and therefore “from the right path.”11 Like other coreligionists, Ruppert counterposed the adjective Lutherisch with Christian, thereby condemning the former as not Christian. Similarly, the Neuhof minister in 1599 set the “Catholic religion” against the “Calvinist heresy.”12 Accordingly, Fulda authorities in the early seventeenth century stated how some subjects “have not aligned themselves with our true religion” but rather “set themselves obstinately against it.” They prohibited the recalcitrants from attending “the forbidden unCatholic church” and took measures “so that the seduced souls at this locale may therefore be won sooner and brought back to . . . the Christian church.”13 They also carried out a reformation so as to remove any semblance of erring religion and they spoke of subjects, parishes, and clerics who conformed to it as “reformirt” (reformed) and persons who had not conformed to it as “disobedient Christians.”14 Integral to that reformation was the Bible. Rome’s adherents, like their adversaries, invoked God’s Word and believed their adversaries had opposed the Holy Scriptures.15 During the same period, the parties today called Lutheran and Reformed continued to claim the term Catholic for themselves.16 Among the latter group, Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel heralded “the ancient Catholic and Apostolic Religion” in a 1575 letter to the Palatine elector.17 Heidelberg professor David Pareus in 1593 explained how “true Catholic doctrine” existed in the Electoral Palatinate churches because they had been purged of “papal leaven.”18 Conrad Bergius in Frankfurt an der Oder iterated the same notion a generation later.19 Among the former group, Tilemann Heshusius sought to defend “our Christian, Catholic faith, and confession” and the remnant on earth that constituted the “holy, universal, Catholic church of God” against “the papal superstitution, error, and atrocity.”20 “The true Christian church,” added Dresden court minister Matthias Hoë von Hoënegg, in a publication declaring “the called Lutheran” faith to be rightly Catholic, “is called Catholic because it has doctrine which is Catholic, that is, which Christ commanded to be preached to all creatures.”21 Similarly, a Hersfeld minister pleaded in 1606, amid official changes to religious practice, that ecclesiastical rites not oppose “holy, divine scripture and the Catholic Christian church.”22 In this way the adherents of the Augsburg Confession countered their critics’ use of the term Lutheran by persistently asserting their right to the term Catholic. Lübeck superintendent Nicolaus Hunnius complemented these rhetorical approaches with one of his own. He likened the “papists” to the dog in Aesop’s fable that dropped the meat in its mouth after grasping for the meat’s reflection in the water. They “gape so much at the name Catholic (which, without true faith, worship service, and life, is nothing more than a shadow) [that]
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they have lost the correct, Christian, Catholic faith and worship service.”23 Did they not realize, he wondered, that the Lord’s disciples were, at Antioch, first called “Christian” and not “Catholic,” and that scholars in Mainz (in 1513 and 1551) and Basel (in 1512) had translated the word “Catholica” into German as “Christlich”? Like other opponents of Rome, Hunnius did not regard the Roman Church as Catholic. No Christian, he insisted, at risk of losing his eternal salvation, should consider it “the Christian church,” because the papists had long since departed from it.24 Naturally, Rome’s adherents denied that those called evangelical (Evangelischen) were Catholisch or that “the Pope had fallen away from or suppressed God’s Word.”25 The “old, Catholic, Roman Church is the true Christian church,” proclaimed the Jesuit theologian Adam Tanner, and it “alone has borne and preserved the Catholic name,” the name “by which it is called by the whole world.”26 Those called Lutherans by people today titled their confessional standard, issued in 1580, the Christian Book of Concord and prefaced it as the embodiment of pure and Christian doctrine of the truly believing church. Although it has been conventionally known as the compiled confessions of the Lutheran Church, Lutheran was a designation the religion’s adherents could readily reject. That included Martin Luther, who issued this directive in 1522: “I ask that men make no reference to my name; let them call themselves Christians, not Lutherans. . . . Saint Paul . . . would not allow the Christians to call themselves Pauline or Petrine, but Christian. How then should I—poor stinking maggotfodder that I am—come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name? . . . Let us abolish all party names and call ourselves Christians, after whose teaching we hold. The papists deservedly have a party name, because they are not content with the teaching and name of Christ.”27 The Book of Concord, at least, heeded his injunction. Every mention of Luther in it pertained to the person Martin Luther, except for one instance, namely in Article 15 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, written by Philipp Melanchthon in 1531. There, while criticizing adversaries for not preaching the word of God, Melanchthon wrote, “This blessed doctrine, the precious Gospel, they call Lutheran.”28 Charles V had reinforced the label by calling himself the “Christian” emperor and defender of the church and associating “Lutherisch” with the concepts of sect and heretical.29 Adversaries thus used the term Lutherisch abusively and to denote illegality. As Jacob Andreä commented in 1589, his party had not given themselves the name; the papists had hung it on them and his party had to suffer being called it. Yet, he wrote, his people did not shame themselves because of it, since what mattered was not the name but the doctrine.30 Sovereigns who adhered to his party’s doctrine unabashedly proclaimed “our true and Christian religion” and “our true Christian religion of the Augsburg Confession.”31 Their territorial authorities called themselves “Christians” and
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directed pastors and visitors to report on any “Calvinists, Papists, Anabaptists, Schwenkfelders and other erring people.”32 After Calvinism entered the empire in the 1550s, those who had been adhering to the Augsburg Confession sharply demarcated their Christian faith from it. In 1578, for example, Andreä and coreligionist theologians condemned what they called the “Calvinist heresy” amid efforts to gain princely subscribers to the 1577 Formula of Concord.33 They also claimed the word reformed for themselves. The Formula of Concord recalled the Christian electors, princes, and estates of the 1520s that had “embraced the pure doctrine of the Holy Gospel and had their churches reformed in a Christian manner according to God’s Word” and who presented at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg a “common confession of the reformed churches, whereby our reformed churches are distinguished from the Papists and other repudiated and condemned sects and heresies.”34 In the early 1600s, when landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel instituted controversial reforms, the noble Rauen zu Holzhausen objected that the wider regions had already been “reformed” and “informed and instructed in the evangelical truth” by his grandfather, landgrave Philipp.35 Moritz’s reforms, echoed a Hersfeld minister, implied that “our ancestors, we, and all reformed churches at the time of Luther” did not serve the Eucharist correctly.36 For them, what had needed reform was reformed. Those called Reformed by people today, however, disagreed and believed rather that their religion was true Christianity. Electoral Palatinate authorities in their 1563 church ordinance delineated the “main articles of our Christian faith.”37 In 1606 landgrave Moritz described his reforms as “for the honor and furtherance of all matters of God and his elected Christian Church,” and his territory’s 1610 Consistory ordinance championed “the pure and whole teaching, and ceremonies of our Christian Religion.”38 In 1643 the City Hanau authorities touted “the true Christian Reformed religion.”39 Adversaries, by contrast, slandered the adherents as Calvinist or Calvinists (Calvinisch, Calvinisten) and, at times, Zwinglians (Zwinglianer). The nobles around the Boyneburg district, opponents of Moritz’s reforms, mocked the five local ministers as old and “Calvinist” and one of them as “a wicked Calvinist cleric.”40 The ministers begged the landgrave that, at the next synod, he link them not to Calvin or any other men but rather to Christ and his true Word alone, and that Calvin be understood as merely a conduit. Then one could say they were instituting the Christlike and apostolic breaking of the bread instead of something that could be “called Calvinist or its analog.”41 In 1594 a Windecken minister wished not to be harassed as a Calvinist or vexed by having the baptism and Lord’s Supper derided as “Calvinist, as one calls it.”42 The Eschwege mayor told interrogators in 1608 that the breaking of the bread was not customary in any “Christlichen Evangelischen” (Christian evangelical) church, rather it was so in the “Calvinist” one alone.43 Electoral Palatinate court minister Daniel Tossanus decried how people slapped such degrading names on his religion. He claimed that most of those
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doing it, including ministers, had read “neither the Augsburg Confession nor our books” but rather had picked up the habit from somewhere else.44 His coreligionists, however, proved just as willing to defame adversaries. When Count Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Lichtenberg inherited the throne of Hanau-Münzenberg in 1642, church authorities of the city of Hanau feared he would set up an opposing religious exercise and complained that the court minister had begun “to hold Lutheran schooling.”45 The lord of Fleckenstein added to their alarm in 1643, noting how “Lutheran” citizens wanted to baptize or had their children baptized “Lutherisch.” If it continued, then “our current, irresponsible negligence” would endanger the glory of God, squander the heathen-sanctifying truth, and precipitate the decline and demise of the pure church until it damned future generations to hell.46 In settings where Rome was publicly opposed, the term Evangelisch circulated typically among governing, clerical, and aristocratic circles. They applied it as an adjective to modify nouns such as religion, truth, minister, sermon, princes, estates, reformation, and parish post.47 If they denoted persons with it, they did so in a pre-1648 context of Christian monism—that is, to denote true Christians as opposed to false claimants. Hence, the Marburg consistory contrasted things “Evangelischen” to popery.48 Church visitors in Kassel asserted “evangelical truth” against “idolatry,” “anti-Christian errors,” and “papal abhorrences.”49 The Hesse-Darmstadt landgrave pitted the evangelical religion against the papal religion.50 Their use of Evangelisch reflects the word’s status in a context of Christian monism and not the denominational descriptor it would become after 1648. Although Rome’s adherents might occasionally call their adversaries socalled Evangelische, more often they did not because the word signaled unassailable authority and, above all, because they viewed themselves as caretakers of the holy Evangelium, tasked with protecting it against false Christians. As those of the Saint Clare convent in Nuremberg stated, “No one would consider and call [a thing] Euangelium that slanders the Pope, Emperor, bishops, priests, [and] monks.”51 They noted how some locals had praised them as good Christians and “evangelical persons” (Euangelische Menschen).52 Similarly, Franciscus Agricola condemned “the apostate, carnal heretics, who, untruthfully, call themselves Euangelisch” and Johannes Nas countered Rome’s adversaries with the “evangelical truth.”53 They and their coreligionist theologians, including contemporaries of Luther, claimed Evangelium and its cognates exclusively for themselves.54 Usually, they called their adversaries Lutherisch, Calvinisch, and Zwinglianer and linked the names to the concepts of sect, heresy, falsity, error, and “the community and gathering of the Antichrist.”55 They also denounced the Augsburg Confession as not true Christianity.56 In summary, parties that disputed true Christian religion prior to 1648 exclusively claimed the sacred terms Christian, Catholic, Apostolic, Reformed, and Evangelium. Those parties included the Anabaptists and Schwenkfelders.57
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Terminology at the Local Level within Territories Sovereigns of the Hessian landgraviates, Hanau-Münzenberg, and Fulda, adhered to and generally enforced true Christianity within their territories. Such duties had become normalized in the fifteenth century and were steadily formalized in the sixteenth century. The 1526 Diet of Speyer affirmed each estate’s responsibility to determine religious life by acting “in such a way as he will be responsible for to God and the emperor.”58 The 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg then granted the right to each sovereign to command subjects to conform to his chosen religion (a principle later known as cuius regio eius religio), or else emigrate. That religion, regardless of the confession or any confessional change, was officially Christian. Consequently, the name Christian continued, seamlessly from the fifteenth century, to be the legal and codified name in the territories examined here. Positive associations with the names Catholisch, Lutherisch, and Reformierte are to be interpreted against this backdrop of Christian monism. For example, in the early seventeenth century a Hünfeld person reportedly declared that he was “a Lutheran man.” In another report, a nobleman of Boyneburg indicated where one could “hear a good Lutheran sermon.” A resident in Hammelburg and another in Marburg each stated that he had been raised in the “Lutheran religion” and held it to be true. A handful from Burghaun wrote that they had been “baptized in the Lutheran religion and instructed in its teaching since youth.”59 When read today, one reflexively calls such persons Lutherans, yet doing so misses the historical connotation of the usage. Adherents associated with Lutherisch on grounds that it was associated exclusively with Christ, Christianity, and the name Christian. On this understanding Wittenberg professor Leonhard Hutter based his 1597 response to “the Calvinist devil,” who, while reiterating Luther’s 1522 directive, declared that “a pious Christian cannot and should not in any way call himself Lutherisch.”60 “We agree with the Calvinists,” replied Hutter, “that one should not call oneself Lutherisch but Christian,” for “we have been baptized not in Luther but in Christ” and “have . . . our new birth not from Paul, Cephus, Apollos, much less from Luther,” rather “solely and alone from Christ.” Yet, Hutter rationalized, “a Christian can call himself Lutherisch” and do so “with a good conscience” because it would “dissociate him from Sacramentarians, Papists, Anabaptists, and other heretics.”61 Daniel Jacobi expressed it this way in 1615: “Calvinists do not have a correct foundation and basis, and because of it the true Reformed Lutheran church cannot be agreed upon with them.”62 The fluidity of the names Catholisch, Lutherisch, and Reformierte was demonstrated by Gemeinde members in the towns of Eschwege and Hersfeld.63 When interrogators in Eschwege in 1608 demanded conformity to Moritz’s reforms, Georg Beck replied that his father “had been a minister [and] com-
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manded him to abide by [the] lutherischen faith and doctrine[;] nevertheless, whatever his neighbors and Christians would do, he would do, too.”64 Conventional discourse would have it that Beck was a Lutheran yet willing to become a Reformed, or that he was merely shifting from one spot under the umbrella of Protestantism to the other. Both are anachronistic. Beck was and intended to continue as a Christian, and if Lutherisch were not associated with the name, then he would associate instead with whatever was. Other members, including widows and those who positively associated with Luther’s catechism and Bible, expressed the same, vital interest to continue as Christians, and not be severed from the name, amid the confessional change of religion. A hesitant Georg Freund stated that he “cannot say [whether] he would become unchristian” by communicating with the breaking of the bread.65 Martha, a widow, was more assured: “She had lived her whole life as a pious Christian and will continue to do so” by communicating.66 “Whatever his lord Christ commanded and taught him,” testified Hans Landau, “that is what he will follow, for then he is certainly a Christian.”67 Orthia Weissen answered, “When she dies as a Christian,” she hoped one would, “as with other Christians, inter her in the earth.”68 Anna Wacker added that if she should “not receive a Christian burial, then she will have to commend it to God.”69 Their testimonies point to a certain paradox. Gemeinden in these territories showed no compulsion to hoard all sacred terms to themselves like theologians and sovereigns did. Consequently, evidence suggests that oppositional terminology as well as positive associations with, for example, the charged name Lutherisch may have first started to become standardized at the grass-roots level, particularly in towns, long before the Peace of 1648 authorized the three disputing religions and thereby set them on course to become formal denominations. Those such as Andreä and Hutter, by contrast, had a complicated association with Lutherisch. Yet, whereas they would suffer the name so long as they believed the doctrine associated with it to be Christian, those in local Christian Gemeinden might readily slip in and out of any association with the name and, all the while, seamlessly remain Christian. Enabling and encouraging them to do this, amid stasis as well as any confessional change of religion, was a Christian monism that was not confessionally but rather communally defined and locally based. For members in Eschwege and Hersfeld, whatever the local Christian Gemeinde did with regard to Moritz’s reforms was Christian and they would direct their actions accordingly. Many men and women plainly stated this with similar refrains such as “whatever [the] whole Gemeinde and pious Christians do, so would she” and “wherever the whole Gemeinde leaned, there he would have to follow, too.”70 Confessionally framed history with anachronistic naming practices might conclude that the individuals were converting or indifferent or ambiguous, or that they were just politically savvy. A communally framed context free of these
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practices, by contrast, would conclude that they sought to affirm themselves as Christians and their place in the “Christliche Gemeinde.” While keeping an eye on their sovereign’s demands, they took care not to distinguish themselves from the local Christian corpus and therefore looked for a cue from it. Claus Schmerfeld had nothing against the reforms and acknowledged that they aligned with God’s word, but he could not have brought himself “to be the first” to signal his conformity to them.71 Gotthard Reiger testified that he wanted to “be a follower of the Christian Gemeinde” of Eschwege and that “it would be disconcerting to him” should he be the first to conform.72 Furthermore, both those who invoked their conscience and those who pleaded an inability to judge the reforms often expressly tied their ultimate decision to the local body of Christians. In his conscience, said Hans Herwig, he could not consent “to this reformation,” but “if his conscience prompted him, and his neighbors would go [to communicate], then he would go.”73 A handworker confessed he “was not knowledgeable enough” to speak about the reforms and “referred himself once again to the Gemeinde.”74 Such local Gemeinden, foremost the rural ones, typically expressed an unopposed notion of Christianity and pursued locally based, non- or a-confessional interests such as improving their status within the wider parish and promoting the positive side of paired opposites, namely, build and betterment versus ruin and perish, custom versus novelty, peace versus discord, and common good versus private good.75 With the religious exercise installed in their local church, one that was Christian in name, they affirmed themselves as Christians and their Gemeinde as Christian, as their ancestors had done. Christian monism clarifies a few more naming matters in pre-1648 territories. One concerns the language surrounding Untertanen (subjects). Subjects were, self-evidently, to be Christians, and therefore authorities simply called them subjects or our subjects. Occasionally, they elaborated. The protesting estates at Speyer in 1529 cited “our Christian subjects.”76 Marburg church authorities in the 1610s noted “subjects who show themselves to be Christian” and who “behave in a Christian manner.”77 Landgrave Georg of Hesse-Darmstadt wrote in 1635 of “all our subjects, as obedient Christians.”78 Subjects themselves typically self-identified in the same way. Hammelburg town councillors, adherents of the Augsburg Confession, called themselves “Christian subjects” in a 1604 written plea to their sovereign, the Fulda abbot.79 One finds an occasional exception. The Völkershausen priest in 1629 mentioned the “Catholic subjects” who resided there and a party at the 1631 Leipzig Convent referenced certain “evangelical subjects.”80 But here, too, each author viewed them as Christians in contrast to those who were not Christian. The priest contrasted the Catholic subjects with those who displayed so-called heretical obstinance and, in the Leipzig case, evangelical subjects were allegedly oppressed by what they called the tyranny of Catholic estates and were aggrieved in body and possessions in the most unchristian fashion.
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A second point concerns the word zugetan, which connoted being affixed, committed, bound, or attached to something. In religious discourse, one hears of a person committed to “our religion,” “our true religion,” “a false religion,” “their religion,” “our confession,” “to the public exercise of the standing religion,” “the ten commandments,” and the “Augsburg Confession.”81 Rome’s opponents wrote negatively of “a number of estates committed to the Roman religion,” while Rome’s adherents affirmed those who were “committed to the Catholic religion.”82 Hammelburg officials declared themselves Christians in that they were committed “to the evangelical, unfalsified religion and none other.”83 After Moritz demanded that one commit oneself to his reforms, a married couple who “would not consent to communicate” were described as ones who had not committed.84 Pre-1648 usage of zugetan, then, typically denoted persons who had consciously and publicly committed themselves to a religion or confession. A third point pertains to certain names’ development and oppositional terminology. Although Augsburg Confession adherents still invoked the term Catholic up to the Westphalian proceedings, Rome’s adherents tended to gain the upper hand in the public relations battle over it, just as the so-called Reformed did with the name Reformed. The Marburg consistory normally labeled Rome’s adherents as papists but could also be heard calling them “Catholische.”85 Protesting imperial estates in 1631 identified opponents at times as “those who call themselves Catholic” and at others as “the Catholic estates.”86 In the territories examined here, whenever the term “Catholic” became associated with the religion headed by Rome, adversaries might demonize Rome’s adherents with the name itself. In 1599 Johann Beier of Rommerz allegedly told a Neuhof carpenter that his “Catholic religion is false,” tacitly ceding the name Catholic to the other’s religion but simultaneously denying its orthodoxy.87 A Völkershausen priest in the late 1620s reported how opponents called his coreligionists “Catholic dogs,” thereby linking the name Catholic with a sub-human creature.88 Rome’s adherents played the same game. Because Augsburg Confession adherents seemed to gain the upper-hand on the term Evangelisch, Rome’s adherents used the term against them. Georg Witzel, a former coreligionist with Luther, warned of the deadly contagion of “new evangelical sects” and Ingolstadt professor Gregory of Valencia mockingly addressed his opponents as the “leaders of new evangelical sects” before attacking their theology as false and unchristian.89 Finally, discrepancies existed between the naming practices in everyday territorial life and those found in printed works. In the territories, people typically used the adjective forms Lutherisch and Catholisch, for example, but in publications both the adjective and noun forms of the names regularly appeared (e.g. Lutheraner, Lutheristen, Lutheranos, Catholicos).90 Publications that advocated irenicism or coexistence accentuated the trend.91 The contrast between the print world and territorial world was more glaring with the term Protestant. In published works, the word protestierende (protesting) emerged by the late
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1530s, and then more regularly over the next century.92 Compared to Evangelisch, protestierende was used even more exclusively in print by governing and intellectual elites and usually as an adjective for specific nouns: electors, princes, and estates. In handwritten, territorial records examined for this chapter, the word protestierende appeared very rarely. Two exceptions were in correspondence pertaining to the 1631 Leipzig Convent and in a 1626 anonymous history of the Hessian Church, in which the author identified those gathered at Naumburg in 1561 with the word.93 In publications, the Latin noun Protestantes surfaced by the mid-sixteenth century, while the German noun Protestanten seems to have come later and comparatively less often.94 Tellingly, none of the three—protestierende, Protestantes, Protestanten—appeared in the recorded parlance of pre-1648 territorial subjects, who likely would not have recognized the terms or regarded them as relevant.95 To interpret the religious interests of local Gemeinden, especially peasant ones, as Protestant misconstrues them and further ossifies an institutionalized trope.96
Christian Pluralism and Naming after Westphalia No confessional group’s exclusive ambitions prevailed universally. Instead, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), imperial delegations at the Congress of Westphalia (1643–48) reached a settlement concerning disputed religion in the empire. Most importantly, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia declared, for all intents and purposes, the exact equality of the three confessional religions.97 If Luther’s words and the response to them had broken a century-long deadlock over reform in the empire,98 then the 1648 Peace broke an equally long deadlock over mutually exclusive confessional claims to Christianity. At the imperial level, the transition to Christian pluralism compelled each confessional party to concede that the other two parties could also invoke the name Christian. One can regard this step as the sine qua non for Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed to come into existence in the eyes of the empire and the territories examined here. In time, the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed became naturalized, legalized, and codified. The 1648 Peace itself started to bear witness to this. One party of adherents was identified as Catholic, one as the adherents of the Augsburg Confession, and one as those called Reformed. The word Lutheran did not appear in the 1648 Peace, perhaps because it was too charged. Nevertheless, the 1648 Peace effectively caused the name Lutheran to become naturalized, too. Whereas, for example, in 1647 the Hanau Count Friedrich Casimir wrote of his “evangelical called Lutheran religion,” a year later he stopped using the word called.99 A similar phenomenon played out at the territorial level. A prince’s religion was no longer Christian in contrast to another prince’s false religion. Rather,
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his bore the name Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed, and the other prince’s religion one of the other two names. Moreover, no longer could the prince enforce the exclusive exercise of or conformity to his religion. The 1648 Peace legislated concerning the public exercise, private exercise, or devotional practice of multiple religions in the territories. Prior to Westphalia, if a prince interpreted the right granted in the 1555 Peace exclusively in his favor and strictly enforced it, then the territorial border doubled as the line of separation between his religion and any differing form. The 1648 Peace allowed that line to be shifted to within a territory. Eventually, territories had multiple ecclesiastical networks and clerical staffs that contended with one another, most often bitterly, over parishioners, properties, and space. Too, the networks and ministers became codified with the naturalized names, as did local Gemeinden, church buildings, parish houses, cemeteries, schools, parish registers, and the like. Consequently, the three root forms Cathol-, Luther-, and Reformiert- appear more often, by order of magnitude, in post-1648 territorial documents than in pre-1648 ones. In related developments, wording around the root forms such as called, so-called, and that one calls disappeared, and the root forms began appearing regularly with noun endings. The word Lutheraner surfaced in Frankenberg, for example, amid the Lutherans’ festering strife with Reformed.100 Likewise, Burghaun Catholics in the 1690s–1700s charged local “Luteraner” with disturbing holy days by doing noisesome work.101 The name Catholicen also emerged, as in a 1664 letter from the Hanau court minister to the town council.102 So, too, did Catholicken, as in a 1670 investigation in Frankenberg and a 1753 dispute between the Hanau Reformed and Lutheran consistories in which were mentioned the “Catholicken” at Osnabrück in 1648.103 The same word was also spelled “Catoliquen” or “Catholiquen,” especially around Fulda.104 The noun Reformierten underwent the same transition as the other two.105 One can, however, discern discrepancies in the names’ usage. Authorities operated bureaucratically with categories of Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, and local Gemeinden that became formally divided into rivaling confessional (or, denominational) Gemeinden commonly used the names. Yet local Gemeinden that remained whole did so far less; they did not lapse into the habit. Nevertheless, a new era had dawned. Nothing testifies more to the failed universalist intentions of the pre-1648 Christian confessions than the fact that imperial territories became populated with Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed after 1648. That was a world the confessional devotees never wanted to see. It was also, apparently, an accident. The delegations at Westphalia did not seem to realize they were engendering it. In any case, before 1648 the terms Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed had been anathema when divorced from true Christianity. Persons attached to them risked association with unbelievers or beasts. As the post-1648 era unfolded, a Christian could associate with any of them because orthodoxy had been baked into each one.
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The measures of the Peace of Westphalia spurred transformations to other terms. In one respect, the name Evangelisch became denominational and standardized. Catholics, for example, were heard benignly calling their opposites Evangelische. Moreover, whereas before 1648 one might hear Evangelisch and Lutherisch used coterminously and exclusive of claims to Christian orthodoxy, in the post-1648 period they formed a singular, sometimes hyphenated appellation, evangelical-Lutheran, that stood alongside one of its two coequals, evangelical-Reformed. The appellations evangelical-Lutheran and evangelicalReformed became affixed to things across the ecclesiastical landscape, especially in regions where the two ranked as the most prominent local corpora with Catholics as a tertiary presence. In another respect, the word Evangelisch passed from a contested state to a still unsettled one. In 1717–22, for example, efforts were made to unite the evangelical imperial estates, to form a “church of the so-called evangelicals.”106 The two sides were encouraged not to use “sectarian names” but rather “call themselves evangelicals or members of the Augsburg Confession.” If they had need to differentiate among themselves, then one was to use the denominations Evangelisch-Lutherischen and Evangelisch-Reformierten.107 The Peace of 1648 also catalyzed a shift in the term Protestant and words related to it. Mention in Article 7 of “the estates which one calls Protesting” reflected the disputed status of protestierende during the pre-1648 period.108 But the word then became naturalized and also no longer appeared typically before the nouns of electors, princes, and estates. Rather, it had broader connotation and application, such as mention in 1722 of a “union of both Protesting sides.”109 Equally significant, the noun Protestanten and the adjective protestantisch eventually appeared in post-1648 territorial life, although authorities were the ones who usually used those terms. One heard mention of the noun Protestants and the adjective Protestant before nouns such as princes, married couple, wife, mother, parish, guild members, clerics and schoolteachers, and exercise of religion.110 The term Protestant was understood to encompass the Lutheran and Reformed religions and therefore the Marburg consistory wrote about the “distinction between the two Protestant religions” and the “necessary unity among Protestants” in a case involving Lutherans and Reformed in Schreufa.111 Similarly, the adjectives Catholische, Lutherische, and Reformierte now regularly preceded the word Untertanen. Governing authorities thus recognized that their territories were no longer populated by Christian subjects along with any nonconformists. Now, authorities differentiated between Lutheran subjects, Catholic subjects, and Reformed subjects and mentioned Protestant subjects, evangelical subjects, evangelical-Lutheran subjects, evangelical-Reformed subjects, Roman-Catholic subjects, and subjects of the Augsburg Confession in correspondence and other records.112 Territorial populations also were heard expressly recognizing the plurality of Christians. Catholics in eighteenthcentury Burghaun defended the erection of a certain cross as edifying “to all
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Christians irrespective of religion.”113 Nevertheless, although the term Calvinist was at times mentioned benignly, at other times an aggressive sovereign or rivaling local Gemeinden used the terms Calvinists or papists pejoratively.114 Finally, religious terminology surrounding zugetan also changed. While certain expressions continued—for example, how persons were committed to the Augsburg Confession—many new ones appeared and, moreover, occurred more frequently.115 Persons were joined to “the Reformed religion,” “the Reformed confession,” “the Lutheran religion,” “the Ev. Lutheran religion,” “the Lutheran confession,” “the Catholic religion,” and “the Roman Catholic religion,” and one hears of “subjects respectively committed to both religions.”116 Furthermore, the discourse surrounding zugetan expanded the word’s connotation beyond a willful, conscious adherence to a religion. Persons were now attached to one by virtue of being born to a father and/or mother of that religion. Church ordinances summed up the new association by stipulating that offspring were to follow in the religion that the father or mother was zugetan.117 Association with the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, which had been voluntary and fluid prior to the 1648 Peace, steadily became involuntary and fixed after it. In time, churchmen and laity projected the names anachronistically onto pre-1648 history, generally unaware of the historic change in their meaning and usage yet paving the way for the framing, analysis, interpretation, and writing of pre-1648 history according to post-1648 categories. “Because in those Catholic times,” wrote Kirchhain secular officials in 1711 as they recollected the town’s distant past when only a church and defensive wall stood.118 Their wording betrays a new historical consciousness and periodization in which the term Catholic had been resigned to the Roman church and the term Catholic times, for them, referred to the pre-1517 era. By the later seventeenth century authors had linked the term Lutheran to the 1580 Book of Concord and by the eighteenth century had modified its title with the name.119 In 1737 subjects of the Burghaun Lutheran church district and Fulda authorities dialogued matter-of-factly about the status of things “Catholic” and “Lutheran” in parish Burghaun in 1624.120 Whereas a 1720 report from Treis an der Lumda identified Siegfried Happel as “the third evangelical Lutheran minister” when he was ordained in 1545,121 Happel himself would not have recognized the classification or numbering system. Neither would have sixteenth-century peasants of Röddenau or Schreufa if they had read a minister’s 1772 letter that distinguished between those churches, like Röddenau’s, that had, “at the time of the Reformation, fallen with its revenues to the Protestants,” and those, like Schreufa’s, that had “been built [in 1590] by one or the other Protestant religion with their own means.”122 In a final example, amid a 1730s ReformedLutheran dispute in Windecken, Reformed minister Engel exclaimed that no one could possibly “doubt . . . that our church and Gemeinde here is much older than theirs.”123 In fact, in the generation after 1648 the Christian Gemeinde
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of Windecken divided into the Reformed and Lutheran Gemeinden and the local church acquired the name Reformed. Consequently, Lutheran members lost their claim on the church, compelling them to establish a secondary local venue for Lutheran services by the early 1670s. But, in his thinking, Engel imagined that the local Reformed church and Gemeinde existed as such long before 1648, presumably since the 1590s, when Count Philipp Ludwig II installed his chosen religion in Hanau-Münzenberg.
Conclusion For some time now, historical study has systematically categorized confession, religion, church, and persons in the pre-1648 empire with the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, as well as with the names Protestant, evangelical, and Calvinist.124 The suggestion here is that doing so views history through the prism of anachronism and institutes fundamental flaws in the understanding of it. If the historical narrative has it that Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed populated pre-Westphalian territories, then the 1648 Peace arrives as a solomonic solution that facilitated peaceful coexistence. But if the narrative has it that Christians along with any nonconformists populated them, and that the 1648 Peace caused persons, properties, and institutions to inexorably acquire one of the three, newly codified names, then its potentially divisive and disastrous ramifications, not least among members of a family or a local Gemeinde, become apparent. “It would have been a blessing had the [Peace of Westphalia] not allowed one to be Reformed,” lamented Bartholomaeus Schirling in Frankenberg in 1670, but because it did the Reformed had to “suffer as did those during the times of Diocletian and the persecutions.”125 Schirling was rector of the Lutheran school but had become Reformed, prompting the irate Lutherans to force him out. Other contemporaries would have sympathized with Schirling’s preference for the Christian monism of pre-Westphalian times. The measure concerning religion that caused the greatest disturbance among many, though not all, local Gemeinden was not a sweeping reform or confessional mandate during the 1517–1648 period but rather the historic step of religious toleration taken at the end of it—essentially, the empire’s recognition of the exact equality of the three confessional religions.126 Did the naming practices in the territories examined here occur in other territories or the free imperial cities of the empire?127 If not, then scholars may do well to use a naming system more sensitive to local variation instead of one applied universally. Nevertheless, mapping the historical record on names and naming yields the argument that the empire conceived Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed amid agreements reached in 1647–48 and birthed them as triplets on 24 October 1648, when the emperor signed the Peace of Westphalia.
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In the imperial territories, Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed materialized in the resulting wake. David Mayes is associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His recent publications include “Beyond Discipline: The Consistory in the Central Reformed Territories of the Holy Roman Empire,” in Politics, Gender, and Belief. The Long-Term Impact of the Reformation. Essays in memory of Robert Kingdon (Droz, 2014); “Divided by Toleration: Paradoxical Effects of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and Multiconfessionalism,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 106 (2015); and “Discord Via Toleration: Clerical Conflict in the Post-Westphalian Imperial Territories,” in Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (Leiden, 2018).
Notes 1. I have explored this topic previously in Mayes, “Religiöse Konflikte,” 125–26. 2. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg [HStAM] 4i nos. 68, 241; and HStAM 92 no. 226. 3. See Melanchthon, “Augsburg Confession” and “Apology of the Augsburg Confession.” The quote here is from p. 270; see also 58, 86, 92, 94, 112, 118, 208, 228, 314, 338, 384. 4. Gotthard, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden. 5. Gordon, Calvin, xi; and Marshall, “The Naming of Protestant England,” 108. 6. Breitinger, Der reformiert-catholische Glaub, xx. 7. Hofmann, Quellen, 98–128. 8. HStAM 4i no. 68. 9. Ibid. no. 241. 10. Ibid. no. 241. 11. HStAM 92 no. 394. 12. Ibid. no. 439. 13. Ibid. nos. 658, 378. 14. Ibid. nos. 92, 373, 375; and ibid. nos. 208, 239, 390, 416, 658, 660, 745. For a reference to a Reformation from a Rome adherent, see Tanner, Ketzerisch Luthertumb, 16–17. 15. For example, Leucht, Ein Christliche Catholische; Hungerus, Defensio; and Högner, Christ Catholische Prödig. 16. For example, Bente, Concordia Triglotta, 56–58, 92–94, 112, 118; and Nevin, The Heidelberg Catechism, 152, 186. 17. HStAM 4i no. 68. Similarly, for the Palatine elector’s 1606 letter to Duke Philipp Ludwig of Palatinate-Neuburg, see HStAM 4i no. 165. 18. Pareus, Summarische Erklärung. 19. Bergius, Grund und Haupt Summa. 20. Heshusius, Kurtzer Vnterschied, esp. chaps. 4, 8, and 19. Similarly, see Hunnius, Catholische und Christliche Abfertigung. 21. Höe von Höenegg, Evangelisches Handbüchlein, 16, 19. 22. HStAM 4i no. 174. 23. Hunnius, Gründlicher Beweiß, Vorrede.
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Ibid., 7. Hammer, Predicanten Latein, A3. Tanner, Manu-ductor, chap. 1; and Tanner, Ketzerisch Luthertumb, 25. Lehmann, Luther’s Works, 70–71; Luther, Eyn trew vormanung. Note that in the opening sentence of this passage, Luther used the German noun Christen and adjective lutherisch. But, symptomatic of the pattern of anachronistic historical writing, the translation quoted here rendered the latter word as a noun in English. Concordienbuch, 158. Friedensburg, Der Reichstag, 524. Andreä, Kurtze gründtliche, 30. Such expressions occur often in Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen. See also HStAM 4i no. 68. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, vol. 7, 1192; vol. 13, 310. HStAM 4i no. 85. Bente, Concordia Triglotta, 846, 850. HStAM 22a no. 9: 6. HStAM 4i no. 174. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, vol. 14, 397. HStAM 4i no. 162; and HStAM 22a no. 4a. HStAM 83 nos. 3, 105. HStAM 4i no. 163. Ibid. no. 163. HStAM 83 no. 4618. HStAM 4i no. 158. Tossanus, Christliche erinnerung, 7. HStAM 83 no. 3. Ibid. no. 3. Respectively, in HStAM 92 no. 745; HStAM 22a no. 8: 6; HStAM 92 no. 740; HStAM 17e Oberrosphe no. 2; HStAM 92 no. 416; HStAM Protokolle II Marburg Konsistorium [PMK] vol. 6 (21 Oct. 1617); HStAM 17i no. 5135; and HStAM 92 no. 423. HStAM PMK vol. 8 (28 March 1621). HStAM 22a no. 8: 6. As in a 1584 letter to the Hesse-Marburg landgrave: HStAM 4i no. 50. Gretser, Historische Erzehlung, 51, 54. Ibid., 45. Agricola, Biblischer Fastenspiegel; and Nas, Secvnda Centvria. Schatzgeyer, Von der warn Christlichen und Evangelischen freyheit; Eisengrein, Warer vnd in Gottes wort gegründter Bericht; and Johann Ferus, Postill oder Predigbuchs. Tanner, Ketzerisch Luthertumb, esp. 8. Tanner, Avgvstanae Confessionis. HStAM 22a no. 1: 12; Franz and Sohm, Urkundliche Quellen, vol. 4, 98, 101, 105–6, 165, 472; Schwenckfeld, Vom Euangelio, fol. 5; Schwenckfeld, Bekanntniß, fol. 8; and Schwenckfeld, Von der Christlichen. As quoted in Brady, German Histories, 215. The five locations, respectively, in HStAM 92 no. 398; HStAM 4i no. 173; HStAM 92 no. 162; HStAM 4i no. 153; and HStAM 94 no. 374. Hutter, Wolgegründte Widerlegung, 28–29.
28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.
48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.
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61. Ibid., 28–29. See also HStAM PMK vol. 6 (21 Oct. 1617); and Scultetus, Newe Jahrs Predigt, 7. 62. Jacobi, Zwei unterschiedlichen Bedencke. 63. The term Gemeinde (plural Gemeinden) was complex. Locally, it denoted the political commune and the religious community, and, prior to 1648, these two largely overlapped. They became disaggregated after 1648 wherever the local religious community became formally divided. 64. HStAM 4i no. 157. 65. Ibid. no. 158. 66. Ibid. no. 155. 67. Ibid. no. 174. 68. Ibid. no. 155. 69. Ibid. no. 155. 70. Ibid. nos. 157, 155. 71. Ibid. no. 155. 72. Ibid. no. 155. 73. Ibid. no. 155. 74. Ibid. no. 156. 75. Mayes, Communal Christianity, chaps. 1–4. 76. Ney, Die Appellation, 30. 77. HStAM PMK vol. 2 (13 June 1612); and HStaM 22a no. 9: 1 (7 May 1619). 78. HStAM 17i no. 3967–70. 79. HStAM 92 no. 745. 80. Ibid. no. 373. See also HStAM 4i no. 208. 81. Respectively, in HStAM 22a no. 8: 19; ibid. no. 8: 19; HStAM 5 vol. 3 no. 10336; HStAM 22a no. 8: 19; HStAM PMK vol. 9 (13 Jul. 1622); HStAM 22a no. 8: 19; HStAM 22a no. 8: 12; and HStAM 318 no. 572. 82. HStAM 4i no. 79; and HStAM 92 no. 398. 83. HStAM 92 no. 745. 84. HStAM PMK vol. 4 (17 March 1613). 85. HStAM PMK vol. 6 (21 Oct. 1617); and HStAM PMK vol. 11 (7 Jan. 1624). 86. HStAM 4i nos. 208, 207. 87. HStAM 92 no. 439. 88. Ibid. no. 373. 89. Witzel, Preseruatiu; and Valentia, Feyerabend. 90. E.g., Raida, Concordia; and Windeck, Controversiae. 91. For an example of irenicism, see Cassander, De Articvlis Religionis. 92. For example, see Braun, Ain Gesprech. 93. HStAM 4i nos. 164, 179. 94. For a sixteenth-century example, see Paulus III, Papa, Enth. For a seventeenth-century example, see Voton, Bekehrung. 95. I did not find any instances in any documents used for this study. 96. As seen in the reviews by Kümin, “Mayes, Communal Christianity,” 621–22; and Schmidt, “Mayes, Communal Christianity,” 257–59. 97. Müller, Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae, Arts. 5.1 and 7.1 of Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense. 98. Brady, German Histories, 149, 156. 99. HStAM 83 no. 25.
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100. HStAM 17e Frankenberg no. 38; HStAM 22a no. 9: 3; ibid. no. 8: 9; and HStAM 5 vol. 3 no. 3362. 101. HStAM 94 no. 285. 102. HStAM 83 no. 5516. 103. HStAM 22a no. 8: 9; and HStAM 83 Schublade 1276 no. 20. 104. In HStAM 315f Rauschenberg (ref.) IV: 12; HStAM 94 no. 285; and HStAM 92 no. 85. 105. Instances abound; see, e.g., the 1654–70 conflict between Lutherans and Reformed in Rosenthal in HStAM 22a no. 9: 9. 106. HStAM 4i no. 217. 107. Ibid. no. 217. 108. Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense, Art. 7.1. 109. HStAM 4i no. 217. 110. The nouns starting with “princes” appear, respectively, in HStAM 92 no. 83; HStAM 94 no. 311; HStAM 92 no. 103; HStAM 318 no. 1007; HStAM 318 no. 1001; HStAM 92 no. 83; HStAM 315f no. 1562; and HStAM 92 no. 83. 111. HStAM 22a 4b: 9; and HStAM 315f Frankenberg (ref.) II: 35. 112. For examples of each of these terms in order, see HStAM Prot. II Hanau A23 vol. 1 (13 Oct. 1661); HStAM 5 vol. 3 no. 10325; HStAM 83 no. 403; HStAM 92 no. 392; HStAM 83 no. 5302; HStAM 92 no. 80III; HStAM 315f Marburg (ref.) IV: 3; HStAM 318 no. 256; and HStAM 94 no. 285. I did not find any instances of the term subjects of the Augsburg Confession in pre-1648 documents. 113. HStAM 92 no. 83. 114. E.g., see HStAM 22a no. 8: 9; HStAM 5 vol. 3 nos. 10145, 3362; HStAM 315f Rauschenberg (ref.) IV: 4; HStAM 92 no. 370; HStAM 92 no. 80I; HStAM 5 vol. 3 no. 3362, 10142; and HStAM 22a no. 9: 9. 115. HStAM 22a no. 9: 1. 116. See these examples in ibid. no. 9: 1; HStAM 22a no. 9: 9; ibid. no. 9: 1; HStAM 318 no. 333; HStAM 318 no. 256; HStAM 318 no. 767; HStAM 318 no. 256; and HStAM 5 vol. 3 no. 3362. 117. HStAM 83 no. 61; and HStAM 318 nos. 256, 1007. 118. Kassel Gesamt Hochschule Bibliothek, Handschriftenabteilung, 2nd Ms. Hass. 119. 119. Calovius, Wiederholter Consens; and Weiß, Christliches Concordien-Buch. Similarly, see Anton, Geschichte. 120. HStAM 92 no. 80II. 121. Kassel Gesamt Hochschule Bibliothek, Handschriftenabteilung, 2nd Ms. Hass. 119. 122. HStAM 315f Frankenberg (ref.) IV: 17. 123. HStAM 83 no. 4674. 124. I would note that German-language scholarship also routinely uses the adjective and noun forms (e.g., Lutherisch and Lutheraner) in their Christian pluralist meaning and usage in the writing of pre-1648 history. 125. HStAM 22a no. 8: 9. 126. For more, and for the changing function of forms of toleration, see Mayes, “Divided by Toleration.” 127. For cases of multiconfessionalism prior to 1648 that might offer a contrast, see, e.g., Safley, A Companion to Multiconfessionalism.
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Bibliography Archival Sources Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAM) 4i: Nos. 50, 68, 79, 85, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 173, 174, 179, 207, 208, 217, 241 5 vol. 3: 3362, 10325, 10336, 10142, 10145 17e: Oberrosphe no. 2, Frankenberg no. 38 17i: Nos. 3967–3970, 5135 22a: Nos. 1: 12, 4a, 4b: 9, 8: 6, 8: 9, 8: 12, 8: 19, 9: 1, 9: 3, 9: 6, 9: 9 83: 3, 25, 61, 105, 403, 4618, 4674, 5302, 5516, Schublade 1276 no. 20 92: 80I, 80II, 80III, 81IV, 83, 85, 92, 162, 208, 239, 370, 373, 375, 378, 390, 392, 394, 398, 416, 423, 439, 658, 660, 740, 745 94: 285, 374 315f: 1562; Rauschenberg (ref.) IV: 4, IV: 6, and IV: 12; Frankenberg (ref.) II: 35, IV: 17, IV: 22; Marburg (ref.) IV: 3 318: 142, 256, 333, 437, 767, 1007 Prot. II Hanau A23 vol. 1 (13 Oct. 1661) Protokolle II Marburg Konsistorium (PMK): vol. 2 (13 June 1612); vol. 4 (17 March 1613); vol. 6 (21 Oct. 1617); vol. 8 (28 March 1621); vol. 10 (8 January 1623); vol. 11 (7 January 1624) Kassel Gesamt Hochschule Bibliothek Handschriftenabteilung, 2nd Ms. Hass. 119.
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Concordienbuch: das ist, die symbolischen Bücher der ev. Luth. Kirche, 2nd ed. St. Louis, 1881. Eisengrein, Martin. Warer vnd in Gottes wort gegründter Bericht. . . . Zu Jngolstaat geprediget Jetzunder in Truck verfertiget. Ingolstadt, 1566. Ferus, Johann. Postill oder Predigbuchs. Evangelischer warheyt und rechter Catholischer Lehr/ über die Evangelien . . . Dem Einfältigen gemeynen Christlichen Volck zu nutz/ wolfart/ und trost, 2 vols. Mainz, 1556. Franz, Günther, and Walter Sohm, eds. Urkundliche Quellen zur hessischen Reformationsgeschichte, 4 vols. Marburg, 1951–57. Friedensburg, Walter. Der Reichstag zu Speier 1526 im Zusammenhang der politischen und kirchlichen Entwicklung Deutschlands im Reformationzeitalter. Berlin, 1887. Gretser, Jakob. Historische Erzehlung Von dem Jungkfrawkloster S. Benedictordens zu Rigen wie wunderbarlich dasselbig von der Zeit an . . . und auß dem Lateinischen Truck getrewlich verteutscht. Ingolstadt, 1614. Hammer, Johann. Predicanten Latein/ Das ist/ Drey Fragen/ allen genanten Euangelischen Predicanten von vielen Catholischen offtmals auffgeben/ . . . Allen Christenmenschen nutzlich und notwendig zu lesen. Cologne, 1608. Heshusius, Tilemann. Kurtzer Vnterschied zwische[n] Christlicher Lehre, zu der sich die Catholische Kirche oder gemeine Jesu Christi bekennet . . . der Pebstlichen Antichristischen Rotten. Eisleben, 1564. Höe von Höenegg, Matthias. Evangelisches Handbüchlein: Darinnen Unwiderleglich/ Auß einiger Heiliger Schirfft erwiesen wird . . . im grund irrig/ und wider das helle Wort Gottes sey . . . . Leipzig, 1603. Hofmann, Hanns Hubert, ed., Quellen zum Verfassungsorganismus des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation 1495–1815. Darmstadt, 1976. Högner, Wolfgang. Christ Catholische Prödig: Darin[n]en auß heiliger Schrifft . . . das der Catholische Römische Glaub der rechte/ wahre/ seeligmachende/ der Lutherisch dargögen der unrechte Glaub seye. Ingolstadt, 1627. Hungerus, Albertus. Defensio scripturae sacrae, contra pseudoscripturarios Lutheranos et Calvinianos. Ingolstadt, [c.1582]. Hunnius, Aegidius. Catholische und Christliche Abfertigung der Uncatholischen und ubel gegründten thesium oder Schlußreden D. Joannis Pistorij Niddani De Justificatione. Wittenberg, 1595. Hunnius, Nicolaus. Gründlicher Beweiß, daß die Römische Kirche nicht sey die wahre Christliche Kirche. Lübeck, 1631. Hutter, Leonhard. Wolgegründte Widerlegung Der Schweren/ aber doch vnwarhafften Bezüchtigung . . . ohn des Autoris Namen boßhafftig ausgesprengt. Wittenberg, 1597. Jacobi, Daniel. Zwei unterschiedlichen Bedencke: Das Erste/ Ob den Reformierten Gemeynden binnen Franckfurt jhr Religions-Exercitium zu verwäigern oder zu verstatten sei. n.p., 1615. Lehmann, Helmut T. ed. Luther’s Works, vol. 45: The Christian in Society II. Philadelphia, 1962. Leucht, Valentin. Ein Christliche Catholische/ in Gottes Wort wolgegründete Predigt . . . Allen Teutschen Christen zur ernsten warnunge/ und trewhertziger vermanunge zur Buß gestellet und gepredigt. Mainz, 1583. Luther, Martin. Eyn trew vormanung Martini Luther tzu allen Christen. Sich tzu vorhuten fur auffruhr vnnd Emporung. Wittenberg, 1522. Melanchthon, Philipp. “Augsburg Confession” and “Apology of the Augsburg Confession.” In Bente, Concordia Triglotta, 37–451.
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Müller, Konrad, ed. Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae—Die Westfälischen Friedensverträge: Vollst. Lateinischer Text mit Übers. Der wichtigsten teile und Regesten. Bern, 1975. Nas, Johannes. Secvnda Centvria, Das ist/ Das ander Hundert/ der Euangelischen warheit/ an welchen . . . vnserer widersacher jrrige lehr/ betrug vnd thorhait menigklich entdecket wirdt. Ingolstadt, 1570. Nevin, John W. The Heidelberg Catechism, in German, Latin and English: With an Historical Introduction. New York, 1863. Ney, Julius, ed. Die Appellation und Protestation der Evangelischen Ständen auf dem Reichstage zu Speier 1529. Leipzig, 1906. Pareus, David. Summarische Erklärung/ Der wahren Catholischen Lehr/ so in der Chur Pfaltz . . . / vnnd andern vom Bäpstlichen Sawerteyg geseuberten Kirchen bestendig . . . . Heidelberg, 1593. Paulus III. Papa, Enth. Außerdem: Pavli III. Pontificis Romani Epistolae duae, ad Heluetios, & aliquot eorum Episcopos atq[ue] Abates, quibus & instituti Concilij Tridentini, & suscepti co[n]tra Protestantes belli ratio continetur. [Basel], 1546. Raida, Balthasar. Concordia und vergleichung der Papisten, Widderteuffer, Rotten, Witzelianer und Lutheraner jnn vnnd mit der heilgen catholischen Christlichen kirchen/ an die zween Ept zu Fulda vnd Herssfelt. Erfurt, 1539. Schatzgeyer, Kaspar. Von der warn Christlichen und Evangelischen freyheit/ ein außgedruckte erklärung/ mit zwelff Cristliche[n] leeren. Und nachuolgend mit zwaintzig irrsalen den leeren widerstrebente[n]. Munich, 1524. Schwenckfeld, Caspar. Bekanntniß und Rechenschafft von den Hauptpuncten des christlichen Glaubens. n.p., 1548. Schwenckfeld, Caspar. Vom Euangelio Christi Vnd Vom Mißbrauch des Evangelii. [Ulm], 1552. Schwenckfeld, Caspar. Von der Christlichen Kirchen Etliche Fragen. Ulm, 1553. Scultetus, Abraham. Newe Jahrs Predigt: Das ist, Historischer Bericht, wie wunderbarlich Gott der Herr die verschienene hundert Jahr seine Kirche reformiert, regiert und biß daher erhalten. Frankfurt, 1617. Sehling, Emil, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, 24 vols. Leipzig, 1902–present. Tanner, Adam. Avgvstanae Confessionis Et Apologiae Falsiloqventia. [Dillingen], 1631. Tanner, Adam. Ketzerisch Luthertumb, Wider deß falschgenandten vncatholischen Papstumbs . . . von der Gerechtfertigung deß Sünders, vnnd gewißheit eigner Gerechtigkeit. Ingolstadt, 1608. Tanner, Adam. Manu-ductor, oder Wegweiser. Das ist: Zehen klare/ gewise/ und unfählbare Kennzeichen/ und Beweiß . . . Allen der Warheit/ und ihrer aingenen Seeligkeit liebhabern zum besten gestellt. Ingolstadt, 1630. Tossanus, Daniel (der Ältere). Christliche erinnerung an einen Ersamen Rath und Gemeinde der churfürstlichen Pfaltz Statt Amberg . . . erhaltung Gottseliger einigkeit in Kirchen und Schulen. [Heidelberg], 1575. Valentia, Gregorius de. Feyerabend/ Aller Neweuangelischen Sectenführer, Das ist: Etliche Außerlesene vnnd vnwiderlegliche Argumenta . . . Sprach unerfahren/ zu sonderm Gefallen inn das Hochteutsche verwendet. Ingolstadt, 1591. Voton, Piquerin. Bekehrung, Herrn Piquerin Votons, eines Engellendischen Freyherrns, . . . Von der Ketzerey der Protestanten, zu dem . . . Catholischen . . . Glauben. Ingolstadt, 1606. Weiß, Christian. Christliches Concordien-Buch, das ist der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche sämmtliche gewöhnlichste Symbolische Schrifften . . . und mit nöthigen Registern und SchlussRede. Leipzig, 1739.
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Windeck, Johann Paul. Controversiae de mortis Christi efficacia, inter catholicos et Calvinistas hoc tempore disputatae: in quibus 286 argumentis, Calvinistarum errore destructo, confirmatur Veritas catholica. Cologne, 1603. Witzel, Georg. Preseruatiu, Cur vnnd Seelen-Artzney, wider die gifftige jetzo schwebende Seuch der NewEuangelischen Secten, bevorab deß hochschädlichen Lvtherthvmbs. Ingolstadt, 1581.
Secondary Sources Brady, Thomas A., Jr. German Histories in the Age of the Reformations. Cambridge, 2009. Kümin, Beat. “Mayes, Communal Christianity.” History 91 (Oct. 2006): 621–22. Gordon, Bruce. Calvin. New Haven, CT, 2009. Gotthard, Axel. Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden. Münster, 2004. Marshall, Peter. “The Naming of Protestant England.” Past and Present 214 (2012): 87–128. Mayes, David. Communal Christianity: The Life & Loss of a Peasant Vision in Early Modern Germany. Leiden, 2004. Mayes, David. “Divided by Toleration: Paradoxical Effects of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and Multiconfessionalism.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 106 (2015): 290–313. Mayes, David. “Religiöse Konflikte und kirchliche Organisation im Zeitalter Landgraf Carls.” In Landgraf Carl (1654–1730): Fürstliches Planen und Handeln zwischen Innovation und Tradition, edited by Holger Th. Gräf, Christoph Kampmann, and Bernd Küster, 123–31. Marburg, 2017. Safley, Thomas Max, ed. A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World. Leiden, 2011. Schmidt, Heinrich Richard. “Mayes, Communal Christianity.” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 57 (2007): 257–59.
PART II
Naming and Organizing Knowledge
CHAPTER 4
Naming and Singing the Psalter in Counter-Reformation Germany ALEXANDER J. FISHER
A
s the chapters in this volume clearly demonstrate, naming was a crucial epistemological process in the early modern era, a time when rapid social changes, new discoveries, and the rise of empirical approaches to knowledge made the question of signifiers and their objects especially fraught. In the German orbit the religious reformations of the sixteenth century impelled new regimes of naming, as individuals and communities sought labels for new theological visions, religious opponents (evangelicals, papists, heretics, and the like), and confessional symbols. Music, too, was at times implicated in confessional naming practices, although the question of whether it could be explicitly confessional or confessionalized in its essence remains highly ambiguous. Music’s lack of semantic specificity, as Marianne Danckwardt has argued, means that it could be confessional only to the extent that its text, its paratexts, or its composer’s religious proclivities give us explicit direction.1 In a 2006 essay on the potentials within Reformation music for confessional conflict, Klaus Pietschmann echoed this view, but offered scattered examples of polyphonic music—such as Maistre Jhan’s motet Te Lutherum damnamus—that explicitly thematized pro- and anti-Lutheran attitudes.2 More recently, Inge Mai Groote and Philippe Vendrix have pointed out that musicological paradigms originating in the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf have compelled us to distinguish Catholic from Protestant musics with a clarity that may not be justified on the basis of the sources alone, whereupon the authors encourage us to forget our confessional preconceptions and embrace music’s ambivalent position.3 For Walter Werbeck, the music of Heinrich Schütz had an inherent Protestant quality given its firm positioning within the liturgical demands of the Saxon court at Dresden—here the functional context for the music determines its confessional character.4
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Text and context seem important in how we might name a particular piece of music as Protestant or Catholic, but the broader category of musical genre poses ambiguities of its own. Many of the principal genres of sixteenth-century sacred music—mass, motet, Magnificat—were shared across confessional lines, even if their musical content and texts (in the case of the motet in particular) could vary considerably. But one genre’s very name became charged with confessional meaning by the middle of the sixteenth century: the Psalm. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, the 150 songs of King David of the Israelites, a divinely inspired music directed at God in praise and in supplication, had long constituted the framework of the daily Offices in traditional observance, and was a foundational element in more elaborate chants such as Office Responsories and the verses of the Alleluia and Offertory in the Mass. Martin Luther, a former Augustinian friar, knew this repertory well; he devoted his earliest Wittenberg lectures to the Psalter and offered a complete vernacular translation in 1524. As a result, many of the principal chorale texts of the early Lutheran tradition are psalmodic in origin. Jean Calvin’s embrace of the Psalter in translation as the principal vehicle for service music helped to deepen the association of vernacular psalmody with the Protestant tradition. For German Catholics at mid-century, the term Psalmen (Psalms) had become a shorthand for Protestant hymnody more generally. This chapter explores the subsequent Catholic reappropriation of the Psalter as a musical vehicle for the laity, focusing especially on the texts and melodies of Die Psalmen Davids in allerlei Teutsche gesangreimen bracht by the Catholic convert and priest Kaspar Ulenberg (1549–1617).5 Ulenberg’s work, with its new translations purified of Protestant “heresies,” opened up the possibility of a Catholic recovery of Psalms for lay use. At the same time, Ulenberg’s melodies carried strong echoes of the Genevan tradition in particular, and in some cases borrowed directly from it. If the words now projected a Catholic theological vision—or at least one emptied of Protestant “verfelschungen” (falsifications)—the musical sounds made for a more confessionally ambiguous picture. With Ulenberg Catholics could now lay claim to Psalms of their own, but, wittingly or unwittingly, their singing was redolent of Protestant practices.
Protestantism and the Psalter The association of the Psalter with the teachings of the German reformers extends back as far as Martin Luther’s earliest lectures at the University of Wittenberg in 1513–15, consisting of scholia (glosses and interpretations) on the Psalms that were preserved in manuscript and identified by their author as Dictata super Psalterium (Lessons on the Psalms).6 From this earliest stage Luther praised the Psalms as an expression of joy and an excitement to
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devotion. “Whoever wants to arouse himself to devotion should take up the Psalms,” Luther writes, citing Paul’s admonishment to the Ephesians (5:19) to “[address] one another in psalms and spiritual songs, singing to the Lord.”7 As in the traditional church, the Psalter retained a prominent role in the emerging liturgy at Wittenberg, where Luther’s 1523 pamphlet Concerning the Order of Public Worship prescribed congregational Psalms, presumably in Latin and chanted to the old recitation tones. His German Mass of 1526 explictly prescribed Psalms in the position of the Introit (Ps. 34) and Communion (Ps. 111).8 In October 1524 Luther’s complete vernacular prose translation of the Psalter, The German Psalter. was printed at Wittenberg, but it is clear that by this time he was also considering the potential of Psalm paraphrases in verse as a vehicle for lay singing.9 Late in that year he wrote to Georg Spalatin of his intent, “following the example of the Prophets and the church Fathers, to create German songs for the people, that is, sacred songs [geistliche Lieder], so that God’s Word may also dwell among the people through singing. We are seeking poets everywhere.”10 Correspondingly, Luther’s paraphrases of the Psalter were a rich source of texts for the earliest layer of vernacular hymns intended for lay singing. The first printed Lutheran hymnal, the Some Christian Songs or Book of Eight Songs printed at Nuremberg in 1524, contains three of these early translations: “Ach Gott vom Himmel, sieh darein” (from Ps. 12, “Salvum me fac”); “Es spricht der unweisen Mund wohl” (from Ps. 14, “Dixit insipiens in corde suo”); and the well-known “Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir” (from Ps. 130, “De profundis”).11 An Enchiridion or Handbooklet published at Erfurt in 1524 added the translations “Wohl dem, der in Gottes Furcht steht” (from Ps. 128, “Beati omnes qui timent Dominum”), “Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält” (from Ps. 124, “Nisi quia Dominus erat”), “Es wolt uns Gott gnädig sein” (from Ps. 67, “Deus misereatur”), and “Erbarm dich mein, O Herre Gott” (from Ps. 51, “Miserere mei Deus”).12 Space will not permit a fuller survey here, but Psalms translations continued to form a large proportion of the texts for newly composed chorales, not only in the hands of Luther (note, for example, his famed “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” a translation of Psalm 46, “Deus noster refugium”), but also in those of colleagues and coreligionists like Paulus Speratus, Justus Jonas, and Hans Sachs.13 Surveying the Lutheran song repertoire for the period 1517 to 1555, encompassing fifty-seven hymnals and a much larger number of broadsides and pamphlets, Stephanie Moisi has identified 438 known settings of the Psalms, of which several stood out for their popularity (Pss. 2, 3, 23, and 79 with seven settings each, and Pss. 1, 13, 103, and 117 with six settings each).14 Of the 578 known publications of Lutheran hymnals between 1524 and 1600, 271 (47 percent) advertise the presence of Psalms on their title pages, often in conjunction with geistliche Lieder (sacred songs) that denote the broader Lutheran
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hymn repertory.15 Increasingly common were hymnals advertised as complete Psalters, the earliest of which may have been Jakob Dachser’s Little Songbook, Including the Whole Psalter of David and Other Sacred Songs. published at Augsburg in 1557.16 Printers here and at Nuremberg, especially, would issue these Psalters at regular intervals over the next few decades.17 While vernacular translations of the Psalms set to accessible melodies continued to spread among the Protestant laity, the Psalter retained an important position in the new liturgy, whether sung in the vernacular forms popularized by Luther, in simple polyphonic settings such as the falsobordone (faburdened) versions for four voices in the Wittenberg songbook of 1533,18 or indeed in Latin and chanted to traditional reciting tones, as seen in Lucas Lossius’s Psalmody, that is, Select Sacred Songs of the Ancient Church. the fourth volume of which provides Psalm texts, Latin antiphons, and recitation formulas.19 In addition, polyphonic settings of the Psalter in both German and Latin were especially prominent among composers with Lutheran sympathies, including Ludwig Senfl, Thomas Stoltzer, Gallus Dressler, Sixt Dietrich, and many others.20 The Psalter, then, assumed the widest range of musical forms during its adaptation to the needs of various communities and churches. An even more profound association of confessional culture with psalmody emerged in the Reformed tradition initiated by John Calvin (1509–64). In 1539, as he sojourned in Strasbourg following his abortive attempt to reform the Genevan liturgy, Calvin issued the Selected Psalms and Canticles in Song (1539), containing a selection of French versified Psalm translations by himself and Clément Marot, set to simple melodies derived from German hymnbooks.21 These so-called “metrical” Psalms, in which the melodies rhythmically underlined the natural accent of the text, spread quickly in Strasbourg and subsequently in Geneva. For Calvin, who feared the potential of melody to amplify the evil of immoral or corrupt texts, the Psalter was uniquely valuable as a vehicle for divine praise. Citing Saint Augustine’s dictum that “no one can sing things worthy of God save what he has received from Him,” Calvin insists in the preface to his Formula for Ecclesiastical Prayers and Songs (1545) that “we shall not find better songs nor songs better suited to that end than the Psalms of David which the Holy Spirit made and uttered through him.”22 Having returned to Geneva in 1541, Calvin promoted successively more-comprehensive editions of these versified Psalms, culminating in the book The Psalms in French Verse. with all 150 Psalms in versified translations by Théodore de Bèze and with melodies by Loys Bourgeois (d. 1559) and a certain “Maître Pierre.”23 Printed no fewer than sixty-three times in its first three years, the Genevan Psalter became standard in the Reformed church, spreading quickly not only among French-speaking congregations but in other congregations as well.24 It was the Lutheran humanist and jurist Ambrosius Lobwasser (1515–85), appointed chair of law at the University of Königsberg by Duke Albrecht of
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Prussia in 1563, who was chiefly responsible for the spread of the Genevan melodies in the German orbit. In The Psalter of the Royal Prophet David in German Verse. first printed in Leipzig in 1573, Lobwasser offered German translations of the original French texts of de Bèze, retaining the tuneful melodies that had been such an effective vehicle in the French orbit.25 Lobwasser did not pursue specific confessional aims in his Psalter—he claimed only to revive a lapsed Lutheran tradition of Psalm versification—but its warm reception by the Calvinist elector Friedrich III of the Palatinate guaranteed its rapid spread in areas sympathetic to the Reformed faith.26 The subsequent negative response by some Lutheran theologians by the end of the sixteenth century, as confessional tensions rose between the different branches of German Protestantism—cannot be pursued at greater length here (a competing Lutheran Psalter would be published by Cornelius Becker in 1602), but the lively reception of the socalled Lobwasser further cemented associations between vernacular psalmody and Protestant culture.27
Psalmen in Catholic Visitations By the time the Lobwasser Psalter appeared, associations between vernacular psalmody and Protestant practices were firm indeed in the German orbit. One index of this reality is the frequency with which the reports of Catholic parish visitations singled out the singing of Psalms as a practice to be curbed. In December 1553 Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria and the clergy of the Salzburg province convened a provincial reform synod in the town of Mühldorf, one of the results of which was an agreement to conduct a series of church visitations in the bishoprics that overlapped with Bavarian territory: the archdiocese of Salzburg and its subordinate dioceses of Passau, Regensburg, and Freising.28 The 1553 synod had already identified “verführerischen und ausgelegten Psalmen” (deceptive [or falsely] translated Psalms) as a disturbance to the divine service.29 Various pieces of evidence suggest that these Psalms were increasingly troublesome for local Catholic authorities. On 1 August 1557, for instance, the Bavarian administrator (Pfleger) at Landsberg reported to the Munich court that a German schoolmaster there, Matthäus Schöffel from Augsburg, had been teaching the children how to sing Lutterisch besalmen. and, despite warnings from himself and from the clergy, marched through the churchyard and the square with his students, singing these besalmen the entire way. Having failed to persuade the pastor to allow these songs to be sung after the sermon on Sundays, the schoolmaster threatened to have sung instead the evidently scurrilous, anticlerical “des pfarrers Liedt von penntzingen” (song of the pastor from Penzing), and persisted with the teaching of besalmen in his class.30 The complaint from Landsberg drew a quick response from Albrecht’s court in
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Munich. Citing the schoolmaster’s practice of “German Psalm singing, against old custom,” the court ordered his imprisonment for two weeks, and eventual expulsion from the city should he persist.31 Even in the Bavarian capital itself the singing of Psalmen proved troublesome. On 19 June in the following year, the sermon at the Augustinian Church in Munich was disrupted by a group of men singing Lutheran songs. Among them were the Psalm paraphrases “Aus tiefer Not” (Ps. 130), “Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh darein” (Ps. 12), and “Es wolt uns Gott gnädig sein” (Ps. 67), but a number of other songs were heard as well, including “Wir glauben all an einen Gott,” “Vater unser im Himmelreich,” and “Ich ruf zu Dir Herr Jesu Christ.”32 Most provocative of all, perhaps, was Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 46, “Erhalt uns Herr bei deinem Wort,” whose opening stanza calls for God to preserve his Word in his flock, and avert the murder of the Turk and the pope.33 Duke Albrecht, furious on hearing reports of the episode, ordered the immediate imprisonment and interrogation of the perpetrators, which took place on 28 June. Of interest here is the terminology used to describe the repertoire. While a ducal report on the event refers to “teutsche psalmen und dergleichen lieder” (German Psalms and similar songs), for example, the interrogation of one of the singers, a tailor by the name of Hans Röll, revealed that he and others “sang the Psalms ‘Aus tiefer not,’ ‘Der herr wöll uns genedig sein,’ ‘Bitten wir den heiligen geist,’ and finally ‘Wir rufen zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ.’ When the preacher mounted the pulpit, the last stanza of the Psalm was sung.”34 The term Psalm. then, represented those texts derived from the Psalter, and other texts that were not. Not surprisingly, the singing of Psalms became an object of interest for the visitations carried out beginning in August 1558 in the archdiocese of Salzburg, followed by Passau (1558–59), Regensburg (1559), and Freising (1560). A set of instructions for visitors to the parishes of the Salzburg diocese in 1558 required them to ask of the pastor “whether he calls on the people to pray at the beginning and end of the sermon, whether he uses the Ave Maria as a prayer, and whether and which calls [rueff ] and Psalms he has sung.”35 The term rueff may imply litanies or litanic songs invoking divine figures, notably the saints, that were common in Catholic practice; typically the visitation reports refer to the alte rueff (old calls) but there are exceptions.36 On the other hand, Psalmen appeared as a cover term for Protestant song, whether or not the song was explicitly derived from the Psalter. The visitation reports themselves revealed that congregations in forty Bavarian parishes and filial churches in the Salzburg diocese “sang new Psalms” during the divine service.37 According to the reports, the town of Traunstein, several kilometers east of the Chiemsee, was one prominent site of this activity.38 In his church he allows nothing but the old songs and calls. But in the city they sing new Psalms [newe psalmen]. [Pastor at Haslach, near Traunstein]
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The schoolmaster begins the Psalms and [they] are sung in the church. [Beneficiary at Traunstein] The schoolmaster begins to sing some Psalms [etlich psalmen] in the church, Aus tiefer Not and the Vater unser. [Treasurer of the Confraternity of All Faithful Souls, Traunstein] The priests believe themselves to be Catholics. The people sing Psalms but at whose command he does not know. From the chancel the Ave Maria and the Vater unser are both prayed aloud. [Zechpröbst at St. Veit, outside of Traunstein]
The visitation reports subsequently filed from parishes in the dioceses of Passau, Regensburg, and Freising show similar tendencies in associating Psalms with Protestant hymnody, while older, approved Catholic songs are identified as “alte gesäng,” “alte kirchengesäng” (old songs), or “alte rueff ” (old calls).39 Especially striking in these reports are examples of parishioners singing Psalms in open defiance of their pastors. At Gaindorf in the Regensburg diocese, for instance, demands for singing Psalms were closely bound up with the desire to receive communion in both species (i.e., as bread and wine), a common phenomenon in areas that had embraced Lutheran ideas: He prays the Vater unser and the Ave Maria. and allows nothing to be sung. For since he will not allow the peasants to sing new, suspect Psalms, they will not follow him in singing the old church-songs. . . . On Laetare Sunday in 1558, the peasants gathered in the churchyard and asked him to grant them communion in both species. When he refused to do so, they were not pleased, but did nothing other than say evil words to him.40
In the parish of Au, near Rosenheim, the vicar reported that “his parishioners sing German Psalms against his will, and when he begins to sing a Catholic song to them, they remain silent.”41 German schoolmasters were often implicated in the singing and teaching of Psalms. Under questioning, Peter Prechler at Munich reported the following: He sings the Vater unser and the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and other Psalms, for no one has forbidden him to do so. He says that he likes the Lutheran sermon better than the other one, for the Dean at Unsere [Liebe] Frau preaches in both manners . . . if German [songs] were sung in church, everyone could understand them; and there are some in the city council and community that have asked him to sing German psalms to their children. He will, however, not name any of them, even though he was asked three times.”42
In other cases schoolmasters who refused to teach Psalms to their students faced resistance from parents: the schoolmaster at the village of Ärding, for instance, claimed that “he does not sing German Psalms, although there are some burghers who desire it.”43
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Concerns about vernacular psalmody in Bavaria long outlasted the midcentury visitations. In Munich the teaching staff of its largest parish, Unsere Liebe Frau, complained bitterly to the pastor that the Jesuits, having been invited to the city by Duke Albrecht, were attracting students that might otherwise attend the parish school. The Jesuits found themselves accused, rightly or wrongly, not only of offering communion in both species, but also of allowing their students to sing German Psalms at nighttime in the streets: As far as the schoolmaster and cantor are concerned, since the Jesuits teach for free, and allow their boys to sing German Psalms at nighttime, it has happened that whereas I, the schoolmaster, once had 60 to 70 boys in the higher school, each of whom paid me 15 kreuzer each quarter, now I have no more than 35. . . . People give money more readily to the boys who sing German Psalms than to the others; in addition, these German Psalm-singers walk before [our students], and claim to be from either of the parish schools, and so when our poor students come afterward, they are given nothing more.44
The complaint, admittedly, says nothing about Protestant songs per se, but the use of the term German Psalms would likely have carried more than a whiff of suspicion for Catholic officials in Munich. Determined to prevent the bleeding of their students to the Jesuits, parish officials may have been tempted to smear the Society with an accusation tinged with suggestions of heresy.
Kaspar Ulenberg and the Catholic Reappropriation of the Psalter Until the advent and rapid spread of the Lobwasser Psalter in the 1570s, the Catholic response to versified Psalm translations was, at best, ambivalent. Neither of the two principal Catholic hymnals of the period, A New Little Songbook of Sacred Songs by Michael Vehe, and the Sacred Songs and Psalms by Johannes Leisentrit, addressed the Psalter systematically.45 Eight of Vehe’s fifty-two song texts were psalmodic in origin, and are likely the work of his collaborators Caspar Querhammer, the burgomaster of Halle, or Georg Witzel (1501–73), the Catholic preacher and convert from Lutheranism. None of the melodies are taken from Lutheran sources, and are supertitled either as “Bittlieder” (songs of supplication) or as “Lobgesänge” (songs of praise). By contrast, Leisentrit provides a distinct set of vernacular Psalms (supertitled “Aus den Psalmen”) that follows the opening cycle of songs for the Temporale.46 Of the sixteen settings, eight are taken from Vehe’s hymnal, while a further five draw texts from Valentin Triller’s evangelical Little Silesian Songbook (1555), a Silesian product likely well known in Leisentrit’s residence at Bautzen (the authorship of the melodies is unclear).47 Unlike Vehe, Leisentrit explicitly borrows a well-known Protestant melody in Luther’s “Aus tiefer Not,”
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assigning to it both the translation of Psalm 130 found in Vehe (“Aus herzen grundt schrey ich zu dir”) as well as a translation of Psalm 23, “Dominus regit me” (Der Herr Gott is mein trewer Hirt). Significantly, the latter Psalm is preceded in the hymnal by a woodcut engraving depicting the struggle to preserve the correct interpretation of scripture in the face of heresy: a shepherd fights off a goat who is biting into a tree labeled “Heilig Schrift” while a pack of wolves tears at a flock of sheep below. The whole is supertitled “Christliche Sa[mm]lu[n]g—Keczrischr Hauf ” (Christian flock—heretical pack).48 Leisentrit’s determination to counter the most provocative of the Lutheran Psalm translations may be seen in two additional examples from the next section of the hymnal, devoted to songs about the church (“Von der Kirch”). Leisentrit’s “Ach Gott von Himel sich darein” is a direct contrafactum of Luther’s translation of Psalm 12 (“Salvum me fac”): “Ach Gott vom Himel sich darein / und laß dich das erbarmen / Wie wenig sind die heilgen dein / verführet seind die armen / Durch list der Ketzer immerdar / der glaub der will verleschen gar / In diesen unsern Landen.” (O God in heaven, look to us / and be merciful / How few are your saints / The poor folk are deceived / Through the fraud of the heretics / Faith will vanish fully / In these our lands).49 Also appearing in this section of the hymnal is a contrafactum of Luther’s infamous “Erhalt uns Herr bei deinem Wort,” replacing the “Pope and the Turk” of the original with “sectarian teachings”: “Bey deiner Kirch erhalt uns Herr / behüt uns vor allr secten lehr / dein Kirch ist einig unzertrent / Bey deinem Rock man sie erkent.” (Lord, preserve us in your church / Protect us from sectarian teachings / Your church is one, undivided / In your robe, it shall be known).50 By providing a distinct set of songs setting texts from the Psalter, Leisentrit showed an awareness of how central vernacular psalmody had been for his confessional opponents. Until the time of Ulenberg, however, cyclic settings of the Psalter failed to provide an alternative to the powerful union of melody and rhyme found in the Protestant repertoire. Georg Witzel, who went on to become a prolific author of manuals interpreting the traditional liturgy for a lay audience, provided new translations of fifty Psalms recited at Vespers in his Psalmody for Vespers.51 In his dedication to Prince-Abbot Philipp of Fulda, Witzel lamented the lack of popular understanding of scripture and discussed the subtleties involved in its translation. His prose translations are not provided with melodies and, as such, their audience likely remained limited to pious clerics and educated laymen. More polemical in intent are two other books printed at Cologne, neither of which is equipped with melodies. The anonymous Psalter Davids Latyn unnd Teutsch provides prose translations only.52 Rutger Edinger, by contrast, offered versified translations in his The Whole Psalter of David. an explicit riposte to the well-circulated Bonn Songbook of the Lutherans.53 However, Edinger explained in his preface to the reader that the varying line lengths of his translations made
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it impossible for him to adapt melodies to the texts, compelling him to leave the choice of the melody to the reader. With Kaspar Ulenberg (1549–1617) an entirely new phase begins in the history of the Catholic versified Psalter. Drawing directly and indirectly on the example of Ambrosius Lobwasser, who introduced German-speaking audiences to the Genevan melodies nearly a decade earlier, Ulenberg issued The Psalms of David in Sundry German Verse from a Cologne press in 1582.54 Born in the Westphalian town of Lippstadt, Ulenberg studied theology at Wittenberg and taught briefly at Lunden in the Dithmarschen region of Holstein.55 In 1572 a letter arrived from his parents at Lippstadt, begging him to travel to Cologne to dissuade his nephew Andreas Roder from converting to Catholicism. This journey had the unexpected result of Ulenberg’s own conversion and continuation of his studies at the university in that city. At the time that he published his Psalms of David he was a priest and canon at the church of St. Swibertus in Kaiserswerth, near Düsseldorf, and a subject of the volume’s dedicatee, Johann Wilhelm of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, bishop of Münster. From 1583 Ulenberg spent the remainder of his life in Cologne, holding positions as a pastor and canon at St. Kunibert (1583–97), director of the Gymnasium of St. Lorenz (1592–1605), pastor at St. Columba (1605–12), and rector of the university (1610–12). In addition to the Psalms of David he was a prolific writer, issuing a catechism (printed as an appendix to the former volume in 1582), a series of translations of scripture, and a number of polemics. In 1614 Archbishop Ferdinand of Bayern commissioned Ulenberg with a complete vernacular translation of the Bible, a work that remained incomplete at his death but that was completed and issued posthumously in 1630.56 In his dedication to Johann Wilhelm, Ulenberg immediately launched an attack against the heretical, deceptive songs of the Protestants. While he took pains to justify the practice of religious singing based on biblical and historical precedent, he took aim at so-called falsified translations of the Psalter in particular. Singling out as an example Psalm 12 (Vulgate Ps. 11), “Salvum me fac,” Ulenberg praised the translations of the Calvinists Paul Schede Melissus (1572) and Petrus Dathenus (1565), as well as that of Ambrosius Lobwasser (1573). In contrast, he criticized several passages in Luther’s translation “Ach Gott vom Himmel” for conflating David’s lament against the ungodly (“Vana locuti sunt unusquisque ad proximum suum, labia dolosa in corde et corde locuti sunt,” Ps. 12:3) with the deceits of teachers of false doctrine (“Sie leren eitel falsche list / Was eigen witz erfindet / In hertz nicht eines sinnes ist / In Gottes wort gegründet”). There is no need here to pursue his argument further, but it is worth emphasizing Ulenberg’s feeling that Catholics had no necessary monopoly on the so-called correct translation of scripture, and that the Calvinist tradition could offer useful models for his own work. Moreover, he insisted that while paraphrase of scripture was inevitable in a versified translation, the
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author should take care to wholly represent the content of the text and “the true meaning of the Holy Spirit.”57 With its appendage of a catechism at the conclusion—containing a “warning against all manner of errors in these times for Catholics and followers of other teachings, to foster one’s blessedness through useful, further clarifications”58—Ulenberg’s Psalter mimicked the format of contemporary Protestant hymnals.59 But Ulenberg’s dependence on Protestant models extended deeply into the melodic content as well, ensuring that the characteristic soundscape of the Genevan tradition would continue to be propagated in Catholic Germany as well. Ulenberg made this dependence clear to his readers only in the second edition of 1603, in which he states, “Among them [i.e., the melodies] are some, nearly the best and most agreeable, that have been taken from the Marot- or Calvinist Psalter; just as in olden times Saint Ephraim kept the aforementioned harmonies of the heretics, but prescribed for the Catholics in Syria other, pure, Catholic texts to be laid underneath.”60 The statement naturally raises the question of Ulenberg’s borrowing from the Genevan Psalter; this question was addressed to some degree in early studies of his Psalter by Nikola Esser, Joseph Solzbacher, and Siegfried Fornaçon.61 But our knowledge of the Ulenberg Psalter’s melodic relationships to the Genevan Psalter, not to mention relationships to Gregorian chant, existing Lutheran and Catholic repertories, and folksong, is largely thanks to Johannes Overath, who exhaustively analyzed the sources for the Ulenberg melodies in a 1960 study.62 His work was updated in a 2004 essay by Dieter Gutknecht, who was able to use the 1962 study of the Genevan melodies by Pierre Pidoux that had been unavailable to Overath.63 It is clear from this work that Ulenberg did not use any of the Genevan melodies in their entirety in the 1582 edition. For the 1603 edition, however, he did use Genevan melodies for Psalm 116 and for a series of biblical canticles that he appended.64 If we take Ulenberg at his word, however, that he “hab auch auff ein jedes genus carminis oder art reimen besondere melodeien zugerichtet und verordnet” (adapted and assigned particular melodies to each type of rhyme),65 we have a clue that his compositional process involved, at least in part, the modification of existing melodies.66 In his study Overath found that seventeen of Ulenberg’s Psalms share a common incipit with a Genevan melody. Three derived their incipit from interior passages of a Genevan melody, thirteen show distinct connections to Genevan melodies in their interior passages and cadences, and seven show a more general, family relationship with Genevan musical contours (some of Ulenberg’s Psalms fall into more than one of these categories).67 As an example of a close resemblance we can examine Ulenberg’s setting of Psalm 2, “Quare fremuerunt gentes,” for which he underlays the text “Warum empören sich die Heiden.”68 The source, as identified by Overath, is the Genevan tune for Psalm 77, “Adieu ma voix j’ay haussée.”69
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Figure 4.1. Kaspar Ulenberg, “Warum empören sich die Heiden.”
The Genevan tune is built from four distinct musical phrases in the form AABCDDBC (see figure 4.1), and is longer than Ulenberg’s (figure 4.2) only by virtue of the repetitions of the A and D sections (measures 1–2 and 5–6). Ulenberg’s first two phrases closely mimic the A and B sections of the Genevan melody, while his fourth phrase (marked D’ in Example 2) is identical to the D section of the Genevan tune save for its initial pitch. By contrast, Ulenberg favors a wider ambitus, including an octave descent from d’ to d in measure 5 that seems to cement the plagal character of the mode with its final on G. Keen singers and listeners to the initial phrase might also have heard connections with Luther’s complex of hymns derived from the plainchant melody for “Veni redemptor gentium,” including “Non komm der Heiden Heiland” and, perhaps more directly, “Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich” (figure 4.3).70
Figure 4.2. “Adieu ma voix j’ay haussée,” from the Genevan Psalter.
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Figure 4.3. Martin Luther, “Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich” (initial phrase).
Nevertheless, as Gutknecht has observed, Ulenberg generally imitates the rhythmic profile of the Genevan repertoire in particular, tending to begin and end phrases with one or more long notes (semibreves) and allowing the interior of the melody to unfold in shorter notes (minims).71 Ulenberg’s intention to make his music as accessible as possible is clear from his absolute avoidance of note values quicker than a minim (a feature shared with the Genevan Psalter), not to mention his brief preface to the reader demonstrating how singers accustomed to traditional German chant notation (in the so-called Hufnagel style) might read his melodies, which are rendered in modern mensural notation that clearly distinguishes hierarchies of duration.72 Many other examples of this melodic dependence on Protestant psalmody have been discussed by Overath and Gutknecht, and need not be reprised here. It may have been for confessional reasons that Ulenberg declined to directly borrow Protestant melodies—save for the handful of borrowings in the 1603 edition. Nevertheless, he was well schooled in the musical grammar of the Genevan Psalter in particular and, by comparison, seems to have been less dependent on Catholic models like those of Vehe and Leisentrit.73 By adopting the manner of Reformed psalmody, whose success was already evident in the the explosive spread of the Genevan repertory and in the popularity of Lobwasser’s translation, Ulenberg’s Psalms of David was by far the most successful Catholic attempt to reappropriate the vernacular Psalter. At least thirteen editions would appear through the year 1710, and many of Ulenberg’s melodies found their way into other Catholic songbooks of the early modern age.74 Polyphonic settings of the Ulenberg Psalms, moreover, soon appeared: at Munich, Orlando di Lasso and his son Rudolph issued three-voice settings of the first fifty Psalms in their 1588 German Psalms: Sacred Psalms for Three Voices.75 while Konrad Hagius, a musician of Johann Wilhelm and one who was likely acquainted with Ulenberg personally, brought out a complete collection for four voices in his Psalms of David of 1589.76 Among the most enthusiastic audiences for the Ulenberg Psalter were the Marian Congregations founded by the Jesuits in many German towns. Indeed, editions of the Psalter issued at Cologne in 1644 and in 1710 were appended by sets of statutes and indulgences for the Marian Congregations.77 Even given the ready embrace of Ulenberg’s Psalms in the Catholic orbit, it seems that some listeners were never quite able to dissociate them from Protestant prac-
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tice. In Cologne, the Marian Congregation began to field a fixed choir that performed not only during its own devotions but also for external occasions, such as the thirteen- or forty-hour prayers mounted in adoration of the Eucharist. A certain woman, hearing these performances, complained, “The Psalm singing was disagreeable. . . . It sounded like screaming, and had something strange and Lutheran about it.” The sodalists of the congregation defended themselves by insisting that this kind of Psalm singing, far from promoting Lutheran song, had in fact helped to prevent its spread in the first place.78
Conclusion The historical trajectory of the term Psalm in sixteenth-century sources illustrates how the emerging religious divide in early modern Europe invested certain names with a confessional valence. The Psalter was a special object of interest to Martin Luther even before the initial steps toward his reformation were taken. By 1524 he had not only issued a complete vernacular translation in prose, but also was developing a repertory of lay vernacular song in which translations from the Psalter would feature prominently. The extant reports of Catholic parish visitations suggest that, by the middle of the century, Psalmen had become a convenient term denoting Protestant vernacular songs more broadly, whether or not they were directly derived from the Psalter. These associations were only deepened by the Calvinist embrace of the Psalter as the exclusively sanctioned form of congregational singing, featuring tuneful melodies that spread without hindrance in the German orbit through Ambrosius Lobwasser’s 1573 translation of the Genevan Psalter. When Kaspar Ulenberg set about writing his so-called unfalsified translations and crafting appropriate melodies a few years later, he was quite explicitly seizing a tradition widely associated with Protestantism and relocating it within Catholic practice. The semantic ambiguity of musical sound, however, lent Ulenberg’s project a certain ambivalence. While he was careful to avoid any direct borrowings of Protestant melodies, he nevertheless deeply understood the musical syntax of the Genevan tunes. In some cases, he adopted Genevan melodic incipits, which would likely have evoked a direct relationship for some singers and listeners. In other cases, he modeled interior passages and cadential formulas on the Genevan originals; and, more broadly, he shared with the Genevan repertory a common vocabulary of rhythm and contour. In many respects Ulenberg was successful in clawing back Psalmen from the Protestants, but his so-called purified translations were clothed in music that, wittingly or unwittingly, had more than a little whiff of the heretical.
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Alexander J. Fisher is professor of music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A specialist in music, sound, and religious culture in early modern Germany, he is the author of two books: Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Ashgate, 2004); and Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria (Oxford, 2014).
Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Danckwardt, “Konfessionelle Musik?,” 377. Pietschmann, Te Lutherum damnamus. Groote and Vendrix, “The Renaissance Musician,” 192–94. Werbeck, “Musik,” 12. Ulenberg, Die Psalmen Dauids. Luther, First Lectures on the Psalms. Ibid., vol. 10, 43–44. See also Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music. 90. Deudsche Messe und ordnung Gottis diensts (Wittenberg, 1526). See Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music. 187–88, 245–46. Der Psalter deutsch (Wittenberg, 1524). “Ich habe die Absicht, nach dem Beispiel der alten Väter der Kirche deutsche Psalmen für das Volk zu schaffen, damit das Wort Gottes auch durch den Gesang unter den Leuten bleibt. Wir suchen daher überall Dichter.” Luther to Georg Spalatin, 1524, quoted in Aland, Die Briefe. 137. Etlich Cristlich lider (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales [hereafter as RISM] B/VIII, 152412). Eyn Enchiridion (RISM B/VIII, 152403). On the position of the Psalter in the song repertoire of the early Reformation, see Moisi, “Die Medialität,” 38–40. Ibid., 39–40. Statistics from the Gesangbuchbibliographie. an online resource of the Interdisziplinären Arbeitskreis Gesangbuchforschung, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, https:// scripts.zdv.uni-mainz.de/gesangbuch/index.php (accessed 2 January 2019). Gesang büchlin, Darinn der gantze Psalter Davids, sampt andern Gaistlichen gesangen (RISM B/VIII, 155703). The Psalter was reprinted at Nuremberg in 1560 (RISM B/ VIII, Augs 1560). See, e.g., the Nuremberg hymnals (RISM B/VIII, 156303 and 158109) and the Augsburg hymnals (RISM B/VIII, 156202, 157001, 157101, and Augs 1583). Luther, Geistliche lieder auffs new gebessert zu Wittemberg (RISM B/VIII, 153302). See Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 255–56. Lossius, Psalmodia, hoc est, Cantica sacra veteris ecclesiae selecta (RISM A/I, L2874). See also Merten, “Die Psalmodia.” See, e.g., the German psalms of Thomas Stoltzer published in Kugelmann, Concentus novi; Dressler, Zehen deudscher Psalmen; and the settings for Pss. 12 and 24 in Schröter, Der Zwölffte. On this tradition, see Dehnhard, Die deutsche.
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21. Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant. See Rokseth, “Les Premiers Chants”; and Trocmé-Latter, The Singing. esp. 220–23. On the general background of psalmody in the Calvinist tradition, see Föllmi, “Calvin.” 22. La forme des prières et chants ecclésiastiques. Calvin quoted and translated in Strunk, Source Readings. 367. Calvin cites Augustine, “Enarratio in Psalmum XXXIV.” For the original text of Augustine’s exposition of Ps. 34, see Augustine, “In Psalmum XXXIV,” col. 322–3, sermon I, verse 1. 23. Calvin, Les Pseaumes mis en rime francoise. A thorough study of the Genevan Psalter may be found in Pidoux, Le psautier. 24. See Reid, “The Battle Hymns”; and Diefendorf, “The Huguenot Psalter.” 25. Lobwasser, Der Psalter dess Königlichen Propheten Dauids, in deutsche reymen . . . gebracht (RISM B/VIII, 157303). 26. Mager, “Zur vergessenen,” 140. 27. On Lutheran reactions to the Lobwasser Psalter, see Kessner, “Lutherische Reaktionen.” 28. For further discussion, see Landersdorfer, Das Bistum Freising. esp. 32–77. 29. Braun, Die bayerischen. 135–36. 30. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München [BayHStA], KÄA 4263, 224br–226v. The precise identity of “des pfarrers Liedt von penntzingen” remains obscure, but it may refer to a specific example of a Schnadahüpfel (Bavarian folksong with a racy or insulting text). Several stanzas of a Schnadahüpfel transcribed in Reiskel, “Schnadahüpfeln,” 118, begin with the phrase “Der Pfarrer von Penzing.” See, e.g., “Der Pfarrer in Penzing / Der fahrt am Kongreß / Und vögelt seine Köchin / Von hint’ im Kaleß.” 31. “Mit teutschen Psalmen singen, wid[er] dz allt herkhomen.” BayHStA, KÄA 4263, 227r. 32. On this Lutheran demonstration, see Roth, “Eine lutherische Demonstration”; and Rößler, Geschichte. 33. See Roth, “Eine lutherische Demonstration,” 101–2. Mention of this song, with the variant text “Bewar uns herr bey deinem wort und behuet uns vor des babsts und Türckhenmordt,” was made in a beiverwarten verzeichnus describing the episode by ducal officials. 34. “Und als sy für der Augustinerkhirchen khomen und gehört, daz man gesungen hat, sennd sy auch on allen argkhwon und one gevar hinein gangen, sich auf ein altar gelaint und wie andere gesungen den psalmen ‘Aus tiefer not’, ‘Der herr wöll uns genedig sein’, ‘Bitten wir den heiligen geist.’ und zum letzten ‘Wir rufen zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’. da der prediger auf den stuel khomen, da hab man an dem lezten satz des psalmens gesungen.” As quoted in Roth, “Eine lutherische Demonstration,” 101, 105–6. 35. “Ob er zu anfang vnnd ennde der Predig der volck betten haiß, vnnd ob er das Aue Maria auch gebrauch als ain gebete, ob vnnd was er fur rueff vnnd Psalmen singen laß.” Instructions of 14 June 1558, BayHStA, GR 512/61b, 3v. See also Ziegler, Altbayern. 269. 36. For example, in the parish of Alzgern, east of Altötting, the vicar reported in the 1558 visitation, “Er laß petten und singen wie vor allter. Aber sein cooperator sing new rüeff wider seinen willen” (He has them pray and sing as in old times. But his colleague sings new calls against his will). BayHStA, KÄA 4049, 306r, quoted in Braun, Die bayerischen Teile. 382. On the origins of the Ruf in the litany, see Fredrich, Der Ruf. esp. 11–33. 37. BayHStA, KÄA 4049, 489r–v. See also discussion in Braun, Die bayerischen Teile. 135–36.
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38. Archiv der Erzdiözese München und Freising, Salzburg 37, fols. 39r, 45r, 49r–v, 55v, quoted in Braun, Die bayerischen Teile. 177, 181, 184, 188. 39. For Passau, see Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cgm 1737, discussed generally in Kaff, Volksreligion. For Regensburg, see Bischöfliches Zentralarchiv Regensburg, Visitationsprotokoll 1559 (1792 copy), edited in Mai, Das Bistum Regensburg. For Freising, see BayHStA, KÄA 4207, edited in Landersdorfer, Das Bistum Freising. 40. “Pett das Vatter unser und ave Maria, laß nichts singen, dann weil er die paurn nit neu verdechtlich psalmen singen lassen wöllen, sy ime die alten kirchengsang nit nachsingen . . . Sontags letare des 58 jars, haben sich die paurn auf dem freithof zusamen gerott und von ime haben wellen, inen des sacrament sub utraque zeraichen, als ers inen aber abgeschlagen, sein sy ubel zufriden, ime aber anderst nichts gethan, als bese wort geben.” Testimony of Pastor Sigismundus Koppenwaldner, quoted in Mai, Das Bistum Regensburg. 354–55. 41. Quoted in Landersdorfer, Das Bistum Freising. 556–57; see also BayHStA, KÄA 4207, 559r–560r. 42. Quoted in Landersdorfer, Das Bistum Freising. 407–8; see also BayHStA, KÄA 4207, 343v–344r. 43. Quoted in Landersdorfer, Das Bistum Freising. 692; see also BayHStA, KÄA 4207, 741r. 44. “Souil dann Mich Schulmaister vnnd Cantorn betrifft, Seitemal die herrn Jesuiter, gratis dociern. vnnd Ire arme knaben, nächtliche weil Teutsch Psalmen singen lassen, eruolgt darauß, wo Ich Schulmaister, vormals .60. oder 70 Knaben, deren Mir yeder quotemerlich 15 k gegeben, In der obern Schuel gehabt, yetzt vber .35.ig Nit habe . . . Man gibt auch den knaben, so Teutsch Psalmen singen, vil lieber vnnd mer, als den annd[er]n, darzue diselben Teutschen Psalmen sinnger, den armen knaben von vnnser Frauen vnnd S: Peter, Mit dem sing[en] vorkom[m]en, vnnd zaigen sich auf sy an, als seyen sy aus aintweder Pfarr Schuel, vnnd so vnnsern arme Schueler nach Inen singen, gibt man Inen Nichtz mer.” BayHStA, GL 2677/338, No. 1. 45. Vehe (ca. 1480–1539), Ein New Gesangbüchlin Geystlicher Lieder (RISM B/VIII, 153706); and Lipphardt, Michael Vehe. See also Leisentrit (1527–86), Geistliche Lieder vnd Psalmen (RISM B/VIII, 156705). A recent study of Leisentrit’s hymnal may be seen in Wetzel and Heitmeyer, Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder. 46. Leisentrit, Geistlicher Lieder. 225v–265v. 47. Schlesisch singebüchlein (RISM B/VIII, 155507). On Leisentrit’s dependence on Triller see Wetzel and Heitmeyer, Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder. 50–51. 48. Leisentrit, Geistlicher Lieder. 241v; and Wetzel and Heitmeyer, Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder. 77, 193–94. 49. Leisentrit, Geistlicher Lieder. 270v–272r; and Wetzel and Heitmeyer, Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder. 204. 50. Leisentrit, Geistlicher Lieder. 278v–280r; and Wetzel and Heitmeyer, Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder. 47–51, 207–8. 51. Witzel, Vespertina Psalmodia. 52. Anonymous, Der Psalter Dauids. 53. Edinger, Der gantz Psalter Dauids. 54. Ulenberg, Die Psalmen Dauids in allerlei Teutsche gesangreimen bracht (RISM B/VIII, 158209). 55. On Ulenberg’s biography see Solzbacher, Kaspar Ulenberg. 5–14 and passim. See also Overath, Untersuchungen. 9–15; and Wissemann-Garbe, “Ulenberg, Caspar,” Personenteil 16: col. 1190.
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56. Solzbacher, Kaspar Ulenberg. 61–66. 57. “Denn ob ich wol wegen der gezwungenen art zurede[n] sölche dolmetschung vnd version hab brauchen müssen/ welche die gelerten paraphrasin nennen; vnd derhalben des Propheten worte nicht also genaw nach den syllaben vnd buchstaben behalten könne[n]/ sondern zuweilen den text etwas erweitern/ vnd den sinn mit mehren worten paraphrastischer weise geben müssen; so wirt sich doch befinden/ daß gleichwol des textes inhalt volkömlich da ist/ vñ die ware meinung des heiligen geistes allenthalben vnverrucket bleibet.” Ulenberg, Psalmen Davids. dedication, 17v–18r. 58. “Kurtzer bericht der gantzen Christlichen Catholische Religion/ samt Warnung wider allerlei unser zeit Irrthum/ beid den Catholischen vnd fremder lehr anhengigen nützlich wetterer erklerung nachzufragen zu befürderung ihrer seligkeit.” Ulenberg, Psalmen Davids. 699. Preceding the catechism (641–61) is a versified German translation in 85 stanzas of Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms, entitled “Des heiligen Aurelij Augustini Pselterlein, welchs er aus dem Psalmen Dauids gezogen, vnd der Monica seiner mutter zugerichtet hat.” For singers Ulenberg provides a melody (641) also used for his settings of Psalms 24 and 103. See also Overath, Untersuchungen. 28. 59. On this point see Scheitler, “Lied und katholische,” 165–66. 60. “Darunter auch etliche, fast die beste vnd lieblichste Melodeyen auß dem Marotischen oder Calvinischen Psalter gebraucht worden: Inmassen vor alters der H. Ephraim des obgedachten Ketzers Harmonij liebliche Melodeyen behalten, vnd andern, reinen Catholischen text vnter denselben den Catholischen in Syria zusingen verordnet.” Ulenberg, Die Psalmen des H. (RISM B/VIII, 160310), preface. See Overath, Untersuchungen. 73–74. 61. Esser, Rutger Edinger; Solzbacher, “Die Psalmen Davids,” 41–55; and Fornaçon, “Kaspar Ulenberg.” 62. Overath, Untersuchungen. 63. Gutknecht, “Die Rezeption”; and Pidoux, Le psautier. 64. Overath, Untersuchungen. 94–96. 65. Ulenberg, Die Psalmen Davids. preface, c ii v. 66. On this point, see Gutknecht, “Die Rezeption,” 254. 67. Overath, Untersuchungen. 94–96. 68. Ulenberg, Die Psalmen Davids. 3–4. 69. Melody transcribed from Calvin, Les Pseaumes. fol. [93r]. 70. Transcription from Luther, Geistliche Lieder. 66, transposed for the sake of comparison. 71. Gutknecht, “Die Rezeption,” 260–61. 72. Ulenberg, Die Psalmen Davids. “Erinnerung von den melodeien und ihrer signatur.” 73. Gutknecht, “Die Rezeption,” 259, 262; and Overath, Untersuchungen. 59–60. Overath identifies only two common incipits between Ulenberg’s melodies and the Catholic repertoire (those used for Pss. 74 and 112, and for Pss. 116 and 118). 74. Melodies by Ulenberg were taken as early as 1586, e.g., into the so-called Walasser songbook, Gesang und Psalmenbuch (RISM B/VIII, 158610). See Härting, “Das deutsche Kirchenlied,” 61. 75. Lasso and Lasso, Teutsche Psalmen: Geistliche Psalmen, mit dreyen stimmen (RISM B/ VIII, 158812). 76. Hagius, Die Psalmen Davids (RISM A/I, H1727; RISM A/I, H1728 [1606 ed.]). 77. RISM B/VIII, 164412 and 171015. 78. Mallinckrodt, Struktur und kollektiver. 186–87, citing Müller, Die Kölner. 57.
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Bibliography Archival Sources Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München (BayHStA) GL 2677/338, No. 1 GR 512/61b KÄA 4049, 4207, 4263, KL München, Augustiner Lit. M, Nr. 1 Archiv der Erzdiözese München und Freising Salzburg 37 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (BSB) Cgm 1737 Bischöfliches Zentralarchiv Regensburg Visitationsprotokoll 1559 (1792 copy)
Primary Sources Aland, Kurt, ed. Luther Deutsch: Die Werke Martin Luthers in neuer Auswahl für die Gegenwart. Vol. 10: Die Briefe. Göttingen, 1983. Augustine. “In in Psalmum XXXIV, Enarratio.” In Patrologia Cursus Completus, sive bibliotheca universalis . . . qui ab aevo apostolico ad Innocentii III tempora floruerunt . . . series prima. vol. 36. Paris, 1845. Calvin, John. Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant. Strasbourg, 1539. Calvin, John. La forme des prières et chants ecclésiastiques. Geneva, 1542. Calvin. Les Pseaumes de David mis en rime françoise, Par Clement Marot et Theodore de Besze. Geneva, 1562. Dachser, Jakob. Gesang büchlin, Darinn der gantze Psalter Davids, sampt andern Gaistlichen gesangen. Augsburg, 1557. Der Psalter Dauids, Latyn vnnd Teutsch. In deme der Latynscher Text nach gemeynem brauch der Christlichen Catholischen Kirchen trewlich vorgesatzt . . . mit grossem fleiß versammlung. Cologne, 1562. Dressler, Gallus. Zehen deudscher Psalmen, in vier oder mehr stimmen gebracht. Jena, 1562. Edinger, Rutger. Der gantz Psalter Dauids, nach der gemeinen alten Kirchischen Latinischen Edition auff verß vnd Reimweiß gar trewlich, verstendlich vnd geschicklich gestellet. Cologne, 1574. Eyn Enchiridion oder Handbüchlein. eynem ytzlichen Christen fast nutzlich bey sich zuhaben zur stetter vbung vnd trachtung geystlicher gesenge vnd Psalmen Rechtschaffen vnd kunstlich verteutsch. Erfurt, 1524. Etlich Cristlich lider Lobgesang vn[d] Psalm, dem rainen wort Gottes gemeß, auß der heylige[n] schrifft, durch mancherley hochgelerter gemacht . . . berayt zu Wittenberg in übung ist wittenberg [Achtliederbuch]. Nuremberg, 1524. Gesang büchlin, Darinn der gantze Psalter Dauids, sampt andern Gaistlichen gesangen, mit jren Melodeyen begriffen, mit fleiß übersehen vnnd Corrigert. Augsburg, 1557. Gesang und Psalmenbuch, Auff die fürnembste Fest durchs gantze Jar inn der Kirchen auch bey Processionen Creutzgaeng Kirch vnd Wahlfarten nuetzlich zugebrauchen . . . Melodey mit vleiß zugeordnet worden. Munich, 1586.
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Gsangbüchlein Geistlicher Psalmen, hymnen, lieder, vnd gebet, Durch etliche Diener der Kirchen zuo Bonn, fleissig zuosamen getragen, mercklich gemeret, vnd in geschickte Ordnung zusamen gestelt, zuo übung vnd brauch der Christlichen gemeine [Bonn Songbook]. Bonn, 1550. Hagius, Konrad. Die Psalmen Davids, Wie die hiebevor in allerlej art Reymen und Melodejen durch den Herrn Caspar Ulenbergium in Truck verfertigt . . . mit vier Stimmen zugerichtet. Düsseldorf, 1589. Kugelmann, Johann. Concentus novi. Augsburg, 1540. Lasso, Orlando di, and Rudolph di Lasso. Teutsche Psalmen: Geistliche Psalmen mit dreyen Stimmen welche nit allein lieblich zu singen sonder auch auff aller . . . vnd in Truck verfertiget. Munich, 1588. Leisentrit, Johannes. Geistliche Lieder vnd Psalmen, der alten Apostolischer recht vnd warglaubiger Christlicher Kirchen . . . Auffs fleissigste vnd Christlichste zusamen bracht. Bautzen, 1567. Lipphardt, Walther, ed. Michael Vehe: Ein New Gesangbüchlin Geistlicher Lieder. FaksimileDruck der ersten Ausgabe Leipzig 1537. Mainz, 1970. Lobwasser, Ambrosius. Der Psalter dess Königlichen Propheten Davids, In deutsche reymen verstendiglich und deutlich gebracht. Leipzig, 1573. Lossius, Lucas. Psalmodia, hoc est, Cantica sacra veteris ecclesiae selecta. Nuremberg, 1553. Luther, Martin. Von ordenung gottis dienst yn[n] der gemeyne. Wittenberg, 1523. Luther, Martin. Der Psalter deutsch. Wittenberg, 1524 Luther, Martin. Deudsche Messe und ordnung Gottis diensts. Wittenberg, 1526. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works: American Edition. Vol. 10–11: First Lectures on the Psalms. edited by Hilton C. Oswald. St. Louis, 1974–76. Luther, Martin. Geistliche lieder auffs new gebessert zu Wittemberg. D. Mart. Luth. Wittenberg, 1533. Luther, Martin. Geistliche Lieder zu Wittemberg, Anno 1543. Wittenberg 1544. Patrologia Cursus Completus, sive bibliotheca universalis . . . omnium S. S. Patrum, Doctorum, Scriptorumque ecclesiasticorum qui ab aevo apostolico ad Innocentii III tempora floruerunt . . . series prima. Vol. 36. Paris, 1845. Schröter, Leonhard. Der Zwölffte und vier und zwantzigste Psalm Davids Sampt dem Schönen Christlichen Kinderliede D. Martini Lutheri Erhalt uns Herr bey deinem wort, etc. . . . Auffs newe in ettliche Stimmen gesetzt. Magdeburg, 1576. Triller, Valentin. Schlesisch singebüchlein aus Göttlicher schrifft. Breslau, 1555. Ulenberg, Kaspar. Die Psalmen Dauids in allerlei Teutsche gesangreimen bracht. Cologne, 1582. Ulenberg, Kaspar. Die Psalmen des H. Propheten Davids: unter allerley Melodeyen in Teutsche Gesangreimen bracht. Mit sampt andern newlich beygefügten Lobsengen des Alten und Newen Testaments. Cologne, 1603. Vehe, Michael. Ein New Gesangbüchlin Geystlicher Lieder, vor alle gutthe Christen nach ordenung Christlicher kirchen. Leipzig, 1537. Witzel, Georg. Vespertina Psalmodia, Die Fünfftzig Vesperpsalme[n]. Cologne, 1549.
Secondary Sources Braun, Reiner. Die bayerischen Teile des Erzbistums Salzburg und des Bistums Chiemsee in der Visitation des Jahres 1558. St. Ottilien, Germany, 1991. Danckwardt, Marianne. “Konfessionelle Musik?.” In Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposion . . . 1993. edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, 371–83. Gütersloh, 1995.
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Dehnhard, Walther. Die deutsche Psalmmotette in der Reformationszeit. Wiesbaden, 1971. Diefendorf, Barbara B. “The Huguenot Psalter and the Faith of French Protestants in the Sixteenth Century.” In Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis. edited by Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, 41–64. Ann Arbor, 1993. Esser, Nikola. Rutger Edinger und Kaspar Ulenberg als Kirchenlieddichter. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenlieds im 16. Jahrhundert. Bonn, 1913. Föllmi, Beat A. “Calvin und das Psalmsingen: Die Vorgeschichte des Genfer Psalters.” Zwingliana 36 (2009): 59–84. Fornaçon, Siegfried. “Kaspar Ulenberg und Konrad von Hagen.” Die Musikforschung 9 (1956): 206–13. Fredrich, Eva. Der Ruf, eine Gattung des geistlichen Volksliedes. Berlin, 1936. Groote, Inga Mai, and Philippe Vendrix. “The Renaissance Musician and Theorist Confronted with Religious Fragmentation: Conflict, Betrayal and Dissimulation.” In Forgetting Faith? Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe. edited by Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein, and Inga Mai Groote, 163–98. Berlin, 2012. Grunewald, Eckhard, Henning P. Jürgens, and Jan R. Luth, eds. Der Genfer Psalter und seine Rezeption in Deutschland, der Schweiz und den Niederlanden. Tübingen, 2004. Gutknecht, Dieter.“Die Rezeption des Genfer Psalters bei Caspar Ulenberg.” In Grunewald, Jürgens, and Luth, Der Genfer Psalter. 253–62. Tübingen, 2004. Härting, Michael. “Das deutsche Kirchenlied der Gegenreformation.” In Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik. edited by Karl Gustav Fellerer, vol. 2: 59–63. Kassel, 1976. Kaff, Brigitte. Volksreligion und Landeskirche: die evangelische Bewegung im bayerischen Teil der Diözese Passau. Munich, 1977. Kessner, Lars. “Lutherische Reaktionen auf den Lobwasser-Psalter. Cornelius Becker und Johannes Wüstholtz.” In Grunewald, Jürgens, and Luth, Der Genfer Psalter. 283–94. Tübingen, 2004. Landersdorfer, Anton. Das Bistum Freising in der bayerischen Visitation des Jahres 1560. St. Ottilien, 1986. Leaver, Robin A. Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications. Grand Rapids, MI, 2007. Mager, Inge. “Zur vergessenen Problematik des Psalmliedes im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert.” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 36 (1998): 139–49. Mai, Paul. Das Bistum Regensburg in der bayerischen Visitation von 1559. Regensburg, 1993. Mallinckrodt, Rebekka von. Struktur und kollektiver Eigensinn: Kölner Laienbruderschaften im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung. Göttingen, 2005. Merten, Werner. “Die Psalmodia des Lucas Lossius.” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 19 (1975): 1–18; 20 (1976): 63–90; 21 (1977): 39–67. Moisi, Stephanie. “Die Medialität des geistlichen Liedes im Zeitalter der Reformation (1517–1555) am Beispiel deutschsprachiger Psalmlieder.” In Musik in neuzeitlichen Konfessionskulturen (16.—19. Jahrhundert): Räume, Medien, Funktionen. edited by Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Michael Fischer, and Norbert Haag, 31–52. Sigmaringen, 2014. Müller, Andreas. Die Kölner Bürger-Sodalität. 1608–1908. Paderborn, 1909. Overath, Johannes. Untersuchungen über die Melodien des Liedpsalters von Kaspar Ulenberg (Köln 1582): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kirchenliedes im 16. Jahrhundert. Cologne, 1960. Pidoux, Pierre. Le psautier huguenot du xve siècle: Mélodies et documents. 2 vols. Basel, 1962.
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Pietschmann, Klaus. “‘Te Lutherum damnamus’: Zum konfessionellen Ausdrucks- und Konfliktpotential in der Musik der Reformationszeit.” In Musikgeschichte im Zeichen der Reformation. Magdeburg—ein kulturelles Zentrum in der mitteldeutschen Musiklandschaft. edited by Peter Wollny, 23–33. Beeskow, Germany, 2006. Reid, Standford. “The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century.” Sixteenth Century Journal 2 (1971): 36–54. Reiskel, Karl. “Schnadahüpfeln und Graseltänze.” Anthropophyteia 2 (1905): 117–22. Rokseth, Yvonne. “Les Premiers Chants de l’Église calviniste.” Revue de musicologie 36 (1954): 7–20. Rößler, Hans. Geschichte und Strukturen der evangelischen Bewegung im Bistum Freising 1520– 1571. Nuremberg, 1966. Roth, Friedrich. “Eine lutherische Demonstration in der Münchner Augustinerkirche.” Beiträge zur bayerischen Kirchengeschichte 6 (1900): 97–109. Scheitler, Irmgard. “Lied und katholische Katechese im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert.” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 49 (2010): 163–85. Solzbacher, Joseph. “Die Psalmen Davids, in allerlei deutsche Gesangreime gebracht durch Kaspar Ulenberg, Köln 1582.” Kirchemusikalisches Jahrbuch 34 (1950): 41–55. Solzbacher, Joseph. Kaspar Ulenberg, eine Priestergesalt aus der Zeit der Gegenreformation in Köln. Münster, Germany, 1948. Strunk, Oliver, ed. Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. New York, 1998. Trocmé-Latter, Daniel. The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523–1541. Farnham, UK, 2015. Werbeck, Walter. “Musik und Konfession bei Heinrich Schütz.” Schütz-Jahrbuch 37 (2015): 7–16. Wetzel, Richard, and Erika Heitmeyer. Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen, 1567: Hymnody of the Counter-Reformation in Germany. Teaneck, NJ, 2013. Wissemann-Garbe, Daniela. “Ulenberg, Caspar.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. edited by Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil 16: col. 1190. Kassel, 1996. Ziegler, Walter, ed. Altbayern von 1550–1651. 2 vols. Munich, 1992.
CHAPTER 5
Naming the Ambiguous
Income and Royal Service in the Seventeenth Century HEIKO DROSTE
T
o name oneself is to signal social belonging. In what is often called the premodern world, this belonging was based on social, cultural, and economic privilege, or the lack thereof. These privileges were strongly related to one another and together created a body politic made up of estates, in which inequality was the norm and expressions of that inequality provided the literary and visual fabric of society. In order to explain differences in status, honor, and the social order, people looked to a divine order and the functions that every estate of the realm had within it. Naming oneself, consequently, was contingent on that God-given order as well as other names from the same social field, thereby providing legibility and recognition to all social groups.1 The self-chosen name, picked in relation to the social function and divine order, is thus by no means arbitrary—not then, not today. Every name refers to other names and all of them have a history, embodying certain norms, values, and memories. To name oneself is thus to engage in a cultural discourse about names—it is an undertaking in which one’s position is described in a sociocultural context. A name expresses both a fixed position in a field, which every other member in the same field can relate to, and a particular understanding of a historical situation in which this name originated. Thus, naming can be understood as a social, cultural, and historiographical triangulation, which is why it offers stability and social belonging. From the historian’s perspective, however, this triangulation alone is not enough to avoid uncertainty. No matter how distinctive the name, its original connotations and historical use in the context of other names can be profoundly ambiguous, especially for historians relying on rather limited, often purely text-based access to this field. A lone name is thus insufficient per se to achieve a proper—unambiguous—understanding of its use; on the contrary, only its context and its use in relation to other names offer a possible unam-
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biguity. Any shift in the use of names is thus a clear marker of change in the broader sociocultural field of their users. In this way, the study of names is a tool for a better understanding of their users and their sociocultural field alike. It is this shift in the use of names and historical terms, which will be addressed here, both with regard to the historical subjects of the investigation and to the historian working on them. The two examples concern the highly mobile Swedish court society in seventeenth century, Sweden’s so-called Age of Greatness. This period is marked by dramatic changes especially among the social elites, which due to Sweden’s military expansion were affected by a fast bureaucratization process. The ensuing changes left an imprint on the language used by members of the court society, who consequently had to redefine their own role and social identity using new terms and names. One key to the understanding of these changes is the set of terms in use for different notions of income and the ensuing notions of royal service, which were used by members of the Crown elites. These individuals were aware of this change, while at the same time defending the existing social order. That reaction had consequences for the names that these members had for themselves. There is a distinct inconclusiveness in these elites’ use of names and terms that will be focused on in the following analysis. It not only highlights contemporaries’ efforts to come to terms with their present, but it also discusses the ways by which historians develop concepts in order to explain the very same inconclusiveness, which are then used to theorize about historical progress. We historians consider ourselves experts for exactly this matter. We love change because it produces all those sources that describe change—or supposed stability. These sources are used in order to explain history, not least through the lens of changes of names and terms. This form of analysis created a subfield within historical research—the Begriffsgeschichte (Conceptual History).2 In its classical version, the Begriffsgeschichte focused on the transformation between the cradle of modernity and the exit of premodernity—the so-called Sattelzeit.3 Consequently, this transformation implies a linear historical development to modernity, in its turn asking for modernity to be understood in terms of pre, genuine, or post.4 This chapter tries to question these notions of transformation. In my view, historians should be more open to conflicting ideas and ambiguities. At the same time, we should be more aware of the shortcomings of the standard periodizations of the nominally premodern world, which is always described in derogative names, bestowed on the so-called premodern world by historians who believed themselves to have outgrown what they labeled variously as premodern, early modern, absolutism, the Baroque, the Middle Ages, and the Dark Ages.5 The following analysis of notions of income and royal service will, therefore, have consequences for the terminological triangulation of the historian. It is, in fact, the main point of this chapter.
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The two examples are part of extensive research on the Swedish Crown elite in seventeenth century, focusing on the Swedish diplomats as well as the court society in general. This elite was composed of native Swedes and a strong influx of foreigners, mostly Germans, creating a multilingual court culture, which used different languages intermittently. The names and terms under consideration here are Swedish and German in the original, however without any ensuing problems of translations because most of the terms in use had the same German, Latin, or French origin. The sources, therefore, show no signs of misunderstandings or need for translations on behalf of the members of these social elites. The analysis will thus not consider any differences in language, when it comes to the terms in use.
Getting Paid—Swedish Diplomats in Seventeenth Century Seventeenth century’s diplomats are a perfect example for Sweden’s multilingual court elite. More than half of them were German-born, most of them originating from the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Not a single foreign-born diplomat seems to have felt the need to learn Swedish, which did not cause any severe problems in their communication with the Crown and court elite. The correspondence with the court and thus the following arguments concerning notions of income were mostly written in German. The letters show how the diplomats framed their work for the Swedish Crown. There was more than one reason the Germans joined the Swedish diplomatic service, since the diplomats had rather different interests. Some of them served the Swedish Crown while remaining in German-speaking regions, often in the place they were born, without any intention of ever moving to Sweden or even paying the country a visit. Others clearly entered Crown services in order to migrate to Sweden, hoping to marry in Sweden or to gain noble titles, estates, and such. Either way, most of them enjoyed a considerable measure of success. Provided that they were Lutherans, they were welcome in Sweden because of their education, quite apart from their social and economic credit. Their success also stemmed from their willingness to adapt to ever-changing bureaucratic routines, the Crown’s efforts to professionalize its diplomatic corps, and changes in the Swedish elite’s social structures. However, the one thing everyone complained about during all of seventeenth century was the reimbursement of their services. Getting paid, on time and in full, was a problem—and Sweden was in no way exceptional in not paying regularly or sufficiently. Diplomats were “a group of overworked and underpaid men who lived comfortless, penurious, tedious, occasionally dangerous lives in their country’s service and who often received meager enough rewards at the end.”6 Not getting paid was not just a cliché, but also the bane of the lives of
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many diplomats in many countries. It was certainly frequently noted in works on early modern diplomacy.7 However, the complaints were not only about the money, although that was never unimportant. My study shows that, despite all the complaints, almost no diplomat actually went bankrupt in the long run.8 But there were more forms of income, both tangible and intangible. We can, thus, expect a variety of related terms describing gains. And indeed, the diplomats used a plethora of terms (see table 5.1) to express their need for sufficient, regular reimbursement, each describing a different notion of Verdienst (remuneration or income).9 These terms are taken from a semantic field that easily can be ascribed to the sociocultural field of seventeenth-century court culture in Sweden, as elsewhere. Most terms used by the Swedish diplomats were German, some were French or Latin, and some—like Accidentien, the informal fees paid a royal servant by other royal servants for all kinds of help with the dispatch of royal letters, letters of ennoblement, appointments, royal gifts, and the like—were in the process of becoming part of the German and Swedish vernacular. The terms were obviously easy to understand for recipients at court, members of the social elites. The diplomats did not offer any kind of additional explanation about the exact meaning of a particular term they might use. The terms do not seem to have been subject to misunderstandings. At the same time, it is not possible to pinpoint particular contexts for different terms or specific rhetorical functions that worked only under certain circumstances. What is more, the terms in use do not relate to each other in specific ways. None of them are superordinate, and there are no clear hierarchies discernable. After having read thousands of letters, I could not find preferences or understandings that would explain the preference for a distinct term over anTable 5.1. Terms used by diplomats in Swedish services in order to describe Verdienst. Abtrag
Accidentien
Accomodement
Aufstieg
Ausgaben
Auskommen
Avancement
Avantage
Belohnung
Billigkeit
Capital
Commoditas
contribuiren
demeriren
Ehre
Eigentum
Einkommen
Ergötzlichkeit
Gebühr
Geld
Geschenk
Gabe
Gewinn
Goldene Kette
Großzügigkeit
Generosité
Kredit
Lohn
Gehalt
Meritieren
Kosten
Mittel
Nahrung
Geschäft
Nutzen
Pension
Pfand
Pfund anlegen
Profit
Progress
Provision
Reputation
Restitution
Bezahlung
Sakrifizieren
Satisfaktion
Schulden
Sold
Teilhabe
Partizipation
Traktament
Unterhalt
Verbesserung
Verdienst
Vermögen
Wohlfahrt
Wohltat
Präsent
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other. Rhetorical arguments about a diplomat’s predilection for a French term, his possible assumptions about the recipient’s predilections, the fleeting use of buzzwords or the need for rhetorical variation (a contemporary stylistic rule) could explain the findings. It is, thus, impossible to ask for a specific definition of income that could be used by historians as an analytical term. The variation of terms used to describe the context of Verdienst is fuzzy, at best. This imprecision of words and semantics presents an obstacle in comparing, categorizing, and creating clusters of terms used in analyzing the diplomats’ letters. These terms do represent a court economy that combined different forms of strictly economic income with social and symbolic forms of remuneration (noble title, marriage, patronage) and solidified these relationships. Thus, an interrelated mix of types of remunerations together made up the diplomats’ social and financial credit. It was this credit that guaranteed that a diplomat’s income in financial terms was as sufficient as was his sociocultural returns. Whereas it was clear that this credit worked as expected—none of the diplomats went bankrupt—it was very hard to find any money.10 It probably stayed outside of the court economy and thus the available archive material, whereas the archive otherwise is crammed to overflowing with accounts. Against this there is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capital, which allows just this kind of analysis.11 In the seventeenth century, all Swedish diplomats did not just want or expect to be paid in cash, although their royal contract explicitly described their remuneration in exact figures. The diplomats thought of their income in different terms, using terms that can be related to notions of symbolic capital, credit, honor, and ennoblement, without referring to a distinct set of terms. A rather typical example for the mixture of different terms is the following quote by Johan Adler Salvius, Swedish resident in Hamburg, asking for getting paid in order to retain his honor and credit in the city: “The high interest in keeping our credit [here in Hamburg] intact is based both on the high respect for services for Your Royal Majesty, as well as my own honor and welfare. . . . Your Royal Majesty’s and the Crown’s credit in this city as well as my own timely welfare depend on the reimbursement of this position.” 12 Adler Salvius is arguing for his own sake, using words like credit, respect, service, honor, welfare, and payment. The one exception to this rule was a diplomat who announced openly that there was just one reason to work for a king— profit; he was believed to be so far beyond the pale that eventually he was forced to resign, after receiving all of his outstanding salary.13 Other diplomats might have agreed with him in private, but they phrased the concept of income from royal service with the semantic field of traditionally accepted terms for Verdienst. There was obviously not just one line of reasoning here, but all of them seemed to be recognizable and to meet expectations.
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At the same time, it is important to consider the terms used by the Crown to describe the diplomats’ position in the political and symbolic order. The technical terms describing their service from the point of view of the Crown are relatively easy to find. There was no such thing as a diplomat—that is a later term—and instead there were different terms that described their ceremonial status, which were then linked to varying degrees of privilege and pay: Korrespondent, Agent, Resident, Envoyé. The overall term applied to all diplomatic personnel was the Minister. The diplomats themselves mostly used one and the same term to describe their position in their correspondence with the Crown—Diener (servant). This name for the position of the diplomat expressed the contemporary understanding of a position in the king’s service, based on patriarchal rule. This understanding was intertwined to the diplomats’ notion of honor and credit (symbolic capital). The general concept of servanthood failed to denote in what way their particular service differed from other forms of royal service. All of them were servants, which stressed that the court society in Sweden was open to a variety of careers and still lacked specific forms of professionalization in almost all branches of the Crown administration, including the diplomatic service. Using the semantic field of servant and service in order to describe their positions, which obviously were not yet identified with professional skills nor named for them, emphasized their common belonging to a court elite.
Asking for Voluntary Perquisites The second example stems from a similar uncertainty concerning the notions of Verdienst, this time from a tract written in Swedish. This analysis focuses on the names the author was giving himself. In 1654 Anders Gyldenklou (1602– 65), a recently ennobled and wealthy royal secretary, composed a tract in answer to complaints by members of the noble estate about the royal secretaries’ reimbursement for their services. They were accused of asking for exorbitant and unreasonable perquisites (voluntary fees for administrative services).14 The manuscript text outlined how royal secretaries working for the chancellery were paid and described which kinds of perquisites could be considered just. Regardless of its circulation or popularity, Gyldenklou’s sorting of valid forms of remuneration represents an important snapshot of both the concerns of a royal servant and the problems of a seventeenth-century state in defining the role of this servant. The tract was written in Swedish, but bears obvious traces of contemporary German and Dutch political discourses, once again emphasizing the close relationship between the Swedish and the German court cultures. Moreover, Gyldenklou wrote this work at the moment the Crown teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. The financial difficulties of the Crown in
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the years after the Thirty Years’ War exacerbated their inability to pay the salaries necessary for servants to sustain their noble lifestyle. This situation led to many debates about distributive justice and social mobility, which were carried out mostly through handwritten tracts.15 Gyldenklou’s tract thus raised and discussed topics and issues about salary and remuneration that also had been of concern to the Crown’s diplomats. Gyldenklou felt the need to defend his income referring to the needs that his position as a royal servant created, a position that according to him entailed specific demands on his lifestyle and expenditures. This income relied heavily on Accidentien. Gyldenklou maintained that without these fees for service, the secretaries would not be able to continue in royal service due to a lack of resources. In addition to this argument, Gyldenklou offered a comparison between different kinds of income. He compared his work as a royal secretary, serving his king, with the work of a farmer, doctor, priest, soldier, officer, and merchant. All these social groups were part of Gyldenklou’s understanding of a patriarchal society of estates, where everyone had to fulfill certain functions or roles in order to receive a just income. In this line of reasoning, perquisites were the just fruit of Gyldenklou’s labor. Gyldenklou’s tract of about ten pages contains twenty-three different terms (see table 5.2) used to describe this idea of Verdienst.16 There are distinct similarities in the terms used by the Swedish diplomats, with its mixture of symbolic, cultural, social, and strictly economic terms, and those used by Gyldenklou (compare tables 5.1 and 5. 2). And even in Gyldenklou’s case, there is no clear hierarchy or structure in his use of terms that could guide the analysis. As a consequence, all of these terms together express a worldview and are useful to gauge how Gyldenklou perceived himself relative to the Crown. Gyldenklou did not use any single term in the entire tract to describe his office, besides referring to himself as a secretary. He claimed that royal secretaries were important both in public business, serving their king in matters of royal politics, and in private matters, which according to him encompassed almost all letters that he issued on behalf of other royal servants of his own or of higher social standing—his peers, in other words. For these letters he expected to receive perquisites. He then explained how these fees were a vital part of his Table 5.2. Terms used by Gyldenklou in order to describe Verdienst. Accidentier
Avantage
Bestechung
Courteoisie
Donativum
Einkunft
Erkenntnis
Erstattung
Gage
Gehalt
Geschenk
Gratiale
Honorar
Lohn
Pension
Recognition
Taxa
Remuneration
Sold
Recompensation
Verdienst
Verehrung
seinen Wohlstand verbessern
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income, most likely far more important than his salary. In his understanding of remuneration and task, his peers had asked for royal favor, he had helped them, and they should pay for that. In order to justify this form of fee for service, Gyldenklou established a clear distinction between his public and private affairs. His work for the king was contract-based. His efforts on behalf of his colleagues were not and, he argued, nor should they be: these transactions were private, otherwise he could not ask for voluntary gifts or payments. In Gyldenklou’s tract, only those letters issued by the king on his own behalf, and that did not explicitly involve specific Crown servants, were accounted public business. Private employment, in this perspective, was everything else done for the specific advantage of particular Crown servants, even those belonging to the Swedish high nobility, who believed all their work to be in the service of Crown and country. Gyldenklou demonstrated this distinction himself, when he claimed he had had to help Swedish officers during their stay in Stockholm in a private capacity and with private means. He also had to equip himself with expensive clothes in order to represent the Swedish Crown in an honorable fashion in public office. The distinction between his public and private duties became even more complicated when Gyldenklou defined some of his activity on behalf of foreign diplomats as explicitly private as well as public at the same time, even though according to contemporary practice the foreign diplomats always represented their own sovereigns. These convolutions seem to have confused Gyldenklou, so that he introduced another line of reasoning. The characterization Gyldenklou presented of his work as a secretary doing contract- or fee-based work did not easily reconcile with his views on the private, voluntary help he gave others. In order to show a way to resolve these contradictions, Gyldenklou cited a treatise on maritime law, published 1652 in Greifswald, that discussed unwritten contracts, contractus innominatus: “Discusses in what ways an unwritten contract obliges due to convention/agreement.”17 The question here was whether an unwritten contract that is based on convention is as binding as a written contract. Gyldenklou compared the idea of the unwritten contract to that of his private work for others and pointed out that the understanding of the relationship was just as binding, because his peers “looked to their honor” while fulfilling it.18 Gyldenklou argued that the binding nature and reciprocal obligations were crucial in the contract and that he depended on these fees for private effort quite as much as he did on his salary for his contract work for the Crown. Thus, he argued, he relied on a mix of incomes in the same way all other royal servants and subjects (farmer, doctor, priest, soldier, officer, and merchant) did. In doing so, Gyldenklou established the absolute right of perquisites for such work and gave a clear explanation for the necessity of informal, customary relationships with expectation of payment. However, Gyldenklou failed to draw
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a hard and fast line between the private and public aspects of his service. His various sources of income were tightly linked to royal service, and such help as he offered was on the basis of an unwritten, honor-based contract. Although he tried to make certain distinctions, all of his work clearly depended on his position as a royal secretary. Which name did Gyldenklou have for this work and his position within the political system? Well, he had no name for himself, but the very last word of his tract names his peers, who are his intended readers, using a term he might very well have applied to himself too: cavalier.19 What Gyldenklou was referring to was obvious in some senses: a code of honor that defined much of the sociocultural field of Swedish court society. It encompassed all royal servants, whose position was defined by their participation in the Crown’s public affairs. However, if cavalier was a fitting term for Crown servants in higher positions, what kind of service was he then thinking of? And how could royal service be defined as being part of the cavaliers’ private interests, when the term cavalier, as I would read it, refers to the court elite in their work for the king? Gyldenklou seems to think that no answer to these questions was necessary. In contrast to courtly metaphors, historians in Sweden and elsewhere have highlighted the juridification and bureaucratization of the political system in the seventeenth century. And it is all there—the contracts, salaries, accounting, and billing, not to mention the job specifications.20 Gyldenklou must have been very well aware that his work was fee-based, with clear obligations and a salary. In this world of bureaucratic norms, gifts or fees for certain types of work did not exist. They were legal, everyone knew about them, but still we do not find them recorded in the Crown’s archive.21 The conceptual mess did not stem only from Gyldenklou’s inconclusiveness, in other words. We find the same contradictions in the way the contemporary royal archive described the functioning of the Crown, which is why it is impossible to understand the Crown servants’ economy, in the same way that it had been impossible with regard to the diplomats. The archive is not mirroring the economic rationale of either the Crown or the royal servants. Instead, it follows an idea of how the Crown economy should look like, considering the state of its bureaucracy and policy documents. The archive thus presents the image of a just distribution of Crown resources.22 The study of Sweden’s diplomats does not and cannot pinpoint their particular relationship to the king, apart from their position within the political system. Even in that narrow relationship, the distinctions between public and private did not turn out as expected. Gyldenklou’s distinction between his private and public duties appears flat-out ridiculous. He obviously was not acting as a private person, at least not according to a modern understanding of that term. Equally odd is his appeal to the cavalier in his peers. Neither term (private person or cavalier) matches his duties as a royal servant.
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Instead, contemporary tracts are very clear about the problems that friendship and money offered in return for promotions, property, and royal help meant for the idea of a just Crown. It was nothing but corruption, which was possibly tolerated when the perquisites stayed within certain limits.23 Usually they signally failed to do so, in particular as Gyldenklou obviously tried to prevent the queen from introducing firm rules and duties. Instead, the huge number of terms he used indicated a noticeably undefined idea of service in connection with the concept of income and royal service.24 Gyldenklou actively defended this uncertainty and balked at the idea of introducing specific rules. He seems to have understood that he would lose income if the ongoing bureaucratization process were to be strengthened. Gyldenklou probably knew that his line of reasoning was dishonest and that the concept of private help for a cavalier did not really work in royal service—but he had no other name for his idea of a royal servant than the cavalier, which represents a different set of unwritten norms and values than his formal contract with the Crown.
Triangulating the Historian Contrary to first glance, this terminological mess is not proof of a political system that did not work. In fact, it worked perfectly well. If we apply the Weberian perspective of bureaucratic rationality as a token for a modernization process, it becomes apparent that the Swedish bureaucratic system was one of the most advanced of its day. Sweden’s military expansion in the seventeenth century is otherwise hard to explain, considering the resources of a country with 1 million to 1.5 million inhabitants, few cities, small elites, and poor infrastructure. This system too relied heavily on older notions of feudal service, where the elite organized itself with the help of patron-client relationships, kinship, and cultural codes such as the courtly gentleman, or cavalier.25 Even the financial system was not structured according to the same rules that governed the archives, which is why we have yet to find the money. It is us historians of the so-called premodern period who cannot find the terms with which to describe the daily experiences of Gyldenklou and his peers. Or rather, their terms do not convince us. Gyldenklou called perquisites Verehrungen (reverences), despite their semicontractual character. Few people were in a position to refuse to pay. Gyldenklou perceives a too-small gift as a form of breach of contract when he discusses an officer’s perquisite of one pistol and three rixdollars: “however, have never demanded anything else, instead was satisfied with it.”26 Even the political philosophy of the day, based on the Roman and Greek philosophers, offered only ill-fitting descriptions of the political system in seventeenth century. In the ancients’ line of thinking, Verehrungen did not exist either, which is probably why little evidence of it exists
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in the archives. And since most of our analytical terms are based on the same political philosophy, they too are equally inapt. Yet historians are not willing to give up on these philosophical concepts, while describing a court society, which was obviously structured according to different terms. It seemed wrong to deny Gyldenklou’s own sense of himself. Far more productive, in many ways, is to put his uncertainty into perspective, holding it up as an example of the gradual transition from the feudal model of lordship to a contract-based understanding of a premodern bureaucratic state in the Weberian mold. This, after all, is what historians are used to doing, what we are good at—and what I did too in my book about diplomats.27 In retrospect, my analytical tools all looked for change according to the idea of a coming modernity. Naturally, there are sudden developments that can be discussed in relation to Gyldenklou’s tract or the diplomats’ correspondence. There always are. But there was also a rather stable form of society: patriarchal, post-feudal, and ordered by the estates of the realm. In this line of reasoning, the very existence of inconsistencies and inconclusiveness is nothing but a marker for a failed analysis. The simple fact that seventeenth century Sweden was an ever changing society, which at the same time thought in concepts that had been grating on one another for centuries, is hard to take into consideration. The ever transitory and unfulfilled society that, for centuries, is permanently en route to modernity, which we tend to label early modern or premodern is thus not only unfitting and unhelpful. The focus on change itself makes foremost sense with regard to our, the historians’, need to put our time (modernity) into perspective, in order to highlight progress and the supposed unambiguity of our terms and names. This not only distorts the analysis of previous societies. It also explains, why politics and economy are at the forefront of our investigations, while all kinds of religious and theological debates are downsized, as they are not fitting our modernization perspective. As a consequence, in our efforts to understand a historical period that is not the easiest to grasp we tend to underestimate the contemporary expressions of social and divine order exemplified by art, architecture, music, literature, and the like.28 All of these cultural fields today fall into the Baroque period. Yet historians refuse to use the term, denying that these cultural expressions have anything to add to our understanding of the period. A short summary of Encyclopedia Britannica entries on these different forms of Baroque culture will suffice here. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there were three broad cultural and intellectual trends that had a profound impact on Baroque art and Baroque music: the Counter-Reformation, the consolidation of Europe’s absolute monarchies, and a new-found interest in nature, spurred on by a general broadening of human intellectual horizons.29 In Baroque art this historical background explains the stylistically complex, and even contradictory, expressions.
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Prominent among them was the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in a dramatic way. There was a quality of grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, and emotional exuberance, as well as a tendency to blur distinctions among the various arts. This was also true of Baroque music, which was known for its grandiose, dramatic, and energetic spirit, and for its stylistic diversity. In architecture we find a complexity in the built environment, a dynamic opposition and interpenetration of spaces, which results in a strong sense of motion and, again, sensuality. Even in architecture, we find grandeur, drama, and contrast, especially in the use of light. Baroque literature, meanwhile, is defined as embodying the contradictions and extremes of the age, since in it a wealthy, sophisticated, ornate court society coexists with political chaos and destructive warfare. Sublime, chivalric ideals and romances were set in utopian landscapes opposite court dramas obsessed with violence, intrigue, murder, and betrayal. In German literature as elsewhere, the themes are the illusory nature of life and the points where the extremes of worldliness meet with extremes of religiosity. In none of these definitions is the Baroque is understood as something in between, a transitory preparation for something bigger or better to come. Here, the myriad contradictions and possibilities are the simple constituents of a historical period, not the marks of its failure. Historians, so obsessed with change, failure, feudal injustice, corruption, the suppression of public debate, and the coming of modernity in its many forms as we are, tend to treat our historical subjects as being less knowledgeable about their own times than we are. Perhaps historians really are that knowledgeable, but especially when it comes to the premodern period, we tend to push aside a whole world of concepts, ideas, and contradictory debates in order to chase the chimera of modernity. Next to the lack of interest in Baroque forms of culture, this is particularly true for their neglect of all kinds of religious and theological debate, which is grossly undervalued in favor of long debates about the reception of Greek and Roman philosophy.
Conclusion All in all, the term early modern society did not mean just a way station on the journey to modernity. It was a historical period with specific qualities, changing constantly, but still distinct in itself. If it were up to me, I would not hesitate to call this the Baroque period.30 I would happily declare myself a Baroque historian, because that is where my place is in the guild. It is the very uncertainty of the term, which means so many things to so many scholars of the arts, literature, music, politics, and history, that makes it ideal when throwing open the field to new perspectives. Therefore, we need a better social, cultural, and
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historiographical triangulation of ourselves. Ambiguities oblige us historians to think harder, to find the more appropriate approach, when it comes to this period—and to our own. Heiko Droste is professor of urban history at Stockholm University in Sweden and head of the Institute of Urban History. He specializes in media history, diplomacy, and postal history and infrastructure, as well as town history in general, for the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in Germany, Sweden, and the Baltic Sea Area. His latest book is Nachrichten als Geschäft: Ein barocker Markt für soziale Ressourcen (Bremen, 2018).
Notes 1. In this essay I use the term field in the modern sociological sense, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and others. 2. Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. 3. Koselleck, “Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft,” 14–15. 4. Despite all the efforts to historicize postmodernity, a new name for the time thereafter has yet to be coined. It is as if we are caught in a limbo, readily discussing postmodernity without being able to pinpoint the location in time from which we are viewing the period; Hasberg, “Historische Bildung nach der Postmoderne.” 5. For discussion of absolutism, see Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism; and Duchhardt, “Absolutismus.“ The word Baroque is used to “denote any kind of contorted and involuted process of thought,” and until the late nineteenth century was applied to any “odd, grotesque, exaggerated and over decorated” style, as an antonym of sorts to the Renaissance (http://global.britannica.com/art/Baroque-period [14 Oct. 2015]). For discussion of the term Middle Ages, see Neddermeyer, Das Mittelalter. The term Dark Ages derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, and was originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception.” 6. Lee, “The Jacobean Diplomatic Service,” 1264. 7. Müller, Das kaiserliche Gesandtschaftswesen, 171–73; and Duchhardt, Balance of Power, 32–33. 8. Droste, Dienst, 231–32. Some widows, however, ended up bankrupt since their financial security depended on having a living husband in active service. 9. See Droste, Dienst, 417–21, for a detailed list of expressions and their rhetorical use in the diplomats’ correspondence, along with a large number of quotes. 10. Lee’s remarks (see note 6) not only echo what other historians think about the remuneration of diplomats, but it also shows that he and the other diplomats could not find the money either. 11. Bourdieu, The Logic. For a critique of Bourdieu’s work with regard to this study, see Droste, “Habitus und Sprache.” 12. “Ein hohes Interesse daran, dass der Kredit [hier in Hamburg] erhalten wird, ist sowohl durch den hohen Respekt und Dienst E. K. Maj:t begründet, als auch durch meine eigene Ehre und Wohlfahrt. . . . Der Kredit E. K. Maj:t und der Krone an diesem
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13.
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
23. 24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
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Ort wie auch meine eigene zeitliche Wohlfahrt sind von der Bezahlung dieses Postens abhängig.” Adler Salvius to Queen Christina, Hamburg, 17 March 1649, Riksarkivet Stockholm (RA), Germanica, vol. 14. RA, De la Gardieska samlingen, E1427, Christian Habbaeus Lichtenstern to Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, Chancellor of the Realm, n.d. but probably 1670: “Es wehre ja nicht zu viel, wan diese 13.000 rthl. nun nach 15-jährigen diensten ein lautherer profit für mich wehren, dan worumb dienet man sonst königen” (It would thus not be excessive if this 13,000 Reichsthaler were now provided to me for 15 years of service; otherwise why would one serve kings?). RA, Manuskriptsamlingen, vol. 30. I have explored this topic previously in Droste, “Die gerechte Verteilung öffentlicher Ressourcen.” The tract exists only in draft, and it is not clear if it was ever used. Runeby, Monarchia mixta. RA, Manuskriptsamlingen, vol. 30. The German terms are my translation from the Swedish original. “Disputatur incidenter an contractus innominati propter conventionem obligent.” Stypmann, Tractatus de jure maritimo et nautico, ch. 4, 101. RA, Manuskriptsamlingen, vol. 30, fol. 12r. Ibid. Florén, “Nya roller”; and Frohnert, Kronans skatter. Swedish historians ever since have emphasized the thoroughness of the bureaucratization process in the seventeenth century, using Max Weber as a kind of template. There have been a few studies of perquisites and the like, mostly for the eighteenth century, e.g., Frohnert, Kronans skatter; Asker, I konungens stad och ställe; and Cavallin, I kungens. In addition to the diplomats, I have also studied another group of Crown servants: the royal postmasters. In tackling the same selfsame problem of gauging the postmasters’ income, I have discussed our way of treating early modern archives. See Droste, “The Terms of Royal Service.” Peck, Court Patronage; and Grüne and Slanička, Korruption. Moraw, “Über Patrone,” 4. Moraw coined the very useful term “co-enterpriser.” The most famous expression of this was in Castiglione’s book, which met with a remarkable reception across Europe; see, Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier. This transition can also be understood in terms of Niklas Luhmann’s sociology, where the members of the court elite still acted according to the rules of this social elite, while at the same times operating within firmly differentiated institutions. The interface of politics and social interaction was no longer there, and instead the dividing line ran right through the individual (see Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur, 107–8). However, even here we find a distinct idea of modernization and development that hides the fact that this uncertainty existed for a very long time. “Habe aber niemals etwas gefordert, sondern gab mich damit zufrieden.” RA, Manuskriptsamlingen, vol. 30, fol. 11v. Droste, Dienst, 287–303. Stollberg-Rilinger, Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? In this discussion of the term Baroque I have drawn on the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s definitions for the terms Baroque, German literature, and Baroque music. Duchhardt, “Absolutismus,” 120. Duchhardt suggests replacing the word “absolutism” with the word “Baroque.” While there have not been many converts to the idea, I appre-
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ciate the argument that such a periodization would facilitate dialogue with other fields of research convincing.
Bibliography Archival Sources Riksarkivet (RA; National Archives of Sweden), Stockholm De la Gardieska samlingen, E1427 Germanica, vol. 14 Manuskriptsamlingen, vol. 30
Primary Sources Stypmann, Franz. Tractatus de jure maritimo et nautico, completus et in lucem editus operâ Anton-Guntheri Fritzii. Greifswald, 1652.
Secondary Sources Asker, Björn. I konungens stad och ställe: Länsstyrelser i arbete 1635–1735. Uppsala, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, UK, 1990. Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 7 vols. Stuttgart, 1972–92. Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. Cambridge, UK, 1995. Cavallin, Maria. I kungens och folkets tjänst: Synen på den svenske ämbetsmannen 1750–1780. Gothenburg, 2003. Droste, Heiko. “Die gerechte Verteilung öffentlicher Ressourcen: Anders Gyldenklous Traktat zur Frage der Accidentien (1654).” In Pars pro toto: Historische Miniaturen zum 75. Geburtstag von Heide Wunder, edited by Alexander Jendorff and Andrea Pühringer, 179–90. Neustadt an der Aisch, 2014. Droste, Heiko. “Habitus und Sprache: Eine Kritik Pierre Bourdieus.” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 28 (2001): 95–120. Droste, Heiko. “The Terms of Royal Service: Post Servants’ Finances, c.1700.” In Connecting the Baltic Area: The Swedish Postal System in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Heiko Droste, 123–74. Huddinge, 2011. Droste, Heiko. Im Dienst der Krone: Schwedische Diplomaten im 17. Jahrhundert. Münster, 2006. Duchhardt, Heinz. “Absolutismus—Abschied von einem Epochenbegriff ?” Historische Zeitschrift 258 (1994): 113–22. Duchhardt, Heinz. Balance of Power und Pentarchie 1700–1785. Paderborn, 1997. Florén, Anders. “Nya roller, nya krav: Några drag i den svenska nationalstatens formering.” Historisk Tidskrift (Sweden), 107 (1987): 505–29. Frohnert, Pär. Kronans skatter och bondens bröd: Den lokala förvaltningen och bönderna i Sverige 1719–1775. Lund, 1993. Grüne, Niels, and Simona Slanička, eds. Korruption: Historische Annäherungen an eine Grundfigur politischer Kommunikation. Göttingen, 2010.
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Hasberg, Wolfgang. “Historische Bildung nach der Postmoderne.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 97 (2015): 177–201. Henshall, Nicholas. The Myth of Absolutism: Continuity and Change in Early Modern European Monarchy. London, 1992. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft.” In Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft und Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts, edited by Werner Conze, 10–28. Stuttgart, 1972. Lee, Maurice. “The Jacobean Diplomatic Service.” American Historical Review 72 (1967): 1264–82. Luhmann, Niklas. Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt, 1993. Mommsen, Theodore. “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages.’” Speculum 17 (1942): 226–42. Moraw, Peter. “Über Patrone und Klienten im Heiligen Römischen Reich des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit.” In Klientelsysteme im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Antoni Mączak, 1–18. Munich, 1988. Müller, Klaus. Das kaiserliche Gesandtschaftswesen im Jahrhundert nach dem Westfälischen Frieden (1648–1740). Bonn, 1976. Neddermeyer, Uwe. Das Mittelalter in der deutschen Historiographie von 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert: Geschichtsgliederung und Epochenverständnis in der frühen Neuzeit. Cologne, 1988. Peck, Linda Levy. Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. London, 1991. Runeby, Nils. Monarchia mixta: maktfördelningsdebatt i Sverige under den tidigare stormaktstiden. Stockholm, 1962. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, ed. Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? Berlin, 2005.
CHAPTER 6
The Mystery of the St. Sebastian Lazareth
Mapping Place-Names and Contagious Disease Hospitals in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg AMY NEWHOUSE
O
ne of the greatest challenges of early modern research is the lack of standardized naming practices appearing in primary source documents. Historians then must solve mysteries—deciphering what occurred in the given historical moment and what the chosen names may reveal about the subjects we study. In the imperial city of Nuremberg, shifts in early modern naming practices have obfuscated our understanding of two of the city’s hospitals during the sixteenth century. While it is known that two facilities, one primarily treating plague and the other syphilis, existed in a single complex northwest of the city walls, it was only at certain moments that records differentiated between the two hospitals by name or description.1 This complex of hospitals appears in a seemingly indiscriminate manner as the Pestilenzhaus, St. Sebastian Lazareth, St. Sebastianspital, Lazareth, Blatternhaus, Holzhaus, or Franzosenhaus. The multiplicity of names applied to one or both institutions has confused historians’ assessment of when and where Nuremberg treated its contagious sick. For example, the Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (Nuremberg City Lexicon) published in 2000 identifies the St. Sebastianspital (St. Sebastian Hospital) as the city’s central plague hospital, a large structure accommodating more than six hundred patients.2 Yet in 2007 a historical atlas of the city identifies the syphilis hospital, a significantly smaller structure to the north of the plague hospital, as St. Sebastian.3 In a sense, both identifications are correct: at various points in the city’s history the name St. Sebastian was used to identify the plague hospital, the syphilis hospital, or occasionally both.
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Some might argue that the ambiguity in the naming of these hospitals merely confirms our suspicions that early modern authorities showed little care for the diseased inhabitants who populated these distant, extramural hospitals. I believe, however, that the ordinances, finances, and admittance procedures of both institutions indicate a clear distinction in function.4 What, then, should we make of the apparent fluidity in nomenclature? The answer to this question lies in the understanding of the primary function of place-names in early modern cities. Above all, they provided geographical references that often combined the what and the where of something that was to occur, such as the Salt Scale at St. Lorenz Church, the Bathhouse on the Sand Banks, and the Stocks on the Butcher’s Bridge. Place-names emerged from the necessity to differentiate a particular structure and to orient where that structure was relative to known landmarks across the city’s terrain.5 In his 1994 study of Nuremberg’s street-naming practices, Herbert Maas discovered that more than 90 percent of the city’s two hundred medieval street-names were derived from orientating geological and topographical features or from the street’s proximity to prominent city structures.6 In modern culture, we use the same functional-geographic description when informally communicating about places in our lives, such as the post office on Highway 6 or the amphitheatre at the Himmel Park. The referential quality of these names means they have an innate, organic susceptibility to change. As the history of a community evolves, new names are introduced to create new defining characteristics or reflect new references. For example, when a new post office is built down the street, the long-standing post office may become known as the post office on Highway 6 under the underpass, the post office at Highway 6 and Hickory Avenue, the Hickory Avenue post office, or the old post office. In early modern cities, this practice of adaptability left places with a range of modifying names that could be recognized and understood by inhabitants. To further add to the confusion, old place-names often remained rooted long after a new name was introduced because old names continued to hold common understanding for the people who lived around them; for example, referring to the post office on Highway 6 was still a sufficient name for some, while others require the addition of Hickory Avenue. A once-neglected placename could even reemerge to describe a completely separate nearby feature. In Nuremberg, the name of the Hallertürlein (Little Haller Gate), which survives to this day, was derived from both its function as a gate and from its geographic proximity to the Hallerwiese, a meadow owned by the Haller family. Although the Haller family no longer owned the meadow as of 1434, the name Haller sufficiently differentiated the small gate on the meadow.7 Often defying any form of standardization, early modern city leaders and inhabitants flexibly compounded old and new names to communicate what and where a place was. While this can be confusing to posterity, the English toponymist
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Margaret Gelling argues that this pragmatic fluidity reveals a living language among neighbors that can provide us with traces of how people once understood and communicated about their space.8 Magistrates and civic functionaries were not immune to this fluidity. Despite Nuremberg city council’s reputation as one of the most active and sophisticated governing bodies in the early modern period, its documents reveal the same lack of standardization in the naming of spaces and structures in its city. Sixteenth-century civic records contain knots of names that can be unraveled only in a deeply contextual study that focuses on the utility of place-names in the city’s changing circumstances and landscape. Nuremberg’s contagious disease hospitals provide an especially useful illustration of this mixing of traditional place-names and functions. Recurrent epidemics required the city council to define spaces of separated care outside the city walls. The varying physical symptoms, threat levels, and intermittent timing of plague and syphilis outbreaks provide a lens into the variety of obstacles encountered and strategies used as the council orchestrated the transfer of the sick and supplies to these designated spaces. Throughout the sixteenth century, the two hospitals accordingly developed a range of modifying names— corresponding to the city’s changing political and religious values over time and reflecting the city’s changing usage of civic space. Such fluidity was by its nature ad hoc, referential, and additive. At precise moments of outbreak, the placenames of Nuremberg’s hospitals needed to communicate specificity and physical direction to the movement of civic resources and sick inhabitants; therefore, their names also needed to correspond to Nuremberg’s landscape as a lived geography. Inconsistent naming practices did not reflect a lack of clarity in the early modern period, but rather reflected a flexibility that could mold names into new designations. As needs arose, inhabitants encoded old and new names into palimpsests of interconnected references that differentiated and oriented inhabitants to places in their city.
The Plague Hospital Since the initial outbreak of bubonic plague in 1348, European cities experienced waves of plague approximately every ten to twelve years. Until the late fifteenth century, Nuremberg housed its plague victims in its central Heilig Geist Spital (Holy Ghost Hospital) with other sick patients; however, the increasingly virulent outbreaks in a growing urban population prompted civic leaders to take stronger measures to remove the infected individuals from the city and from contact with the other patients.9 In 1490 a Nuremberg patrician, Konrad Toppler, bequeathed the small sum of 160 gulden to be used for the city’s stricken inhabitants. His donation afforded another patrician—Sebald
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Schreyer, a city council member and active philanthropist—the opportunity to establish a separate hospital where “the poisoned pestilent people should on their desire be taken in and have all their spiritual and physical needs looked after.”10 The city council, led by Schreyer, selected a space for the new hospital outside of the city, immediately northwest of the walls and downriver, a place “in which all of these people could be held separated from others who had been un-poisoned.”11 The large stone building was eventually outfitted with room for several hundred patients and staff.12 The earliest names for Nuremberg’s plague hospital differentiated it from other hospitals by describing its geographic location. An endowment book written at the turn of the sixteenth century described the institution as the hospital northwest of the city walls “towards the St. Johannis” leper house and chapel.13 Other references chose to place the hospital next to the nearby Weidenmühle (mills on the pasture lands) along the river. A judgment in a 1502 financial court case required two defendants to buy stone for the building of the Pestilenzhaus bei der Weidenmühle (pestilence house near the mills on the pasture lands).14 These early place-names reflect the hospital’s informal reference to its function and placement among Nuremberg’s known landmarks. They highlight the basic function of place-names in differentiating and orienting information for inhabitants. A more formal name was bestowed on the hospital soon after, in accordance with medieval religious custom. The hospital took the name St. Sebastian from the patron saint of its adjoining chapel.15 Saint Sebastian was a popular medieval saint, who according to legend was shot with arrows during the persecution of early Christians in the Roman Empire. Because Sebastian was believed to have shielded the faithful from the darts of descending pestilence with his own arrow-pierced body, his image and name emerged as a common motif for popular worship in plague-stricken areas throughout Europe.16 More than just devotion, the chapel provided the revenue for such a charitable project. Schreyer’s endowment book (1490–1516) was filled with the coordination of priests, stipulations of religious ministrations, and fundraising for construction through the sale of indulgences and endowments of special masses.17 The name Sebastianspital (Sebastian Hospital or House at St. Sebastian) oriented inhabitants to the spiritual nature of the hospital and rooted it in its adjacent chapel, which rose higher than other buildings in the northwestern city sector. From its inception in 1490 until its official opening in 1528, the plague hospital faced opposition. Construction was delayed due to lack of funds, building materials, or enthusiasm from some city council members who feared that financial shortfalls would become the city’s responsibility. In 1516 Schreyer came into conflict with the council over the wood needed to construct a facility comprising four detached stone buildings with a common overlaying wooden roof. He made personal loans to cover the project’s deficits, but his unwilling-
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ness to compromise on the hospital’s design resulted in his dismissal as supervisor.18 It became progressively apparent that Nuremberg’s city council needed to accept, however reluctantly, the financial responsibility for the structure as well as the hospital’s administrative expenses during outbreaks. Around the same time that civic management was assumed in 1521, a new name for the plague hospital emerged: the Lazareth. The name Lazareth was adopted from the city of Venice, which had the oldest and most august of plague hospitals in Europe. As early as 1423, Venice converted a monastery on a distant island into a permanent hospital or Lazzaretto. In 1456 Venice built a second plague hospital on another distant island, resulting in a Lazzaretto Vecchio (old) and Lazzaretto Nuovo (new). It appears that Nuremberg took the name Lazareth in 1518 when it copied the Venetian hospital procedures: “The ordinances, like those for both the old and new Lazareths in Venice, are upheld in time of reigning pestilence. . . . Let them be translated into German for our use here . . . in the newly built Lazareth outside the city under the order of the head supervisor.”19 A few years after this order a wave of plague prompted the first-time housing of patients in the partially completed building. In 1522 the council published its plague ordinances with the new name, informing the inhabitants of how “the newly built Lazaret[h] or house at St. Sebastian” was intended to serve their plaguestricken loved ones.20 In communicating with the inhabitants, the name Lazareth was used conterminously with that of the saint. By adding Lazareth to the previously publicized name, the council elided the previously promoted spiritual meaning and geographic orientation of the Sebastian while also introducing the new name. The name Lazareth was a curious term in German because it dons the sophisticated aitch (h). The aitch would have been silent when pronounced in German, but the spelling gave the word a refined feel of classical Greek or Latin (like Luther, the name assumed by the famous reformer, as opposed to his given family moniker of Luder).21 The term Lazareth had its roots in the cult of another medieval saint. Saint Lazarus was a conflation of two biblical characters: Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha whom Jesus brought back to life, and the allegorical Lazarus, a long-suffering man who was abused and disregarded by a rich man. Primarily referring to the latter, Saint Lazarus became the patron saint of all suffering poor, especially of those stricken with leprosy.22 In the eleventh century an Iberian legend emerged about a Castilian knight who met a leper-pilgrim on his way to Santiago. When the pilgrim was revealed to be Saint Lazarus, the knight subsequently established the first leper house in Palencia in 1067.23 Lazar House became a common name for extramural leper hospitals throughout Europe.24 Although originally associated with leprosy, the word Lazar became connected with other charitable houses for the sick, especially those placed outside the city walls.
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The name and long-standing meaning of Lazar was subsumed into the term Lazzaretto in fifteenth-century Italy as civic efforts to manage plague victims mimicked the separation of the leper houses.25 In Venice, however, some historians argue that the term had a more complex origin. Jane Crawshaw argues that the original place-name Lazzaretto was a corruption of the name for the monastic island on which plague victims were originally isolated: Santa Maria di Nazareth.26 In Venice’s early history, the terms Nazareth and Lazzaretto were used conterminously and may have become conflated with their similar “azar” sounds. In either case, when the name Lazareth was brought into Nuremberg, it had already contained the vestiges of associated geographic orientation, both of the separated island of Nazareth and the extramural Lazar houses. The decision by Nuremberg’s council to adopt the procedures and name of the Venetian Lazzaretti drew a clear connection to the grandiosity and sophistication of early modern Venice. The Venetian senate was famous for actively adopting the latest in medical and statecraft philosophies on behalf of its large, cosmopolitan populace. Nuremberg’s patricians had extensive trade and cultural connections with the city, often recommending the emulation of its civic institutions.27 While not as robust as its Italian counterparts, Nuremberg was one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire with more than 40,000 inhabitants at the turn of the sixteenth century. Its city council, dominated by merchant patricians, considered itself equally forward thinking as its Venetian magistrates and took special pride in gaining the city a reputation for being well ordered.28 Nuremberg was the first of the few sixteenth-century German cities that had a large enough population and a council with enough tenacity to establish and support a specialized plague hospital.29 In contrast, smaller cities could only build, buy, or confiscate huts on an ad hoc basis during outbreaks.30 Nuremberg’s decision to erect a permanent, extramural structure was a brazen one in an early modern climate of border disputes and intermittent siege warfare. During the 1520s the new hospital became the focus of a long-standing legal dispute with the city’s neighbors, the margraves of BrandenburgAnsbach. When construction began, Margrave Frederick I complained to the Swabian League that Nuremberg had transgressed its fortification building rights northwest of its city walls. A commission from the League ruled that the hospital was within the city’s land rights and did not present a battlement against the margrave.31 However, in 1526 and again in 1538 the house filed suits in the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court) concerning “the newly fortified and built Lazareth near Nuremberg.”32 In printed reports from the case, the word Lazareth features prominently. It was listed along with watchtowers, patrician estates, and other civic structures; the building was effectively portrayed as though it was a large, garrisoned, and immutable stone structure. The margrave claimed that it presented “an un-collapsible heap” and threat to his territory.33
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In their response, Nuremberg’s lawyers demystified the word Lazareth, which would have been thoroughly foreign to the German-speaking court; they explained that the structure was merely a “Spital [hospital], namely a Lazareth.”34 It was intended “toward use and good, and to honor God, to help the poor citizens, inhabitants, servants, and foreigners who were blighted with the sickness of plague in Nuremberg to their comfort and charity.”35 Although the council emphasized the spiritual and charitable function of the buildings, the original name Sebastian was excluded from the city’s defense. The omission of the plague saint may reflect Nuremberg’s desire to represent the Lazareth as part of the council’s effort to implement systemic civic reforms, which had previously won the emperor’s attention and admiration.36 The city council also may not have wanted to complicate the case by drawing attention to the chapel’s dedication to the Catholic saint, considering that the city had quite publicly accepted the Protestant Reformation in 1525. This possibility may have merit since the year that Margrave Casimir filed suit in the Reichskammergericht was the same year that Philipp Melanchthon, the Wittenberg reformer, was helping Nuremberg in the process of dismantling Catholic religious endowments and transferring funds to civic programs. This decision left Nuremberg in a tenuous relationship with the Catholic emperor.37 The name Lazareth emerged as the name clearly preferred by the council because it alluded to its orchestration and largess in managing, implementing, and systematically financing a permanent civic institution. In Nuremberg’s 1543 plague regimens, the council invoked the term Lazareth three times, informing inhabitants that it was out of fatherly protection, Christian utility, and love that the hospital was constructed. It admonished all inhabitants who contracted plague to let themselves be carried to the Lazareth, a place where both male and female attendants were prepared to receive them.38 Although the term Lazareth was inculcated on the city residents, the older place-name still remained in this 1543 ordinance: “laid before the city a newly built Lazaret at St. Sebastian.”39 The description provided information not only about how the Lazareth functioned, but also about where it was located by using Sebastian as the former name of the hospital and the continuing name of the chapel. In the next phase of its history, Nuremberg’s plague hospital fell victim to the empire’s religious wars. In 1552 Margrave Albert II Alcibiades capitalized on the empire’s religious disunity to press his house’s long-standing feud with the city. He besieged Nuremberg twice, extorted 200,000 gulden from the city, and devastated everything outside the walls—including the contested plague hospital and chapel.40 In this conflict, the large stone hospital and chapel had proven to be a military vulnerability.41 The council built the new plague hospital out of cheaper and collapsible wood, and it decided not to rebuild the Sebastian chapel at all. A possible reason for this choice may have been that the Reformation made the ostentatious chapel expensive and unnecessary. The
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religious change had left the city with ambivalent views toward non-biblical saints like Saint Sebastian and Saint Rochus, the city’s other popular plague saint.42 City theologians and magistrates never came to a satisfactory resolution in their debates about what to do with the shrines, endowments, and imagery associated with these patron saints.43 Eventually the lack of consensus concerning the plague saints resulted in anomalous objects simply being ignored. Ultimately, the Reformation gave the council impetus to continue augmenting the civic function of the plague hospital. While still providing spiritual services within the hospital, the cost-conscious council rebuilt the facility in a more expanded, streamlined, and pragmatic form. Without the chapel standing next to the plague hospital, one would expect the name Sebastian to have completely disappeared, as it did from the city’s 1562 plague regimens.44 However, despite the chapel’s destruction and the council’s choice of the name Lazareth, the old place-name Sebastian was not completely erased from memory. The term continued to emerge occasionally in reference to the plague hospital, such as in Stefan Gansöder’s 1580 woodcut depicting Nuremberg’s northwestern territory; however, more commonly it appeared in reference to other features geographically northwest of the city walls. These features are explored in later sections of this chapter.45 Before 1562 the names for Nuremberg’s plague hospital display the fluid nature of early modern place-naming. The transition from the original Pestilenzhaus, Sebastianspital, and finally to the Lazareth reveals layers of the city’s unfolding history in changing religious and civic contexts. As recent trends in early modern historiography tend to gravitate toward an evaluation of ideologies and the hegemonic power of labeling, it is easy to end an analysis here. However, this evaluation would not answer the essential question of why there was such inconsistency in names within early modern communities (even within civic documents themselves), and it would also deny the fundamental relationship of city inhabitants to their places in a lived-geography. In the midst of the plague hospital name changes, place-names needed to encode information that differentiated structures and facilitated navigation. The history of the plague hospital shows that even when the council implemented the name Lazareth, it added additional names and descriptors in order to provide orienting clarity and root the new name in the city’s landscape, such as Lazareth before the city or Lazareth at Sebastian. It was not only that the city council’s religious or civic values were changing, but also that the names chosen needed to evolve within the inhabitants’ recognition of the city’s landscape.
The Syphilis Hospital In the mid-1490s, even as Nuremberg’s leaders began the process of erecting the plague hospital, the city’s concerns about health matters were compounded
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by the arrival of a new disease, syphilis. The disease was known as Franzosenkrankheit (French disease) because it is said to have followed the French soldiers on their journey home from their war in Naples.46 Infection first reached Nuremberg in 1496. The council tried multiple temporary solutions to house and treat their stricken inhabitants in huts inside the city, but ultimately it implemented a plan to extend Schreyer’s construction to include a separate hospital for syphilis care to the northwest of the city walls.47 Standing adjacent to the grand, stone plague hospital, the small wooden building admitted its first patients in 1523.48 The crux of the confusion over the sixteenth-century history of the syphilis hospital is that it did not have a consistently used name of its own. While its inmates underwent drastically distinct medical procedures and practices, it primarily took the same place-name as the adjacent plague facility, the Lazareth. In city ordinances, the name Lazareth appears for both hospitals. It is only upon a close reading of the practices, treatments, and staffing that it becomes clear that the Lazareth to which they are referring is actually the small syphilis house.49 A reference to patients “in the Lazareth, thus afflicted with the sickness of syphilis” appears in documents such as a late sixteenth-century instruction manual for civic barber surgeons.50 The council’s reinforcement of the name Lazareth for the syphilis hospital is consistent with its original aims regarding the plague hospital. The institution was a place designed to function with well-managed civic care for the city’s diseased citizens. In the margrave’s court cases, the council argued that the city built the Lazareth as two hospitals and a chapel “for the broken out and frenchly [syphilitic] poor people” at great cost to the city.51 Affluent syphilis sufferers could obtain medicines from private physicians and barber-surgeons; therefore, public hospitalization was only for Nuremberg’s poor and destitute inhabitants, many of whom were already on the city’s alms system.52 One ordinance boasted that approximately three hundred men and women on the alms system were “treated, and the honorable council paid all of the costs.”53 While almost all major cities in Germany had a syphilis hospital with similar treatments and admissions, Nuremberg was unique in having a syphilis hospital as a Lazareth outside the city walls.54 It was a place where “the sick people with lesions . . . should apply themselves to the pursuit of all fear of God, constant prayer, demonstrable obedience, order, patience, and cleanliness.”55 Any individuals presenting cases failing to meet the city’s standards of obedience and purity, reoccurring too often (implying reinfection in their medical philosophy), or failing to show residency in the city could be banished from that extramural place.56 The extension of the term Lazareth to the syphilis hospital bolstered the council’s reputation for heavy-handedness in the care of the sick, well-guarded poverty relief, and preference for the extramural care for contaminated individuals, allowing them to return to the city only after being cleansed.
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While the overlapping name of the Lazareth has certainly cast a fog over attempts of archivists and historians to find or understand the early history of the syphilis hospital, the broadly applied name was logical when considering its pragmatic utility as a place-name. The two hospitals were rarely in use at the same time. The plague hospital operated only once in every ten to twelve years, meaning the large structure stood empty waiting to be officially opened upon outbreak. In contrast, the syphilis hospital housed patients perennially. This meant that for more than 90 percent of an inhabitant’s lifespan, the name Lazareth sufficiently guided individuals to the northwestern area, where it would have been clear which building was prepared to receive them.57 For instance, when an April 1533 council decree simply ordered “accept Hans Knopf into the Lazareth,” or a July 1562 decree mentioned that “Jorg Kraltzen the sick day laborer because he worked for so long here, [was] allowed entrance into the Lazareth,” these references must have meant the syphilis hospital because they occurred at a time there was no plague, and the plague hospital was officially closed.58 While physically dwarfed in comparison to the plague hospital, the small syphilis house would have been the only functioning institution named Lazareth for the majority of Nuremberg’s early modern history. When more specificity was needed, other modifying names for the syphilis hospital were flexibly used. The term Blatternhaus referenced the most basic function as a house for people with Blatter (broken-out lesions).59 In 1533 Nuremberg patrician Lorenz Tücher referred to the hospital in a personal letter as the “plotterhaus, das im Lazareth” (Blatternhaus, which [is] in the Lazareth).60 In 1536 widow Ursula Lienhard Heldin used the chapel as the reference, donating “to the blatterhaws zu Sand Sebastian [Blatternhaus at St. Sebastian] for their need. If it be bedding or the like, I send 25 Gulden.”61 The name Blatternhaus gave additional differentiating descriptor to the syphilis house’s geographic position near or in the Lazareth and Sebastian. Another differentiating name, Holzhaus (Wood House), referred to the syphilis hospital’s use of medicinal guaiac wood.62 The expensive wood was imported from the New World.63 The sawdust of the guaiac was meticulously boiled into a decoction and administered along with fasting and sweating treatments, and the practice was medically praised for its effectiveness in comparison to the standard mercury treatments. With the same assiduousness that it had displayed when copying Venice’s Lazzaretti, the city council acquired the superior wood treatment for its syphilis house. In 1548 it commissioned the hospital’s barber-surgeon Franz Renner to prepare a handbook on the benefits of the wonder drug.64 In a personal letter, humanist and city council member Willibald Pirckheimer told of a woman who “zum holtz gehört” (belonged to the Wood [House]) because she was too weak, she had lost everything, and she is “from the inside out [so] severely infected with it . . . that she had almost no human
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countenance.”65 The term was also used when the council deliberated on whom to admit for syphilis treatment. In January 1563 the council issued this order: “Concerning the sick carpenter’s apprentice, upon the master’s request, accept him into the Wood [House] and may it help him!”66 In August 1562 one young so-called unclean maid was brought before the council. After an initial examination to rule out leprosy, the council determined that they should admit the “poor young maid Barbara Mainbrecherin . . . if she can be helped in the Wood.”67 Although this guaiac wood was believed effective for many different illnesses and was considered a catch-all remedy, the council made numerous appeals to its physicians and barber-surgeons to ensure that their civic hospital used only the expensive wood for the city’s syphilitic inhabitants.68 One would think that the clarity of the name Wood and the importance of the treatment would make it emerge as the primary name for the institution; however, it appears in civic documents only on occasion. In 1561 the council ordered the city’s barber-surgeon to write a report on the treatment of the syphilitic patients to advise the city of Ulm. After a long description of the guaiac wood treatment, the surgeon Jacob Kalbfuß signed his letter: “the submissive sworn doctor, Jacob Kalbfuß, barber-surgeon in the Lazareth.”69 In addition to Lazareth, Blatternhaus, and Wood House, the original placename for the plague hospital St. Sebastian was also reappropriated for the syphilis hospital. A few early references connect the saint and syphilis; one report stated that the syphilis sufferers moved from their temporary huts “to the
Figure 6.1. Hans Bien’s 1625 city map denotes the plague hospital as the Lazareth and the syphilis hospital with its later designation as St. Sebastian. Stadtplan von Hans Bien, 1625. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg A 4/IV Nr. 23.
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St. Sebastian in the Lazareth.”70 However, the name association did not become prevalent until the end of the sixteenth century, long after the original chapel was destroyed by the margrave. One possible reason for the connection is that the spiritual services associated with the saint’s chapel were still a vital part of Nuremberg’s care for the body and soul. The syphilis hospital employed an on-site pastor continuously, and it would have contained some form of chapel from which daily confession, communion, and preaching could be administered.71 A more institutional connection can also be drawn between the syphilis hospital and its financial endowments for masses to the saint. After intermittent years of funding shortfalls, a 1596 reassessment of the finances for the hospital revealed a lingering 607 gulden a year from the Sebastian endowments for the expressed treatment of the French disease.72 In the above-mentioned instruction manual for civic barber-surgeons, it described the patients as being housed in the Lazareth, but it also named the city’s syphilis physician as the “franzoßarzt das haus St. Sebastian” (French [pox] doctor [at] house St. Sebastian).73 The saint’s name was also assigned to the syphilis hospital by local architect and fortification supervisor Hans Bien on his city map in 1625 (figure 6.1).74 The reemergence of Sebastian is probably one of the more confusing examples of early modern fluidity in naming practices. At various times the name could denote the chapel, the plague hospital, or the syphilis hospital. While one can find possible explanations for the saint’s changing association in Nuremberg’s complex religious and political history, the consistent quality of the name Sebastian through all of these changes was that his name oriented Nuremberg’s inhabitants to the contagious disease care to the northwest of the city walls. It was the explanatory power of the name that probably precipitated its continued references long after the destruction of the original chapel. In conclusion, the history of Nuremberg’s syphilis hospital displays a strong example of the mutable and referential nature of early modern place-naming. The hospital held a range of modifying place-names that could communicate the dual quality of what and where, such as Blatternhaus in the Lazareth, Lazareto Spital Frantzosen, St. Sebastian in the Lazareth, Lazareth and the hospital (plague hospital) laid before the city, the Wood House, Lazareth St. Sebastian, or Franzosen at the house St. Sebastian.75 The series of references reflects the flexibility of naming in the early modern period, but it also reflects how, instead of supplanting former references, inhabitants built on existent names, even appropriating old descriptors in an effort to build on the previously understood references. In addition, the syphilis hospital also shows the centrality of geographic information in place-names. The names that emerged most commonly for the syphilis house were not those that distinguished it from the nearby plague hospital (Blatternhaus or Wood House). Instead, the most commonly used names contained geographically orienting information that guided inhab-
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itants toward the plague hospital and former chapel (Lazareth, Sebastian, or some other compounded variant of the two). Since the nature of plague and syphilis outbreak meant that the two intuitions were rarely in use at the same time, these place-names provided the pragmatic what and where information needed to recognize the designated syphilis hospital.
Place-Naming the Franzosenhaus (French House) Like all urban authorities, Nuremberg’s city council continually adapted its public space to align with shifting civic priorities. In the cases of plague and syphilis, this meant providing the sick inhabitants with appropriate accommodation while at the same time maintaining the isolation of their polluting bodies. The two diseases, however, presented radically different levels of threat regarding the speed of infection and mortality rates. This disparity prompted a hierarchy of urgency in the council’s use of its extramural hospitals. When there was a need to use and manage both hospitals simultaneously, city leaders needed consistent place-names that clearly designated to which of the two extramural hospitals patients and personnel were to be moved. In August 1562 one of Nuremberg’s worst bouts of plague erupted, resulting in six hundred hospitalized patients at one time and more than nine thousand deaths.76 The plague hospital was activated as a critical defense in combatting the spread of the poisonous plague airs. This function supplied the entire reason why such a large, expensive structure was maintained. The rapid nature of plague outbreak and subsequent preventive measures meant that the name Lazareth, which would have pointed inhabitants to the syphilis hospital when plague was dormant, rapidly changed to designate the more important plague hospital. On Thursday 27 August 1562, the council minutes proclaimed that a poor broken-out woman should be examined “in the Lazaret” to see if she had syphilis.77 On Tuesday 1 September, within five days of the syphilitic woman’s initial case, the council decrees transitioned to using the name Lazareth to refer to the plague hospital that was being prepared for opening.78 As the candles, cooking fires, and medicinal smoking herbs began to emanate from the gigantic plague hospital, it became the clear place on which all civic concentration and management efforts were focused. City plague regimens ordered sick inhabitants, body carriers, and errand runners to carry the patients and supplies “to the ordered Lazareth house.”79 As the plague hospital took over the name Lazareth, the syphilis hospital needed a term that was more consistent and specific than the confused range of names, including the more general terms Lazareth and Sebastian, outlined in the previous section. On 1 September the council achieved this specificity by referring to the syphilis hospital with a new name, the Franzosenhaus.80
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As the outbreak continued, the plague hospital could not accommodate the influx of patients. The council progressively deprioritized patients in the syphilis hospital or French House.81 On 20 September the council declared that when the numerous plague victims “could not be accommodated, they should also use the Franzosenhaus at St. Sebastian, along with the above-mentioned Lazareth.”82 Ironically, after the syphilis patients were removed, the syphilis hospital could, once again, take the name Lazareth because it became a temporary branch of the plague hospital, as the “Frantzosen hauß was brought into the Lazareth.”83 An ordinance from Casper Korn, the city’s central hospital supervisor during the 1562 outbreak, described “what should happen in the Lazareth during the time of pestilence,” meaning how the Lazareth, as the small, year-round syphilis hospital, was to be transformed into a section of the Lazareth as the plague hospital with appropriate personnel, medical treatment, and dietary guidelines.84 The city council did not simply suspend its syphilis care, but it brought the patients inside the city walls. On 20 September 1562 the council decreed that “those sick with the French disease, in the meantime, must [be brought] in the city, [and] placed into the Siechhaus [sick house] on the Neu Bau [newly built city section].”85 The Siechhaus was a structure originally built to house lepers during their week of charity in the city.86 Like the plague hospital, this large structure was left empty when not needed for its specified purpose. Its convenient position in the downriver, dirty portion of the city meant that it was the perfect quarters for displaced syphilis patients.87 The council commanded that the building master construct whatever accommodations in the Siechhaus were necessary, including special baths used for syphilis treatments.88 When the plague outbreak subsided, the syphilis hospital was thoroughly cleaned and purged of so-called plague airs, and syphilis patients were returned to their extramural hospital.89 A decade later, the council faced a similar dilemma when a fire destroyed the syphilis hospital on the eve of 1573. The wooden structure ignited as a maid was boiling the guaiac wood treatment.90 The neighboring miller at Weidenmühle and a servant were able to save all but two of the patients. According to Johannes Müllner’s seventeenth-century chronicle, the surviving patients were then temporarily “put in the adjacent Lazareth.”91 The empty plague hospital served as an ideal temporary site because it fulfilled the city’s preference for extramural syphilis care. This solution proved to be only short-lived since a new plague raged within the year. In December 1573 the council commanded that “the people so blighted with the French, and who a year ago were placed in the Lazareth and since that time were held within it on account of the ruined French house, lead them to the Siechhaus in the Neu Bau, until the house is erected.”92 Like a rehearsed dance, plague once again sent the syphilis patients to the Neu Bau until the syphilis hospital could be rebuilt.93 The Franzosen-
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haus (new syphilis hospital) was rebuilt with stone, ostensibly due to the threat associated with the roaring fires needed for the wood treatment. Standing until the Thirty Years’ War, this final sixteenth-century construction was composed of the smaller stone syphilis hospital and the large wood plague hospital—the exact opposite of how they had originally been built. The two structures with corresponding names, Lazareth and Franzosenhaus, can be seen on Paul Pfinzing’s depictions of the Nuremberg’s landscape from 1594 (figure 6.2).94 City leaders needed to physically maneuver the sick and pertinent resources to both hospitals, so they required place-names that adequately signified what and where the actions were to take place. The names Lazareth and Sebastian may have provided useful place-names for the small syphilis hospital because they generally oriented inhabitants toward the extramural complex; however, those associations ceased to be sufficient when the more august plague hospital was also open. The example of the name Franzosenhaus shows the flexibility of early modern people to pragmatically shift names in order to differentiate and communicate about places in their city; however, as helpful as the term was, the name Franzosenhaus did not completely supplant the older place-names. Only two years after the syphilis hospital fire the institution’s renewed ordinances used the name Lazareth with no mention of the Franzosenhaus.95 The new name was not fixed to the building of the syphilis hospital, but it could provide a helpful modifying name that distinguished it from the plague hospital at critical moments.
Figure 6.2. Paul Pfinzing’s 1594 map labeled the plague hospital as the Lazareth and the syphilis hospital as the Franzosenhaus. Pfinzing-Atlas, 1594. Staatsarchiv Nürnberg Reichsstadt Nürnberg Karten und Pläne 230 S. 23.
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Conclusion This place-name exploration ends with the final destination for Nuremberg’s plague saint, Sebastian. As seen throughout this chapter, the saint was at one time applied to a chapel or to either of the two hospitals; fittingly, at the turn of the century, it became a name for the whole geographic complex. By 1602 the growing suburban population of Nuremberg necessitated a second extramural plague hospital. The council chose to build a new Lazareth next to the Saint Rochus chapel and cemetery to the southwest of the city walls.96 In order to differentiate the new hospital complex, the council drew from the geographic name that had never left the northwestern complex of hospitals, St. Sebastian. The new Lazareth zum St. Rochus (Lazareth at St. Rochus) stood in opposition to the long-standing Lazareth zum St. Sebastian (Lazareth at St. Sebastian).97 The fluidity of place-naming not only was sparked by political or ideological changes, but also occurred in response to a city’s changing use of landscape. As the need to delineate a new space arose, the council selected terms that could communicate information about places in their city. The descriptor Sebastian contained power because it remained a recognizable geographic reference throughout all manner of changes, such as new diseases, Reformation, siege, court cases, shifting financial procedures, shrinking charitable applications, rapidly growing populations, and ultimate destruction. Sebald Schreyer could never have imagined this Nuremberg when fighting to endow the patron saint’s hospital and chapel a century earlier, but the name would have contained an easily understandable, useful message for city inhabitants at the close of the sixteenth-century. The mystery of the St. Sebastian Lazareth displays how place-names functioned in communicating what and where an action was to take place in an early modern city. What appears as inconsistent or overlapping naming from our distant perspective did not necessarily present a problem to the neighbors who lived among the interconnected references at any particular moment. As seen in the opening portion of this chapter, city leaders certainly sought to install names that promoted their ideological agendas in both the plague and syphilis hospitals, but those names only had power when they sank into the ground and contained useful, orienting references for city inhabitants. City leaders and inhabitants added to or pulled from possible descriptive modifiers (Franzosenhaus, Blatternhaus, St. Sebastian, or Pestilence House) and geographic references (e.g., at Sebastian, at St. Johannis, at the Weidenmühle, on the Neu Bau, or at/in the Lazareth) to create recognizable yet fluid composites that enabled inhabitants to conceptually or physically navigate Nuremberg. Perhaps as early modern historians our greatest challenge is abandoning questions such as what exactly the Lazareth was or which building contained the Sebastian for ques-
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tions that ask what the effective utility of any given place-name was or what the range of place-names suggests about how inhabitants understood their space. Place-names were not drawn en masse on the drafting boards in the studios of cartographers, but instead emerged within a matrix of mutually interacting terms as city leaders and inhabitants adapted and defined their space. In this way each stage, phase, and range of possible place-names provide unique insights for historians because each name is a composite of historical information. Thus, place-names are palimpsests—ripe for excavation. The exploration of the names attributed to these relatively obscure hospitals display how placenames, as a messy historical patchwork, can help us unlock how people of the past used and understood their space. Amy Newhouse is adjunct professor of history at Lone Star College-Cy-fair in Houston. Her dissertation is entitled “Outside the Walls: Civic Belonging and Contagious Disease in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg.” Currently, she is preparing articles on the relationship between disease and the movement of physical bodies and objects in early modern Nuremberg. Outbreak necessitated choreographed movements of personnel and resources that defined to what extent an individual received care in the city.
Notes 1. I have chosen to use the blunt and anachronistic terms plague and syphilis throughout this chapter for the sake of clarity. 2. Thoben, “Sebastianspital.” 3. This identification was probably made because of the plague hospital’s later use as a military barracks, Kaserne (Caserne). Beyerstedt, “Kinder, Arme,“ 39. 4. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 4; and Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 203. Michel Foucault made these hospitals notorious as instruments of categorization and containment by power-hungry authorities. He used the image of the leper as the foundation for the later discipline houses and the hospitals for the insane. In her work on early modern medicine, Mary Lindemann asserted that hospitals were sites of concerted care even without modern medicine. 5. Montello, “Cognitive Geography,” vol. 2, 162. Geographer Daniel R. Montello argues that spatial words and landmarks are essential to cognition and are present in every language; they can most notably be found in prepositions (next to, under, by, on, etc.). 6. Maas, “Nürnberger Straßennamen,“ 120. For more on the history of Nuremberg’s landmarks, see Nopitsch, Wegweiser für Fremde. 7. Weingärtner, “Hallertürlein”; Beyerstadt, “Hallerwiese,” 123. According to Maas, when the Haller name was almost changed in 1839, the name change was rejected because of the historical worth of the name Haller. 8. Gelling, Signposts; and Gelling, Place-Names. See also Berger, DUDEN; and Reitzenstein, Lexikon fränkischer Ortsnamen.
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9. StadtAN, A 21–2, Nr. 116, 2r (1490–1516); and Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital, 91. 10. StadtAN, A 21–2, Nr. 116, 2r (1490–1516). 11. Ibid. 12. StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 8r (1562). For a discussion of Lazarus Spengler’s report of 490 inhabitants in 1533, see Ohlau, “Neue Quellen,” 242. 13. StadtAN, A 21–2, Nr. 116, 70r–71r (1490–1516). 14. StadtAN, B 14/II, Amtsbuch P, 61r (15 July 1502). 15. In this way, Sebastianspital follows the naming convention used for Nuremberg’s older hospitals, i.e. Holy Ghost, St. Johannis, St. Leonhards, St. Peters, St. Jakobs, and St. Elizabeth. 16. Berger, “Mice, Arrows, and Tumors,” 45. 17. StadtAN, A 21–2, Nr. 116 (1490–1516). 18. Caesar, “Sebald Schreyer,” 75. 19. Solger, “Aus dem Sanitätswesen,” 71. For a 1562 reference to the original ordinance adoption, see StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 3r (1562). 20. StadtAN, A6, Nr. 111; and StAN, Rep. 53II, Verz. III, Nr. 7/1 (1522, reprinted 1533). 21. This lack of substantial pronunciation of the aitches reflected in the fact that many documents appear without it (Lazaret, Lazarett, or Lacaret). For Luther reference, see Roper, Martin Luther, 99. 22. Byrne, Encyclopedia, 2 (“Lazarettos and Pesthouses”); and Brodman, Charity and Religion, 15. 23. Brodman, “Shelter and Segregation,” 37. See also Barber, “The Order”; and Marcombe, Leper Knights. 24. Brenner, “Recent Perspectives,” 397. 25. Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital, 95–96; and Byrne, Encyclopedia, 208 (“Lazarettos and Pesthouses”). 26. Crawshaw, Plague Hospitals, 3, 20. Nazareth and Nuremberg’s Lazareth may further validate the association of the two words. 27. Strauss, Nuremberg, 65. 28. Groos, “The City as Community and Space,” 188. 29. Some believe the Dutch Pesthuis was the first reference. See, e.g., Andel, “Plague Regulations,” 430–31; Bühl, “Die Pestepidemien,” 142; and Ulbricht, “Pesthospitäler,” 102–3. Other plague hospitals in Germany include Augsburg (1521), Strasbourg Pestilenzhaus (1541), Würzburg (1542), Colmar (1543), Regensburg (1543), and Stuttgart (1572). 30. Ulbricht, “Pesthospitäler,” 106–7; Höhl, Die Pest in Hildesheim, 94; and Christensen, Politics and the Plague, 174–92. 31. Müllner, Die Annalen, vol. 3, 410. 32. Articuli Superadditionales, 1r. 33. Ibid., 2r. 34. Ibid., 4v. 35. Casimir, 1. Libellus summarius, 4v. 36. Müllner, Die Annalen, vol. 3, 464. 37. Strauss, Nuremberg, 176–77. 38. StAN, Rep 52II Verz. III, Nr. 62. 39. Ibid. 40. Strauss, Nuremberg, 184–86; and Beyerstedt, “Fraischprozeß.” The dispute over Nuremberg’s western border remained in the courts until the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.
53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.
60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.
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Mummenhoff, Altnürnberg, vol. 2, 32–40. Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 126–30. Dormeier, “St. Rochus,” 55–56. StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 247 (1562). Windsheimer, Schreiber, and Schmidt, St. Johannis, 10. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 6. For more on the early temporary housing of the syphilis patients, see Newhouse, “Bearing the Cross.” Mummenhoff, Die öffentliche, 105. StadtAN, D 1, Nr. 2 (1543/1547); StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 298 (1567); StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 32 (1574); and StAN, Rep 52b, Nr. 9. StadtAN, D 15 S14, Nr. 15, 1r (1570–1590). Casimir, 1. Libellus summarius, 4v. For private cases of syphilis treatment, see StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 309; StadtAN, B 14/ II, Amtsbuch L, 147r–v; StadtAN, B 14/II, Nr. 6, 97r; StadtAN, B 14/II, Amtsbuch Z, 252v; and Siena, Venereal Disease, 49. Kevin Siena suggests that private practice for syphilis was the beginning of doctor/patient confidentiality as affluent patients would secretly send off for remedies. StadtAN, D 1, Nr. 2, 48v (1543). Hamburg, Bern, and Erfurt had syphilis hospitals just outside their city gates. Frankfurt am Main and Würzburg had them next to their leprosaria. Jütte, “Syphilis and Confinement,” 102. StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 298 (1567). Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital, 101–2; and Arrizabalaga, The Great Pox, 170, 194. For the opening of the Lazareth, see StAN, Rep. 52a, Nr. 130, 916–17 (1522–1560). These cases occurred during plague years before the plague hospital was in use. StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 821, 31v (9 Apr. 1533); and StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1211, 14v (3 July 1562). Jütte, “Syphilis and Confinement,” 102. According to Jütte, Blatternhaus was typical in Swiss and southern German cities: Augsburg (1495), Ulm (1495), Freiburg am Breisgau (1496), Frankfurt (1496), Memmingen (1524), Zurich (1525), and Bern (1529). It was pocken in Northern Germany. StadtAN, E 29/IV (4 Nov. 1533). StadtAN, E 56/II, Nr. 171. Arrizabalaga, The Great Pox, 102; and Jütte, “Syphilis and Confinement,” 104. Stein, Negotiating the French Pox, 91–101. The Fugger family established two private syphilis or wood houses for the treatment of their workers on their landholdings. Renner, Ein new wolgegründet; Jütte, “Syphilis and Confinement,” 112; and Arrizabalaga, The Great Pox, 102. Strasbourg’s use of mercury earned the house the name Murderer House by reformer Katharina Zell. Pirckheimer, Willibald Pirckheimers, vol. 7, 118. StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1218/19, 20v (19 Jan. 1563). StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1213, 13r (28 Aug. 1562). StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 309; and StadtAN, D 1, Nr. 2, 56v (1547). For the sake of brevity, this chapter will not explore diagnoses. Syphilis, both then and now, is difficult to diagnose from its variety of symptoms, but early modern leaders were less concerned with pinpointing the disease than with finding a place for the infected to be healed. For more on the complexity of diagnosis, see Hammond, “Naming, Describing and Treating.”
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69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.
StAN, Rep. 52b, Nr. 234, 7 (1561). StadtAN, D 1, Nr. 2, 21r (1527). StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 298 (1567). StadtAN, B 35 Losungamt A123a (1596). StadtAN, D 15 S14, Nr. 15, 1r. “Ausschnitt aus einem Stadtplan von Hans Bien,” reproduced in Windsheimer, St. Johannis, 72. StadtAN, E 29/IV (4 Nov. 1533); StadtAN, B 35 Losungamt A123a, 1v, 1r; StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1218/9, 20v (19 Jan. 1563); StadtAN, D 1, Nr. 2, 21r (1527); StadtAN, D 1, Nr. 2, 46v (1543); and StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 8r. StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 80r. StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1213, 11r (27 Aug. 1562); and StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1213, 13r (28 Aug. 1562). StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1213, 20r (1 Sept 1562). StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 247 (1562). It is impossible to know precisely when the term Franzosenhaus was first used. It is possible that it could have dated back to the complex’s reconstruction, but it was not popularly used in civic records until after these occurrences. StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1213, 20r (1 Sept. 1562). StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 8r. StAN, Rep. 52a, Nr. 130, 794 (1522–60). StAN, Rep. 52b, Nr. 9; and StadtAN, B19/1 Nr. 481, 8r. StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 8r; and StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1213, 24r (1 Sept. 1562). StadtAN, A 21–4˚, Nr. 031, 23v. The building was housing for refugees during the Margrave’s sieges, a site for plague inspection, and was used as Nuremberg’s first workhouse. Harrington, “Escape,” 317–18, 326. StadtAN, B 19/1, Nr. 481, 8r. StAN, Rep. 60a RV, Nr. 1218/9, 18r (18 Jan. 1563). StAN, Rep. 52a, Nr. 130, 850 (1522–60). StAN, Rep. 50a, Nr. 32, 2287v; see also StAN, Rep. 52a, Nr. 130, 916–917 (1522–60). StAN, Rep. 52b, Nr. 253, 4r; see also StAN, D 15 S14, Nr. 49 (1574). Pred, “Place.” Windsheimer, St. Johannis, 86. StadtAN, A 6, Nr. 328 (1574). Dormeier, “St. Rochus,” 38–53; Porzelt, Die Pest, 86. Roth, Nürnbergisches, 169.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.
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Bibliography Archival Sources Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (StadtAN) A 6: Nrs. 32, 111, 247, 298, 309, 328 A 21–2: Nr. 116 A 21–4˚: Nr. 031 B 19/1: Nr. 481
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B 14/II: Amtsbuch L, Amtsbuch P, Amtsbuch Z, Nr. 6 B 35 Losungamt A123a D 1: Nr. 2 D 15 S14: Nr. 15, 49 E 29/IV E 56/II: Nr. 171 Staatsarchive Nürnberg (StAN) Rep. 50a, Nr. 32, Rep. 52a: Nr. 130 Rep. 52b: Nrs. 7, 9, 253 Rep. 52II Verz. III: Nr. 62 Rep. 53II Verz. III: Nr. 7/1 Rep. 60a Ratsverlässe (RV): Nrs. 821, 1211, 1213, 1218/19
Primary Sources Articuli Superadditionales et Reprobatorii. Meiner gnedigen Herrn der Marggraven zu Brandenburg u. Contra Burgermesiter und Rath der Stadt Nürmberg. In causa das neu bevestet und gebaut Lazareth bey Nürmberg belangend. Speyer (Spirae), 1539. Reprinted in 1586. Casimir, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, 1. Libellus summarius Der Herrn Marggrafen zu Brandenburg Contra Burgermeister vnd Rath der Statt Nürmberg . . . In sachen das Lazareth vnd neue gebeu belangend. Product. Spirae 25. Septemb. Anno 1534. Nuremberg, 1586. Pirckheimer, Willibald. Willibald Pirckheimers Briefwechsel, vol. 7, edited by Helga Scheible. Munich, 1956. Renner, Franz. Ein new wolgegründet nützlichs unnd haylsams Handtbüchlein gemeiner Praktik aller innerlicher und eusserlicher Erzney wider die Krankheit der Franzosen. Nuremberg, 1548.
Secondary Sources Andel, Martinus A. van. “Plague Regulations in the Netherlands.” Janus 21 (1916): 410–44. Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson, and Roger Kenneth French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven, CT, 1997. Barber, Malcolm. “The Order of Saint Lazarus and the Crusades.” Catholic Historical Review 80 (1994): 439–56. Berger, Dieter. DUDEN, Geographische Namen in Deutschland: Herkunft und Bedeutung der Namen von Ländern, Städten, Bergen und Gewässern, 2nd ed. Mannheim, 1999. Berger, Pamela. “Mice, Arrows, and Tumors: Medieval Plague Iconography North of the Alps.” In Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, edited by Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, 23–63. Kirksville, MO, 2007. Beyerstadt, Hans-Dieter. “Fraischprozeß.” In Diefenbacher and Endres, Stadtlexikon Nürnberg. http://online-service2.nuernberg.de/stadtarchiv/objekt_start.fau?prj=verzeichn ungen&dm=Lex_Internet&zeig=2157. Beyerstadt, Hans-Dieter. “Hallerwiese.” In Diefenbacher and Endres, Stadtlexikon Nürnberg. http://online-service2.nuernberg.de/stadtarchiv/objekt_start.fau?prj=verzeichn ungen&dm=Lex_Internet&zeig=2567.
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Beyerstedt, Horst-Dieter. “Kinder, Arme, Kranke, Alte—Das Sozialwesen der Reichsstadt.” In Der Nürnberg-Atlas: Vielfalt und Wandel der Stadt im Kartenbild, edited by Wolfgang Baumann and Hajo Dietz, 38–39. Cologne, 2007. Brenner, Elma. “Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe.” History Compass 8, no. 5 (2010): 388–406. Brodman, James W. “Shelter and Segregation: Lepers in Medieval Catalonia.” In On the Social Origins of Medieval Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan, edited by Donald J. Kagay and Theresa M. Vann, 35–46. Leiden, 1998. Brodman, James. Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe. Washington, DC, 2009. Bühl, Charlotte. “Die Pestepidemien des ausgehenden Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit in Nürnberg (1483/4 bis 1533/34).” In Nürnberg und Bern: Zwei Reichsstädte und ihre Landgebiete, edited by Urs Martin Zahnd and Rudolph Endres, 121–68. Erlangen, 1990. Byrne, Joseph Patrick. Encyclopedia of the Black Death. Santa Barbara, CA, 2012. Caesar, Elisabeth.“Sebald Schreyer, ein Lebensbild aus dem vorreformatorischen Nürnberg.”Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg (MVGN) 56 (1969): 1–213. Christensen, David. Politics and the Plague in Early Modern Germany: Political Efforts to Combat Epidemics in the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolffenbüttel during the Seventeenth Century. Saarbrücken, 2008. Crawshaw, Jane L. Stevens. Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice. Farnham, UK, 2012. Diefenbacher, Michael, and Rudolf Endres, eds. Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (on-line). Accessed 10 November, 2017, https://www.nuernberg.de/internet/stadtarchiv/publikationen_ einzeln_stadtlexikon.html. Dormeier, Heinrich. “St. Rochus, die Pest und die Imhoffs in Nürnberg vor und während der Reformation.” Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (1985): 7–72. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Abingdon, UK, 2005. Gelling, Margaret. Place-Names in the Landscape. London, 1984. Gelling, Margaret. Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England. London, 1978. Groos, Arthur. “The City as Community and Space: Nuremberg Stadtlob, 1447–1530.” In Spatial Practices: Medieval / Modern, edited by Markus Stock and Nicola Vöhringer, 187–206. Göttingen, 2014. Hammond, Mitchell Lewis. “Naming, Describing and Treating Maladies in SixteenthCentury Germany.” Paper presented at the 7th Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär Conference. Nashville, TN, March 2015. Harrington, Joel. “Escape from the Great Confinement: The Genealogy of a German Workhouse.” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 2 (1999): 308–45. Heal, Bridget, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648. Cambridge, UK, 2007. Henderson, John. The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul. New Haven, CT, 2006. Höhl, Monika. Die Pest in Hildesheim: Krankheit als Krisenfaktor im städtischen Leben des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (1350–1750). Hildesheim, 2002. Jütte, Robert. “Syphilis and Confinement: Hospitals in Early Modern Germany.” In Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and Northern
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America, 1500–1950, edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte, 97–115. New York, 1996. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK, 1999. Maas, Herbert. “Nürnberger Straßennamen: Die Problematik der Straßenbenennung einer modernen Großstadt.” MVGN 81 (1994): 119–217. Marcombe, David. Leper Knights: The Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem in England c.1150– 1544. Woodbridge, UK, 2003. Montello, D. R. “Cognitive Geography.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 12 vols., edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, vol. 2, 162. Oxford, 2009. Müllner, Johannes. Die Annalen der Reichsstadt Nürnberg von 1623: Teil III, 1470–1544, edited by Michael Diefenbacher and Walter Gebhardt. Nuremberg, 2003. Mummenhoff, Ernst. Altnürnberg in Krieg und Kriegsnot. Vol. 2: Aus den schlimmsten Tagen des dreißigjährigen Kriegs. Nuremberg, 1917. Mummenhoff, Ernst. Die öffentliche Gesundheits- und Krankenpflege im alten Nürnberg. Neustadt/Aisch, 1898. Newhouse, Amy. “Bearing the Cross: Syphilis and the Founding of the Holy Cross Hospital in Fifteenth-Century Nuremberg.” In Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern across Disciplines, edited by Karen Christianson, 53–60. Chicago, 2011. Nopitsch, Christian Conrad, ed. Wegweiser für Fremde in Nürnberg, oder topographische Beschreibung der Reichsstadt Nürnberg nach ihren Plätzen . . . Gebäuden rc. Nuremberg, 1801. Ohlau, J. K. “Neue Quellen zur Familiengeschichte der Spengler, Lazarus Spengler und seine Söhne.” MVGN 52 (1963/64), 232–55. Porzelt, Carolin. Die Pest in Nürnberg: Leben und Herrschen in Pestzeiten in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg, 1562–1713. Sankt Ottilien, 2000. Pred, Allen. “Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the TimeGeography of Becoming Places.” Annals of Association of American Geographers 74, no. 2 (1984): 279–97. Reitzenstein, Wolf-Armin Freiherr von. Lexikon fränkischer Ortsnamen: Herkunft und Bedeutung: Oberfranken, Mittelfranken, Unterfranken. Munich, 2013. Roper, Lyndal. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. London, 2016. Roth, Johann Ferdinand, ed. Nürnbergisches Taschenbuch. Nuremberg, 1812. Siena, Kevin P. Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor: London’s “Foul Wards,” 1600–1800. Rochester, NY, 2004. Solger, E. “Aus dem Sanitätswesen der Reichsstadt Nürnberg im 16. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Hygieine.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 2 (1870): 67–90. Stein, Claudia. Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany. Farnham, UK, 2009. Strauss, Gerald. Nuremberg in the Sixteenth-Century: City Politics and Life between Middle Ages and Modern Times. New York, 1976. Thoben, Claudia. “Sebastianspital.” In Diefenbacher and Endres, Stadtlexikon Nürnberg. http://online-service2.nuernberg.de/stadtarchiv/objekt_start.fau?prj=verzeichnung en&dm=Lex_Internet&zeig=4946. Ulbricht, Otto. “Pesthospitäler in deutschsprachigen Gebieten in der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Die leidige Seuche: Pest-Fälle in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Otto Ulbricht, 96–132. Cologne, 2004.
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Weingärtner, Helge. “Hallertürlein.” In Diefenbacher and Endres, Stadtlexikon Nürnberg. http://online-service2.nuernberg.de/stadtarchiv/objekt_start.fau?prj=verzeichnung en&dm=Lex_Internet&zeig=2564. Windsheimer, Bernd, Martin Schreiber, and Alexander Schmidt, eds. St. Johannis: Geschichte eines Stadtteils. Nuremberg, 2000.
CHAPTER 7
Global Goods in Local Languages Naming Cotton Textiles in the Swiss Cantons JOHN JORDAN AND GABI SCHOPF
I
n April 1662 Hans Bauernköng, an officer of Bern’s night watch, was suspected of being financially bankrupt. As was becoming the norm in Bern, a bankruptcy inventory listing all of his assets, possessions, and debts was created. Included in the assets were two pairs of “weiss baumwullig Strumpf ” (white cotton stockings).1 More than a century later, in March 1792, a young woman placed an advertisement in a Basel newspaper, seeking to sell a variety of “aller Sorten Indienne” (printed cottons). Interested parties were to contact her in the Aeschenvorstadt, just outside the old town on the southern bank of the Rhine.2 What to make of these two cases separated by a period of 130 years? What interest could they still hold for a historian today? In both instances, the names and words used for the cotton textiles, first Baumwolle and later indienne, were different. Was this change in terms reflective of broader changes concerning the prominence of cotton or increased interaction with the non-European world? Or were they simply a natural evolution of textile terminology? The early modern period marked a massive growth of European interest in the natural world and exotic goods. Fueled by colonial desires and shipping ventures, Europeans crisscrossed the world, bringing more and more goods from across the globe back to Europe.3 This commercial exchange was paralleled by significant advances in the natural sciences, including attempts to classify, structure, and name this new-found universe.4 Names, after all, are one way in which humans attempt to bring order to the messiness of daily life.5 This process of naming and categorizing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not just an endeavor of natural scientists. The period also witnessed a massive growth of foreign consumer goods entering into the market that needed to be named: porcelain, tobacco, printed cotton textiles, spices, sugar, cocoa, and
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coffee are just some examples.6 Over time, these goods went from being the preserve of specialists to being available broadly throughout society, prompting an additional process of establishing a new vocabulary. As a result, it is possible to see how the general public engaged with a novel and exotic world by looking at the various names given to imported merchandise. Cotton offers a fruitful and valuable window into this world of naming and popular consumerism. First cultivated as early as the fifth millennium BCE, it did not gain a significant foothold in Europe until the late medieval period.7 Through trading links with the Levant, cotton industries developed in Spain, southern France, and northern Italy in the twelfth century. From there, the industries spread north to Swiss and southern German cities including St. Gallen, Ulm, and Augsburg, where principally Barchent (fustian), a mixed cotton-linen textile, was produced. But by the late sixteenth century, these industries were in decline as changes in the trading relationship with the Ottoman Empire disrupted the supply of raw cotton. As a result, the European cotton industry fell into sharp depression for most of the seventeenth century, no doubt impacted by the Thirty Years’ War as well.8 It was not until the close of the seventeenth century, spurred by imports from India, that cotton rebounded, and then boomed, within Europe. Given this background, the history of cotton’s naming, like most naming processes, is rather convoluted. On the one hand, some of the names bestowed on it in the late Middle Ages were still in use in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, new names given to printed cotton textiles were introduced after the Middle Ages. Untangling these names can help reveal how the old met the new in a period of increased classification and globalization. The Swiss cantons offer an intriguing and highly relevant laboratory for such a study. Despite being far from most European and global trading hubs, they were one of Europe’s largest producers of cotton textiles.9 Yet, the place of the Swiss cantons is largely ignored in historical narratives about cotton. Given the voluminous scholarly attention cotton has received in recent decades—as well as the transformative social, economic, sartorial, and domestic changes it helped set off—such an omission is surprising.10 Investigating the names used for cotton textiles is one way to begin to fill this gap. To provide a broad basis for German-speaking Swiss cantons, this chapter uses primary sources from two of its major cities, Bern and Basel. The principal source from Bern are decanal samples from 1660–1789 of bankruptcy inventories.11 Covering a wide socioeconomic spectrum, the inventories provide complete lists and descriptions of people’s possessions—real property, crockery, furniture, and textiles—that often provide specialized labels for the material (whether metallic, fabric, or other substance). The primary source for Basel is a sampling of the Avisblätter, a weekly newspaper first published in 1729, that included advertisements, lost and found notices, and general announce-
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ments. From this source, we have created weekly samples of one year from each decade of publication in the eighteenth century.12 By examining both sources, it is possible to see how a global good like cotton was commonly called, which will reveal how early modern Swiss made sense of a globalizing world. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part establishes how cotton textiles were named, tracking the naming process from global to local. The second part probes the etymologies of the names and argues that this wave of global contact set in motion a new kind of naming, one more focused on geography. The third section assesses how broader developments, namely the growth of taxonomy and European production, affected the naming process. In doing so, it seeks to show first, that names, once in common use, are resistant to change, even if the original meaning ceases to be an accurate description. And second, that by prioritizing consumption and broad appeal rather than precision, Swiss consumers and local merchants approached the non-European world in a much different manner than specialists.
Stages and Places of the Naming Processes: From Global to Local Before it is possible to assess how the Swiss understood the global, it is first necessary to look at cotton’s path to the Swiss cantons. The naming process began far away, and featured many rounds of (re)naming and translation along the way before arriving in Switzerland. Understanding cotton’s journey from its global origins to its local endpoints reveals not only the myriad forces and actors that shaped this process, but also which of the global terms caught on domestically and which did not. The first stage of the naming process began in seventeenth-century India where local (or other foreign) producers used their own indigenous names for cotton.13 Many, but not all, of these indigenous names appear in the shipping lists of the major trading companies, albeit often mediated through one of the company’s shipping agents. For example, in the Danish Asiatic Company, eight of the eleven most frequently used terms for cotton were Danish approximations of Indian, or rather anglicized versions of Indian, terms: baftas, cassa(s), gorras, guzinas, salempuris, sannas, mamudies, and sirts.14 More evidence of mixed terminology can be found by the more than twenty-five different names for muslins in the cargo lists of the English East India Company from 1700 to 1750, or the University of Warwick’s “East India Company Traded Textiles to Europe Glossary,” which includes more than sixty-six different terms for cotton textiles traded from India to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.15 Second, this mass of terms was slowly trimmed down as textiles moved from foreign producers to the European market. When ships arrived in ports,
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customs agents and government officials were forced to come up with classifications to tax these different kinds of textiles. For example, a Russian list of import taxes from 1797 lists four terms for cotton: Zitz, Kattun, Baumwolle, and Nesseltuch. Further specification was provided by the color and origin, but no names beyond those four were used.16 After clearing customs, many cargoes went straight to large auctions or were sold to European merchants, entailing a further round of translation, communication, and at times, naming. With regards to the Danish Asiatic Company, of the eleven terms for cottons textiles, only three (baftas, gorras, and tørklæder/romals) appear in the advertisements of merchants who bought at these auctions. The other eight terms were routinely repackaged under different names, especially a generic one such as the Danish word for cotton (cattun).17 Third, for polities like the Swiss cantons without overseas trading companies, manufacturers and merchants had to first purchase textiles at these auctions or from foreign merchants, then ship the textiles back to their home base where, more often than not, the textiles would be further refined (e.g., printed, dyed, or cut). A typical Swiss example is Christian Friedrich Laué who bought textiles at auctions in London, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen; printed them at his workshop in Wildegg (twenty miles west of Zurich); and then reexported them to Italy, France, Holland, and even as far as the Caribbean.18 Not surprisingly, given the scope of his (and most Swiss textile printers) business, he largely retained industry standard terms. For example, for the plain, white cotton textiles that he bought at auctions as well as some of his own productions, Laué used the international terms of bafta, cassa, calanca, and guignam or gingan (gingham). For others, he used common terms among European producers for imitations of Indian prints, such as pattnas, cottons piqués, or camayeux.19 Identifying actors in this naming process is problematic. From the beginning of a global good’s journey until it reached a local customer’s hands, scores of people may have played a role in its naming: foreign producers, shipping agents, customs officials, merchants and manufacturers, tailors, shopkeepers, authors of fashion magazines and trade lexica, and consumers. The role of the latter is especially hard to grasp since individual consumers did not participate by creating names for textiles. But by using and reusing, and thereby popularizing a name or by ceasing to use a name, they played a crucial role in the process. Furthermore, at least some of those who named textiles did so with consumers in mind.20 What is apparent in cotton’s journey from global to local is that a rich vocabulary of different terms existed. But this vocabulary was the purview of specialists. As can be seen in tables 7.1 to 7.4, the local and nonspecialist vocabulary was markedly different. For one, with the exception of gingham (gingan/guignam) and muslin (mousseline), none of the hundreds of global terms (kalamkari, sannas, gorras, surats,
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Table 7.1. Printed cotton terms in the Bernese bankruptcy inventories (by decade). Fabric name
1660– 1669
1680– 1689
1700– 1709
1720– 1729
1740– 1749
1760– 1769
1780– 1789
Total
Inventories
36
64
4
66
121
126
95
512
Indienne
0
18
1
89
185
209
100
602
Gingham*
0
0
0
0
1
14
2
17
Persienne
0
0
1
1
8
5
0
15
Gedruckte Baumwolle**
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
1
Calmander
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Calanca
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Total
0
19
2
90
194
228
102
635
Sources: StABe, Geltstagsrödel B IX 1408 Band Nr. 1 (1646–1664); StABe, Geltstagsrödel B IX 1459 (1789–1790). * Ginghams are not easily classified as either printed or plain. Their striped pattern was originally woven, but was later imitated by European textile printers. For the purposes of this essay, we have classified them as printed because we think their fashionable patterns are best encompassed by this label. ** Both the bankruptcy inventories and Avisblätter include entries of textiles described as printed (gedruckt) where the type of fabric was not specified. These fifteen entries (eight for the inventories; seven for the Avisblätter) are not reflected in either table 7.1 or 7.2 as the material could have been something other than cotton, such as linen.
Table 7.2. Printed cotton terms in the Basel Avisblätter (by year). Year
1732
1742
1752
1762
1772
1782
1792
Total
Advertisements 1
1729
2
13
7
21
24
30
81
179
Indienne
1
0
5
0
2
4
6
15
33
Persienne
0
2
5
0
6
4
7
6
30
Calmander
0
0
1
2
3
4
2
1
13
Gingham
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
3
6
Calanca
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
3
Gedruckte Baumwolle
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
2
Total
1
2
11
2
15
13
16
27
87
Source: Wochentliche Nachrichten aus dem Bericht=Haus zu Basel, 1750–1850.
etc.) acquired broad usage. Nor (again with the exception of gingham) did any of the specialist terms (pattna, camayeux, etc.) used by a domestic merchant or producer like Laué find resonance.21 Instead, a corpus of eight distinct terms (indienne, gingan, persienne, calmander, Baumwolle, Gansauer, mousseline, and Barchent) were used most frequently in colloquial usage in the Swiss cantons.
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Table 7.3. Plain cotton terms in the Bernese bankruptcy inventories (by decade). Fabric name
1660– 1669
1680– 1689
1700– 1709
1720– 1729
1740– 1749
1760– 1769
1780– 1789
Total
Inventories
36
64
4
66
121
126
95
512
Baumwolle
2
15
0
7
27
71
6
128
Gansauer
2
1
0
7
44
15
0
69
Muslin
0
0
0
5
17
18
2
42
Barchent
0
0
0
1
5
11
0
17
Cotton
0
0
0
0
0
10
3
13
Manchester
0
0
0
0
0
0
8
8
Total
4
16
0
20
93
125
19
277
Sources: StABe, Geltstagsrödel B IX 1408 Band Nr. 1 (1646–1664); StABe, Geltstagsrödel B IX 1459 (1789–1790).
Table 7.4. Plain cotton terms in the Basel Avisblätter (by year). Year
1729
Advertisements 1
1732
1742
1752
1762
1772
1782
1792
Total
2
13
7
21
24
30
81
179
Baumwolle
0
0
2
3
5
6
14
58
88
Muslin
0
0
2
3
10
8
9
39
71
Gansauer
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Barchent
0
0
0
0
0
2
1
4
7
Cotton
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
Manchester
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
2
Total
0
0
4
6
15
16
25
103
169
Source: Wochentliche Nachrichten aus dem Bericht=Haus zu Basel, 1750–1850.
While some of the terms came from the global or European terms, some names were distinctly local. Gansauer appears not to have been used outside the Swiss cantons, and in France, persienne referred not to a printed cotton textile, but rather to a type of silk.22 In engaging with the global word of textiles, the Swiss clearly had their own unique vocabulary—one set in their own local languages.
A New Kind of Naming: From Descriptive to Imagined Geography In looking at these eight locally used terms, it is apparent that cotton’s resurgence in the seventeenth century did not lead to wholesale renaming. While four of the terms (indienne, persienne, calmander, and gingan) were new; the
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other four (Baumwolle, Gansauer, Barchent, and mousseline) were not. Instead, the latter terms had been part of the Swiss vocabulary for centuries. What changed with cotton’s boom was the linguistic approach to naming textiles. One of the main aspects of this change was the growth of French words (indienne, persienne, muslin). Linguistic and economic considerations certainly played a role in this: French was the language spoken on a daily basis by the patrician elite in Bern and Basel, and France was an important market for Swiss printed cottons.23 But most importantly, it was the French terms (indienne and persienne), and not the corresponding German terms (Kattun and Zitz), that were used to describe the new stylish and fashionable printed cotton textiles.24 With basic, plain cottons, however, German terms (Baumwolle, Barchent, Gansauer) were used whereas the corresponding French terms (coton, bouracan) were not. In other words, the Swiss turned to the French not only for fashion, but also for the language of fashion.25 German, while functional for basic and older descriptions, was not considered to be a fashionable language.26 More than the preference for French terms, the linguistic change can best be seen in the shift from descriptive to geographic names. Terms that described a textile’s material qualities had once been a common manner of naming textiles. For example, cotton, as the eighteenth-century encyclopediast Johann Georg Krünitz noted in his trade dictionary, was originally viewed by Europeans as a type of wool that grew on trees.27 The term Baumwolle, literally translated as tree wool, reflected this. Although incorrect, the term Baumwolle captured what was seen originally as the fabric’s distinctive qualities. In the eighteenth century Basel merchants tried to replicate this process with ginghams, a striped cotton textile, by giving it a German name that described its material properties. Since ginghams originally were a woven mixture of cotton and a type of silk that looked like tree bark, the term Baumrinden (literally cloth from tree bark), accomplished this.28 But whereas the term Baumwolle was successful and remains a common term today, terms such as Baumrinden or gedruckte Baumwolle (printed cotton) failed to catch on. For instance, the term Baumrinden was never used in the bankruptcy inventories, and there are only five entries using the term in the Avisblätter. Similarly, gedruckte Baumwolle appears only once in the bankruptcy inventories, and only twice in the Avisblätter.29 When describing printed cottons, other, less materially descriptive terms, were much more popular in the eighteenth century. Chief among these terms were names either adopted or derived from foreign words or places. Such names helped to cultivate a connection between the textile and a distant place from where it was thought to originate. For example, indienne and persienne are the French words for Indian and Persian and refer to broad geographical regions. Gingham is from ginggang (the Malaysian word for striped).30 Calanca is quite possibly an approximation of kalamkari (the Persian word for pen work).31 In naming textiles in this manner, early modern Swiss
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were building on a long European tradition, especially in the German-speaking regions, of associating textiles with the area they came from: St. Gallen, Dutch, and Silesian linens, as well as Flemish wool, all gained European, or at least regional, renown.32 Moreover, even prior to cotton’s resurgence, foreign textiles like muslin, Gansauer, and Barchent were named in this manner.33 But while the style of naming may not have been new, the frequency with which it was used was unmatched.34 With printed cottons in the eighteenth century, almost every name was derived from a foreign word or place. Other forms of naming ceased to be used.35 Contemporary developments, particularly a rise of European interest in and contact with global locations, goes a long way to explaining this change in naming practices. As the history of collections has shown, Europe experienced a surge in accumulating objects—whether artifacts, maps, books, paintings, engravings, or textiles—from faraway places during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.36 That the names of cotton textiles, especially indienne, gingan, persienne, calmander, and calanca, tapped into the period’s growing fascination with the non-European—or as it increasingly became construed, the exotic world—is hardly surprising.37 Names were important to selling textiles. If they could also tap into a continental zeitgeist for far-off places, it was even better for business. Strikingly, this new naming preference for the foreign was accompanied by a new linguistic form. The older method, used primarily for European goods, often used the place-name as an adjective, such as St. Gallen linen or Flemish wool.38 The new form for non-European places did away with the adjective, and instead used the place as a noun (e.g., indienne, not coton indien or indische gedruckte Baumwolle). In doing so, it highlighted the textile’s foreignness over its materiality.39 That this new manner did away with the material descriptions for such a novel kind of textile—one whose bright colors and floral designs stood in stark contrast to most contemporary Swiss textiles—is remarkable.40 It implies that printed cottons did not need a descriptive name to make them comprehensible or desirable to Swiss customers, but rather their foreignness and connection to an exotic world was more important in marketing.
Hybridity, Geographic Imprecision, and Taxonomic Desires While contemporary passions may have made it more appealing to use foreign-inspired names, domestic developments, particularly the growth of taxonomy and European production soon presented fundamental challenges to the underlying logic of this manner of naming. How the naming process responded to these issues provides insight on the flexibility, accuracy, and understandings of the names during this period.
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Beginning in the late seventeenth century, many European polities commenced a phase of import substitution.41 This shift in sourcing and production meant that many textiles (and other goods) were no longer solely produced in the area that they were named after. For a system that was built on geographic names signaling origin, new sources for these textiles created a naming problem. For example, with muslin, Mosul was soon eclipsed by eastern India, particularly Bengal and the Coromandel Coast, as the center of production by the mid-eighteenth century.42 Furthermore, muslin was even being produced domestically in Europe, including in rural areas of the canton of Zurich.43 What once may have been a product distinct to Mosul no longer was. Yet the name muslin continued to be used regardless of where it was produced. More than muslin, this issue is best exemplified by the name indienne. As most printed cottons textiles were—at least initially—made in India, the name indienne was natural. But parallel textile industries developed relatively quickly in Europe. Geneva (1687), Neuchatel (1688), Bern (1706), and Basel (1716) all quickly became sites of calico production. The output of these and other regional workshops also earned the name indienne.44 For these textiles, the connection to India was tenuous. While the woven, plain cotton may have come from India, it could also have come from the Levant or Persia.45 Nevertheless, Swiss calico printers were called Indienne Drucker (printers of Indian textiles) rather than simply textile printers. Despite the growth of Swiss and European production, the names of cotton textiles never evolved to reflect this change. The closest that they came was with the name persienne. As defined by Bern’s sumptuary legislation of 1728, which also temporarily banned them, persienne were clothes made from foreign cottons.46 With this definition, the Bernese were trying to make a distinction between locally printed cotton textiles (indienne) and foreign printed cotton textiles (persienne).47 For the old manner of naming textiles after where they were made, this distinction would have been inaccurate: Indian textiles could not be made in Bern, and not all foreign printed cottons were made in the Middle East. But in a globalizing world, where products could be made and refined in several places, such a naming system was no longer as functional or useful. Such hybrid goods simply could no longer be accurately named geographically.48 Instead, what the names signified changed. Rather than their origin, geographic terms like indienne and persienne now referred more to a specific regional style. Indienne and persienne, thus, denoted, not printed cottons from India or Persia, but printed cottons generally. This disconnect from geography and the place of production is perhaps best encapsulated by advertisements appearing in the 1740s for “ostindisch” (East Indian) as well as English persienne.49 The name of the textile (persienne) was now firmly indicative of a specific style, and not a geographic origin. In short, the boom of printed cottons and growth of
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interest in the non-European world brought with them a new style of naming. Rather than following the traditional customs of denoting where a textile was made or describing its material qualities, this new manner of naming ignored materiality and used geographic terms to signify, broad foreign styles. It was a marked departure from how cotton textiles had been named for centuries. As the terms evolved to indicate regional styles rather than sites of production, the approach to geography, however, remained inexact and imprecise. For example, indienne referred not to a specific place, but rather to a large geographical area—one that in the sixteenth century could as easily have referred to the Americas, or anywhere outside of Europe, as India.50 Terms that referred to specific places like Patna or Surat (both Indian cities) were too unfamiliar for a mainstream audience.51 Broad and coarse geographic regions, not precision, were the characteristics of the commonly used terms. This type of indistinctness in textile terms is consistent with European engagement with the exotic world. In his work on exotic geography, Benjamin Schmidt characterizes the years from 1670 to 1730 as being not only a period of great interest, but also a period of great imprecision in how the non-European world was understood. As Schmidt writes, “Icons of exotica, as produced by Europeans circa 1700, do not represent a particular place or landscape but come to stand for an entire and somewhat arbitrarily defined exotic world.”52 In other words, the connotation of the non-European world was not one of distinct regions, but rather of general exoticism. This was precisely the period when the term indienne entered the Swiss vocabulary (it first becomes a noticeable presence in the bankruptcy inventories in the 1680s). More than just referring to an Indian style, the name indienne tapped into general preconceptions of the foreign and the exotic. In making this connection explicit, indienne and later persienne too, captured the exoticism of the Far East for an early modern European audience. It was a name that signified a printed cotton textile from a far-off, decidedly non-European place. Where exactly that place may have been was of less importance. Instead that it was foreign and associable with an expansive, known geographic region made it desirable to a European audience lusting after the foreign. Geographic precision was a secondary concern, and making the exotic consumable was primary.53 But where the imprecision of this initial wave of global contact from 1670 to 1730 can account for the early names of cotton, the mid to late eighteenth century approached the global quite differently. By then, there was a demand for greater precision. Schmidt notes that, beginning in the 1730s, exotic geography was criticized for its lack of distinction and inaccuracy. Rather than a broad, pleasing and delightful world, collectors, scholars, and naturalists called out for greater care and precision.54 Matching this trend were the growth of taxonomic systems and the publication of trade lexica that attempted to bring order to this terminological confusion. For example, Linnaeus’ system of clas-
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sification is usually dated to either 1737 or 1753—well after most of these textiles had been named.55 Despite all these changes, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed no major changes to the popular names used for cotton, whether printed or plain. In fact, the prominence of indienne actually increased at this time. While a few new terms developed (e.g., calmander, gingan, calanca, Manchester), none achieved wide usage partly because these terms referred to refined, expensive fabrics, and partly because they were all specialist terms. Furthermore, outside of naturalists’ discussions, the botanists’ chosen term of gossypium for cotton was never used. Why was science and the greater demand for precision unable to make any headway in the common Swiss vocabulary for cotton textiles? First, taxonomic systems such as the naming of plants, where Linnaeus’s system of taxonomy was first applied, proceeded on a fundamentally different logic than that of the naming of consumer goods like textiles. The former was a scientific endeavor, carried out and debated by specialists who sought not to engage a broad public, but rather to classify and categorize the natural world. The textile trade also had specialists (authors of trade lexica, shipping agents, manufacturers, and tailors) who took part in such debates, but for the average consumer these discussions were of little importance. Taxonomic precision was not how one engaged with or sold textiles to a broad audience, instead that was done through broad terms that stimulated desire. Second, once a name is in common circulation, it has staying power. This characteristic of naming was not unique to geographically named textiles. As seen with Baumwolle, even after it was understood not to be a type of wool from a tree, no new term that correctly described its material properties surpassed it in popularity. Once they have acquired currency, names, it would appear, are not easily displaced.
Conclusion In looking at the names the Swiss used for cotton textiles, three major features stand out. First, once a name is in broad circulation, it is quite resistant to change. Even as cotton waned in popularity and accessibility over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the main terms for it (e.g., Baumwolle, Gansauer, Barchent) did not change. When it became readily available again at the end of the seventeenth century, these terms were still used. Similarly, indienne and persienne remained common terms even after they were domestically produced in Europe. In the middle of a globalizing world that brought ever more consumer goods and fashions, these steady, core terms helped people make sense of, and integrate, printed cottons within existing patterns of consumption. Second, unlike so many other processes of naming in this period, the naming of cotton textiles was not done taxonomically. Of the hundreds of global
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terms in circulation, only eight were used regularly in the Swiss cantons. As with taxonomic processes, while such a plethora of terms may have been feasible for specialists, for the general population such an array of terms was simply unnecessary, and likely too burdensome.56 Thus, not surprisingly, the late eighteenth-century calls for greater precision and care in naming fell on deaf ears for the broader public. That style of naming was the reserve of the natural sciences where specialists pushed strongly for a singular manner of naming plants and other things. For consumer goods, names that helped to stir desire were more important. Third, the boom of printed cotton and Europe’s growing interest in the foreign and exotic were accompanied by a new manner of naming. Epitomized by terms like indienne, persienne, and calanca, in this new manner of naming, textile terms no longer described the material aspects or origins of a textile but instead referred to a broadly imagined exotic world. While this was a pronounced departure from how textiles had been traditionally named, this imprecise approach was consistent with how Europe engaged with the global at the time. More importantly, it helped to make the exotic consumable, even after it was increasingly domestically produced. John Jordan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His current research interests lie in the history of consumption, especially that of global goods and textiles, in early modern Europe. Previously he has worked on the intersection of law and society in early modern Germany, particularly as it pertains to disputes—their initiation, conduct, management, and (sometimes) resolution. Gabi Schopf is a PhD student at the University of Jena, Germany. Her research is focused on eighteenth-century trading practices, including advertising, mail ordering, travelling salesman, and exchanging samples. Previously she worked as a researcher in the project “Textiles and Material Culture in Transition: Consumption, Cultural Innovation, and Global Interaction in the Early Modern Period” at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Notes Our sincere thanks to the editors of this volume as well as Kim Siebenhüner, Claudia Ravazzolo, John E. Jordan, and the participants of the University of Bern’s MittelbauKolloquium and the Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär conference for their feedback on various drafts. 1. Staatsarchiv Bern [StABe], Geltstagsrödel, B IX 1408 Band Nr. 1 (1646–64), Case 12, unfoliert. 2. See Wochentlicher Nachtrichten aus dem Bericht=Haus zu Basel, 8 March 1792.
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3. For an accessible introduction to these globalizing processes for the seventeenth century, see Brook, Vermeer’s Hat. For the eighteenth century, see Smith and Findlen, Merchants & Marvels; Nussbaum, The Global; Bleichmar and Mancall, Collecting across Cultures; Findlen, Early Modern Things; and a recent special issue of Art History (Bleichmar and Martin, “Objects in Motion”). 4. See, e.g., the growth of encyclopedia and trade lexica in this period. A major, albeit later, driver of this process was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and his taxonomic labeling system. On Linnaeus, see Schiebinger, “Names and Knowing.” 5. This idea is supported both by research in anthropology and by sociolinguistics, where it has long been noted, “Language is the process whereby cultural understandings are enacted, created, and transformed in interaction with social structure.” Mertz, “Language, Law,” quote at 423. More generally, see Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistic Categories”; and his later follow-up, Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse.” On anthropology, see, e.g., Douglas and Hull, How Classification Works. 6. On the growth of consumer goods and consumption, see McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society; Breen, “An Empire of Goods”; Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution; Overton et al., Production and Consumption; McCabe, A History; and Trentmann, Empire of Things. On some of the specific goods, see Goodman, Tobacco in History, 37–55; Goodman, “Excitantia,” 126–47; McCants, “Exotic Goods”; McCants, “Poor Consumers”; and Hochmuth, Globale Güter. 7. See Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 6–22. Considering its geographical scope, cotton was likely traded within the Roman Empire but specific references are hard to find. The story of cotton from antiquity to the Middle Age is not well documented. 8. On medieval cotton, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 23–28; and Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry, 28–55, 130–62. On the disruptive effects of the Thirty Years’ War, see Robisheaux, Rural Society, 197–263. 9. Jenny-Trümpy, “Handel und Industrie”; Fetscherin, Beitrag zur Geschichte; Bodmer, Die Entwicklung; Jean-Richard, Kattundrucke; and Veyrassat, Négociants et Fabricants. 10. On the changes that cotton sparked, see Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite; Lemire and Riello, “East & West”; Riello and Parthasarathi, The Spinning World; Riello and Roy, How India Clothed; Riello, Cotton; and Beckert, Empire of Cotton. Significant attention has been paid to how cotton changed patterns of dress: see Styles, The Dress; Roche, The Culture of Clothing. The majority of research on cotton in the Swiss cantons was carried out before the global and material turns of the last two decades, and instead is much more concerned with issues like proto-industrialization. See the references in note 9, as well as Caspard, La Fabrique-Neuve; and Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques. Three recent exceptions to this trend are David, Etemad, and Schaufelbuehl, Schwarze Geschäfte; Siebenhüner, “Calico Craze?”; and Siebenhüner, Jordan, and Schopf, Cotton in Context. 11. The years sampled are 1660–69, 1680–89, 1700–9, 1720–29, 1740–49, 1760–69, and 1780–89. 12. The years sampled are 1729, 1732, 1742, 1752, 1762, 1772, 1782, and 1792. 13. See Edwards, Block Printed Textiles, 27–43. India was not the only foreign producer of cotton, but it was the largest. Indian names, of course, have their own history and etymology that dates back to antiquity. That process, however, is outside the scope of this paper. 14. For more, see Martens, “Indian Textiles.” The exceptions were a Portuguese term (pano comprido) and two Danish terms (tørklæder/romals and cattun). Salempuris and mamudies do not appear to have had English equivalents (the English version of the
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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
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23.
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other six terms are bafta, cassa, gurrahs, guzzies, sannoes, and chintz). Our thanks to Vibe Maria Martens for sharing her research on the Danish Asiatic Trading Company. On muslin, see Clifford, “There Is Another Sort,” 5. On the Warwick database, see Warwick, Europe’s Asian Centuries. See also, Trentmann, Empire of Things, 66. Frank Trentmann argues that there were more than two hundred kinds of cotton textiles at this time. See Allgemeiner Zoll-Tarif, 16–18. The document also lists a host of mixed cotton textiles: Velverette, Tiksite, Plüsche, Barchent, Baumwolle Bon, and Baumwolle Felb. Martens “Indian Textiles.” See Schopf, “From Local Production.” For Laué’s correspondence see Staatsarchiv Aargau [StAAg], NL.A-0105 Mappe 1–22. See Styles, “Fibres, Fashion.” As Styles has argued, once a textile name has caught on, merchants will try to sell similar textiles under the same name to capitalize on the fame of the existing name. No doubt one reason for this trimmed-down terminology was that so many different terms would be far too cumbersome for daily usage, especially when one considers the plethora of fabrics in early modern Europe (linen, wool, silk, and many mixed fabrics such as half-linen and half-wool products). See Colenbrander and Browne, “Indiennes.” Only the historical Swiss dictionary, Das Schweizerische Idiotikon, has an entry for Gansauer. Other early modern dictionaries do not. Like persienne, indienne had a different meaning in another language, albeit in Dutch where it was used to denote oriental silks. Silk was (and is) one of the finest materials, and by appropriating terms for it, Swiss producers were likely trying to imbue their cottons with a similar, highly refined status. On the sale of Swiss printed cottons in France (much of which was illegal for most of the eighteenth century), see Kwass, Contraband. The French expulsion of the Huguenots in 1685, many of whom settled in the Swiss cantons, also provided a great impetus for the Swiss textile industry. See Tosato-Rigo, “Protestantische.” On linguistic knowledge in the Swiss cantons, see Furrer, Die vierzigsprachige. The term Kattun was used to refer to both plain and printed cottons. In the eighteenth century, it would appear it was used slightly more often for printed cottons. See Krünitz, Oekonomische Encyklopädie (“Kattun,” vol. 36: 10–184; Nesseltuch, vol. 102: 433–34). The same pattern exists with the luxurious muslin, where the French mousseline, rather than its German equivalent Nesseltuch, was the term of choice. This was true not just for the Swiss cantons but for other European polities as well. For example, indiane, an adoption of the French indienne, was how printed cottons were called in the Italian city of Vicenza. Our thanks to Francesco Vianello for this reference. Beyond French as the use of the Italian calanca shows, Italian was also a fashionable language. Without doubt, this is also one of the reasons that despite living in a German-speaking area, Laué’s correspondence with his sales staff and the textile terms he used were in French. See Krünitz, Oekonomische Encyklopädie, vol. 4, 96 (“Baumwolle”). The misclassification of cotton as a type of wool may date to Herodotus who wrote in Book III.106 of his Histories, “There are also wild trees there which produce a kind of wool which is more attractive and of a better quality than sheep’s wool, and which is used by the Indians for their clothing.” See Herodotus, The Histories, 213.
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28. On the material properties of gingham, see Irwin, “Indian Textile Trade,“ 64. On Baumrinden, see, e.g., Avis=Blättlein Dienstags, 12 April 1792. 29. On the uses of gedruckt, see table 7.1. A similar notation of toiles peintes (painted textiles) was a common term for printed cottons in France that did not catch on in the Swiss cantons. 30. See Scott, “The Malayan Words,” 142–44. 31. See Jordan and Schopf, “Fictive Descriptions?,” 235. 32. See Jeggle, “Labelling with Numbers?” On the enforcement of a guild’s seal, see Ogilvie, State Corporatism, 197–201. Guilds were central to establishing and upholding tradition because their stamp on a textile guaranteed a certain quality. 33. The word Barchent comes from the Spanish barragán or Arabic barrakán, a type of heavy outer garment. Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry, 199. The word muslin referred to the Iraqi city of Mosul, formerly a major Middle Eastern trading hub and manufacturer. Gansauer’s connection to this is a bit more tenuous. Das Schweizerische Idiotikon suggests that the name could stem from the Bohemian city of Gansau. We have, however, been unable to find any trace of a city with this name. Regardless of whether the city actually existed, what is important is the belief that the name derived from the name of a city, indicating geography’s assumed importance in the naming of textiles. See “Gansauer,” Schweizerisches Idiotikon, 363. Outside of the Swiss cantons, Kattun and Zitz (chintz) were common names for printed textiles. The word Kattun comes from qutn (the Arabic word for cotton). The word chintz comes from the Hindu word chīnt, meaning variegated or multi-colored. See “Chintz,” in Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 20 vols. (Oxford, 1989), vol. 3, 131. 34. As the cotton textile called Manchester shows, the same process also occurred with European places. 35. It is interesting to note that many of the adopted foreign terms like chintz and gingham, described the material qualities in their original language. These original meanings, however, were likely unknown to most contemporary Swiss who instead would have just viewed the term as foreign. 36. See a special edition of Journal of the History of Collections (Keating and Markey, “Captured Objects”; Bleichmar and Mancall, Collecting Across Cultures; and Karl, Embroidered Histories. Aztec codices, Indonesian birds of paradise, Chinese porcelain, and Indian cotton textiles were just some of the things that people collected. This was not just a European process: people from all over the world engaged in it. See Thomas, Entangled Objects; and Jardine, Worldly Goods. Jardine argued that these processes had already started during the Renaissance. 37. See Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism. 38. This was not just a feature of textile naming. Other goods, particularly food, followed the same pattern, such as Thüringer Wurst (Thuringian sausage) or Dresdner Stollen (Dresden Christmas cake). 39. See Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 227–31. As Schmidt notes, other material goods besides textiles were also named in a similar manner: china was (and still is) a common name for porcelain, ottoman a term for a low-backed sofa or seat without a back or arms, and Persian a name for a certain kind of carpet. 40. On flowers in textile designs and European history generally, see Lemire, “Domesticating the Exotic”; and Weisberg-Roberts, “Surprising Oddness and Beauty.” 41. On import substitution generally and European production of Asian consumer goods, see Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury”; and Koeppe, “Chinese Shells.” This was not only an
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45. 46.
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issue with textiles: Delft and Meissen both became major producers of porcelain in the eighteenth century, and their productions were routinely referred to as china. Riello, Cotton, 20–22. See, also, Krünitz, Oekonomische Encyklopädie (“Musselin,” vol. 99, 86). The changing center of production was not lost on Europeans at the time. Krünitz, for one, noted the shift to eastern India. Pfister, Die Züricher Fabriques, 67. Mulhouse (1746) was a later, albeit key addition to the region. Slightly farther afield, Marseille, Augsburg, and Barcelona all had robust printed cotton industries. On the diffusion of cotton printing in the Swiss cantons, see Jean-Richard, Kattundrucke, 42– 43. On Marseille, see Raveux, “Spaces and Technologies”; and Raveaux, “The Birth.” On Barcelona, see Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization. On Augsburg, see Clasen, Textilherstellung. On Mulhouse, see Schwartz, “Les débuts (I)”; and Schwartz, “Les débuts (II).” For the local weaving and spinning industries see Jäger et al., Baumwollgarn; and Tanner, Das Schiffchen fliegt. Raw cotton, which was then spun and woven locally, was imported as well from the Levant and Persia, and later from America. See StABe, Mb 112 Ordnung Wider den Pracht und Uberfluß in Kleideren, wie auch andere Excessen und Uppigkeiten in der Statt BERN und Dero Teutschen Stätten und Landen, Bern 1728, 6–7. See also Fukasawa, Toilerie et Commerce, 47–48. The Middle East was also home to a robust printed cotton industry, including in the cities of Aleppo, Urfa, and Gaziantep, where imitations of Indian textiles were manufactured. See StABe, Mb 150 Ordnung die Kleider und andere Sachen betreffend. Zusammen einem Einsehen der Knecht- und Mägden halber wegen deren Dienst und Lidlohn . . . , Bern 1747; StABe, Mb 220 Ordnung die Kleider u. Knechten und Mägde, wie auch deren Dienst und Lidlöhn betreffend, Bern 1766, 12, 14; and StABe, Mb 325 Ordnung die Kleider u. Knechten und Mägde, wie auch deren Dienst und Lidlöhn betreffend, von neuem aufgelegt 1777, Bern 1777, 13. The effectiveness and frequency of this linguistic distinction between the terms indienne and persienne is questionable. The general prohibition against the term persienne was not repeated in Bern’s sumptuary legislation from 1747, 1766, or 1777; the 1766 and 1777 sumptuary legislations restricted the ownership of persienne only for young people and maids, not for the general population. Despite its newfound legality, the term persienne was never used with anywhere near the frequency of indienne in Bern. In Basel, persienne and indienne were used with approximately the same frequency, and were often sold by the same merchant (see tables 7.1 and 7.2). Some signs do point to a distinction as having been made. The term Persienne Drucker does not seem to have been used for textile printers, and in travel reports and town chronicles, writers almost always spoke of the indienne industry in the Swiss cantons, never a persienne industry. See e.g., Maurer, Kleine Reisen, 291; Walsers, Reformierten Predigers, 59, 126; and Haller and Heinzmann, Beschreibung der Stadt, vol. 1, 80, and vol. 1, 173. On hybrids generally, see Leibsohn and Dean, “Hybridity”; and Burke, Cultural Hybridity. See, also, Bleichmar, “History in Pictures.” As Bleichmar has shown, hybrids contained great potential for geographic misinterpretation. See, e.g., Avis=Blättlein Dienstags, 5 July 1792; and, for the English persienne, see Avis=Blättlein Dienstags, 21 November 1742. Advertisements for ostindische persienne continued throughout the eighteenth century, with one advertisement each in four of the years studied (1762, 1772, 1782, 1792).
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50. See Keating and Markey, “‘Indian’ Objects.” Interestingly whereas Keating and Markey find the word Indian being used to describe many different kind of objects, in the Swiss cantons, the distinction of indienne was reserved almost exclusively for printed cotton textiles. Examples of other objects being labelled as Indian are exceedingly rare. 51. See Savary des Bruslons and Savary, Dictionnaire Universel (“Mousselin,” vol. 2, 826). Muslin would have potentially been an exception to this, but the connection to Mosul seems to have been lost to Europeans. Jacques Savary ignored the Mosul connection, and instead argued that the name stems from the French word mousse (foam), and was based on their soft, creamy texture. 52. See Schmidt, “Collecting Global Icons,” quote on 39. 53. See Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism. As Schmidt writes about terms like indienne, “The non-proper noun or verb [does not] become a synecdoche per se; geographic and material meanings remain technically distinct. Rather, these doubly vested words serve to indicate the blurring process of early modern geography, whereby geographic space, particularly the space of the exotic world, becomes a commodity, as it were, most typically a luxury item. This linguistic phenomenon also demonstrates a broader conceptual approach to the world and to worldly things. It illustrates how the early modern European culture of collecting and consuming had merged with the aesthetic of exotic geography-how exotic places came to be correlated with consumable things” (228). 54. Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 325–35. 55. See Schiebinger, “Names and Knowing,” 91. 56. See Trentmann, Empire of Things, 66–67. Trentmann writes how customers in England had to be careful not to be swindled by false advertising in textile names.
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Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia, 2015. Schopf, Gabi. “From Local Production to Global Trade: the Distribution of Swiss Printed Cottons in the Early Modern World.” Textile History (forthcoming). Schwartz, Paul. “Les débuts de l’indiennage mulhousien (I).” Bulletin de la Société industrielle de Mulhouse 124, no. 3 (1950): 21–44. Schwartz, Paul. “Les débuts de l’indiennage mulhousien (II).” Bulletin de la Société industrielle de Mulhouse 125, no. 1 (1951): 33–56. Scott, Charles Payson Gurley. “The Malayan Words in English.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 17 (1896): 93–144. Siebenhüner, Kim. “Calico Craze? Zum geschlechtsspezifischen Konsum bedruckter Baumwollstoffe im 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Blick von England zur Alten Eidgenossenschaft.” L’homme: Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 27 (2016): 33–52. Siebenhüner, Kim, John Jordan, and Gabi Schopf, eds. Cotton in Context: Manufacturing, Marketing, and Consumption of Early Modern Textiles in the German-speaking World (1500–1900). Cologne, forthcoming. Silverstein, Michael. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, edited by John Arthur Lucy, 33–58. Cambridge, UK 1992. Silverstein, Michael. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by Keith Basso, and Henry Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque, NM, 1976. Smith, Pamela, and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York, 2002. Styles, John. “Fibres, Fashion and Marketing: Textile Innovation in Early Modern Europe.” In Siebenhüner, Jordan, and Schopf, Cotton in Context. Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT, 2007. Tanner, Albert. Das Schiffchen fliegt, die Maschine rauscht: Weber, Sticker und Unternehmer in der Ostschweiz. Zurich, 1985. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA, 1991. Thomson, James. A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728–1832. Cambridge, UK, 1992. Tosato-Rigo, Danièle. “Protestantische Glaubensflüchtlinge.” In Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz. Vol. 10: Pro-Schafroth, edited by Marco Jario, 11–13. Basel, 2011. Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first. New York, 2016. University of Warwick. “East India Company Traded Textiles to Europe Glossary.” GHCC Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600–1830. Accessed 2 September 2016, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/eac/databases/textiles/catalogue. Veyrassat, Béatrice. Négociants et Fabricants dans l’industrie Cotonnière Suisse 1760–1840: Aux Origines Financières de l’industrialisation. Lausanne, Switzerland, 1982. Weisberg-Roberts, Alicia. “Surprising Oddness and Beauty: Textile Design and Natural History between London and Philadelphia in the eighteenth century.” In Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, edited by Amy Meyers and Lisa Ford, 160–79. New Haven, CT, 2011.
PART III
Naming the Other
CHAPTER 8
Naming the Turk and the Moor Prehistories of Race CARINA L. JOHNSON
I
n the early modern Germanies, what was invoked by the name Turk, whether applied to the Ottoman ruler or his people? What was its relation to the older name Moor, derived from the Latin place-name Mauretania?1 How did the meanings of those names shift during the sixteenth century, in the era of Ottoman imperial expansion across North Africa that was initiated by the conquest of the Mamluk capital, Cairo? During the fifteenth century, questions about the people named the Turks centered on their origins. Were they from Troy? Or Scythia?2 During the sixteenth century, theories of origin competed for space in print with other forms of knowledge in an explosion of information about the Ottoman empire and its peoples. Widely circulating printed material ranged from proto-ethnographic eyewitness accounts and translated Turkish-language texts to recycled medieval fabulism. Other uses of the name Turk were rhetorical. Martin Luther and the Wittenberg circle, for example, regularly invoked the Antichrist through a pairing of the Turk (as Ottoman ruler) and the pope.3 The sixteenth century also witnessed an increased level of engagement between Ottomans and Central Europeans, which inspired further negotiations and resignifications of the names Turk and Moor. Among the elements subject to definition and redefinition were the bodies and appearances of the Turk and the Moor, who might be described as either a white Moor or a black Moor. These German ideas and representations of physical appearance in the Ottoman Empire serve as markers in the early modern processes of racializing. The scholarship on pre-Enlightenment racializing ideas has generally focused on early modern Iberia as a crucial location in the emergence of the ideas that would lead to notions of biological, Enlightenment-era race. There, religious identities understood to be imbued within blood, first Jewish and then
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later Muslim, took on hereditary qualities.4 In contrast, Central Europe has not been the locus of intensive scholarly inquiry into the history of racialization. But as recent works by Christine Johnson, Stephanie Leitch, and Elizabeth Ross have demonstrated, the late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century German printing industry played an important role in defining New World and Old World alterity.5 The Holy Roman Empire was the site of rich experimentation in depicting the Ottoman empire, its inhabitants, and their embodied identities during the second half of the sixteenth century. These experiments conveyed their ideas and information not only textually, but also visually. Among the material traces of these experiments are the depictions of skin color or complexion in hand-colored prints. These colors of complexion were ascriptions; the fragmentary extant evidence cannot answer the question of whether patrons, artists, or other cultural agents led the way in producing these ascriptions. The colorists’ actions, recorded in painted print images, reveal both the fluidity and some fixities of ideas about Turkish and Moorish appearance, identity, and alterity during the 1560s and 1570s in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Hand-colored prints have received limited attention in art historical scholarship, reflecting centuries-old evaluations that they were inferior to the unaltered or unadulterated print. Susan Dackerman has dated this aesthetic judgment of prints to Erasmus’s 1528 discussion of Albrecht Dürer’s graphic works. Invoking Aristotle’s Poetics, Erasmus praised Dürer’s prints for the expressiveness and artistry of their black lines unobscured by the distraction of paint. Yet print-coloring was a flourishing profession in Northern Europe. Early modern prints were regularly painted, often as a component of their production.6 Methods and inks specific to the medium were developed; in Brussels, for example, print colorists typically used more-transparent paint in contrast to the more opaque paint of manuscript illuminators. Coloring a print increased its market value considerably: at a minimum, hand-colored prints were double the price of uncolored prints, and evidence in the Low Countries reveals that high-quality colored prints were typically three or four times more expensive than uncolored copies.7 The cost and technical complexity of some color prints signals their value to a broad range of viewers. Paint added content: emotion, aesthetics, and information (figure 8.1). In early prints, color was most notably used to heighten religious sentiment for both the literate and the illiterate. Thus, images of Christ’s suffering were incomplete without the addition of Christ’s red blood.8 The technique of painting droplets of colored blood would not, in the sixteenth century, be reserved for depictions of Christ or the Christian saints. In hand-colored engravings from Nicolas de Nicolay’s travel narrative The First Four Books of Oriental Navigation and Travel (referred to in its various trans-
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Figure 8.1. Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528). Ecce Homo, ca. 1498. From the series “The Large Passion.” Woodcut with transparent and opaque watercolor, heightened with gold and silver. Sheet: 400 × 288 mm. (15 3/4 × 11 5/16 in.). The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchased as a gift of Charles W. Newhall III, and Todd Ruppert, Baltimore; and with exchange funds from Garrett Collection, and Gift of Theodore W. Strauel, Pound Ridge, New York, BMA 2000.91. Photography by: Mitro Hood.
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lations and editions hereafter as the Books of Oriental Travel), the dervish’s self-inflicted wounds also dripped blood added by book painters (figure 8.2).9 The Books of Oriental Travel described Nicolay’s travels to the eastern Mediterranean as part of the 1551–52 French diplomatic mission to the Ottoman court led by Gabriel de Luels, Sieur d’Aramon. Before this mission, Nicolay had previously conducted intelligence-gathering travel for the French Crown and, upon returning home from Istanbul, he continued to serve the crown as Henry II’s royal geographer.10 More than a dozen years later, Books of Oriental Travel was published in 1567 by Lyonnaise merchant-publisher Guillaume Rouillé. This first edition included images by Louis Danet, based on Nicolay’s own drawings.11 The subject of each print was provided with an identifying name or caption drawn from nearby text. The written descriptions and visual images corresponded closely to each other without completely overlapping. Within a decade of the book’s appearance, Nicolay’s text proliferated across multiple vernaculars. A second French edition by Rouillé was printed in 1568. A German translation of the Books of Oriental Travels followed in 1572, printed in Nuremberg by Dietrich Gerlach and illustrated with Conrad Saldörffer’s copies of Danet’s images.12 In the summer of 1576, Antwerp printer-publisher Willem Silvius produced French, Italian, German, and Flemish editions of Nicolay’s book. The strategy of simultaneously producing a work in multiple vernaculars was not uncommon for Silvius, and reflected the size and scope of the Antwerp book market.13 The edition’s images by Antoon van Leest and Cornelis Muller, like Saldörffer’s, closely followed Danet, although the experience of reading Nicolay’s Books of Oriental Travels was altered by enclosing the costumed figures in decorative arabesque borders that increased the perspectival distance between viewer and image.14 (See figure 8.2 for an example from Silvius’s editions.) The 1576 editions, printed just prior to the sack of Antwerp by Spanish troops in November 1576, would be followed by Silvius’s reprint of the Italian edition in 1577. During its first decade in print, Nicolay’s travel account also entered the colored-print market. Hand-colored copies of editions produced by Rouillé, Gerlach, and Silvius are extant, allowing an examination of colorist choices at the level of individual copies.15 The multiple editions of Nicolay’s text and the production of their colored versions drew on the popularity of costume books in the second half of the sixteenth century. The first German edition of 1572 even advertised this component in its subtitle: “With beautiful figures [depicting] how both man and woman are clothed according to their regional costume.”16 Costume books had made their print appearance with François Deserps’s 1562 volume, A Collection of the Various Styles of Clothing Which Are Presently Worn in the Lands of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Islands of the Savages, All Realistically Depicted (hereafter A Collection of Various Styles), published in Paris
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Figure 8.2. Dervis ein Turckischer Orden Person (Dervish, a member of a Turkish order). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 200. Boston Athenæum.
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by Protestant Richard Breton. Drawing on single-sheet engravings by Enea Vico produced from the 1540s through the 1550s and sometimes bound as volumes, A Collection of Various Styles depicted men and women, identified by named geographic place of origin and accompanied by commentary quatrains. In one copy with hand-colored images, printed text and color choices depict individuals including a Brescian peasant woman, an Egyptian woman, an African woman, and a man from India.17 They are distinguished from one another by dress or costume, not by skin color. Manuscript precursors to the costume book from the first half of the sixteenth century exist in Christoph Weiditz’s sketchbook of his journeys to Iberia in 1529 and the Low Countries in 1531–32, as well as portrait or family books commissioned by Central European burghers seeking to record their familial status and self-representations through costume.18 Costume, as scholars have recently noted, was vitally connected with identity—whether individual or social group identity or identity of place. To change clothes was, at least potentially or temporarily, to change identities. So in 1548 the envoy Justus de Argento reported that he did not recognize Christoph Freiherr von Roggendorf because Roggendorf was dressed in Polish clothing. Roggendorf ’s identity at that point was extremely ambiguous. He had abandoned his allegiance to the Holy Roman emperor in order to serve Sultan Süleyman, at whose court he had appeared in Turkish clothing but not Turkish headgear.19 Similarly, inquiries of heresy in sixteenth-century Venice could revolve around questions of whether dressing as a Turk signaled the profession of Islam.20 Nicolay’s account included the story of a fugitive captive who escaped his enslavement disguising himself in Turkish clothing.21 Costumes, and costume books, could be tools for determining or attributing identity in a world of strangers. Costume books were books of cultural description, recording and documenting appearance. They served as a visual version of the widely popular cosmographies or proto-ethnographies of the sixteenth century that endeavored to present the world’s peoples comprehensively. Cosmographies, including the often-reprinted Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster, sometimes included images to expand the reader’s experience and understanding.22 The colored costume or travel book was an elaboration of those comprehensive projects, a market update depicting the diversity of the peoples of the world through their appearance, their costumes, and their customs. In the year after Deserps’s 1562 costume book was published, Ferdinando Bertelli published Costumes of Nearly All People of Our Era, followed by a host of other titles in the last three decades of the sixteenth century.23 Nicolay’s description of his travels in the eastern Mediterranean contributed to the visual cosmographic project, functioning as a costume book as well as a travel narrative. The number of reprints and translations dating from the first
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decade after its publication in 1568 suggests the popularity of the Books of Oriental Travels. Its contents filled a cosmographic lacuna, providing details of the peoples in Ottoman lands that had been absent from previous costume books. These images of costumes would be rapidly incorporated into subsequent costume books, to meet the demand for costume books that were comprehensively encyclopedic in scope. Latin Christians’ familiarity with the diversity of the world in general would, consequently, be informed by Nicolay’s descriptions of the diverse peoples living and working in the Ottoman Empire: Algerians, Berbers, Moors, Macedonians, the people of Chios and Paros, the Greeks of Pera and rural areas, Adrianopolitans, Jews, Armenians, Ragusans, Arabians, and Turks of different military and court ranks. As readers flipped through the pages of Nicolay’s book, they viewed depictions of many diverse peoples whose differences were highlighted visually through the addition of color in moreexpensive painted versions. In the Nicolay editions, the written text and the painted image were complementary. Colorists sometimes relied on information in the written text when making decisions about painting clothing colors. So, for example, the tunic of the Azamoglan or acemoglen ( Janissary novice) was regularly painted blue following Nicolay’s textual description. Nicolay’s commentary was most specific when describing headgear. Women from a variety of locales wore various types of white veils. Greek noblemen wore black hats. Turbans were color-coded: Greek merchants wore blue turbans, Jewish merchants yellow turbans, and descendants of Muhammad green turbans. Jannissary headgear and decorative rank insignia were described in detail, and the engravings of these headcoverings were colored with fidelity to the text.24 Long-standing and well-known conventions meant that Ottoman high-ranking court officials were depicted wearing white turbans.25 Colorists often escaped the text’s limitations when selecting colors for garments, perhaps reflecting the lack of detailed attention to clothing color, or their own disregard for the available information. Mirroring Nicolay’s discussion of the sumptuary splendor of Turks in Istanbul, book painters spent considerable time and care on the details of multicolored brocades and silk or jewelry. The attention given to sumptuary display reflected its function as status marker in Ottoman and Latin Christian states; Ottoman sumptuary legislation existed early in the sixteenth century, arbitrating men and women’s garment and fabric types and colors by rank and faith.26 Other choices of a print-painter might be driven by Latin Christian color conventions.27 Coloring decisions might also reflect the intended recipient; a 1572 copy discretely blackened out the penis but not the penis ring of the Turkish Qalandar (a member of a Muslim religious order). In other painted copies, including a 1568 volume in Queen Elizabeth I of England’s library, the ring and visibly exposed genitals were highlighted.28 Choosing a color scheme that
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emphasized the genital piercing suggests an effort to draw viewers’ or readers’ attention to it and inspire contemplation of the practices that this Muslim order engaged in to ensure their celibacy (figure 8.3). Jost Amman’s single-page etching Costumes of the Nations of the World (hereafter Costumes of the World) offers an example of the painted print’s potential to depict identity in the service of a cosmography of costumes during the 1560s and 1570s (figure 8.4). This 1577 copy is dated by the pasted central written label, which also explains that the piece could be obtained at Georg Mack’s workshop (where it was likely painted).29 Georg Mack’s Nuremberg workshop painted at least one copy of the 1572 German edition of Nicolay’s Books of Oriental Travels, and presumably copies of both the Travels and the Costumes could be found in his shop.30 The Costumes of the World labeled a cornucopia of small human figures, providing their named places of origin and, sometimes, their roles in society. Thus, the viewer’s eye could range immediately above the central caption tag, and identify a woman of Nuremberg modeling her local costume. The print informs us that she is flanked by a German prince as well as Swiss and German soldiers and women. The etching displays the four quarters of the world: a large oval filled with the people of Europe in the top of the image, and below it, a rectangle of “India or America,” with a polygon of Africa to the left and a polygon of Asia to the right. Men, women, and children wearing the costumes of different peoples fill these spaces, and are labeled to guide the viewer through a quick world tour. The figures draw on visual models and costume conventions found in earlier costume works ranging from Christoph Weiditz to François Deserps and Nicolas de Nicolay.31 Many of the costumes and figures here also appear in the contemporaneous costume book produced by Hans Weigel in conjunction with Amman’s workshop.32 As a whole, Costumes of the World made a subtle statement about the Ottoman Empire and the Turk. It depicted the geographic extent of the Ottoman Empire through the presence of the Turks signified by their distinctive white turbans. A Turk stands on Europe’s shores, in conversation with a Greek man wearing a noble’s black hat. The woman seated at their feet holds up her child for their examination, evoking the child-tribute that the Ottoman state extracted from its Christian Greek populations. Armed men wearing the white turban populate Asia and Africa as well. Christian Europe is hemmed in on multiple sides by the encroaching white-turbaned Turkish threat. In this copy, the Mack workshop demarcated the peoples of the Costumes of the World through complexion, offering a quick orientation to the color choices selected by Georg Mack’s workshop in 1577. In Europe and Asia women are pale and men ruddy, with the exception of one brown-faced man in a pair of Tatars. There is little discernable difference in complexion between the men of Europe and of Asia, whether Christian or Muslim.33 In the lands of “India or
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Figure 8.3. Calender ein Turckische Orden Person (Qalandar, a Member of a Turkish Order). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 197. Boston Athenæum.
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America,” the people have slightly browner complexions, perhaps reflecting a growing use of the skin color descriptors “reddish” or “tawney” for peoples from the Americas.34 Women once again are lighter-colored than the men. Dark brown skin color is evident only on the dismembered limbs grilling on the barbeque and on one baby carried in a sling on a woman’s back. By contrast, the peoples of the continent of Africa are represented through a diversity of skin tones. Amman has located Prester John in Africa, at the end of his kingdom’s migration over the course of centuries in the Latin Christian imaginary from Asia and India. The ruler is seated in front of his army and their pitched tents. While his soldiers are brown-skinned, Prester John is palecomplexioned, with skin tones similar to those of the European and Asian men, as well as the African men identified as “Gypsy” and “Ethiopian.” The paleness of the Ethiopian man and woman in the bottom left corner counters the common practice, dating to the linkage of Ethiopia and a dark-skinned Queen of Sheba, of describing Ethiopians as very dark, even black.35 One light-skinned man with two camels stands directly in the middle of the Africa quarter, above the title “African Moors,” while all other African Moors have darker complexions. The women identified as African Moors wear the distinctive clothing reminiscent of at-home Iberian moriscas in Christoph Weiditz’s Costumebook and are slightly darker than the Ethiopians. In Amman’s etching, the morisca wears her household clothing outside the home, as she stands in a sociable circle. The women and children of the Barbary coast at the base of the polygon are distinctively darker, with complexions that are near-black in color.
Figure 8.4. Jost Amman (Swiss, 1539–91) and the workshop of Georg Mack the Elder, Costumes of the Nations of the World, 1577. Color etching with gilt, 352 × 455 mm. From the New York Public Library, Print Collection.
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This presentation of the peoples of the world and the Ottoman Empire is one in which the eclecticism of skin color is centered in Africa. This eclecticism extended to the depiction of Moors in Africa, whose complexions might be light or dark. Climactic theories about dark skin color explained it as the consequence of long-term exposure to a harsh sun, a hazard of life in some regions of Africa and the world. A Leipzig embroidered wall hanging (1571) underscores the broad circulation of these ideas. Each of the nine panels depicts a costumed man representing his people and captioned with a tercet, with the loin-clothed “white Moor” bounding one end and the unclothed German man the other. The man in the middle panel confirms that his identity as the “black Moor,” his customary state of nakedness, and the climactic origin of his complexion “burned by the sun’s heat.”36 The fluidity of the Moors’ appearance, delineated through the complexion-based names of white or black, was not new in the 1570s; it had antecedents stretching back at least a century in print. The association between Moors and dark brown or black skin had a long history. In the German 1486 edition of Bernhard von Breydenbach’s travels, Breydenbach described Indian pilgrims with a comparison to Moors: “[T]hese Indians are all black like the Moors,” although in the Latin edition the comparison was more indirect, between “Abyssinians or Indians” and Ethiopians.37 The understanding of the term Moor as linked with dark complexion was also present in the Latin version of Sebastian Münster’s 1550 Cosmographia. There, Münster used the same image of a dark-complexioned person, covered between waist and midthigh with a garment resembling a Roman military skirt, to depict the Moor whether he was found in Libya, Ethiopia, or India.38 Yet for other authors and translators, Moors were not always dark-complected. Several decades after Breydenbach’s travels, in 1507, Fracanzano da Montalboddo published Alvise Ca’ da Mosto’s description of his west African voyages in the cosmographic compilation Newly Found Lands. It was soon translated into Latin by Archangelo Madrignani as Itinerary of the Portuguese in India (1508) and into German by Jobst Ruchamer as New Unfamiliar Land (1508). In the Italian and Latin editions, although not in the German, the Moors of Senega were described as “black” in skin color, which distinguished them from other people named “white Moors.” In addition, the Latin translation linked the “white Moors” to an Ethiopian identity. By 1534, Michael Herr’s revised and unillustrated German version of this compendium had added the term “Black Moors” to describe the people of Senega in contrast to “White Moors.”39 In the early decades of the sixteenth century, Moors of North Africa might be white Moors. In a German print pamphlet dating from circa 1526, the re-
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sistance of “Morocco together with the African White Moors in Barbary” to Ottoman rule was discussed and publicized.40 When Deserps’s 1562 costume book appeared, the people of Barbary had complexions similar to those of most other peoples in the volume. The only exceptions to homogeneity of complexion were the Moorish man and woman, who were painted as dark-complexioned, following their textual description as “black colored.”41 A diversity of skin tones in Barbary was represented in the Codex of Costumes, a German costume book tentatively dated to the 1540s. In this volume, the peoples of Barbary were variegated, with complexions ranging from dark brown to pale, including a group of pale-complected men labeled white Moors.42 The link between white Moors and the southern coasts of the Mediterranean remained active through 1571, when a man born in Spain and who resided in the Ottoman Empire was described in a Habsburg state news bulletin as “appearing more like a white Moor than an [Italian] or a Spaniard.”43 While many of these earlier cosmographies placed the Moors in regions of Africa and India, the Leipzig 1571 wall hanging presented a white Moor who had little geographic connection to North Africa. There, the white Moor was geographically linked to a location farther afield, an unspecified region of many islands.44 Thus, in the 1560s and 1570s, a range of complexion colors were available to colorists as they began to paint Nicolay’s Books of Oriental Travels. Comparing the different hand-colored exemplars of Nicolay’s Books of Oriental Travels reveals that some figures’ complexions were consistent across copies, while others were not. Some of the Moors of North Africa had lost their relative fluidity of skin color and were consistently depicted as dark-complexioned. In Algeria and Barbary, some female inhabitants labeled the free “Algerian woman” and the “enslaved Moorish maiden” were consistently painted with dark skin across copies. The Books of Oriental Travel followed the French embassy’s journey eastward to the Greek islands and then the central lands of the Ottoman Empire, where Nicolay encountered another enslaved Moor, a man who also consistently appeared in colored copies with darker skin.45 After arriving in the metropolis Constantinople, Nicolay described an array of peoples associated with the Ottoman court and its urban environs. Colorists made another consistent choice to paint those figures identified by Nicolay as Turks and Greeks with pale skin and often rosy cheeks. In books 1 and 2 of the Books of Oriental Travel, they assigned Algerian and Barbary peoples dark complexions and Turks light complexions, thereby linking skin color with identity.46 In contrast to these consistently colored complexions, the colored copies reveal unstable or varied skin tones for the men described in book 3 of the Books of Oriental Travel, who were engaged in Muslim religious activities yet were not members of sufi religious orders. Whether depicted singly or in groups, these
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men were painted sometimes with pale complexions and sometimes with dark ones (figures 8.5 and 8.6). In chapter 21, Nicolay explained that all Muslims, “Turks, Moors, and other Mohammedan people,” follow the Qur’an by making a pilgrimage to Mecca.47 In the subsequent chapter, he noted that “a great many Moors and Turks” served as water bearers throughout the Ottoman Empire, an important function necessitated by the Qur’an’s prohibition against wine.48 The widely dispersed presence of Moors and Turks encountered by Nicolay in the Ottoman Empire occurred during the gradual expansion of Ottoman rule across North Africa.49 In the accompanying engravings, the pilgrims and water carriers exhibited either ruddy pale complexions and brown or reddish hair, or dark brown complexions and black hair. The diversity of skin tones visually underscored the diversity of Muslims living within the bounds of the Ottoman empire (figures 8.7 and 8.8). The wrestling ring was another setting in which colored prints depicted a diversity of complexion. In Constantinople Nicolay observed wrestlers at work and at rest (figures 8.9 and 8.10, and figures 8.11 and 8.12). Nicolay described the distinctive clothing that identified the court-funded wrestlers in Constantinople, shared his earlier viewings of the wrestlers of Algeria and Barbary with the reader, and drew on the account of Franciscus Alvares to verify that the sport was practiced in Prester John’s court in Morenland (Land of the Moors) as well. All nations contributed wrestlers to the sport, although the men were “most commonly Moors / Indians or Tartars.”50 The wrestlers’ range of nations of origin reflected wrestling’s ancient practice among the Greeks, Asians, and later the Romans.51 Drawing from the coded identities of dark-complected Moors and light-complected Turks established in earlier sections of the volume, the colorists presented the wrestlers in and outside the ring as variously having pale or dark complexions, denoting the diverse origins of these men. The textual descriptions of pilgrims, water carriers, and wrestlers all emphasized the men’s diverse identities, just as the fluid skin colors did. The Books of Oriental Travels highlighted, in words and images, the many different peoples Nicolay had encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Visibility of diverse people, primarily through the identity marker of their costume, was an organizing principle of the Books of Oriental Travels. Painting practices in the Books of Oriental Travels supported an emergent practice of associating skin color conventions with some of them. These conventions encouraged the viewer to see the brown-complexioned pilgrims of Mecca, devout water bearers, and wrestlers as black Moors who were similar in complexion to the Moors of Algeria and Barbary.52 The visual representation of Ottoman subjects as diverse in complexion can be found not only in the Nicolay colorists of the 1560s and 1570s, but also
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Figure 8.5. Walbruder oder Pilgram von Mecha (Pilgrims from Mecca). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576). Heidelberg University Library, A 3542 RES, 214.
in Lambert de Vos’s 1574 depiction of an Ottoman procession. In that procession, a pair of Moorish praeliantes (mounted soldiers) appear as brownand light-complexioned, respectively. Other dark-complexioned men appeared within pairs of attendants in the Ottoman court parade, one a pair of military officers (a sipahi and a çavuş), and another pair of eunuch courtiers.53 Painters’
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Figure 8.6. Walbrüder oder Pilgram von Mecha (Pilgrims from Mecca). Nicolas de Nicolay, Der Erst Theil. Von der Schiffart vnnd Raisz in die Türckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Nuremberg, 1572). © British Library Board, C.55.i.4.(1.), facing fol. LXXII.
coloring choices for volumes on the Ottomans during the early 1570s marked out visible diversity as well as fixities of skin color for some Ottoman peoples. Yet the significance of such a heterogeneous empire was ambiguous. Nicolay’s representation of Muslim religious orders in the Books of Oriental Travels offered a subtly negative characterization of the Ottoman Em-
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Figure 8.7. Sacquaz Pilgram von Mecha die den Leuten zu trincken gebem [sic] (Water-carrier pilgrim from Mecca, who gives people water to drink). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576). Heidelberg University Library, A 3542 RES, 218.
pire.54 The Turkish Qalandar’s celibacy, enforced by his penis ring, depicted an externally enforced rather than internally inspired sexual abstinence (see figure 8.3). Nicolay’s textual and visual depiction of the dervish also reinscribed Latin Christian readers’ perception of this order. Georgius of Hungary’s latefifteenth-century text had explained that Dervischler (dervishes) rejected the
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Figure 8.8. Sacquaz Pilgram von Mecha die den Leuten zu trincken geben (Water-carrier pilgrim from Mecca, who gives people water to drink). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 218. Boston Athenæum.
utility of laws and social norms. They sought salvation through grace, bearing scars of the firebrands and sword cuts that they made in this search. Through such ascetic practices, they entered mystical states. The wounding process was also described in Bartholomäus Georgiević’s 1540s texts on Ottoman Islam, encouraging the dissemination of knowledge about this practice to a broader
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Figure 8.9. Die Turckischen Ringer (Turkish wrestlers). Nicolas de Nicolay, Der Erst Theil. Von der Schiffart vnnd Raisz in die Türckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Nuremberg, 1572). © British Library Board, C.55.i.4.(1.), facing fol. LVIII.
Latin Christian readership.55 In Nicolay’s text, he corroborated details of these earlier accounts, noting these cuts were produced during herb-induced states, as part of the dervishes’ efforts to be faithful followers of Mohammed. Nicolay acknowledged the piety and patient suffering that Georgius had recognized in Muslim religious orders, but Nicolay’s description of the dervish broke with
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Figure 8.10. Die Turckischen Ringer (Turkish wrestlers). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Schiffart unnd Raisz in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 173. Boston Athenæum.
Georgius in his characterization of the dervish as a perpetrator of crimes and (in bold typeface) of “sodomy.”56 The practice of sodomy was inextricably tied to heresy in the minds of Germans by the mid-sixteenth century. Defining the dervish as not only a social but also a sexual deviant contributed to the expanding German practice of vilifying the Turk as sybaritic, tyrannical, libertine,
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Figure 8.11. Wie die Turckischen Ringer vor vnnd nach dem Ringen bekleidet sein (How the Turkish wrestlers are clothed before and after the ring). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576). Heidelberg University Library, A 3542 RES, 174.
and sexually or morally deviant.57 Nicolay’s discussion of bathhouse customs emphasized this sense of misused religious practices. He noted that Ottoman bathhouses were used by people of all nations, but more intensively by “Turks, Moors, and other Muslims.” Their religious customs required frequent and regular ablutions, but this focus on bodily cleanliness, in Nicolay’s judgment,
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Figure 8.12. Wie die Turckischen Ringer vor vnnd nach dem Ringen bekleidet sein (How the Turkish wrestlers are clothed before and after the ring). Nicolas de Nicolay, Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey [Books of Oriental Travel] (Antwerp, 1576), fol. 174. Boston Athenæum.
resulted in neglect of the soul’s interior cleanliness.58 The most vivid handcolored images of the dervish implicitly juxtaposed Islam and Christianity, elaborating a parallelism that, for a pious Christian viewer, highlighted religious error through its dissonance (see figure 8.2). In two colored copies from 1572 and 1576, the visual representation of the dervish’s vivid dripping blood
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adds a gory immediacy that encouraged the reader to recall the materiality of Christ’s wounds or perhaps even those of Catholic flagellants.59 Considering the locations of production and the identity of the printerpublishers who were responsible for the 1572 and especially the 1576 Nicolay editions suggests possible anti-Catholic understandings of some versions of the painted dervish in his bleeding piety. The initial publisher Guillaume Rouillé had been a cautious merchant publisher in Lyon with ties to the Italian cities, who had moved into Catholic printing by 1567, the year that he produced the Nicolay edition.60 In contrast, the 1572 publisher Dietrich Gerlach was a supporter of the Lutheran confession, producing Protestant devotional works in 1574–75.61 In Antwerp, Willem Silvius had been suspected of Protestant heresy in 1566, but remained Philip II’s royal publisher until the November 1576 sack of Antwerp. Soon thereafter, he collaborated with Antoon van Leest, one of his Nicolay edition illustrators, to produce Jan Baptista Honwaert’s 1578 Milenus’s Complaint about the Great Tyranny of the Romans (hereafter Milenus’s Complaint). Milenus’s Complaint was a translation of Antonio de Guevara’s critique of imperial corruption and injustice. In Guevara’s work, Milenus, an ancient German “Peasant of the Danube,” condemns the Roman Empire for its failure to govern in a fair or just manner.62 The metaphorical condemnation of contemporary Habsburg rule in Milenus’s Complaint was made vivid by van Leest’s illustration in the pamphlet, The Rape of the Maid of Antwerp by Spanish Soldiers. Text and image delineated the collapse of a universal empire governed by a just Habsburg sovereign. Given this context, it is possible that Silvius’s colorist also sought to confront the viewer with the visible parallels between Catholic flagellant and Muslim dervish, in a comparison echoing the Wittenberg circle’s rhetorical strategy of pairing Turk and papacy. During the 1560s and 1570s the meaning of the names or terms Turk and Moor shifted to encompass consistently ascribed skin color, with Nicolay’s Books of Oriental Travels marking that shift. Some of the Nicolay colorists went a step farther, using the ascribed complexions to denote the diverse identities present in the Ottoman Empire. In the century preceding Nicolay’s volume, other empires had also been depicted as diverse through the visual representation of diverse skin color. The diversity of peoples in the Mamluk sultanate had been a source of concern for many Latin Christian observers. When Bernhard von Breydenbach described the Mamluks in 1486, he noted with what might be characterized as pride that, while there were many Hungarian renegades among the Mamluks, there was only one German, from Basel, serving among them.63 Konrad Grünemberg’s 1487 account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land concurred with Breydenbach about the rarity of Germans among the Mamluks. His discussion of the Mamluk state noted that it primarily comprised Christian renegades from many lands, including many Italians and Hungarians, but not more than one German.64 The sketch of four Mamluks
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in their distinctive hats that accompanied Grünemberg’s text highlighted that diversity by depicting the men with a range of complexions: light grey-brown, medium grey-brown, and black.65 Visual depictions of the Habsburg Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century drew from indexical signs of identity to depict Habsburg dynastic claims that their empire was universal. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I’s Triumphal Procession woodcut project from the 1510s included peoples not under Maximilian’s control or rule—the people of Calicut, in a melange of Tupinamba (West Indians) and East Indian iconography. In the 1520s and 1530s, Charles V continued these practices of representing Habsburg authority over the peoples of the world. The geographic scope of his realms was often depicted through an array of coats of arms or by noting the diversity of subject peoples at his court, which occasionally included client Muslim North African rulers and Mexican nobles from New Spain.66 Christoph Weiditz’s Costumebook, that precursor to the print costume book, had recorded the visually diverse peoples of Castile, Aragon, Granada, New Spain, and Africa, with skin colors ranging from brown to pale peach. By the 1570s such visual displays of the Habsburg Empire no longer received Crown support. In the 1560s Granadino moriscos petitioned the Crown for permission to continue wearing their distinctive clothing and practicing their cultural customs, arguing that the moriscos served as embodiments of the diversity of Philip II’s subject peoples. Philip II rejected this appeal, requiring the moriscas and moriscos of Granada and Aragon to dress like his Old Christian subjects.67 Heterogeneity of empire, as represented by the visible diversity of peoples, was no longer valued as a sign of sovereign might. The project of coloring-in the Ottoman people, of marking out their visible population diversity, did depict the Ottoman state as an empire of nations, a powerful and heterogeneous empire of diverse peoples with political and economic dominance over a large geographic expanse. Yet the significance of such an empire was ambiguous if these people were no longer admirable in their diversity. While the names Turk and Moor had long been associated with religious error in the Germanies, they now bore additional meanings. In Nicolay’s text and in the colorists’ choices, the Moor was increasingly associated with a dark-skinned slave state and the Turk with religious deviancy. Carina L. Johnson is professor of history at Pitzer College and extended faculty at Claremont Graduate University. She is author of Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (2011) and coeditor of Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformations, 1517–2017 (2017). Her current research focuses on early modern identity markers and the central European home-front experience of the Habsburg-Ottoman wars.
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Notes 1. A note on terminology: The terms Turk and Moor were common terms in early modern Latin Christendom and are used here when referring to contemporaneous usage. 2. For a recent detailed survey of this fifteenth-century scholarship on Turkish origins, see Meserve, Empires of Islam. 3. For prominent print examples, see Georgius, Tractatus de moribus; Sanct Brandans Seefahrt (which includes Hans Schiltberger’s Reisebuch); Georgijević’s 1540s accounts; Johannes Leunclavius’s omnibus publications, e.g., Neuwe Chronica; and Martin Luther’s Turkish pamphlets Vom Kriege, Ein Heerpredigt, and Vermahnung, as well as others discussed in Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy, 65, 181–88. 4. Recent surveys are Bethencourt, Racisms; and Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths. 5. Johnson, The German Discovery; Leitch, Mapping Ethnography; and Ross, Picturing Experience. 6. Dackerman, Painted Prints. Dackerman establishes the technical depth and breadth of these practices in her introduction to that volume (1–47). 7. Stock, Printing Images, 41–42, 59–60, 118, 122–23. 8. Primeau, “The Materials and Technology,” 65–66; and Os, The Art of Devotion. 9. The first edition is Nicolay, Les qvatre premiers livres (1567). 10. Paviot, “The French Embassy”; Yerasimos, Les Voyageurs, 205–25; and IsomVerhaaren, Allies with the Infidel, 168–74. 11. Brafman, “Facing East,” esp. 159–60. When discussing the engravings, Brafman notes evidence dating at least one plate to 1558. Brafman does not discuss the Germanlanguage editions that are the focus of this chapter. 12. Nicolay, Der Erst Theil; Baudrier, Bibliographie Lyonnaise, vol. 9: 315, 318–19; and Andresen, Der Deutsche Peintre-Graveur, vol. 2: 17–22. 13. Clair, “Willem Silvius”; and Blouw, “Willem Silvius.” Silvius’s business was devastated by the November 1576 sack of Antwerp. He would relocate to Leyden, taking up a dual position as both university printer and printer to the new state of Holland. 14. Wilson, The World in Venice, 97–100. Bronwen Wilson has argued that framing not only distanced viewers from images, but also directed their attention away from a consideration of bodies as sites of morality toward costumes as signifiers of morality. 15. These copies are Les qvatre premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations Orientales (Lyon, 1568) [British Library {BL} C.18.c.8]; Der Erst Theil. Von der Schiffart unnd Raisz in die Türckey (Nuremberg, 1572) [BL C.55.i.4]; Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey (Antwerp, 1576) [Boston Athenaeum {BA}, 1576]; Vier Bucher Von de Raisz vnd Schiffart in die Turckey (Antwerp, 1576) [Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg {UH}, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/nicolay1576]; and Der Erste [sic] Theil Von der Schiffart Vnnd Raiß in die Türckeÿ . . . Le navigationi et viaggi nella Turchia (Nuremberg, 1572 and Antwerp, 1577) [Herzog August Bibliothek {HAB} 159.26 Hist]. This last HAB copy includes both the 1572 German and the 1577 Italian edition title pages, and images captioned in Italian and German. Subjecting these copies to X-ray fluorescence testing would provide greater confidence in dating these engravings’ coloring to the era of their printing. 16. “Mit schönen figuren Wie beede Mann vnnd Weib irer Landtsart nach bekleydet seyen.” Nicolay, Der Erst Theil. 17. Deserps, Recueil de la diversité; and Jones, “Habits, Holdings.” Recent thoughtful studies of costume books include Ilg, “The Cultural Significance”; Wilson, The World in
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23. 24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
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Venice, 70–132; Wilson, “Foggie diverse”; Smith, “Ottoman Dress”; Rosenthal, “Cultures of Clothing”; and Rublack, Dressing Up. Weiditz, Des Trachtenbuch; and Groebner, “Inside Out.” Džaja, Weiss, and Nehring, Austro-Turcica, 117, 227. Wilson, The World in Venice, 120–27. Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, Biir. Münster’s Cosmographia, in its full encyclopedic expanse, first appeared in Basel in 1550 in both Latin and German editions. Another popular cosmography was Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores. A primarily visual presentation of the world through city views bordered by inhabitants, Civitates orbis terrarum, was produced by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg from 1572 to 1617. Bertelli, Omnium fere gentium, was followed by Sluperius, Omnium fere gentium, which reorganized Deserps. A foundational article on early costume books is Olian, “Sixteenth-Century Costume.” See copies BL C.55.i.4 (1572), BA (1576), and UH (1576). For the relative permeability of Latin Christian art and fashion to Ottoman headcoverings and headgear, see Jirousek, “More than Oriental Splendor”; and Necipoğlu, “The Serial Portraits.” Late-sixteenth-century status associated with brocade and other rich sumptuary goods are detailed in Tietze, “Mustafa Âli.” For surviving examples of such clothing, see Erduman-Çalış, Tulpen Kaftane. In general, see Faroqhi and Neumann, Ottoman Costumes, esp. 15–48, 81–89, and 103–23. See also Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 77–80. For an introduction to this subject, Barasch, “Renaissance Color Conventions.” Compare BL C.55.i.4 (1572), 35 with BL C.18.c.8 (1568), figure after 116; BA (1576), fol. 197; and UH (1576), fol. 197. Dackerman’s analysis of this print focuses on several evident tropes: “The painted print embodies numerous racist assumptions: the King of Africa, identifiable by his crown and scepter, is a white man surrounded by a troop of black warriors; and the Native Americans are depicted as cannibals.” Dackerman, Painted Prints, 180–82, here 180. BL C.55.i.4, bibliographer notes. E.g., Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, 101; Deserps, Recueil de la diversité, 58 (“La damoiselle flamende”) and 142 (“La fille turquoise”); and Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, fig. 10. Weigel, Habitus praecipuorum, figs. 21, 28, 87, 96, 177. No identified Jewish people appear in Amman’s engraving. See López de Gómara, Primera y Segunda, xiir and cxviir. For a discussion of Prester John’s Morenland located in Africa, see Bottschafft. The Ethiopian woman’s costume in Costumes of the World copies Deserps’s “La fille turquoise,” 142. “Von der sonnen hitz die mich vorbrant,” Inv. No. V 466 Grassi Museum, Leipzig. Rublack, Dressing Up, focuses on the wall hanging’s totality and the German’s malleability of costume, 144–45. “Dise indiani syn all swartz wie die moren.” Breydenbach, Die heyligen, 95r; and “Isti abbasini siue indiani omnes sunt nigri instar ethiopum.” Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, 83v. In Münster, Cosmographia (Latin edition), 1066, 1145. For the black Moor in the Germanies, see Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Schwarze Europäer. In her recent comprehensive study of the black Moor, Kuhlmann-Smirnov covers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See also Spicer, Revealing; and Lowe, “The Black Diaspora,” 38–56. Montalboddo, Paesi novamenti retrovati, chap. 16. For “Moren” and “weyssen Moren,” see Ruchamer, Newe vnbekanthe, biii. For “Ethiopes: quos Mauros albos,” see Madri-
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57. 58.
59. 60. 61. 62.
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gnani, Itinerarium Portugallensium, xiiv. For “Schwarzen Moren” and “Weyssen Moren,” see Herr, Die New welt, 7r, 15v. “Marocho sambt den Aphrican schon weissen moren in Barbaria.” Etliche Artickel, Aiiiv. The description is “et noire couleur,” see Deserps, Recueil de la diversité, 124–25. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Res/ 285, fol. 14v–16v, esp. “Die Weÿsen Moren,” fol. 16v; and Mesa, “El Códice de Trajes.” Tiroler Landesarchiv, OÖ Regierung Kopialbücher, Causa Domini, Bd. 10, fol. 568r. Inv. No. V 466 Grassi Museum. He is armed like the black Moor with a bow and arrow. The malleability of the term Moor and its relationship with terms for sub-Saharan African slaves in Portugal and Italy is discussed in Saunders, A Social History. See also Kaplan, “Black Turks”; and Earle and Lowe, Black Africans. See especially BL C.55.i.4 (1572) 2, 3, 5, 44; BA (1576) 20, 21, 59, 244; and UH (1576) 20, 21, 59, 244. “die Turcken/ Moren vnd andere Mahometische Volcker.” Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, LXXI r. “ein grosse meng Moren und Turcken.” Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, LXXIII r. For examples of the distinction between Moors and Turks dating from the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluks, see Der krieg zwischen. “auß aller Nationen zubesolden/ seind doch gemeiniglich Moren/ Indianer oder Tartarn.” Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, LVIIIr. Nicolay, Der Erst Theil (1572), LVIIIr–v. In UH (1576), it is also possible that one of the wrestlers is east Indian and the other not; the wrestlers have two different brown skin tones; 173. Vos, Das Kostümbuch, vol. 2, 3r, 40v, 84r. The volume is now at the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen. See also Mukerji, “Costume and Character,” 151–69. Readings of the Nicolay engravings as particularly engaged in eroticizing women is complicated by depictions of women in other contemporaneous costume books. Georgius, Tractatus de moribus, 354–57, 272–87. Georgievićs’s De Turcarum ritu (1544) was translated into German in 1545. See Aksulu, Bartholomäus Georgievićs, 168–69. Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, LXVIIr–v. Spanduginos’s manuscript description of the Ottomans, first published in the Italian peninsula in 1550, and in Bamberg in 1523, characterized the Torlacci in particular as given to sodomy, rather than all dervishes, Spanduginos, On the Origin, xviii, 138; and Der Türken heymligkeyt. Puff, Sodomy; and Johnson, “Imperial Succession.” “Auff dise weiß werden allerley Nationen/ sie sein was Religion oder glauben sie wollen/ vmb ir gelt in den badern tractiert und gehalten/ Bevorab pflegen die Turcken/ Morn/ und alle Mahometisten gar offt zu baden/. . . . Verstehet also diß viehisch volck/ die reinigung von den eusserlichen gliedern des leibs/ vnnd nicht die innerliche reinigung der seelen.” Nicolay, Der Erst Theil, XLIII v. BL C.55.i.4 (1572), fig. 36; BA (1576), fol. 200; cf. Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, 28. Davis, “Publisher Guillaume Rouillé.” Davis dates this turn to publishing Catholic content to 1560–61. Reske, Die Buchdrucker, 692–93; and Krautwurst, “Dietrich Gerlach, ” 6, 300. Honweart, Milenus clachte; Stock, Printing Images, 72; Clair, “Willem Silvius,” 202; Blouw, “Willem Silvius,” 198–99; Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, 9–12; and Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, 253, 282.
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63. Breydenbach, Die heyligen, 126v. 64. “von alen landen da.” Denke, Konrad Grünembergs, 463–64. 65. Goldfriedrich and Fränzel, Ritter Grünembergs, 130; and Betschart, Zwischen zwei Welten, 300–8. 66. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy, chap. 2. 67. For the morisco petition, see Foulché-Delbosc, “Memoria”; Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 47– 48. Fuchs highlights Nuñez Muley’s emphasis on the display of diversity.
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Johnson, Carina L.“Imperial Succession and Mirrors of Tyranny in the Houses of Habsburg and Osman.” In Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd, 80–100. Toronto, 2015. Johnson, Carina L. Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans. Cambridge, UK, 2011. Johnson, Christine R. The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous. Charlottesville, VA, 2008. Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Habits, Holdings, Heterologies: Populations in Print in a 1562 Costume Book.” Yale French Studies 110 (2006): 92–121. Kaplan, Paul H. D. “Black Turks: Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman Ethnicity.” In The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750, edited by James G. Harper, 41–66. Farnham, UK, 2011. Krautwurst, Franz. “Dietrich Gerlach.” Neue Deutsche Biographie 6: 300–301. Berlin, 1964. Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Anne. Schwarze Europäer im Alten Reich: Handel, Migration, Hof. Göttingen, 2013. Leitch, Stephanie. Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture. New York, 2010. Lowe, Kate. “The Black Diaspora in Europe in the 15th and 16th Century, with Special Reference to the German-speaking Areas.” In Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann, 38–56. Oxford, 2013. Mesa, Teresa Mezquita. “El Códice de Trajes de la Biblioteca Nacional de España.” Goya 346 (2014): 16–41. Meserve, Margaret. Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought. Cambridge, MA, 2008. Mukerji, Chandra. “Costume and Character in the Ottoman Empire: Dress as Social Agent in Nicolay’s Navigations.” In Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500– 1800, edited by Paula Findlen, 151–69. New York, 2013. Necipoğlu, Gülru. “The Serial Portraits of Ottoman Sultans in Comparative Perspective.” In The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, edited by Filiz Çağman and Gülru Necipoğlu, 22–61. Istanbul, 2000. Nirenberg, David. Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. Chicago, 2014. Olian, Jo Anne. “Sixteenth-Century Costume Books.” Dress 3 (1977): 20–48. Os, Henk van. The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300–1500. Amsterdam, 1994. Paviot, Jacques. “The French Embassy of d’Aramon to the Porte: Scholars and Travellers in the Levant, 1547–1553.” Studies on Ottoman Diplomatic History I (1987): 27–39. Primeau, Thomas. “The Materials and Technology of Renaissance and Baroque HandColored Prints.” In Dackerman, Painted Prints, 49–78. Puff, Helmut. Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600. Chicago, 2003. Reske, Christoph. Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet. Wiesbaden, 2007. Rosenthal, Margaret, ed. “Cultures of Clothing in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 3 (2009). Ross, Elizabeth. Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book: Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio from Venice to Jerusalem. University Park, PA, 2014.
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Rublack, Ulinka. Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe. Oxford, 2010. Saunders, A. C. de C. M. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441– 1555. Cambridge, UK, 1982. Smith, Charlotte Colding. “Ottoman Dress in Sixteenth-Century German Printed Costume Books.” In Images of Islam, 1453–1600: Turks in Germany and Central Europe, 123–50. London, 2014. Spicer, Joaneath, ed. Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe. Baltimore, 2012. Stock, Jan van der. Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City. Fifteenth Century to 1585. Rotterdam, 1998. Tietze, Andreas. “Mustafa Âli on Luxury and the Status Symbols of Ottoman Gentlemen.” In Studia Turcologica memoriae Alexii Bombaci dicata, edited by Aldo Gallotta and Ugo Marazzi, 577–90. Naples, 1982. Wilson, Bronwen. “Foggie diverse di vestire de’ Turchi: Turkish Costume Illustration and Cultural Translation.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 97–139. Wilson, Bronwen. The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity. Toronto, 2005. Yerasimos, Stephane. Les Voyageurs dans l’Empire Ottoman (XIVe–XVIe siècles). Ankara, Turkey, 1991. Zilfi, Madeline. Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire. Cambridge, UK, 2010.
CHAPTER 9
Denouncing the Spendthrift
Debating Social Identity in the Court of Law and Public Opinion ASHLEY L. ELROD
I
n 1587 the local sheriff of Oberbronn, a town in the Upper Rhine region, gathered the town residents and announced that Philipp Hector Weidmann had been convicted as “a prodigus [prodigal] and Verschwender [spendthrift].”1 The sheriff warned the residents not to conduct any business with Weidmann, since this verdict marked him as legally mundtot (incompetent) and therefore incapable of making legally binding decisions. For at least a decade, Weidmann lived stigmatized by the notorious names of prodigus and Verschwender. These legal verbal brands should have reduced him to the legal status of a minor and barred him from local networks of commerce and credit without his guardian’s approval. However, within a few years an appeals court investigation discovered that Weidmann had escaped the dishonorable associations of his verdict when he moved to a nearby village. His new community welcomed him into their commercial and lending networks, accepting him as a fully empowered adult who was, in the words of his neighbors, “just like any other honorable citizen.”2 In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, towns and territories throughout the German lands revived the Roman practice of declaring wasteful subjects legally incompetent in order to protect families, community members, and the state from financially unstable households.3 These three structures—family, community, and state—often worked together to brand financially reckless individuals as untrustworthy and unreasonable, blocking their access to family properties and commercial networks. Local and state officials depended on cooperation from the community to publicly denounce and monitor transgressors like Weidmann. Spendthrift laws encouraged aggrieved parties to denounce reckless householders in court, transforming private family disputes into matters of communal and legal scrutiny. For subjects, the incentive to comply
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brought communal benefits. Labels like Verschwender and prodigus provided a valuable service to local residents, who used this information about their neighbors’ reputations and financial histories to determine to whom they might entrust access to their local networks of commerce and credit. Through these acts of public naming, a diverse group of enforcers redefined transgressors’ legal and social status and thereby reinforced the value of communal norms.4 Weidmann’s individual case shares connections with cross-confessional, pan-European legal contexts. The influence of Roman law on the German lands ensured that legal restrictions on personal spending emerged throughout early modern Germany, including large territorial states and free imperial cities, Protestant and Catholic texts, and in regions as far flung as the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Alps.5 Similar policies emerged in Flanders, Lower Austria, Italian city-states and principalities, and parts of France between the midsixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.6 These legal developments suggest that public repudiations of spendthrifts served fundamental communal needs, despite diversity of creed, geography, or political ideology. Yet, the failure of the judicial naming process in Weidmann’s case calls into question the nature of the alliance between families, community members, and political and legal authorities. This chapter reevaluates that alliance and its role within the naming process through a case study of spendthrifts in southwestern Germany, whose deviant financial behavior earned them the dishonorable legal titles of prodigus or Verschwender. It asks to what extent public appraisal worked both in concert and in conflict with local court actions in the process of identity formation. Early modern judicial procedures for preventing financial mismanagement depended on the unpredictable nature of public opinion and memory. Although state officials, community members, and families often cooperated to publicly name spendthrifts, judicial verdicts failed to account for the complex, fluid process of articulating social identities.7 The following analysis begins with the historical development of spendthrift policies in Germany, identifies common problems in judicial procedures and enforcement practices, and concludes with a detailed examination of the case of Philipp Hector Weidmann. Drawing from a combination of legislative texts from southwestern Germany between 1400 and 1650, as well as court trials from the territorial state of Württemberg and the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court), this chapter shows that naming can be defined as a public process through which communities articulated judgments about an individual’s reputation and social identity. Scholarship on the economic and legal cultures of premodern Europe suggests that an individual’s name depended significantly on shifting public perceptions of that person’s financial worth and trustworthiness.8 Weidman’s ability to access credit signified more than a quantifiable estimate of his financial holdings. It also revealed public opinion about diverse aspects of his identity, such as his gender role, social status, reputation
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for piety, or the quality of his relations with neighbors and local officials. A complex combination of forces factored into each community member’s decision to embrace or reject a given name.
Legal Developments in Prodigalität (Prodigality) Law in Southwestern Germany The origins of the term prodigus date back to the property systems of Roman antiquity. Roman law promoted the ultimate authority of male heads of households over the family estate by limiting the rights of dependents to pledge or alienate property without the approval of the paterfamilias. Roman law also sought to limit possible liabilities caused by individuals with mental impairments or poor judgment who might diminish the family estate through reckless contracts. In addition to establishing guardianships for minors and women, legal codes restricted the legal standing of two main groups, prodigi and furiosi (spendthrifts and madmen), and established guardianships for both types of individuals, usually under the supervision of a male agnatic relative.9 Although Roman policies on spendthrifts largely fell out of common practice after the ninth century, references to prodigus and its German synonyms— Verschwender, Vertuner (spendthrift), Geuder or Vergeuder (wastrel), and the catchall unordentliche Haushälter (disorderly householder)—gradually began to appear in German legal codes between the early fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries.10 Nikolaus Wurm’s comprehensive summary of Magdeburg law, one of the earliest examples from circa 1400, drew directly on the language of Justinian’s Institutes, stating,“Prodigus means a person who gives away his property without honest purpose or good sense. And for this reason, the insane person and the prodigus are forbidden by law to administer their property because they do not have authority over their property without a guardian.”11 More commonly, regional legislation used vernacular terms, such as an ordinance from the imperial city of Esslingen from 1438, which stated, “Extravagant, useless Vertuner. . . were not mächtig [capable] of selling, trading, or giving away property” without a guardian’s approval, due to their “unvernufft oder unsinn” (unreasonable) spending habits.12 The city of Nuremberg also called for guardianships for Verschwender in its Reformation of 1479.13 By experimenting with old and new terminology, lawmakers sought to resolve a naming problem. The new policies of the late medieval period drew on Roman legal terms and their vernacular counterparts to describe the social problem of household mismanagement, a vague and multifaceted offense that could elude neat definition. In the duchy of Württemberg, for instance, the statewide legal code of 1515 and 1521 initially described bad householders through the cumbersome phrase, “men who lie about in taverns while their
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wives and children accept charity.”14 Meanwhile, at the local level, Württemberg district officials began using the German terms Verschwender, Vergeuder, Verthuner, and (less commonly) the Latin term prodigus in their court verdicts with increasing regularity between the 1520s and 1540s to describe this same type of offense.15 Finally, in 1552 Württemberg’s central administration revised its statewide legal code to include the specific legal terms of unnütze Haushälter (useless householder), Verschwender, and prodigus.16 Legal commentators and lawmakers orchestrated the changes in terminology from the top downwards, but the terms also circulated through the public consciousness through other avenues. In Philipp Weidmann’s case from the Upper Rhine at the end of the sixteenth century, court officials still considered it necessary to begin each interrogation session by first asking witnesses “if they understood what a prodigus is.”17 In response, witnesses referred to a variety of different knowledge sources to demonstrate their comprehension of the term, ranging from cultural references to the parable of the prodigal son, exposure to legal documents such as testaments, or personal experiences with family property disputes.18 The intellectual revival of classical texts during the Reformation period supplied lawmakers and jurists with a useful series of words to capture a social problem that provoked increasing state concern in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Converging developments in late medieval legal culture, administration, economy, and religious ideology contributed to a revival of Roman spendthrift policies and a shift in legal vocabulary. German adaptations of Roman spendthrift laws formed part of a general legislative movement to ensure the social and financial stability of households, particularly those at risk of state or community dependence.19 As one part of this effort, early modern German cities and states developed systems of guardianship law to protect the financial interests of vulnerable subjects who were deemed incapable of managing their own affairs, including orphaned minors, individuals with mental and some physical disabilities, and spendthrifts. The Holy Roman Empire released Reichspolizieiordnungen (imperial police ordinances) in 1548 and 1577 that drew on Roman and German precedents to publicize comprehensive guidelines for the guardianship of minors.20 In the wake of the imperial ordinances, towns and territories throughout the empire released similar policies, thus establishing new regional guardianship systems that included spendthrifts under their jurisdiction.21 Other polities’ guardianship laws, like those of Magdeburg and Nuremberg, predated the imperial police ordinances, but similarly looked to Roman law for inspiration.22 For early modern secular authorities, the Roman legal practice of publicly incapacitating wasteful subjects provided a solution to demographic and social problems of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Growing unease about moral and behavioral discipline, driven by discussions surrounding the con-
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fessional reforms of the sixteenth century, added to state and church officials’ interests in limiting how much their subjects spent on morally suspect activities like excessive drinking, gambling, conspicuous displays of wealth, and public festivities.23 As population rates grew, city and state authorities expressed alarm over poverty rates, control of property, and the stability of their tax base, leading to new legislation aimed at conserving the stability of individual household economies.24 Within this context of property and disciplinary reform, lawmakers introduced legislation to disenfranchise spendthrifts to shore up the economic and ideological stability of the household. German legal culture conceived of the family household as a matter of political and communal concern. Over the course of the sixteenth century, religious and secular authorities in both Catholic and Protestant regions bolstered the legal power of the male Hausvater (head of household) over his dependents and the family property.25 The Hausvater’s privileged position came at a cost, because he undertook greater legal responsibility for the household and endured intense surveillance by the expanding administrations of sixteenthcentury states.26 As magistrates across southern Germany discovered over the course of the sixteenth century, fathers and husbands displayed a disconcerting inability to live up to these expectations.27 Resulting legal policies made a Hausvater’s legal autonomy and household authority contingent on his reputation for managing the household with due thrift and moderation. Spendthrift laws addressed the disciplinary failures of the Hausvater by recruiting public assistance to monitor and discipline bad householders. Enforcement of the legal brand Verschwender depended on a range of social groups—including village and district officials, relatives, close friends, and creditors—and their willingness to initiate a court suit against their reckless fellow residents. Sixteenth-century policies thus rewarded community members and household dependents who used the court system to air private grievances. When the duchy of Württemberg published judicial guidelines for the prosecution of spendthrifts in 1555, its legislators invited “the friends and relatives of the spendthrift or his wife, or others who are affected by the losses of such wastefulness” to bring their complaints to local officials.28 Spendthrift laws provided these members of the community with a formal procedure to transform public opinion about a person’s financial reputation into an institutionally sanctioned legal brand. If the accusers provided compelling evidence of prodigality (a point rarely, if ever, clarified within the law), then local officials might proceed immediately to publicly declare the accused an incompetent Verschwender and appoint guardians to manage the estate. Without the support of a family or other close party to initiate the suit, the enforcement of spendthrift laws fell to village and town officials. When local officials initiated accusations without the assistance of relatives, the subsequent legal process could take months, if not years, to reach the level of a formal verdict.29 The legal naming
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process thus worked most efficiently when local officials successfully convinced relatives and members of the credit network to convert public rumors into a formal accusation and verdict against a notorious spendthrift. The willingness of relatives, neighbors, and officials to levy accusations against spendthrifts affected the frequency with which courts investigated subjects for prodigality. In about half of Württemberg’s districts, an average of 3 percent of courts’ legal verdicts stemmed from charges of financial mismanagement.30 However, the actual distribution of cases varied considerably from region to region, with the highest concentration of cases in urban centers like Stuttgart. Prosecution rates for prodigality also varied over time. In one Württemberg district the period of highest frequency (approximately 12 percent of total complaints brought to the local court) occurred immediately after the duchy issued statewide legislation calling for the guardianship of spendthrifts in the mid-sixteenth century.31 Beyond Württemberg, court records from the broader region of southwestern Germany suggest that prodigality trials were neither frequent nor negligible. Between 1500 and 1700 the Imperial Chamber Court chose to investigate court appeals of about fifty trials for prodigality, with half of those occurring between 1580 and 1620.32 Regional legal codes provided judges and accusers with generous leeway to interpret which behaviors constituted wastefulness. As a result, local officials and members of the community used the court system to apply the legal brand Verschwender to a diverse range of individuals who provoked conflict within their communities. In nearly half of all spendthrift trials that the Imperial Chamber Court adjudicated in southwestern Germany between 1500 and 1700, litigants applied the terms Verschwender or prodigus to borrowers who had failed to repay their creditors.33 Other judges and litigants appropriated the terms to punish charlatans suspected of commercial deception and trickery. In Württemberg, the Bietigheim Stadtgericht (town court) declared Jörg Franck incompetent for prodigality in 1579 for breaking contracts with his fellow residents. Franck had agreed to construct buildings for several local residents, but after accepting payments, failed to deliver his side of the bargain.34 Like creditors and commercial partners, relatives accepted lawmakers’ invitation to air their dirty laundry in court to resolve household disputes. Litigants named their parents, in-laws, and siblings as spendthrifts in court to persuade court judges to intervene in the line of inheritance. In southwestern German territories with systems of partible inheritance, any decline in the value of the estate had a proportionate impact on the heirs’ future livelihoods.35 This dynamic created an incentive for expectant heirs to become invested in how the current custodian of the property—the head of household—chose to manage the estate. In the 1550s, for example, Martin Michel’s sons and sonsin-law persuaded a Palatinate court to declare Martin a prodigus for wasting their mother’s legacy with his incompetent household management.36 From
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1561 to 1572 three adult sisters in Leutkirch attempted to dissolve their stepfather’s inheritance claims by arguing that his notorious reputation and court conviction as a prodigus proved his inability to manage their deceased mother’s legacy.37 Court judges permitted generational shifts in property rights in extenuating circumstances to protect the family patrimony. However, the transfer of power could be messy. By encouraging subjects to make public legal accusations against prodigal relatives, spendthrift laws often brought years of private grievances into the public eye, with allegations ranging from child abuse to parental favoritism. Wives took advantage of these policies to persuade courts to declare their husbands incompetent, prevent spouses from interfering with their dowries, or retrieve joint marital property that their prodigal husbands had sold off. Württemberg’s new spendthrift policies of 1552 and 1555 protected a woman’s joint marital property from the claims of her husband and his creditors if a court deemed that her spendthrift husband had failed to manage the property wisely.38 In the late sixteenth century, Eva Zehen, a resident of Württemberg, persuaded her local town court to legally brand her husband, Peter, “a useless householder and spendthrift” after he “extravagantly squandered her property and brought her into poverty, so that she had to accept charity.”39 When Eva learned that Peter had sold some of their joint property at too low a value, she took the matter to court and argued “the sale is not valid, according to the Landesordnung [territorial law code], because he is a prodigus and spendthrift.”40 Branding her husband as a prodigus accorded Eva greater influence over the disposal of the household’s property, a development of no small significance within women’s increasingly narrow legal and economic realm in the sixteenth century.41 However, Eva’s case indicates that a court ruling alone failed to constrain her husband’s influence over his household and within his community commercial network. Rather, Eva had to continue spreading her husband’s legal name by word of mouth and through additional court petitions to make the ruling stick. Lawmakers ordered members of the broader community to bring news of reckless householders to the courts to have them officially declared as a prodigus. The prince-bishopric of Würzburg, for instance, warned, “It is the bound duty of . . . every neighbor to report a spendthrift to local officials.”42 In other locales, town magistrates deputized certain members of the population, such as notaries, tavern keepers, and watchmen, to keep a particularly close watch on local residents’ financial affairs.43 Monitoring troubled households formed part of a subject’s duties to the ruler, who offered incentives to residents who brought private disputes to the court’s attention. Both men and women used wide-ranging community credit networks over the course of their lifetimes.44 By spreading the news about a financially reckless neighbor’s reputation, community members delineated the
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boundaries of acceptable behavior and exerted public pressure on transgressors.45 The stability of public credit networks depended on the financial health of individual households, making it vital for the network members to monitor and circulate information about each individual’s trustworthiness and reputation.46 Any decline in one household’s welfare could send ripples of instability throughout an entangled web of lenders and borrowers. This serial quality of credit incentivized residents to monitor their neighbors and protect their own household’s public reputation for trustworthiness and reliability.47 Members of the community thus obtained greater leverage over reckless neighbors when they converted informal reports about a person’s reputation into a courtsanctioned denunciation of a prodigus. Without such information about their neighbors’ good name, residents took the risk of making illegal contracts with individuals who lacked the legal authority to control property. Württemberg’s spendthrift laws offered no protections for individuals who were duped or disadvantaged by notorious spendthrifts. If a person made a financial exchange with a reputed spendthrift—whether a purchase, loan, or otherwise—without the approval of the spendthrift’s guardian, the guardian could petition the court to nullify the agreement without compensating the other party for losses.48 After all, to do business with a person reputed for financial recklessness amounted to foolishness in the eyes of the law. In the mid-sixteenth century, Joost Damhoudere, a Flemish legal authority on matters of guardianship, quipped, “Whoever lends money to a publicly denounced spendthrift is putting his money in a torn wallet and cannot demand it back using the law. Let everyone look out . . . and take note of whom one deals with.”49 For one litigant in the Upper Rhine in 1595, the practical implications of spendthrift policies were clear: “Wer da kaufft der luge wa es lauft,” essentially “Let the buyer beware” in English.50 Keeping informed about the neighbors’ reputations was a matter of personal, fiscal, and moral responsibility, and not merely a state mandate.
Naming as Legal and Communal Process The judicial act of naming was a long-term process that involved both official judicial procedures as well as unofficial, everyday functions carried out by ordinary subjects. The naming process broke down into four general stages: initiation of a court investigation, communication of the judicial sentence, repeated reminders or other forms of enforcement in the subsequent years, and general endorsement by fellow residents. The case of Philipp Hector Weidmann, the spendthrift with whom this chapter began, offers an intimate portrait of how this process unfolded—and foundered—at the level of daily life. Remarkably, the naming process formed the central point of investigation in the appeals
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trial conducted in 1595. Both litigating parties realized that public awareness and endorsement of Weidmann’s status as a prodigus would determine the outcome of the case, and they accordingly interrogated dozens of witnesses about how his label had been publicized, endorsed by local officials, and circulated through written form or informal communication networks. Most of the surviving documentation of Philipp Weidmann’s story emerged at the height of the main controversy over his legal status in 1595. Weidmann was a young adult and recent widower who worked as the tavern keeper in the small town of Wörth, located in the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg, a territory in the Holy Roman Empire. Weidmann’s troubles appear to have begun in earnest in the late 1580s, after the death of his parents. Upon this abrupt shift in the administration of the family estate, the family properties were divided among at least three surviving heirs: Philipp, his younger brother Hans Ludwig Weidmann, and Philipp’s brother-in-law, Adam Schmiedberg. Both Weidmann brothers had dabbled in reckless extravagances in their youth, earning them reprimands from local authorities in the town of Oberbronn. In hindsight, Philipp attributed his own actions to “youth and uncomprehending foolishness,” a stereotype of financial irresponsibility that many of his contemporaries attributed to minors.51 Some legislators were especially wary about the prodigal tendencies of the young. In Freiburg, for example, the Stadtrecht (municipal law) of 1520 sought to protect fathers from liability for wayward children who “waste any property with gambling, whoring, and other unworthy ways. . . . Whatever they gamble away, drink up, waste, give away, or change without the father’s knowledge and approval must be returned to the father.”52 The extravagances of youth, however, were generally expected to end as one gained maturity and reached the age of reason, set by law at age twentyfive in most regions.53 Of the two brothers, only Philipp carried his prodigal habits well into adulthood. Even though he had reached the age of majority, Weidmann’s apparent immaturity later drew commentary from onlookers within his community, who remembered him as “frivolous” and “fairly wasteful.”54 Philipp inherited several thousand gulden worth of property from his parents. Within five years of their deaths, he reportedly had frittered away more than 3,500 gulden. In the years that followed, Schmiedberg and Hans Ludwig appeared to resent Philipp’s carefree management of the family properties, particularly when they were forced to clean up after Philipp’s financial mistakes. Both of Philipp’s male kin spent considerable resources and effort repaying his outstanding debts over the years, in exchange for empty promises of better behavior.55 The cost and continuation of Weidmann’s problematic financial dealings finally led them to take official action. It is not clear how exactly Weidmann’s case evolved from a private family dispute into an official court investigation. Similar contemporary cases from
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southwestern Germany indicate that most often family members took advantage of spendthrift laws to prevent their prodigal relatives from squandering the family patrimony.56 Frustrated creditors made court accusations against wasteful borrowers to force repayment of outstanding debts.57 Finally, village and town officials initiated court actions against spendthrifts to resolve a range of public disturbances, from chronic drunkenness to gambling to oath breaking.58 It is possible that representatives of all these parties—family, credit network, and local government—collaborated to put a stop to Weidmann’s reckless financial decisions by formally declaring him a prodigus and Verschwender. In 1587 the Vogt (bailiff ) of Oberbronn publicly announced that Philipp had lost the right to administer his own properties—including that which he inherited from his parents—without the approval of his newly appointed guardians. Adam Schmiedberg, his brother-in-law, was the most vigilant of Philipp’s guardians over the next decade. While Schmiedberg acted as official guardian, he could expect assistance from both the court, which would protect Schmiedberg’s rights as guardian, and the surrounding community. The bailiff ’s public announcement signaled that Philipp’s verbal branding was widely witnessed and official, thus separating common gossip from an officially sanctioned legal decision. With no visible markers to signal a spendthrift’s loss of rights and status (such as physical brands or bodily mutilation), local authorities instead depended on members of the community to help police the local commercial life of the town and prevent the convicted spendthrift from participating in restricted activities. Public proclamations were essential for enforcing the restricted legal status of convicted spendthrifts and for spreading an official name of prodigus. According to Conrad Müller, a sixty-six-year-old baker with a long memory for public events, the officials of Oberbronn called a public gathering to announce Weidmann’s change in legal status. The district sheriff rang the town bells to summon the residents and then read Weidmann’s conviction aloud.59 Only when Weidmann’s potential lenders, business partners, and friends had heard the announcement did the effects of the name take hold. The power of the name did not derive from official documents alone— which residents rarely consulted, in any case, before engaging in trades or sales—but rather from widespread knowledge of the legal judgment within the surrounding community.60 Town officials attempted to reach a broad audience through public proclamations, but some residents heard the news only after the fact, through word of mouth. One citizen of Oberbronn missed the official proclamation of Weidmann’s status, but heard the news later when he ran into the Schultheiß (sheriff ) of Oberbronn.61 Mattheus Augstett was sitting in a tavern in Oberbronn when he overheard the Schultheiß admonish a group of tavern patrons for helping Weidmann squander his wealth.62 Matthis Dietherich had heard about Weidmann’s poor reputation from the old town
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notary eight years before, but Hans Herbach could not recall from whom he had first heard the news. Nor could either of these men remember whether an official announcement had ever occurred.63 While Dietherich and Herbach may not have been the most dependable news sources, their contributions to the broad regional network of informal communication of legal judgments played no less important a role in law enforcement than the initial public sentencing. Officials depended on the populace to receive and repeatedly share the news about Weidmann’s reputation as an untrustworthy neighbor. Unofficial channels of communication allowed the news to spread and permeate public memory over the years, albeit through fluid and imprecise verbal and written networks of communication. In Weidmann’s case, his guardian, Adam Schmiedberg, had the most to lose from Weidmann’s prodigal habits. As a result, Schmiedberg undertook the legwork necessary to disseminate the news about Weidmann’s change in legal status throughout the broader region. His efforts spanned a nearly thirty-kilometer radius of towns and villages. Weidmann moved to two new towns, Reichshofen and Wörth, over the course of his guardianship, keeping Schmiedberg constantly on his toes. Friedrich Bartholome was visiting the chancellery when he overheard Schmiedberg angrily rebuking Philipp for frivolous spending.64 When Paul Hürlin went to a party at the Münzmeister’s (mint master) house, he heard Schmiedberg complain about his burdensome and frivolous ward.65 Conrad Müller remembered an occasion six years earlier when Schmiedberg had warned everyone in Wörth, as well as anyone else in his jurisdiction, to avoid doing any business with Weidmann.66 Schmiedberg also used written communication to spread the word about Philipp’s legal verdict, sending messages to three different officials in Reichshofen, another to the nearby village of Froeschwiller, and yet another to Heinrich Reben, the primary official of Weißenburg, who also served as a coguardian for Philipp (albeit a far less meddlesome one). For each location in his network, Schmiedberg wrote to the head official and asked him to publicly name Weidmann as a prodigus before the entire populace. Matthis Dietherich had been the Amtmann (bailiff ) of Reichshofen when Schmiedberg sent him one such request. Schmiedberg asked Dietherich “to command [the community] not to make contracts or agreements with Weidmann, for [any such contracts] would be at the risk of the contractor of that place and would be null and void.”67 Dietherich dutifully read forth Schmiedberg’s words to his subjects in Reichshofen, which Schmiedberg likely assumed brought the news of Weidmann’s legal status to the attention of his new neighbors. Schmiedberg also leveraged his own personal relationships: he contacted Bernhard Herzog, the head official of Wörth, who was related by marriage to Schmiedberg, as well as Hieronymus Bauschen, a medical doctor. Despite his efforts, Schmiedberg’s attempts at renewed publicity and constant reinforcement ultimately failed to canvas the relatively compact region where Weidmann lived.
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Names drew their power from the communities who endorsed them; in Weidmann’s case that power dwindled between 1587 and the late 1590s as he moved farther away from his vigilant guardian and the original community where he had first been sentenced. Although the source record leaves no trace of Weidmann’s own intentions, his mobility and continued financial activity suggest that he sought to expand his autonomy and repair his social standing during this time. Despite Schmiedberg’s disapproval, Philipp married the widow of a tavern keeper and settled down with her in Reichshofen, a town located about five kilometers away from the court in Oberbronn. This marriage brought new financial opportunities to Weidmann unavailable in his previous community after his public denunciation as a prodigus in Oberbronn. The newlyweds arranged several new loans, even though they neglected to get Schmiedberg’s approval. Their access to credit may have resulted from a combination of Weidmann’s wife’s social and real capital. Weidmann likely took over her deceased husband’s tavern business in Reichshofen, where she owned several properties. Martzolf Ulman, a fifty-year-old judge from Wörth, reported that Weidmann conducted business on credit (such as purchasing wine for his business) because the community trusted him to provide well for his wife.68 Philipp enjoyed even greater expansions to his autonomy and credit when he and his wife moved again around 1590 to a town called Wörth an der Sauer, located a mere six kilometers away in the neighboring county of Hanau-Lichtenberg. In Wörth Philipp took up the profession of tavern keeper. Philipp found his new neighbors more than willing to extend him credit and to purchase his household goods and landed properties. He bought wine on credit in Wörth, Breuschdorff, and Mitschdorff (located three to four kilometers southeast of Wörth).69 He took out loans from various Wörth residents, sold off land, livestock, and housewares, and enjoyed sociable drinking bouts with several of his new neighbors. While Schmiedberg might have hoped that Weidmann’s public reputation as a prodigus would have followed him the six kilometers to Wörth, he was furious to learn that none of his contacts in Wörth had publicly named Weidmann as a spendthrift. Schmiedberg discovered that several residents and officials of Wörth bought up land and housewares from Weidmann, regardless of Schmiedberg’s overtures to the town governor for stricter surveillance. Even worse, Philipp remained heavily in debt, with nearly 400 gulden owed to various residents of Haguenau, Froeschwiller, Cleebourg, Oberbronn, and Wörth.70 Weidmann’s credit network had indeed flourished in his new social landscape. His new neighbors proved eager to purchase properties from Weidmann and extend him loans, likely due to Weidmann’s reported habit of offering advantageous terms to his commercial partners. Weidmann, in turn, decided to mortgage or sell off pieces of his estate to satisfy his creditors and procure new cash flows.
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Negotiating Names The litigants and witnesses in Weidmann’s trials argued a point that surfaced repeatedly in litigation and commentaries on spendthrift law during this period: Who enjoyed the right to brand an individual as a spendthrift? Naming a spendthrift required communities and court officials to work together to accuse, convict, and monitor an untrustworthy resident, but the court and community also competed to arbitrate social conflicts. Legal commentators insisted that a court sentence was necessary to justify the significant change in a person’s legal status brought about through the process of judicial incapacitation. Jurist Joost Damhoudere insisted that court officials alone possessed the power to name spendthrifts, despite public perceptions to the contrary.71 Judicial authorities did concede that they required unofficial help from common citizens. When the court process reacted too slowly to protect vulnerable households from a looming financial disaster, legislators in Württemberg and Franconia allowed subjects to brand kundlich offenbar (known, obvious) or scheinbar (obvious) offenders as a spendthrift before a trial had even begun.72 To support his appeal, Schmiedberg was forced to argue that official court bodies claimed a monopoly over the right to determine legal status, making it unnecessary to ascertain whether that legal status had publicly extended to Weidmann’s reputation. Throughout the 1590s Schmiedberg, Weidmann’s guardian, had vehemently disapproved of Weidmann’s casual willingness to liquidate real estate and increase his credit. In 1595 Schmiedberg returned to the court system to reinforce Philipp’s restricted legal status and officially nullify all contracts that his guardians had not preapproved. Schmiedberg brought his case to the Landgericht (regional court) in Haguenau, located fifteen kilometers to the south, where the court initiated a lengthy investigation of the dispute. If Schmiedberg could prove to the court that Philipp was a prodigus who lacked the legal authority to agree to the contracts, then the Weidmann estate would be free of all obligations to the creditors. The court issued a broad call for witnesses from throughout the region, including the towns of Wörth, Weißenburg, Oberbronn, Reichshofen, Niederbronn, Froeschwiller, Sulz, Cleebourg, and Haguenau. The court’s investigations revealed that Philipp’s relatives, neighbors, and business partners vehemently disagreed about the influence that formal legal naming should wield over local social conflicts and residents’ status within the community. In contrast to Schmiedberg’s position, one camp of witnesses insisted that local public opinion played a decisive role in determining the trustworthiness of an individual’s name, independent of institutional court rulings. Several witnesses, for instance, informed the court that a person of ill-repute who had never been sentenced as a spendthrift “should not be considered any less as a Prodigum.”73 Lipsen Hans, a fifty-six-year-old butcher, had never heard
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of any court verdict against Philipp, but he insisted “that anyone who squanders his property frivolously should be considered a Prodigum whether he had been named by a judge or not.”74 According to Hans Herbach, a Schultheiß in the village of Froeschwiller, “If a person’s friends publicly announce that one should protect oneself against [his recklessness], then he should be considered a Prodigum.”75 This camp of witnesses dismissed the need for formal channels of legal naming and instead insisted that local communities should unofficially apply legal terminology to spread crucial information about that person’s reliability and reputation. In doing so, they privileged their own informal networks of communication over formal processes of investigation and sentencing. In contrast, a second camp of witnesses refused to consider anyone as a prodigus “without a preceding verdict.”76 Although several witnesses acknowledged Weidmann’s reputation for “frivolous” financial management, they denied “that the common man can declare someone a Prodigum. . . . That is for the authorities [to determine].”77 While their testimony seemed to support Schmiedberg’s position about the preeminence of official court rulings, even these witnesses threw a wrench into Schmiedberg’s plans to confirm Philipp’s legal status as a spendthrift. To Schmiedberg’s dismay, most of the witnesses from Wörth claimed that they simply had never heard about the court ruling that had labeled Philipp as a prodigus seven years earlier. The court interviewed the head official of Wörth as well as the entire village court of twelve jurors, but not a single official would concede any knowledge of Philipp’s diminished legal capacity or his status as a spendthrift. As far as the witnesses of Wörth were concerned, there had never been any public indication that Philipp was under guardianship. Other witnesses from Haguenau, Froeschwiller, and Oberbronn similarly professed ignorance of any public declaration about Philipp’s restricted legal privileges.78 One of Weidmann’s creditors from the village of Froeschwiller informed the court that his Gemeinde (community) “had never been warned not to do business with or provide loans to [Weidmann],” nor was Weidmann’s court sentence ever publicly “proclaimed or published,” as Schmiedberg had requested.79 Another witness, Conrad Müller, testified that Weidmann could not be a prodigus because local officials had not made a formal announcement, nor had they rung the village bells to signal an official judicial act.80 Schmiedberg’s efforts to publicize Weidmann’s verdict through private correspondence lacked the public trappings of legitimacy that Weidmann’s neighbors had come to expect. Furthermore, several witnesses offered testimony that counter-branded Philipp not as an untrustworthy or deviant spendthrift, but as an honorable and largely unremarkable member of their local credit network. Public opinion cut both ways: not only could it tarnish a person’s good name, but it could also restore credibility and public trust. Four different members of Wörth’s court testified that Philipp was “just like any other citizen,” and even “an honorable
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citizen.”81 Two witnesses described Philipp as mächtig, a term that conveyed his legal capacity to administer his own property without any oversight.82 Finally, another witness also underscored that the local residents “trusted him,” a claim that directly contradicted Schmiedberg’s counterclaim that “no citizen . . . had wanted to trust or loan anything [to Weidmann]” in his previous home in Reichshofen.83 Weidmann successfully reclaimed his reputation and good name by moving outside the confines of his bounded community. According to many residents in Wörth, he had earned their trust by meeting their standards of proper financial exchanges and good household management. Peter Zugmantel testified that “Philipp Weidmann had been of full age and understanding to [manage] his property himself. That is why he thought he had free administration [of his estate].”84 When questioned about Philipp’s legal rights to conduct commercial activities, the residents of Wörth pragmatically pointed out that Philipp had clearly maintained possession of property, frequently made contracts with it, and had not provoked any controversies with his financial dealings since his first arrival in Wörth five years earlier. Friedrich Bartholome, a local member of the governing Gericht (court), noted that Philipp had also complied with standards of legitimate business, including having his contracts properly signed and authorized by court judges in Haguenau.85 Philipp’s conduct in Wörth bore all the trappings of legal and financial respectability, and, as such, his name retained its good bond in this new community. As a result, Philipp’s neighbors concluded, “[he] had authority over his property and its management, just as any other honorable citizen had [such] power.”86 Weidmann’s apparent capacity for good management constituted proof of his legal authority, just as poor management served as a legal justification to revoke property rights under the spendthrift policies of sixteenth-century Germany. To be sure, much was at stake for the people of Wörth on the decision about Weidmann’s reputation and name. If his neighbors admitted that they had known about Weidmann’s incapacity or had noticed any of his prodigal behavior, they would have implicated themselves in several respects. For those who had done business with Weidmann, they would have appeared predatory at worst and naive at best, since spendthrift laws held the community responsible for researching the backgrounds of their potential business partners. Even worse, a court ruling in favor of Schmiedberg would have dissolved the contracts that several Wörth residents had made with Weidmann. Weidmann’s good name and creditworthiness had immediate repercussions for the neighbors who had chosen to admit him into their credit network over the preceding five years. His status and reputation affected them by association. Finally, the status of Weidmann’s name would make a statement about the relative autonomy of the community in Wörth, which belonged to a different political jurisdiction from that of the Oberbronn court that had originally sen-
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tenced Weidmann nearly a decade earlier. Although only ten kilometers apart, Wörth and Oberbronn belonged to the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg and the county of Leiningen-Westerburg, respectively. In part, some witnesses testified in favor of Weidmann’s reputation in order to repudiate foreign interventions into their local financial dealings. Testimony from the case indicates that witnesses from Wörth had considered these factors over the course of the investigation. While some testified that they accepted Weidmann’s legal autonomy based on his merit, the context of the dispute suggests that the value of Weidmann’s name was deeply embedded in larger conflicts about political identity, fair economic practices, family power dynamics, and the balance of power between a community and its governing officials.
Conclusion The judicial naming of spendthrifts was a fluid and collective process of identity formation that rarely aligned perfectly with officials’ and litigants’ law enforcement strategies. This case study of spendthrifts adds to a growing body of scholarship on governance, social discipline, and legal culture in the early modern era that examines the relationship between elite officials and the rest of society. One of the most controversial aspects of this line of research is the ambiguous nature of that relationship. Over the past thirty years, regional studies have emphasized the contingency of state authority upon the cooperation of common subjects.87 One important way that community members either supported or undermined state governance was through the use of informal channels of communication and self-regulation. Judicial names drew their power from collective endorsement. Ultimately, Weidmann eluded the dishonorable brand of prodigus because his legal status failed to accommodate fluctuations in public opinion regarding his trustworthiness and status within the community. To be sure, some legislators made attempts to prepare for such scenarios when they designed the judicial procedures for disciplining spendthrifts. Convicted spendthrifts could petition for an Aufhebung (reversal) of their sentence if they could demonstrate sufficient improvement in their ability to meet the weighty obligations of a Hausvater.88 Little evidence from the early modern period suggests that courts granted such requests. Furthermore, Weidmann’s case file indicates that his relatives and guardians were highly unlikely to support such a request. Rather, it was the informal processes beyond institutional judicial practices that undermined the restrictions on Weidmann’s legal status. The authors of early modern spendthrift policies took for granted that the interdependent interests of families, community members, and government officials would ensure their cooperation. Although collaboration among these groups was common
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in most spendthrift trials examined by the Imperial Chamber Court between 1500 and 1700, Weidmann’s case indicates that the tenuous relationship between legal status, reputation, and social identity nonetheless proved to be an enduring weakness in the enforcement process. Weidmann’s neighbors exploited that weakness by using parallel, unofficial channels of naming and reintegration without (and occasionally in spite of ) institutional mandates. The reliance of the enforcement process on public opinion encouraged a lay culture of branding and counter-branding transgressors, while residents worked through property conflicts and negotiated community standards of acceptable economic behavior. Two parallel systems—one official, sustained by documentation, public ritual, lawyers, and judges, and the other communal and fueled by public networks of surveillance and communication—often worked in tandem to promote the state and communal welfare.89 It is the moments when cooperation dissolved into conflict that offer us insights into the crucial role that an entire community of namers played in early modern law enforcement. However, this is not to say that Weidmann’s case can be reduced to a conflict between educated, official elites and a homogeneous, popular community. Weidmann did not escape the dishonorable label of Verschwender because his neighbors had repudiated elite legal categories. Rather, many of his new neighbors and local officials viewed his previous conviction as an irrelevant judgment from outsiders. Weidmann’s old verdict failed to align with their personal economic priorities and the established social relations of their village. Community coherence, rather than top-down political or jurisdictional mandates, determined the outcome of Weidmann’s dispute. Instead of a two-tiered, hierarchical model of official and unofficial cultures, law enforcement in Weidmann’s case more closely resembles a model of vertical cultural consensus. Enforcing the label of Verschwender worked best when communities united around a vertical system of shared values and reciprocity that forged alliances between state and local officials, members of commercial professions, families, and the larger community. As Weidmann’s neighbors testified, these common values included mutually agreed standards of behavior, such as dutiful household management, fair economic practices, and trustworthy dealings with other members of the community. When a sufficient group of namers within the diverse social hierarchy endorsed a judicial verdict, then the courts had adequate support to enforce the restricted legal status of a spendthrift. Naming not only reconstructed the individual social identities of transgressors, but also did so through a process in which communities rearticulated the norms that informed their own collective identity. Naming, in other words, revealed as much about the namers as it did about the named. Naming in Weidmann’s case underscores the fluidity of social identities. A diverse community scrutinized his conduct, tapped into years of public memory
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for information about his character, and used that information to determine the extent of his social capital and legal status. While communal endorsement was essential for enforcement, names proved unstable. Weidmann’s fellow residents adjusted their appraisal of his status according to fluctuations in public opinion and ten years of communal recollections. His resulting standing in the community, to borrow Fenster and Smail’s fitting words, “was fleeting, aspectual, and notoriously protean; it was a process rather than the fixed, unchanging memory that written records necessarily convey to us.”90 Legal verdicts, sealed in wax and ink, failed to account for the fluid process of identity formation in early modern societies. In a case like Weidmann’s, when public opinion so openly repudiated an official verdict, this dynamic ruptured the alliances among family, state, and community. Through this process, Philipp Hector Weidmann eluded the identity of a dishonored spendthrift and rebuilt his public image. Ashley L. Elrod earned a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and is assistant professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the intersection of legal culture, disability, and household economy in Europe since the sixteenth century, specializing in the southwestern German lands. Her research has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Council for European Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Central European History Society.
Notes I would like to thank Duke University, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Council for European Studies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for supporting this research. Aside from the texts cited below in note 5, legislation consulted for this essay include Der Marg Graffschafft; and “Öffingen und Hofen Vogtordnung,” in Wintterlin, Württembergische, vol. 2, 215. 1. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart [HStAS], C3, Bü. 4088, Acta in Sachen Anwalden Herren Adam Schmidtbergs contra Baruch Juden zu Neuweiler (1595/1596), 4r. 2. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 38r. 3. For an in-depth analysis of these developments, see Elrod, “Waste Not.” 4. See Safley, “Business Failure,” 43. 5. For examples from the Lutheran territorial state of Württemberg, see “Von den unnützen, haußhaltern, prodigis verschwendern und geidern, irer haab und gütter,” in Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 12, 222. For the imperial cities of Esslingen and Nuremberg, see StadtAEssl, Bestand RSU Nr. 80, 24 Jan. 1438; and Reformacion der Statut und Gesetzte. For the Catholic stronghold of Bavaria, see Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, Landrecht, 205, 228. See also Griebl, Die Behandlung; and Sabean, Property, 114, 214–22.
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6. Damhoudere, Patrocinium pupillorum; Chorinsky, Das Vormundschaftsrecht, 361–64; Gallati, Entmündigt, 61–81; Mellyn, Mad Tuscans; Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy, 110–11; and Delaporte, De La Condition, 189–96. 7. For an investigation of interactions between villagers and local and state officials within the broader southwestern region also examined in this essay, see Forster, The CounterReformation. For family and state alliances in spendthrift cases, see “Spending Without Measure,” in Mellyn, Mad Tuscans, 94–127. 8. See Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation; and Shepard, Accounting for Oneself. 9. “Twelve Tables (Table V),” in Johnson et al., Ancient Roman Statutes, 10; and Bowyer, Commentaries, 54–56. 10. For a literary perspective on these developments, see Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch. 11. Leuchte, Das Liegnitzer, 256. 12. StadtAEssl, RSU Nr. 80. 13. Reformacion der Statut und Gesetzte. 14. Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 12, 22. In the 1536 edition of the Landesordnung, the phrase is even more cumbersome: “Those who get drunk on wine in public or gamble in secret, even though they do not have a single penny for their creditors, or they let their wife and children accept charity.” Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 12, 120. 15. Based on a survey of more than two hundred Urfehde (Oaths of Peace), located in the collection HstAS A44, from twenty-three Württemberg administrative districts, primarily from Bietigheim, Bottwar, Brackenheim, Göppingen, Markgröningen, Güglingen, Herrenberg, Kirchheim, Leonberg, Marbach, Neuenstadt, Neuffen, Nürtingen, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Urach, and Vaihingen between 1500 and 1576. 16. Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 12, 222, 782–85. 17. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 103v, 269v. 18. Ibid., 119v, 133r, 137v, 160r, 204v. 19. See, e.g., the analysis of conservative Bavarian policies in Strasser, State of Virginity, 46– 54; and, on the Hohenlohe region in southwest Germany, Robisheaux Rural Society. 20. Weber, Die Reichspolizeiordnungen. 21. Debray, Das Vormundschaftsrecht, 15–26. 22. Leuchte, Das Liegnitzer, 256; StadtAEssl, RSU, Nr. 80; and Reformacion der Statut und Gesetzte, Tit. 18.2, 18.7. 23. For a summary of confessionalization and social discipline literature, see Harrington and Smith, “Confessionalization”; and Hsia, Social Discipline. 24. Brady, German Histories, 21–22; Scribner, Germany, 38–43. For an overview of the transformation of value systems related to this shift in economic policy, see Schulze, “Vom Gemeinnutz.” 25. For an overview of this literature, see Sabean, Property, 88–123; and Harrington, “Hausvater and Landesvater.” For laws against prodigal Hausvater emerging in Catholic legislation as well, such as in the Bavarian Landrecht of 1616, see Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, Landrecht, 205, 228; and Strasser, State of Virginity, 46–54. 26. Strasser, State of Virginity, 49–50. 27. Roper, The Holy Household, 205; Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, 117–22; and Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 99–105. 28. Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 4, 326. 29. In the Württemberg district of Bietigheim, the local sheriff appears to have intiated a large majority of legal complaints against suspected spendthrifts. The ensuing court investigations spanned months, if not years. For example, see the warning officially is-
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31.
32.
33.
34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
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sued by the Bietigheim court to Theiß Hecken for prodigality in September 1554, again in February of the following year, and a final time four years later (StadtABi, Bh, B442, Theiß Hecken [Dienstag nach Matthei 1554, 14 Feb. 1555, 23 Feb. 1559], 229v, 233v, 294v); Lenhart Unfrid was warned for a second time in February 1557 and eventually declared mundtot seven months later (StadtABi, Bh, B442, Lenhart Unfrid [4 Feb. 1557, 30 Aug. 1557], 268v, 275v); and three brothers, Caspar, Marx, and Ulrich Kurzweil, continued to receive warnings on multiple occasions between 1584 and 1591 (StadtABi, Bh, B444, Ulrich Kurzweil [25 May 1581], 102v; B445 Ulrich Kurzweil [25 Apr. 1591], 77v–78r; B444, Caspar Kurzweil [22 Dec. 1584], 167v–168r; B445 Caspar Kurzweil [25 Apr. 1591], 77v–78r; B445, Marx Kurzweil [24 Nov. 1589], 24r). Key word searches of Württemberg’s collections of 7,000 Urfehde, located in the collection HstAS A44, yielded more than two hundred cases of prodigal subjects from twenty-one of Württemberg’s districts between 1473 and 1576. The districts with the most surviving Urfehde for prodigality included Stuttgart (21 percent), Kirchheim (18 percent), and Nürtingen and Vaihingen (10 percent each). “Findbuch A44 Urfehde Einführung,” online version at https://www2.landesarchivbw.de/ofs21/olf/einfueh.php?bestand=3023, accessed 5 March 2017. Since the preservation of early modern documents varied considerably from district to district, prosecution rates gathered in this study are suggestive rather than conclusive. In Württemberg, for instance, problems with transportation and preservation of legal documents resulted in the loss of an unknown number of Urfehden since the sixteenth century. The unknown extent of those losses precludes the possibility of conducting a prosopographical analysis based on frequency or change over time. Brunotte and Weber, Akten des Reichskammergerichts. For an overview of research on the Reichskammergericht, see Fuchs, “The Supreme Court.” Prodigality trials constituted less than 1 percent of the Imperial Chamber Court’s known case record in southwestern Germany in the early modern period. Percentage estimates are based on keyword searches of the catalogue index of 1,200 legal deeds and 6,300 trial dossiers, located in the collection HstAS C3. Two factors to the Court’s case record make it difficult to estimate the total number of prodigality cases appealed to and accepted by the court. First, the Court’s total case record for the empire is massive, numbering at least 73,000 dossiers that are still undergoing inventory. Second, the Court’s records underwent extensive document destruction, particularly in the nineteenth century, that distorted adjudication rates. See, e.g., HStAS, C3, Bü. 3266 Anna Oswald contra Jakob Mayr (1504); HStAS, C3, Bü. 3618, Bartholomäus Roth contra Berach, Jude und Sohn Liebman (1528–30); and HStAS, C3, Bü. 3557, Anna Rosenberger contra Martin und Hans Aschenbrenner et al. (1541–56). StadtABi, Bh, B444, Vogt contra Jörg Franck (18 Dec. 1578), 56r. For partible inheritance in the German southwest, see Sabean, “Devolution of Property,” 115–17; and Hurwich, “Inheritance Practices,” 702. HStAS, C3, Bü. 2530, Martin Michel contra Wyprecht Ziegler, Wolf Michel, Dietrich Haslacher, und Friedrich von der Pfalz (1554–56). HStAS, C3, Bü. 4076, Christoph Schmid contra Bartholomäus Sterr und Bastian Weber (1561–72). Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 4, 287. For a similar policy from 1559 where the Electoral Palatinate denied protections to widows’ dowries and individual property if they had
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43.
44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.
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abetted their husbands’ financial mismanagement, see Churfürstlicher Pfaltz Fürstenthumbs, 46–47. StadtABi, Bh, B444, Peter Zehens weib contra Hans Welzing (12 July 1585), 177v–78r. For similar cases from the eighteenth century, see Sabean, Property, 215. StadtABi, Bh, B444, Hans Welzing, 177v–78r. Wiesner, Women and Gender, 35–41, 133–34. “Des hochloeblichen Stiffts Wuertzburg und Hertzogthums zu Francken Kayserliche Land-Gerichts-Ordnung” (1618), in Ludolf, Collectio Quorundam, 158. See also “Der Stadt Basel Statuta und Gerichtsordnung” (5 June 1719), in Schnell, Rechtsquellen, 866; and Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 4, 326. Württemberg’s spendthrift policy extended the right to accuse spendthrifts to any affected member of an offender’s financial network. For notaries, see the Bietigheim Annalenbücher, StABi Bh B544, 173v. For tavern keepers and the city watch, see the following local watch ordinances: HStAS A206, Bü. 4434, Wachtordnung über den Flecken Beüttelspach, Schondorffer Ambts (1600); and HStAS A282, Bü. 1141, Maßnahmen zur Linderung des Strassenbettels in Stuttgart (1666–94), no. 19. Ogilvie, Küpker, and Maegraith, “Household Debt,” 150–52. In one district of Württemberg, 85–90 percent of residents were still indebted at the time of their deaths. In this regard, public reactions to spendthrifts resembled that of bankrupts in early modern society. Safley, “Business Failure,” 4; and Lindemann, The Merchant Republics, 277–79. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 148–50. See also Panek, “Community, Credit,” 63–64. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 150; and Panek, “Community, Credit,” 64–68. See also StadtAEssl, RSU, Nr. 80; Wintterlin, Württembergische, vol. 2, 653 (“Herrschaft Wiesensteig Vogtgerichtsordnung und Statuten 1587”); and Churfürstlicher Pfaltz Fürstenthumbs, 45–66. Damhoudere, Patrocinium Pupillorum, 48. This sentiment was expressed by Adam Schmiedberg, one of the primary litigants in the Philipp Weidmann trial analyzed in Sections II–III. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 15v. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 292r. Zasius, Nüwe Stattrechten, 44v. Schröer, Institutiones tutorum, Teil III, I. Frage; Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy, 91; and Blumbacher, Libellus de tutelis, 266. The age of full legal majority was twenty-five in imperial law and age twenty-one in Saxon law. Blumbacher shows that precociously mature young adults could petition for early majority. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 17v–18r, 23v, 121v, 137v, 230v. Ibid., 69v. For example, HStAS C3, Bü. 5130, Hans Jakob Garb et al. v. Burkhard Garb the Younger, 1611. See note 33. See, for example, HStAS A44, Bü. 4356, 4357, 4362, 4420. The town court of Stuttgart issued mundtot warnings and sentences combined with curfews, gambling bans, and drinking bans against accused spendthrifts. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 151r. Ibid., 16r, 18v. Ibid., 157r.
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90.
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Ibid., 154r. Ibid., 119v, 137v. Ibid., 26v. Ibid., 17v. Ibid., 150r. Ibid., 120r. Ibid., 25r. Ibid., 32v. Ibid., 76r. Damhoudere, Patrocinium Pupillorum, 35. See also Blumbacher, Libellus de tutelis, 245. Reyscher, Vollständige, vol. 4, 327; and “Des hochloeblichen Stiffts Wuertzburg,” 160. HStAS, C3, Bü 4088, Baruch Juden, 144v–145r, 205r. Ibid., 230v. Ibid., 138r. Ibid., 153r. Ibid., 121v, 149r, 277r. Ibid., 151r, 157r. Only two witnesses recalled Weidmann’s original conviction in Oberbronn in 1587, but both claimed that they had not been in a position to exert control over his dealings. Ibid., 13r. Ibid., 21r, 22r, 25r. Ibid., 38v. Ibid., 21r. Ibid., 25r, 75r. Ibid., 42v. Ibid., 29v. Ibid., 38v. See, esp., Forster, The Counter-Reformation. See, e.g., Lanndtßordnung der Fürstlichen. See Friedman, The Legal System; Muchembled, Popular Culture; and Scribner, “Is a History.” Sociologist Lawrence Friedman’s framework of dual legal cultures reflects similar efforts in the field of cultural history to identify categorization schemas based on elite/ popular, central/marginal, and literate/oral distinctions. Fenster and Smail, Fama, 6.
Bibliography Archival Sources Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (HstAS) A44 A206: Bü. 4434 A282: Bü. 1141 C3: Bü. 2530, 3266, 3557, 3618, 4076, 4088, 4356, 4357, 4362, 4420, 5130 Stadtarchiv Bietigheim-Bissingen (StadtABi) Bh: B442, B444, B445, B544 Stadtarchiv Esslingen (StadtAEssl) Bestand RSU: Nr. 80
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Primary Sources Blumbacher, Christopher. Libellus de tutelis: Vormundschafts-Büchel. Salzburg, 1668. Churfürstlicher Pfaltz Fürstenthumbs in Obern Bayern Landsordnung. Amberg, 1599. Damhoudere, Joost de. Patrocinium pupillorum, minorum atque prodigorum, cupidae Legum, Canonum, Praxisquae, Iuuentuti non tam vtile, quam necessarium. Bruges, 1544. Der MargGraffschafft Baden Statuten vnd Ordenungen in Testamenten/ Erbfällen/ vnd Vormündschafften. Baden, 1511. Grimm, Jacob, und Wilhelm von Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 25 (Leipzig, Germany: 1854–1961). Online version accessed 1 June 2017, http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemma=verschwender. Johnson, Allan Chester, Paul Robinson Coleman-Norton, Frank Card Bourne, eds. Ancient Roman Statutes: Translation, with Introduction, Commentary, Glossary, and Index. Austin, 1961. Lanndtßordnung der Fürstlichen Grafschafft Tirol. Augsburg, 1532. Ludolf, Georg Melchior von, ed. Collectio Quorundam Statutorum Provinciarum et Urbium Germaniae. Cum Praefatione. Wetzlar, 1734. Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria. Landrecht, Policey-, Gerichts-, Malefitz- und andere Ordnungen der Fürstenthumben Obern- und Nidern Bayrn. Munich, 1616. Reformacion der Statut und Gesetzte. Nuremberg, 1484. Reyscher, August Ludwig, ed. Vollständige, historisch und kritisch bearbeitete Sammlung der württembergischen Gesetze, 19 vols. Stuttgart, 1828–51. Schnell, Johannes, ed. Rechtsquellen von Basel: Stadt und Land. Erster Theil zweite Hälfte. Basel, 1859. Schröer, Thomas. Institutiones tutorum et curatorum Germanicae, Das ist, Summarischer Deutscher Unterricht, vom Ampt der Vormünder vnd Pflegeväter. In drei Theile verfasset. Leipzig, 1635. Wintterlin, Friedrich, ed. Württembergische ländliche Rechtsquellen, vol. 2: Das Remstal, das Land an mittleren Neckar und die Schwäbische Alb. Stuttgart, 1922. Zasius, Ulrich. Nüwe Stattrechten und Statuten der loblichen Statt Fryburg im Pryszgow (1520), edited by Gerhard Köbler. Giessen, 1986.
Secondary Sources Bowyer, George. Commentaries on the Modern Civil. London, 1848. Brady, Thomas A. German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. Cambridge, UK, 2009. Brunotte, Alexander, and Raimund J. Weber, eds. Akten des Reichskammergerichts im Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart: Inventar des Bestands C3, 8 vols. Stuttgart, Germany, 1993– 2008. Chorinsky, Carl. Das Vormundschaftsrecht Niederösterreichs: Vom sechzehnten Jahrhundert bis zum Erscheinen des Josefinischen Gesetzbuches. Vienna, 1878. Debray, Arthur Friedrich. Das Vormundschaftsrecht der Reichspolizeiordnungen von 1548 und 1577. Göttingen, 1899. Delaporte, E.-M. Léonce. De La Condition du Prodigue dans le Droit Romain, le Droit Français. Paris, 1881. Elrod, Ashley Lynn. “Waste Not: Criminalizing Wastefulness in Early Modern Germany.” PhD diss., Duke University, Durham, NC, 2017.
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Fenster, Thelma, and Daniel Lord Smail, eds. Fama: the Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY, 2003. Forster, Marc R. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720. Ithaca, NY, 1992. Friedman, Lawrence. The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective. New York, 1975. Fuchs, Ralf-Peter. “The Supreme Court of the Holy Roman Empire: The State of Research and the Outlook.” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 9–27. Gallati, Mischa. Entmündigt: Vormundschaft in der Stadt Bern, 1920–1950. Zurich, 2015. Griebl, Ludwig. Die Behandlung von Verschwendern und Geisteskranken im frühneuzeitlichen Territorialstaat (1495–1806) . . . im Kurfürstentum Mainz und Herzogtum Württemberg. Hamburg, 2010. Hardwick, Julie. Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France. University Park, PA, 1998. Harrington, Joel F. “Hausvater and Landesvater: Paternalism and Marriage Reform in Sixteenth-Century Germany.” Central European History 25, no. 1 (1992): 52–75. Harrington, Joel F., and Helmut Walser Smith.“Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870.” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101. Hsia, Ronnie. Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750. London, 1989. Hurwich, Judith J. “Inheritance Practices in Early Modern Germany.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 699–718. Leuchte, Hans-Jörg. Das Liegnitzer Stadtrechtsbuch des Nikolaus Wurm: Hintergrund, Überlieferung und Edition eines schlesischen Rechtsdenkmals. Sigmaringen, 1990. Lindemann, Mary. The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648– 1790. New York, 2015. Mellyn, Elizabeth W. Mad Tuscans and Their Families: A History of Mental Disorder in Early Modern Italy. Philadelphia, 2014. Muchembled, Robert. Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750. Baton Rouge, 1985. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York, 1998. Ogilvie, Sheilagh, Markus Küpker, and Janine Maegraith. “Household Debt in Seventeenth-Century Württemberg: Evidence from Personal Inventories.” Journal of Economic History 72, no. 1 (2012): 134–68. Panek, Jennifer. “Community, Credit, and the Prodigal Husband on the Early Modern Stage.” English Literary History 80, no. 1 (2013): 61–92. Robisheaux, Thomas. Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany. New York, 1989. Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1989. Sabean, David Warren. “Devolution of Property in Southwest Germany around 1800: Interhousehold Cooperation and the Distribution of Tools in Germany in the 18th and 19th Centuries.” In Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe, edited by Hannes Grandits and Patrick Heady, 115–124. Münster, 2003. Sabean, David Warren. Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. Cambridge, UK, 1990. Safley, Thomas M. “Business Failure and Civil Scandal in Early Modern Europe.” Business History Review 83 (2009): 35–60.
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Schulze, Winfried. “Vom Gemeinnutz zum Eigennutz: Über den Normenwandel in der ständischen Gesellschaft der frühen Neuzeit.” Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986): 591– 626. Scribner, Bob. “Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 175–91. Scribner, Robert W. ed. Germany: A New Social and Economic History, 1450–1630. London, 1996. Shepard, Alexandra. Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Oxford, 2015. Strasser, Ulrike. State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State. Ann Arbor, MI, 2004. Tlusty, B. Ann. Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany. Charlottesville, VA, 2001. Tolley, Bruce. Pastors and Parishioners in Württemberg during the Late Reformation, 1581– 1621. Stanford, CA, 1995. Weber, Matthias. Die Reichspolizeiordnungen von 1530, 1548, und 1577. Frankfurt, 2002. Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK, 2000.
CHAPTER 10
Confessionisten, Calvinisten, Tibben Nomenclatures of Legal Exclusion in Northwestern Germany, 1535–1650 DAVID M. LUEBKE
T
he Reformations of the sixteenth century generated a rich vocabulary to describe the multitude of new religious groupings it spawned. Polemicists crafted many labels to belittle an opposing group by associating its beliefs with a mere human, an office, or a liturgical practice, robbing their opponents of any lofty claim to universality: to describe someone as lutherisch, as a Papist, or as a Sakramentarier was to suggest that they were less than fully Christian. Not all of the new labels were pejorative, however. As the empire’s governing elites worked through the political implications of religious reform, they forged a vocabulary that avoided derogatory labels and eschewed descriptors that implied the superiority of one party over the other.1 Eventually a few labels morphed from pejoratives into terms of official self-description.2 Despite their differences, these terminologies shared several common premises—the assumption, for example, that doctrinal adhesion defined belonging in one group or the other, that religious labels referred to well-rounded theologies and selfcontained systems of observance, and that relations between these groups were bound to be competitive and antagonistic. Taken together, these terminologies had a logic, a structure. We know far less about the terms that ordinary people used and what they meant in everyday parlance. Did parishioners use the same words that polemicists and governing elites spoke and wrote? If so, did those words mean the same things on the street as they did in palaces and seminaries? Did their vocabularies possess the same logic and structure? Were everyday terminologies even about religious belief, primarily, as opposed to ritual behavior or legal categories?
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It is not difficult to imagine milieus in which vernacular religious vocabularies shared the same logic and structure as those of ruling ecclesiastical and secular elites. One of them was the Westphalian prince-bishopric of Münster in the late seventeenth century, a time and place where ordinary parishioners had adopted a language of religious identity and difference that incorporated the premises of confessional exclusivity and irreconcilable antagonism. But the bulk of this chapter is devoted to an earlier period in that region’s history— the decades between 1535 and 1650, when confessional identities had not yet hardened and boundaries between religious groupings remained porous. This state of affairs prompted Anton Schindling to describe the prince-bishopric and its region as a confessional no-man’s-land, a quadrant of the empire in which no one confession dominated over the others.3 Such indeterminacy at the top made room for freewheeling experimentation at the bottom, in parishes and communes, where priests and parishioners often blended elements of many religious systems freely.4 The language that sixteenth-century Westphalians used to describe religious groups reflected these ambiguous circumstances no less faithfully than did the hard categories that their descendants used in the late seventeenth century and after. To reconstruct its logic, however, we must cast off the freight of assumptions embedded in terminologies that took sharp, all-encompassing confessional differences for granted. As the first part of this chapter shows, such terminologies distorted sixteenth-century realities severely. In the second section I argue that, taken together, the descriptors in common use during the second half of the sixteenth century constituted a semantic system that reflected customs and practices for dealing with religious pluralization in the confessional no-man’s-land. In this system, most terms in use to describe religious belonging were as much legal in nature as theological. In the main, non-pejorative descriptors were reserved specifically for lawful creeds and their adherents. As the third section shows, the legal essence of these terms emerges from shifts in the terms used to describe Reformed Protestants, who, depending on the circumstances, might be derided as Calvinisten or lumped together with lawful Protestants as Confessionisten (adherents of the Augsburg Confession). Pejoratives, in other words, were reserved for groups beyond the legal pale, permitted neither by territorial or imperial law on religion. As a fourth segment shows, this was the domain of Tibben—the derogatory term for Anabaptists—the rhetorically outcast group at whose expense lawfulness was defined.
A Distorting Mirror With few exceptions, the long strand of scholarship on confessional nomenclatures offers little guidance for reconstructing the everyday meanings of reli-
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gious labels. The first historians who concerned themselves with confessional nomenclatures typically approached the topic philologically and sought to trace the earliest origins of later usages. The founder of the field, for example, a mid-nineteenth-century Reformed theologian and church historian named Heinrich Heppe, made his mark by reconstructing the origins of the terms Lutheran and Reformed and their transformation into proper labels for the two main evangelical camps.5 Friedrich Lepp, the great cataloger of confessional labels, adopted a more expansive approach and included every kind of label he could identify, pejoratives as well as terms of self-description. More importantly, Lepp gave no special preference to official nomenclatures but culled terms from every source, among them single-leaf broadsheets, chronicles, and the surviving texts of popular song.6 Yet he took fully formed and totalizing confessional identities for granted and regarded confessional labels solely as verbal precipitates in the Unwetter (great storm) of theological controversy. More-recent scholars fall into a similar rhetorical pattern. Hans-Joachim Diekmannshenke, for instance, analyzed the Schlagwörter (key words) used by so-called radicals in the evangelical movement to distinguish themselves from less thorough-going reformers, such as the soft flesh in Wittenberg.7 The outstanding exception to this pattern is Bent Jörgensen, who has analyzed the confessional lexica deployed at the highest tier of politicking—in the emperor’s pronouncements on religion, in memoranda prepared for deliberations of the imperial diet, and the like.8 As Jörgensen shows, political and military necessities often demanded compromise; to achieve such compromise, the empire’s ruling elites crafted a lexicon that construed the two camps as parties to a legal dispute, neutralizing the question of theological truth in the interest of regulated, mediated cohabitation. By the late seventeenth century the totalizing theological claims embedded in confessionalized terminology had come to dominate the language of religious difference in everyday life in Westphalia, too.9 But to assume that they had always done so would distort the ambiguities of religious identity in the sixteenth century, before fully confessionalized identities had crowded out the alternatives. This preconception was a mistake that late-seventeenth-century Westphalians made about their own ancestors. Consider, for example, a nasty row that erupted in the 1660s over the confessional status of Gemen, a village situated near the Dutch frontier. The parish had only one church, but its flock was confessionally diverse: Protestants outnumbered Catholics, but were divided between self-identified Lutherans and Gereformiert (Reformed or Calvinist) parishioners.10 When the pastor, Johannes Heussler, died in the summer of 1663, his flock divided over the choice of a successor. The Reformed faction— a group of about twenty households—petitioned the parish patron, Countess Isabella of Gemen, to hire a Reformed minister.11 But the Lutheran parishioners opposed the Calvinists’ maneuver vehemently. For more than a century,
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the Lutherans argued, the parish had worshiped according to the Augsburg Confession and not the Reformed creed, which had been forbidden until 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia included it among the lawful forms of Christianity.12 Every pastor appointed to the parish since the 1560s had therefore been a Lutheran clergyman, and not a Calvinist. Not to be outdone, Gemen’s Calvinists brought forward a parade of old-timers who testified that their upbringing in the parish school had been Reformed, not Lutheran.13 One of them, a septuagenarian named Bernd Tenderingh, claimed that when he was a child the pastor taught him religion using the Heidelberg Catechism.14 Only a disciple of John Calvin, his statement implied, would have preferred the Heidelberg Catechism over its Lutheran alternatives. The Calvinist faction used Tenderingh’s memory to prove that the exercise of religion in Gemen had been Reformed, not Lutheran.15 This tale of confessional squabbles is revealing for several reasons. First, it shows that ordinary people were well aware of the great political settlements that governed their religious lives. From the logic and structure of their disagreement, it is clear that both sides sought to enforce a doctrinal and liturgical monopoly over the parish, under the terms set down in the Peace of Westphalia. At issue specifically was the practice of religion in 1624—the annus decretorius or annus normalis (normative year). As is well known, the Peace of Westphalia required the restoration of whatever public or private religion had been exercised on 1 January 1624.16 Both sides, accordingly, sought to establish that theirs had been the public form of observance up to that date. If, for example, it could be proved that the parish used baked bread for the Lord’s Supper, as the Calvinists did, and not unleavened wafers, in the Lutheran manner, then the Peace of Westphalia required a restoration of the Reformed faith as the official exercise of religion. As luck would have it, the Calvinist faction could support their case on the testimony of Dirk Hollendall (aged eighty-three), who recalled that when he was a child only baked bread had been used, “which was cut length-wise and was called ‘church bread.’”17 Second, the story reveals a great deal about the transformation of confessional labels and the meanings that ordinary parishioners attached to them. By 1663, the Lutherans and Calvinists of Gemen had come to experience their differences so intensely that, even though they still shared the same church, the two groups had crafted separate and mutually contradictory narratives of their common past. By 1663, both groups had also adopted confessional labels that in the sixteenth century had been pejorative (e.g., lutherisch) or imprecise (reformirt), reversing by appropriation their negative valence and/or ambiguity. Among polemicists, such appropriations already enjoyed a long history: the earliest uses of the term gut Lutherisch (good Lutheran) as a positive term of self-description, for example, date back to the polemics surrounding the Book of Concord in the late 1570s.18 Back then, as in Gemen during the 1660s, such
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descriptors cast a harsh light on the emerging fissures within the evangelical camp. Applied retrospectively to the fluid religious identities of the sixteenth century, however, these meanings distorted realities profoundly. Much of the debate in Gemen during the 1660s centered on the beliefs and liturgical practices of one Johannes Hammacher, who had served as pastor in Gemen from 1581 until his death in 1613. Each faction claimed him as one of their own, the better to assert the ascendancy of their confession during the annus normalis of 1624. In doing so, their narratives and arguments imposed a degree of confessional coherence on Hammacher’s pastoral practice that it had not possessed in the sixteenth century. According to a biographical sketch by the Lutheran reformer Hermann Hamelmann (1526–95), Hammacher began his long career serving as court chaplain to the nominally Roman Catholic princebishop of Münster, Wilhelm von Ketteler (r. 1553–57), in whose court he “taught and administered the sacraments purely.”19 Like many of his generation, Hammacher had absorbed Erasmian and evangelical doctrines, though without breaking formally with the institutional Catholic Church or violating the canonical ban against clerical marriage. During the 1560s and 1570s, visitors from the bishopric of Münster reported that Hammacher, then a nominally Catholic priest in the village of Angelmodde, had distributed the Eucharistic host “juxta institutum Christi sub utraque speciebus” (in both kinds, according to the institution of Christ) while also striving to retain those elements of the “old” Catholic liturgy that he considered “integra et sana” (sound and whole).20 As the testimonies of Bernd Tenderingh and Dirk Hollendall suggest, Hammacher’s conduct of his clerical office toward the end of his life had taken on Reformed elements. But to characterize him as decidedly Lutheran or Calvinist would sharpen differences that remained blurry to most of his parishioners during his lifetime. It would also exclude from consideration any evidence of Hammacher’s accommodations to the variety of doctrinal inclinations that had already begun to emerge in Gemen. Late-seventeenth-century confessional descriptors could not convey the elasticity of Hammacher’s theological stances, nor could they comprehend the accommodations he had made to the evolving liturgical tastes of his parishioners.
A Legal Yardstick: Heretics and Confessionisten What picture emerges if we strip away such anachronisms and ask instead what labels ordinary, sixteenth-century parishioners used and what meanings they attached to them? To be sure, most sources that might offer a clue are themselves products of top-down pressure to conform in religious doctrine and liturgical practice—administrative orders and correspondence, petitions and
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supplications, the protocols of visitations both episcopal and archidiaconal. In this connection, however, their status as products of power and its exercise are a positive boon, since in the moments of confusion and misunderstanding between the mighty and the weak we can discern the outlines of local discourses, terminologies, and meanings. Consider, for example, a letter written in 1602 by the town council of Ahlen to the Ecclesiastical Council, a board of oversight that Prince-Bishop Ernst of Bavaria had established only a year earlier, to detect and rectify so-called heretical practices among the parish clergy. Ahlen was a walled and privileged town, located about thirty kilometers to the southeast of Münster. For several years running, the Ahlen town council had battled to prevent the dismissal of a schoolmaster named Christopher Wale on the grounds that he was a haereticus (heretic).21 The Ecclesiastical Council used that word to describe anyone who broke with post-Tridentine Catholicism. But members of the Ahlen town council disputed the charge of heresy. To prove their point, the councilors argued that Wale had never used schoolbooks that were “contrary to the Religious Peace.”22 Thanks to an archidiaconal investigation carried out in 1597, several years before the Ecclesiastical Council’s founding, we know that Wale taught from an unimpeachably Lutheran curriculum. On that occasion, Wale had confessed to using suspect schoolbooks, among them the catechisms of Martin Luther and the Rostock theologian David Chyträus, one of Luther’s last students and a coauthor of the Formula of Concord; the Dialogi sacri by the French Reformed theologian and irenicist Sébastien Castellio; as well as the Latin grammar and syntax of Philipp Melanchthon.23 In their defense of Wale to the Ecclesiastical Council, the councilors offered an alternative definition of heresy under imperial law. As a privileged town with membership in the prince-bishopric’s territorial estates, they argued, Ahlen should be at liberty to instruct its children in the doctrines of any lawful religion.24 They wrote, The Religious Peace established in the Holy Empire of the German Nation stipulates explicitly that all conflicts over religion should be set aside completely . . . and should be resolved in all estates [of the realm] by Christian and peaceful means; that for this reason both the Augsburg Confession as well as the Catholic Roman Religion are permitted throughout the whole Empire; and that both should enjoy the safeguard and protection (Schutz und Schirm) of the same Empire, such that no one should injure another in body, honor, or possessions on account of his confession of faith, in order that in this way all suspicion and distrust may be dissipated and that all estates and subjects may live side by side in peace, tranquility, and unity.25
In short, the Ahlen town council defined heresy not by doctrine, but by imperial law as it pertained to the confessions, local customs, and legal classes of ecclesiopolitical subordination.
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What is especially striking about this letter is how closely it hewed to specific articles of the Peace of Augsburg, starting with a reference to Article 13—the extension of the Landfrieden (territorial peace) to conflicts over religion—as well as Article 15, which included the Augsburg Confession among the lawful forms of Christianity. Most significantly, the text alluded to the Declaratio Ferdinandea, the royal codicil to the main treaty, which protected the exercise of the religion of Augsburg in privileged towns and villages under the secular authority of an ecclesiastical prince, such as Prince-Bishop Ernst of Bavaria, the letter’s addressee. At a minimum, this confirms Axel Gotthard’s finding that the Declaratio was by no means forgotten, but rather lived on in the political consciousness of Protestant communities in ecclesiastical territories.26 Throughout the prince-bishopric, indeed, the descriptors for mainstream Protestants in widest usage referred to categories set down in the religious settlement of 1555. They included phrases such as “der augspurgischen confession zugethan” (those inclined toward the Augsburg Confession),27 “außpurgsche confessions verwandten” (adherents of the Augsburg Confession),28 “religionsverwandten” (adherents of the religion),29 or, more rarely, “confessionisten” or “confessionalisten” (Confessionists or Confessionalists).30 Together, these terms described not simply a set of shared beliefs, but also the circle of dissenters whose standing as the peaceable subjects of an officially mono-confessional ecclesiastical territory guaranteed them certain benefits of residence within a parish. Representatives of the craft guilds in Münster, for instance, made this connection explicit in 1607, arguing that, “As in the neighboring princely and ecclesiastical states of Osnabrück, Minden, Hildesheim, and other [territories],” it has been the obligatory custom in Münster “to bury Catholics and adherents of the Augsburg religion indiscriminately in [parish] churchyards and within [parish] churches.” In the capital city only one form of public religious observance was permitted—the Roman Catholic. As the guildsmen stressed, however, adherents of the Augsburg Confession suffered no civic or occupational disability for their adherence to a lawful religion. Thus, as honorable members of the community, they were entitled to a proper burial in one of the city’s parish churchyards. Any violation of these arrangements would constitute an intolerable innovation against ancient custom.31 As for Ahlen, the legal definitions used by the town councilors reflected a complex, confessionally plural system of liturgical accommodation. By the time of Münster’s first diocesan visitation in May 1572, several of Ahlen’s clergy were openly Lutheran, albeit without separating formally from the Roman Catholic church, its hierarchies, or its system of benefices. That year the priest in St. Mary’s parish, Johann Kattenbusch, declared that double communion “according to the institution of Christ” was the only theologically defensible manner of distributing the sacraments and that neither the “Roman pontiff, councils, or the church,” he claimed, had the power to change.32 The ministrations of
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Kattenbusch did not, however, rule out Catholic forms of observance in Ahlen. Several of his fellow clergymen reported that they read the canonical hours, as their office required. All wore the obligatory tonsure. Celebrating the Mass, Kattenbusch and his chaplain chanted in Latin from the choir, to which the congregants responded with singing in the vernacular German. True, Kattenbusch distributed the Eucharist in both kinds, but he insisted that this was already well established local custom long before he had assumed office.33 It was, in short, a hybrid rite that combined Catholic and Lutheran elements, the better to accommodate the liturgical tastes of Ahlen’s confessionally mixed citizenry. From the standpoint of Ahlen’s ruling families, none of it could properly be labeled heretical, because all of the beliefs that Ahlen tolerated were lawful. Furthermore, the town’s hybrid rite enjoyed the imprimatur of tradition and privileges conferred both by imperial law and, so they claimed, by the past prince-bishops of Münster.34 The only beliefs and practices that deserved the label heretic were those that fell outside the terms of legality laid down in the Peace of Augsburg and the Declaratio Ferdinandea. Hybridity, to rephrase their point in modern terms, was the status quo; any change would be an unacceptable innovation.
On the Margins: Calvinisten If vocabularies of religious description were shaped by the Peace of Augsburg, one might ask, where did Calvinists fit? To return, then, to an earlier question: Did the term Augsburg Confession include Protestants who counted themselves as Reformed? If so, for whom? What do ordinary usages tell us about the status of the Reformed creeds? Here is how one Catholic parish priest answered these questions. In January 1575 Wilhelm Brüggemann, a theologically amphibious priest in the town of Bocholt, denounced Johannes Tremonius, a vice-curate serving in the filial chapel in the village of Werth.35 According to Brüggemann, Tremonius had removed the old altar from the chapel and adopted a communion rite that was “in no way . . . consistent with the Augsburg Confession and the Catholic Religion.” Instead, Brüggemann explained, Tremonius was distributing the sacraments from a simple table, in both kinds, the bread in the form of loaf—not “azymo pane . . . as the Catholics and Lutherans [do]”—and the wine from a stoip (plain beaker).36 The implication was clear. As an apparent convert to the Reformed rite, Tremonius had placed himself outside the circle of creeds that were recognized as lawful. In making his case against Tremonius, Brüggemann described lawful Protestants as confessionalithen—the same catch-all term used by the guildmasters of Münster. Like the guildmasters, Brüggemann used it without disapproval. But his usage deliberately excluded the followers of Cal-
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vin, such as Johannes Tremonius and his followers. Brüggenmann’s definition counted only Lutherans as confessionalithen. How representative was the meaning that Brüggemann attached to the Augsburg Confession? Was his exclusion of Reformed practices typical? A controversy in 1584 suggests that his usage was no personal idiosyncrasy. In February of that year, bishopric’s board of secular administrators met to discuss neuerungen (innovations) that had been introduced by a nobleman, Adolf von Wylich, to the parish church in Erle, over which he held patronage rights.37 His introduction of caluinismus in preaching and worship, they noted, violated the Religious Peace, “darinne alle religionen ausserhalb der catholischen und augspurgischen confession verboten” (wherein all religions other than the Catholic and Augsburg confessions are forbidden).38 The nobleman’s error, in other words, had not been to introduce Protestant worship: it had been to introduce a form of religious observance that was inconsistent with the two religions permitted under the “constitution of the Holy Empire.”39 Rarely do the sources assert so clearly the norms and assumptions underlying the language of confessional distinction. Obviously, the councilors believed that the Reformed creed was inconsistent with the Augsburg Confession and therefore classified Calvinism as heretical. They did so on solid legal grounds: in its one and only explicit pronouncement on lawful and forbidden religion, the territorial estates in 1562 had condemned the “grievously intruding sects of the Zwinglian or Calvinist teaching,” banned the circulation of books that advocated such theologies, and forbade anyone to allow the “winckell prediger” (secret preachers) to purvey such false doctrines “in his house.”40 By negative definition, the territorial diet’s resolution also affirmed the lawfulness of the creed of Augsburg. This was the sense in which the prince-bishop’s administrators condemned the “priest” in Erle, Philip Raesfeld, for innovations that “violate and are forbidden under the Religious Peace, the constitution of the Empire, and the resolutions of the territorial Diet promulgated in this prince-bishopric.”41 With all due respect to Brüggemann and the councilors in Münster, we must not assume that ordinary parishioners distinguished sharply between the terms Lutheran and Reformed—terms that they did not use to describe themselves. The Protestants of Bocholt, for example, referred to themselves indiscriminately as euangelisch. In 1611, for example, the “euangelisch” guildmasters of Bocholt claimed that the religious settlement of 1555 had conferred on themselves, as adherents of the Augsburg Confession, “beneficium libertatis conscientiae” (the privilege of freedom of conscience), which entitled them as members of a privileged corporation both to the private exercise of their religion and to attend church services elsewhere, if they so desired.42 For decades many “euangelisch” citizens had been walking out to the “caluinisch” chaplain in Werth; in their own understanding, their (Calvinist) exercise of the Augs-
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burg Confession was a “zugelaßener und bestettiger religion” (permitted and confirmed religion). The “euangelisch” guildmasters also made clear that the Religious Peace must be understood as a reciprocity. If the Protestant citizens accepted a Catholic monopoly over the public exercise of religion within the town walls and allowed Dutch Catholics to visit for worship, the guildmasters argued, they should be granted the same courtesy, “to hear the sermon and Mass outside their places of residence in other localities.”43 It was a reciprocity predicated on a definition of euangelisch that was loose enough to include Calvinists as well as Lutherans. As Irene Dingel and Matthias Pohlig have argued, this elastic concept of the Augsburg Confession in the sixteenth century was not as perverse as it surely seemed to contemporary dogmatists—or, for that matter, to the Lutherans of Gemen, a century later.44 No resolution of the imperial diet stipulated which version of the Augsburg Confession was normative—Philipp Melanchthon’s original or the Variata, a revision also penned by Melanchthon to accommodate differences over sacramental theology. Adherents of the Reformed faith— whose founder, after all, had endorsed the Variata—could and did contend that the Religious Peace embraced their religion as well as the Lutheran. In Gemen, Johannes Hammacher found himself caught in the same definitional gray zone. In 1584 diocesan authorities accused him of preaching Calvinism to visitors from the nearby town of Borken. In Hammacher’s defense, Countess Elisabeth of Gemen asserted her right under “the Holy Empire’s Constitutions, Laws, and Settlements” to install a minister either of the old religion or the “Ausspurgisch confessionn [sic].”45 This, implicitly, was also the position advanced by the Bocholt guildmasters, most of whom by 1611 had shifted toward a more Reformed practice of evangelical faith.46 Their self-definition as euangelisch implied a freedom of conscience under the Religious Peace and assumed that the faith of Augsburg was not confined to orthodox Lutherans, but extended to the followers of Calvin as well.
Categorical Denials: Tibben To sum up the argument thus far: in ordinary usage, confessional descriptors typically referred not solely to systems of belief, but also in the first instance to the legal standing of a particular creed under imperial law in a particular place. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but in fact it left open wide room for ambiguity, accommodation, circumlocution, and tergiversation, as hard-driving reformers liked to call it. On the lawful side of that demarcation were the adherents of catholisch and euangelisch religions. Descriptors for the latter usually referred explicitly to the Augsburgische Confession and, depending on the user, included or excluded the followers of Calvin.
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Beyond that line of demarcation lay the realm of heretics, whom the adherents of lawful creeds described in a manner that affirmed the plurality of lawful religions. Taken together, these usages amounted to a kind of categorical denial—to borrow a phrase from Carina Johnson—a manner of applying strict standards of definitional exclusion that lumped heretics together with paganism and the non-Christian faiths.47 This elision was reflected in the suspicion, widespread during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, that Anabaptist communities were collaborating with the Turks to bring down Christian authorities, and therefore posed as grave a threat to the Holy Roman Empire from within as the Ottomans presented from without.48 In the princebishopric of Münster, until the late sixteenth century, the terms sectisch (sectarian) or ketzerisch (heretical) almost always turn out to refer, on close inspection, to Anabaptists, broadly defined to include Mennonites.49 More than that: Anabaptists were not simply a secte but also were an uproerische secte (rebellious or seditious sect).50 Anabaptists were little more than rebels against lawful religion, “agitators of public unrest,” in the words of an edict promulgated by Duke Johann III of Jülich-Kleve-Berg in 1534, like vagabonds, robbers, and gypsies.51 Adherents of the lawful creeds had several pejoratives term for them. One derogatory label was Mennist (Mennonite), a term that, like the label Caluinist, diminished their faith by identifying it with a merely human founder. Until well into the seventeenth century, the terms Mennist, Mennisten, or more rarely Mennoniten were used to describe the forbidden religion of another.52 A more overtly offensive term for Anabaptists was Tibben, and for their religion, Tibberei.53 The meanings of this term are uncertain, but converge on the age-old conflation of heterodoxy with sexual deviance or passivity. According to the Warendorf archivist, Siegfried Schmieder, a Tibbe was a “she-dog” or “bitch”; in that case, the term Tibberei might translate as “bitchery” or the “bitches’ religion.”54 Nineteenth-century dictionaries of Low German and Westphalian dialects proposed more anodyne meanings and derivations: Tibbe signified Mennonite, specifically, and derived either from the diminutive personal name Tibbke, a mildly demeaning term for housekeeper, or perhaps from tib, a term for female cat.55 The lexicographer of Frisian dialects, Jan ten DoornkaatKoolman, speculated that the word Tibberei referred to the refusal of male Mennonites to bear arms, which in the eyes of their neighbors rendered them weibisch (fearsome and effeminate).56 Whether feline or canine, the term evoked the masculinist suspicions of sexual transgression that were also encapsulated in the double meaning of Ketzer as both heretic and sodomite.57 Rumors of the Anabaptists’ putative depravities remained very much alive throughout the diocese. In January 1592, for example, a family in Warendorf that had long been suspected of crypto-Anabaptism stood accused of hosting a naked dance party for apprentices and journeymen in the wool-making trades.58 Alas, no
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one would say what the dancing had been about, and the Warendorf town council let the matter fizzle out.59 The linguistic habits associated with categorical denial—vagueness about what constituted the in-group, combined with sharp condemnations of those regarded as beyond the pale—pervaded the vocabulary of confessional descriptors that ordinary parishioners used. Until the second decade of the seventeenth century, theologically specific terms such as calvinisch or lutherisch were rarely used. Like the label Tibben, the terms Calvinisten and Lutheraner remained derogatory terms, used only by non-Calvinists or non-Lutherans to describe somebody else. One of the earliest instances of the use of the term calvinismus, for example, comes from 1593, when the parish priest in Wüllen, Werner Kemner, used it to describe alien intruders—in this case, refugees from the Dutch war.60 It was never deployed as a term of self-description, however, and neither was the word Lutheran until the Thirty Years’ War had run its course. Among adherents of the lawful creeds, the everyday language of religion tended to generate a common, negative definition of heresy and equated it with Anabaptism or Tibberei. Even Mennonites paid lip-service to certain aspects of this semantic regime by accepting, tacitly, the charge of heresy while also attempting to displace legality with obedience as the criterion of toleration. In 1612 such groups of self-designated obedient subjects in the towns of Ahaus and Vreden petitioned the newly enthroned prince-bishop, Ferdinand I, pleading for relief from the persecutions they had suffered under his uncle and predecessor, Ernst. These so-called resident citizens repudiated all gemeinschafft (association) with the “widertaufferscher verdambter lehr” (damnable Anabaptist teaching) of the “münsterische secterie” (Münster sectarians)—a reference to the militant radicals who had seized control of the capital city in 1534 and 1535. Without giving themselves a label, the “obedient subjects” of Ahaus and Vreden protested that they had at all times pledged themselves to remain subordinate “with body, goods, and blood” to the prince-bishop’s authority as a secular, territorial prince.61 Having broken no laws save those that constrained conscience, they argued, Mennonites should be allowed to remain unmolested in their places of residence. This regime of negative definitions began to change after 1600, when Prince-Bishop Ernst of Bavaria started pressuring parish clergymen to conform in Catholic doctrine and observance. Prince-Bishop Ernst and his successors rejected out of hand the proposition that the territory could contain more than one lawful form of Christian worship and recognized only one lawful form of worship: the Roman Catholic. His instrument was the Ecclesiastical Council, which eventually interviewed 270 priests, vicars, sacristans, and schoolmasters, many of them more than once. This linguistic shift was gradually absorbed into the language of confessional relations. In the first decade of
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the seventeenth century, diocesan officials began using the term haereticus and its adjectival forms more broadly, to include all non-Catholic forms of Christianity, and not just Anabaptism. They also began attaching a new adjectival phrase to Catholicism, which described it as the religion that alone is true and sanctifying—“wahr und allein-seligmachend”—as in the “true-and-uniquelysanctifying Catholic religion.”62 Understood in its proper context, this phrase did far more than assert Catholicism’s monopoly over access to salvation. It also negated the open-ended terminologies of legal definition that had prevailed until the end of the sixteenth century. By constricting the circle of inclusion to confessing Catholics, it reorganized categorical denial around doctrinal criteria. This tendency was captured in new labels that lumped the faithless into a single category. In addition to confessionally specific labels such as “Lutheran” and “Calvinist,” diocesan authorities started started to write and speak of “acatholici” (non-Catholics) or of “uncatholischer Religion zugethane” (persons inclined toward a nonCatholic religion)—blanket terms that covered any and all who did not confess their sins to a Catholic priest and receive communion in the Catholic rite.63 Beginning in 1623, anyone who fit that description was eligible for expulsion from the prince-bishopric.64 The definition of heresy had expanded from a synonym for Anabaptism to embrace all the evangelical creeds; the definition of lawful religion had shrunk to contain only confessing Roman Catholics. It is a measure of how far the ground had shifted that by the 1660s evangelicals had adopted former terms of opprobrium to describe themselves.
Conclusion Over the long run the story of confessional nomenclatures in the prince-bishopric of Münster was one of acculturation and the assimilation of everyday parlance to the concepts that had informed the discourse of confessional polemicists since the early days of the religious controversy. It would be mistaken, however, to deduce from this a two cultures model of religious culture. On the contrary, the everyday language of these sixteenth-century Westphalians reveals how well aware they were of the religious controversy and of the imperial settlements that had been crafted to blunt its edges. Indeed, the structure of that vocabulary resembles nothing so strongly as that lexicon of confessional descriptors, crafted by politicians and jurists at assemblies of the imperial diet, to facilitate the regulated coexistence of the empire’s two lawful religions. In Westphalia, as at sessions of the imperial diet, that vocabulary eschewed terms that asserted claims to theological truth, avoided words like caluinisch and lutherisch that denigrated any lawful confession, and favored labels such confessionisten and religionsverwandte (religious adherents) that neutralized doctrinal
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conflict. The adherents of lawful religions reserved the term Ketzerei (heresy) and its associated pejoratives (secterie, Tibben, Tibberei) for that complex of doctrines and practices loosely associated with the illegal and with so-called damnable Anabaptist teaching. To make the point another way: subjects of the prince-bishopric of Münster crafted a political and legal vocabulary that facilitated peaceable cohabitation; they also rejected another lexicon that made cohabitation more difficult to maintain. To theologians and polemicists on both sides of the confessional divide, this smacked of error and tergiversation. On the Catholic side, the prince-bishopric of Münster harbored its own, vociferous critic of confessional accommodation in the person of Jesuit Petrus Michaelis Brillmacher, author of the Evidiotheca, a copious polemic against so-called Protestant heresy in general and against the toleration of dissenting minorities in particular. In his opinion, to cede any freedom of worship to heretics, public or private, would “transform . . . the house of God into an unclean domicile / [and] the school of truth into Babylon and a workshop of lies / in which no one understands the other / [and] no peace or unity or love can be found / because one is Lutheran / the other Calvinist / the third Anabaptist / the fourth a Schwenckfelder, etc.”65 As for Protestant dogmatists, the bishopric’s system of confessional labels must have smacked of Nicodemism—betraying the true faith by conforming outwardly to the liturgical demands of false religion.66 Few topics agitated Protestant divines more. In 1545 a letter to Luther, Calvin expressed his horror at those who had “been brought out from the darkness of the Papacy to the soundness of the faith, [but] had altered nothing as to their public profession, and that continued to defile themselves with the sacrilegious worship of the Papists, as if they had never tasted true doctrine.”67 Calvin’s outrage arose from the assumption that public religious practices should flow smoothly from first principles.68 The target of Calvin’s ire was dissimulation: not the fear of confessing one’s faith openly, but the habit of deliberately obscuring one’s beliefs, whether to avoid conflict or simply to get along with one’s neighbors. Calvin’s critique was accurate: such “tergiversation” was essential to the region’s system of religious descriptors. But his critique also missed the point. In the prince-bishopric of Münster, at least, popular vocabularies aligned more closely with concerns that governed the negotiation of religious differences in imperial law and politics—the need to restore injured parties to wholeness, to prevent violent confrontation, and so on. For them, the ambiguities embedded in religious descriptors served a useful purpose—keeping to a minimum the disruptive potential of religious disagreements, facilitating peaceable coexistence, even upholding a kind of religious pluralism. For them, these meanings expressed a religious regime that blunted religious conflict by honoring hierarchies and accommodating differences.69 The prince-bishop’s subjects had
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chosen a political and legal vocabulary. They knew well enough to keep hidden that which needed concealing. David M. Luebke is professor of history at the University of Oregon whose work focuses on the religious and political cultures of central Europe during the early modern centuries. His many books, edited volumes, and articles include Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (2016), Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517– 2017 (2017), and “Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation” (Archive for Reformation History, 2010).
Notes 1. Jörgensen, Konfessionelle Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen. 2. For discussion of this theme in a foundational work, see Heppe, Ursprung und Geschichte. 3. Schindling, “Konfessionalisierung,” 24–28. The phrase konfessionelle Niemandsländer (confessional no-man’s-land) was coined by Press; see “Adel im Reich,” 28. On the legacy of Press’s concept, see Ninness, “Im konfessionellen Niemandsland.” 4. See examples from the prince-bishopric of Osnabrück in Westphal, “Konfessionelle Indifferenz.” 5. Heppe, Ursprung und Geschichte. 6. Lepp, Schlagwörter des Reformationszeitalters. 7. Diekmannshenke, Schlagwörter der Radikalen. 8. Jörgensen, Konfessionelle Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen. 9. See Holzem, Religion und Lebensformen. 10. Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen [LAV NRW W], Herrschaft Gemen 29848, Gemeinde (Petition of the Reformed Community) in Gemen to the Count of Schaumburg-Gemen, 25 July 1664. 11. Ibid., Petition of the Reformed in Gemen, 1663. 12. LAV NRW W, Herrschaft Gemen A 29827, 4r–v, “Supplication der lutherischen religions verwandten anno 1663 auf der reformirten ergangene supplication, wie dieselbe nach absterben weil[and] pastoris Honselers exercitium praetendirt,” 29 July 1663. 13. LAV NRW W, Herrschaft Gemen A 29848, Attestation of Dirk Hollendal, aged eighty-three, et al., 21 Sept. 1666. 14. Ibid., Attestation of Bernd Tenderingh, aged seventy, 21 Sept. 1666. 15. Ibid., “Verschiedene Attestata das der Heidelbergische Cathechismus ab ao 1615 bis 1625 gelert und der prediger Reformirt gewesen.” 16. Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis, 24 October 1648, Article 5, § 2. For the full text of the treaty, see Buschmann, Kaiser und Reich, 2: 11–106. 17. Ibid., Attestation of Hollendall. See also ibid., Attestation of Christoffel Mentropff, aged eighty-eight, 3 Aug. 1666. 18. On the earliest uses of lutherisch and reformirt, see Heppe, Ursprung und Geschichte, 4, 12. 19. For biographical sketches of Johannes Hammacher, see Hamelmann, Opera Genealogico-Historica, 1302, 1312; and Kubisch, “Versuch einer Geschichte,” 30–32. Hamel-
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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
28.
29.
30.
31. 32.
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mann’s observations on Hammacher were contained in an addendum to his twovolume Hamelmann, Historiae Ecclesiasticae, which was not published until the massive 1711 compilation of historical and genealogical treatises. Schwarz, Akten der Visitation, 136–37. In the judgment of the Ecclesiastical Council, Wale’s testimony was “perversum haereticum se declaravit.” See Immenkötter, ed., Protokolle des Geistlichen, 114. Bistumsarchiv Münster [BAM], Domarchiv XVIII A 1, “Communio seu administratio sacramenti Eucharistiae sub utraque specie in Ahaus et Ahlen, querelae ex parte magistratu ibidem super denegationem,” c. 1602. BAM, Generalvikariat Ahlen Alte Pfarre A 36, Interrogation of Christopher Wale, 22 Sept. 1597. BAM, Domarchiv XVIII A 1, 7r–12v, mayor and council of Ahlen to Bishop Ernst, 1 Dec. 1602. Ibid. Gotthard, Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 249–50, 267–71. LAV NRW W, Herrschaft Gemen A 29827, 4r–v, “Supplication der lutherischen religions verwandten anno 1663 auf der reformirten ergangene supplication, wie dieselbe nach absterben weil[and] pastoris Honselers exercitium praetendirt,” 29 July 1663. BAM, Generalvikariat Drensteinfurt A 10, no. 55–10, “Johan von der Reck zu Drensteinfurt laßet appellation insinuiren auf abgangenes mandat wegen abschaffungh des daselbst priuirten pastors,” [8 June 1607]; and LAV NRW W, Herrschaft Werth 499, “Articuli novitiis pastoribus lutheranis ante confirmationem sub scribendi” (ca. 1617). Stadtarchiv Münster [StadtAM], Ratsarchiv II 20, vol. 20, “Protocollum was sowoll bey völligen und gmeinen rhatsversamblugen . . . vorgetragen,” 102r–103r, 16 July 1607; StadtAM, Ratsarchiv II 5a, vol. 2, “Allerunderthänigster Gegenbericht loco execeptionum sub- et obretpionis cum annexa petitione Bürgermeister und Rhat der Statt Münster in Westphalen . . . beclagten in sachen . . . Hern Ernsten . . . Administratorn des stifft Münster clegern contra Statt Münster in Westphalen,” 2 Oct. 1607; and LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Regierungsprotokolle 12, 158v–165v, “Clagt etlicher [der] Rittersch[aft],” 21 Nov. 1608. For examples, see LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Landesarchiv 2a 16, Bd. 1, 36r–40v, “Protocollum Dieterich Seueckers Begräbnuß betr[effend],” 5 March 1597; StadtAM, A II 20, vol. 20, “Protocollum ws sowoll bey völligen und gmeinen rhatsversamblugen, als auch vor und durch die auß mittel eines ernvesten wollweisen rhats dieser löblichen Statt Münster in Westphalen uff der Statt Schreiberey und sonsten vor der statt wagen deputirt und erschienen Bürgermeister unnd Ampthere in rhats, Statt und Partheyen sachen vorgetragen,” 6 Apr. 1607, 59r; ibid., “Protocollum ws sowoll bey völligen und gmeinen rhatsversamblugen, als auch vor und durch die auß mittel eines ernvesten wollweisen rhats dieser löblichen Statt Münster in Westphalen uff der Statt Schreiberey und sonsten vor der statt wagen deputirt und erschienen Bürgermeister unnd Ampthere in rhats, Statt und Partheyen sachen vorgetragen,” 13 July 1607, 100r–101v; and LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Domkapitel, Archidiakonate A 46, Wilhelm Bruggemann Pastor to Goddert von Raesfeld, Archidiacon, 25 Jan. 1575. StadtAM, Ratsarchiv II 5a, vol. 2, “Allerunderthänigster Gegenbericht . . . ,” 2 Oct. 1607. Schwarz, Akten der Visitation, 175–79.
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33. Ibid., 178. 34. Ibid., 177. For this practice, the schoolmaster in Ahlen claimed to have permission from the reigning prince, Bishop Johann von Hoya. 35. The identification comes from Teschenmacher, Annales Ecclesiastici, 81. Judging by his Latinate surname, Tremonius hailed from Dortmund (or Tremonium). 36. LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Domarchiv, Archidiakonate A 46, Wilhelm Brüggemann to Gottfried von Raesfeld, 25 Jan. 1575. 37. See Gillner, Freie Herren, 124–31. Exactly when Adolf von Wylich introduced new teachings is unknown. According to a parish chronicle, the priest in 1540s had been semi-catholicus (half-Catholic). The diocesan visitation of 1571 noted that the so-called priest, Philip Raesfeld, administered the sacraments in a Protestant manner. 38. BAM, Generalvikariat Erle A 4, no. 34–56, “Prothocoll am 29 February Anno 84 gehalten.” 39. Ibid., Münsterische Heimgelassene Räte [MHR] to Adolf von Wylich, 10 Feb. 1584. 40. LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Landtagsprotokolle 1 (1535–99), 166r–169v, Landtagsrezess, 24 June 1562. 41. BAM Generalvikariat Erle A 4, no. 34–9, MHR to Adolf von Wylich, 10 Feb. 1584. See also LAV NRW W, Stadt Borken A 1a, 10r–11v, Mayor and Council of Borken to Prince-Bishop Wilhelm, 7 Nov. 1584. 42. LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Landesarchiv, 2a/16, vol. 5, 38r–40v, Guilds of Bocholt to MHR, 5 Dec. 1611. 43. Ibid. “So dan auch weilandt der hochlöblichster keyser Carolus der funffter, christmilten andenckens, auff underthenigst ansuchen der catholischen, alß deroselben euangelische obrigkeit sie sub poena inhibiren, und coërciren wollen, ne alibi caeremoniis antiquae religoinis catholicae intereßent, solchs an den euangelischen stenden improbirt, und die behinderungh der catholischen außerhalb ihren stät und flecken ahn anderen ortteren die predig und meß zuhören bei den in anno 1530 zu Augsburg aufgerichteten reichs abescheidt, in § Item etliche Obrigkeit p interdicirt und das auß heimisch exercitium den catholicis frei und und [sic] unbehindert zugestatten, allergnedigst verordnet.” 44. See Dingel, “Augsburger Religionsfrieden”; and Pohlig, “Wahrheit als Lüge.” 45. LAV NRW W, Herrschaft Gemen 29848, Gräfin Elisabeth von Schaumburg to Bishop Johann Wilhelm Herzog von Kleve und Berg, 3 Oct. 1584. 46. BAM, Generalvikariat Bocholt St Georg A 11, Domdechant Arnold von Büren to MHR, 29 Oct. 1612. 47. I borrow the phrase from Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy; and Johnson, “Idolatrous Cultures.” 48. See, most recently, Laubach, “‘. . . kain oberkait.’” 49. Schraepler, Rechtliche Behandlung, 12–25. 50. Among the many examples of this linkage, see LAV NRW W, Fürstentum Münster, Domkapitel A 2247, “Diese seien die anwesende moitwillige uproerysche” [c. 1564]. 51. See Ehrenpreis, “Obrigkeit, Konfessionen,” 127–28. 52. Thus Tönnies Frielinck referred to his own son-in-law as the adherent of the “verbottener mennistischen religion”; LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Landesarchiv 518/519, vol. XIa, 354r–v, Petition of Tönnies Frielinck to Prince-Bishop Ferdinand,18 Sept. 1612. 53. Kreisarchiv Warendorf [KAW], Stadt Warendorf A 100, 8r–11v, 18 March 1605. The use of this pejorative was general and transconfessional; for an example from the
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54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.
63.
64.
65. 66. 67. 68. 69.
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westernmost reaches of the diocese, see BAM, Generalvikariat Vreden St Georg A 2, “Befehl an die Beampten zu Ahaus,” 2 Jan. 1591. Schmieder, Ratsprotokolle, 112, n1. See also Art, “Teve, f. Hündin, canicula,” in Schiller and Lübben, Mittelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 4, 537. See, e.g., Molema, Wörterbuch der Groningenschen Mundart, 419. Koolman, Wörterbuch der ostrfriesischen Sprache, vol. 3, 408. See Puff, Sodomy, 13–14, 23–24, 42. KAW, Stadt Warendorf A 90, 3r–v, “Inquisitio eines ungepurlichen danzens,” 24 Jan. 1592. Ibid., 4v–5r, 31 Jan. 1592. LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Domkapitel A 1773, “Bericht des Werner Kemner, Pastor, über die Religionsverhältnisse in Wüllen,” 14 Feb. 1593. LAV NRW W, Fürstbistum Münster, Landesarchiv 518/519, vol. XI, 289r–291r, “Eingeseßene bürger zu Vreden” and “Burgere zu Ahaus” to Prince-Bishop Ferdinand, 22 July 1612. See, e.g., BAM, Generalvikariat Bocholt St Georg A 11, Arnold von Büren to MHR, 29 Oct. 1612; BAM, Generalvikariat Altes Archiv I A 4a–1, “Edikt der Münsterischen Heimgelassenen Räte zur Durchführung des Kirchengebotes der österlichen Zeit,” 30 March 1626. For the term “acatholici” and its variants, see, e.g., BAM, Generalvikariat II 1 37, Status spiritualis et religionis ciuitatum diocaesis Monasterien. [1620]; BAM, Generalvikariat Vreden St Georg A 3, no. 2, Status acatholicorum in Vreden [1624]; and BAM, Domarchiv II A 7, Materia continet mandatum Sermi Principis Ferdinandi puncto Emigrationis Acatholicorum ex Dioces. Mons. Varias difficultates, scripta et rescripta desuper circa annum 1626; for the expression “uncatholischer Religion zugethane,” see BAM, Generalvikariat Verstreutes A 10, Interragoria proposita D. Temmonis Vreden Vicario seu officiani Altaris S. Annae, Warendorf, 30–31 Aug. 1626. Expulsions in the new mode began in 1623, although a formal decree to that effect was not issued until November 1624. For the edict, see LAV NRW W, Fürstentum Münster, Edikte B 1, 41, Ferdinand to Petrus Nicolartius, 14 Nov. 1624. On Ferdinand’s expulsion decree and its effects, see Luebke, Hometown Religion, 193–99. Brillmacher, Evidiotheca, 812. See Kaufmann, Ende der Reformation; and Kaufmann, “Our Lord God’s Chancery.” John Calvin to Martin Luther, 21 Jan. 1545, quoted in Eire, “Calvin and Nicodemism,” 45. See also Zagorin, Ways of Lying. See Friedrich, “Orthodoxy and Variation.” The city council of Münster made this connection explicit in 1607: StadtAM, Ratsarchiv II 5a, vol. 2, Allerunderthänigster Gegenbericht . . . , 2 Oct. 1607.
Bibliography Archival Sources Bistumsarchiv Münster (BAM) Domarchiv II A 7 Domarchiv XVIII A Generalvikariat II 1 37
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Generalvikariat Ahlen Alte Pfarre A 36 Generalvikariat Altes Archiv I A 4a–1 Generalvikariat Bocholt St Georg A 11 Generalvikariat Drensteinfurt A 10 Generalvikariat Erle A 4 Generalvikariat Verstreutes A 10 Generalvikariat Vreden St Georg A 2; A 3, no. 2 Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen (LAV NRW W) Fürstbistum Münster, Edikte B 1, 41 Fürstbistum Münster, Domkapitel A 1773; A 2247 Fürstbistum Münster, Domkapitel, Archidiakonate A 46 Fürstbistum Münster, Landesarchiv 2a 16, Bd. 1; 2a/16, vol. 5; 518/519, vol. XI; 518/519, vol. XIa Fürstbistum Münster, Landtagsprotokolle 1 (1535–99) Fürstbistum Münster, Regierungsprotokolle 12 Herrschaft Gemen 29848, Herrschaft Gemen A 29827 Herrschaft Werth 499 Stadt Borken A 1a Stadtarchiv Münster (StadtAM) Ratsarchiv II 20, vol. 20 Ratsarchiv II 5a, vol. 2 Kreisarchiv Warendorf (KAW) Stadt Warendorf A 90 Stadt Warendorf A 100
Primary Sources Brillmacher, Petrus Michaelis S. J. Evidiotheca: Brillenkästlein, Das ist, Ein Newes sehr nützlichs Büchlein, in welchem an statt vieler Bücher . . . weit vnd nahe sehenden Brillen zu sehen geben wirdt. Münster, 1593. Buschmann, Arno. Kaiser und Reich: Klassische Texte und Dokumente zur Verfassungsgeschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation vom Beginn des 12. Jahrhunderts bis zum Jahre 1806. Munich, 1984. Hamelmann, Hermann. Opera Genealogico-Historica de Westphalia & Saxonia Inferiori. Lemgo, 1711. Immenkötter, Herbert, ed. Protokolle des Geistlichen Rates in Münster (1601–1612). Münster, 1972. Schmieder, Siegfried, ed. Die Ratsprotokolle und Kämmereirechnungen der Stadt Warendorf, 1601–1618. Warendorf, 1995. Schwarz, Wilhelm E. ed. Die Akten der Visitation des Bistums Münster aus der Zeit Johanns von Hoya (1571–1573). Münster, 1913. Teschemacher, Werner. Annales Ecclesiastici [1623]. Düsseldorf, 1962.
Secondary Sources Diekmannshenke, Hans-Joachim. Die Schlagwörter der Radikalen der Reformationszeit (1520–1536): Spuren utopischen Bewußtseins. Frankfurt, 1994.
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Dingel, Irene “Augsburger Religionsfrieden und ‘Augsburger Konfessionsverwandschaft’: Konfessionelle Lesearten.” In Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden 1555, edited by Heinz Schilling and Heribert Smolinky, 157–76. Münster, 2007. Ehrenpreis, Stefan. “Obrigkeit, Konfessionen und Täufer im Herzogtum Berg.” In Drei Konfessionen in einer Region: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konfessionalisierung im Herzogtum Berg vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Burkhard Dietz and Stefan Ehrenpreis, 113–52. Cologne, 1999. Eire, Carlos M. N. “Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal.” Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (1979): 45–69. Friedrich, Markus. “Orthodoxy and Variation: The Role of Adiaphorism in Early Modern Protestantism.” In Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and Creativity, 1500–1750, edited by Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen, 45–68. Leiden, 2007. Gillner, Bastian. Freie Herren—Freie Religion: Der Adel des Oberstifts Münster zwischen konfessionellem Konflikt und staatlicher Verdichtung 1500 bis 1700. Münster, 2011. Gotthard, Axel. Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden. Münster, 2004. Heppe, Heinrich. Ursprung und Geschichte der Bezeichnungen ‘reformirte’ und ‘lutherische’ Kirche. Gotha, 1859. Holzem, Andreas. Religion und Lebensformen: Katholische Konfessionalisierung im Sendgericht des Fürstbistums Münster, 1570–1800. Paderborn, 2000. Johnson, Carina L. Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Aztecs. Cambridge, UK, 2011. Johnson, Carina L. “Idolatrous Cultures and the Practice of Religion.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 597–621. Jörgensen, Bent. Konfessionelle Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen: Zur Terminologie der Religionsparteien im 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 2014. Kaufmann, Thomas. “‘Our Lord God’s Chancery’ in Magdeburg and Its Fight against the Interim.” Church History 734 (2004): 566–85. Kaufmann, Thomas. Das Ende der Reformation: Magdeburgs “Herrgotts Kanzlei” (1548– 1551/2). Tübingen, 2003. Koolman, J. ten Doornkaat. Wörterbuch der ostrfriesischen Sprache, etymologisch bearbeitet, 3 vols. Norden, 1884. Kubisch, Ernst. “Versuch einer Geschichte der lutherischen Gemeinde zu Gemen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Protestantismus im Münsterlande.” Westfalische Zeitschrift 64 (1906): 23–78. Laubach, Ernst. “ ‘. . . kain oberkait zu erkhennen und sich dem Turkhen anhengig zu machen . . . .’: Zu einer Stigmatisierung der Täufer im 16. Jahrhundert.” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 37 (2010): 411–39. Lepp, Friedrich. Schlagwörter des Reformationszeitalters. Leipzig, 1908. Luebke, David M. Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia. Charlottesville, VA, 2016. Molema, Helmer. Wörterbuch der Groningenschen Mundart im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Norden, 1888. Ninness, Richard J. “Im konfessionellen Niemandsland: Neue Forschungsansätze zur Geschichte der Reichsritterschaft zwischen Reformation und Dreißigjährigem Krieg: Das Vermächtnis von Volker Press.” Historisches Jahrbuch 134 (2014): 142–64. Pohlig, Matthias. “Wahrheit als Lüge—oder: Schloss der Augsburger Religionsfrieden den Calvinismus aus?.” In Konfessionelle Ambiguität: Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als re-
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ligiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Andreas Pietsch and Barbara StollbergRilinger, 142–69. Gütersloh, 2013. Press, Volker. “Adel im Reich um 1600.” In Spezialforschung und ‘Gesamtgeschichte’: Beispiele und Methodenfragen zur Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Grete Klingenstein and Heinrich Lutz, 15–47. Munich, 1982. Puff, Helmut. Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600. Chicago, 2003. Schiller, Karl, and August Lübben, eds. Mittelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch, 6 vols. Bremen, 1875–81. Schindling, Anton. “Konfessionalisierung und Grenzen von Konfessionalisierbarkeit.” In Territorien des Reiches im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung, vol. 7, edited by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, 7, 9–44. Münster, 1997. Schraepler, Horst. Die rechtliche Behandlung der Täufer in der deutschen Schweiz, Südwestdeutschland und Hessen, 1525–1618. Tübingen, 1957. Westphal, Siegrid. “Konfessionelle Indifferenz oder politische Strategie? Die Osnabrücker Fürstbischöfe in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts.” In Miteinander leben? Reformation und Konfession im Fürstbistum Osnabrück, 1500 bis 1700, edited by Susanne Tauss and Ulrich Winzer, 99–110. Osnabrück, 2017. Zagorin, Perez. Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA, 1990.
AFTERWORD
Names All the Way Down
Naming Practices in Early Modern Germany and Early Modern Historiography RANDOLPH C. HEAD
I
n his opening reflection to this volume, Joel Harrington observes that “the human tendency to experience and understand the world through names is an epistemological imperative as old and universal as language itself.” What kind of history can we imagine for imperatives as old as humanity, as universal as language? The preceding chapters demonstrate that there are many answers to this question, each delicately balancing tensions between the particular and the general, between historical evidence and the historians who observe it, and ultimately between the past and the present. In doing so, the chapters help us understand, as well, how humanistic and historically framed analysis can provide insight—as it must to fulfill its ambitions—not only into the specific circumstances of an identifiable past, but also into the constraints and affordances that human naming more generally, with its associated dimensions of identification, specification, differentiation, and branding, establishes for the diverse societies we study. The research presented here thus reveals the challenges and some rewards of analyzing the past through the evidence that naming provides. Before reflecting on the specific contributions found in this volume, therefore, a few words on the implications of studying names and naming are necessary. While the full philosophical implications of naming are far beyond the scope of this afterword, two aspects of naming resonate particularly strongly with perennial predicaments of research in the historical humanities: the scholarly reflexivity that is unavoidable when we study past societies, and the way that humanistic research valorizes the particular in order to understand the general.
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Let me start with the role of the particular in the humanities. Historical scholarship is defined, in part, by its fundamental concentration on particular actors in particular contexts. Whether investigating literary production, musical artistry, visual cultures, or the flow of events as conceptualized in narratives, historical analysis looks at named persons, identified locations, and definable processes. Establishing such particularity, in turn, depends irreducibly on naming things and concepts. Novartis is not Novalis, and Werth im Münsterland is not Wörth am Main, nor Wörth am Rhein nor even Wörth an der Donau. Without naming its subjects and objects, historical writing could not cleave to the particular as its structure requires. Indeed, our insistence on naming particulars, among other characteristics, helps distinguish the humanities from the hypothesis-driven and generalizing sciences. For the latter, as Max Weber characterized them a century ago, the rejection of particular names is an integral part of their reductionist methodology: names in the sciences are paradigmatically the names of generalizations, not of the particular exemplars that establish or illustrate a general principle. Though natural and social scientists seeking generalizable knowledge rely on names as much as any other human thinkers, the names they foreground in their work are essentially different from the names of persons, places, and things spread through the works of humanists. Where particular names do appear in the sciences (which of course they do), they serve to localize phenomena as exemplars of larger categories, rather than to focus our attention on the specificity of the thing named.1 Historians name their generalizations, too, of course, as did the people they study. Indeed, one way of understanding the fundamental problem that lies behind diverse theories of historicism is to consider what relationship exists between the names for generalizations used by historical actors and the names used by their historians. Can historians understand, and should they rely on categories of generalization established by their historical subjects? Conversely, are the generalizations that historians name, on the basis of their own experience and worlds, legitimately applicable to those who lived in earlier times under very different circumstances? The chapters in this volume provide an opportunity to reflect on these and similar problems—but not as theoretical conundrums, but rather through the practice of historical analysis. Careful discussion of how historical actors used or adopted names for important ideas as well as for people, places, and things—particularly for ideas about religious identity, practices, and communities in the case of early modern Germany— helps us see the tensions that arise as historians discuss such names as mutable historical phenomena themselves. In this year, five hundred years after Martin Luther’s actions triggered the movements we now gather under the name Reformation, it is particularly valuable to be reminded how such incendiary names as Lutheran came into use and changed their meanings, depending on both the
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context and the era, and also on how different users (including historians since at least the seventeenth century) have deployed them for changing purposes. Considering naming practices in the past, therefore, brings up the inevitable reflexivity that historical research involves. Names are themselves part of the scholar’s toolkit; to historicize them by attending to names’ creation, deployment, and modern application therefore casts light not only on our subjects’ practices, but also on our own. Such double implications are one manifestation of the generally reflexive character of historical research: practitioners in all of the historical humanities rely on the evidence produced by humans in the past in order to understand that past. Past humans named things of interest to them, and recorded those names in the evidence that we now read or examine. Our tools for analysis thus rest on the same human achievements of cognition, reason, language—and of naming—that characterized our subjects, introducing an irreducible element of self-reflection into the analysis and narratives that scholars produce. Just as every science—or to use the more capacious German term, every Wissenschaft—necessarily undertakes some examination of its own preconditions and pays some attention to its own categories and cognitive tools, scholars in the historical humanities must also attend to the way their categories (as objects of naming and differentiation) are formed and how they relate to the objects of study involved. A full-scale analysis of historians’ epistemology belongs to the philosophy of science, but practitioners of history must also remain aware of the reflexive implications of our evidence and the way we manage it in our work. The essays collected here respond to the challenges of reflexivity in different ways. Amy Newhouse, for example, demonstrates that even the names of specific hospital buildings in Nuremberg were fluid and subject to immediate concerns. Her work provides a salutary reminder that if we were to assume that actors in the past used place-names in a stable and continuous way, our analysis might come to completely mistaken conclusions. Entirely aside from any issues of how we today work with names from the past, past actors themselves often changed the way they referred to places, people, or events. David Mayes and Birgit Emich, in contrast, each look at modern terms that have become fundamental for historians’ study of early modern Germany—names such as Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics with their Tridentine church—to show that such names emerged and stabilized much later than the phenomena we now name by using them, and were not widely disseminated until late in the seventeenth century. This raises the question whether these terms may mislead us in our efforts to understand what happened in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Historians risk introducing later polemics, even later political identities, or contemporary historians’ preconceptions into the unstable and fluid religious world of the first half of the sixteenth century if they carelessly apply such terms. In different ways, these chapters thus invite us to step back
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and reconsider how we have been using names for things in the past in our own work—which again highlights the unavoidability of reflexivity in our field. A look at the past century’s historiography suggests, however, that the level of self-reflection varies considerably from period to period. At some points— paradigmatically when Leopold von Ranke began his systematic critique of eighteenth-century history writing practices—highly critical reflections on historical methods emerged during major debates over the possibility and methodology of historical writing.2 Ranke’s critique shifted attention from chronicles and similar sources to the administrative sources accumulating in Europe’s state archives since the fifteenth century; subsequent historiographical debates over class, social history, gender history and beyond have similarly included new reflections on how historians deploy both evidence and categories from the past. Most recently, historians’ responses to, appropriations from, and critiques of post-structuralist philosophy have accompanied the emergence of cultural history as a common mode of analysis across multiple historically oriented disciplines. The relative stability of that approach now seems to be giving way, once again, to renewed interest in examining our own practices and reconsidering how we treat evidence, as manifest in the whole series of turns now shaping the humanities. Among recent studies of the senses, knowledge, archives, material culture, and more, this book’s study of naming finds its place in heightening our sensitivity to historical reflexivity. The epistemological and indeed ontological implications of reconsidering naming practices, both in the past we study and in the present within which we work, are thus vast, and cannot be explored further here. Philosophers of science will continue to provide vital impulses about such issues from outside our immediate disciplines. Meanwhile, from within we can look at how selfreflection about naming as a historical phenomenon affects our understanding of one region and cultural zone, namely the early modern German world under the purview of the conference group Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär. The rest of this afterword therefore turns to the chapters in this volume, grouping them in various ways both methodological and substantive to highlight their contributions to ongoing debates both in the field and about historical analysis more broadly.
Approaches to Naming in Early Modern Germany Focusing on the German lands from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the chapters here show names operating in various ways for various users. They can therefore be used to exemplify the fruits of applying the analysis of names to a region characterized by its diversity, conflict, and complexity in the early modern era. Looking broadly, three interlinked and overlapping approaches to
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naming practice predominate in the research presented here. A first approach considers the instability of how places and things were named in a changing world, a second addresses the ways names served as brands that conveyed much more than mere identification, and the third asks how naming—of others and of the self—served to create and sustain identities and their boundaries. Each of these issues will be familiar from other contexts, and each connects to extensive theoretical apparatuses across multiple disciplines. Equally, however, the specificity of the early modern German context creates distinctive resonances, and thus places each of these broad approaches into the context of precise phenomena and the particular, often intensely debated, historical processes that transformed the German lands through the early modern period. The first type of naming—exemplified in Amy Newhouse’s examination of how the buildings of Nuremberg’s plague hospitals were named, and in John Jordan and Gabi Schopf ’s meticulous recording of the names used for diverse textiles in Switzerland—involves the way communities used particular names for certain places or identifiable things. In Nuremberg, as Newhouse points out in chapter 6, place-names combined “the what and the where of something that was to occur.” The hospitals the city built outside its walls, first for plague victims and then for those suffering from syphilis, faced not only varying medical demands and a different pace of epidemic progression, but also unstable associations with particular saints or biblical figures: early references to St. Sebastian, the plague saint, thus yielded after 1500 to the borrowed Venetian term Lazareth, referring to confabulated biblical actors named Lazarus. Later, the term Holzhaus evoked the medicinal guaiac wood used for syphilis treatments, only to yield back to recurrences of the name Sebastian. All the names involved referred to a complex of buildings that itself was repeatedly rebuilt and repurposed over time. The fact that place-names had widely recognized referents thus does not mean that such names were stable, nor that all contemporaries understood them to have the same referents at any given time. No scholar will view early modern place-names as passive identifiers after reflecting on such results. Rapid change in Europe’s commercial and material environment played comparable havoc with the names of products, especially when these were made from extra-European materials. In tracking the many names that Swiss magistrates, merchants, and consumers used for cotton textiles, made from a fiber new to Europeans in the early modern period, John Jordan and Gabi Schopf in chapter 7 show how both global dynamics and local circumstances provoked repeated renamings and diverse appropriations of place, appearance or contents in naming such products. Ranging from Danish transliterations for textile terminology from India—baftas, cassa(s), gorras, guzinas, salempuris, sannas, mamudies, and sirts—to Russian tax categories—Zitz, Kattun, Baumwolle, and Nesseltuch—the authors show that not only specific names, but also
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patterns of naming changed profoundly from the early seventeenth to late eighteenth century. Ultimately, French renderings of an imaginary geography of origin came to predominate among terms for cotton textiles in Switzerland, as these simplified from a long unstable list down to indienne, persienne, calmander, and gingan for fashionable printing styles and weaving types (although the prosaic and misleading Germanic term Baumwolle did survive for humbler weaves). By the late seventeenth century in Bern the authorities even distinguished “between locally printed cotton textiles (indienne) and foreign printed cotton textiles (persienne).” Thus, names themselves could remain in circulation even when their area of reference changed in ways utterly unrelated to each name’s etymology. Fluidity and confusion (intended or not) accompanied the way early modern Germans named the material world they lived in. Naming in this first sense flowed quite naturally into a second sense: naming as branding (in the sense of distinctive marking by names for specific purposes).3 Branding appeared in a very concrete way when terms such as indienne transformed from labels designating a cloth’s origins into brands describing cloth made of certain materials, in certain locations, and decorated in certain ways. In chapter 9 Ashley Elrod takes the notion of branding farther by showing how a term intended to brand an individual with one stigma, spendthrift, depended on information circulating among face-to-face communities as much as on formal designations by courts and by written correspondence and records.4 Early modern German law provided various avenues by which families could have irresponsible members declared as spendthrifts, primarily to ensure that they did not contract away the entire family’s patrimony. As Elrod shows, families were not shy about availing themselves of this protection. Yet as the case of Philipp Hector Weidmann from the Upper Rhine in the late sixteenth century makes visible, such legal branding was far from secure, and was only partially under the control of local magistrates. Weidmann may have been named as a prodigus in the town of Oberbronn after frittering away 3,500 gulden of his inheritance and leaving a trail of debts that his relatives became responsible for, but he was able to elude the consequences. Despite his family’s best efforts to make the entire region aware that Weidmann had been declared incapable of contracting debts or finalizing contracts without his new legal guardian’s approval, Weidmann encountered little difficulty in continuing to take on financial commitments. By moving a few miles, marrying, and establishing new social circles that did not heed stigmatization from outside their own immediate community, he made himself into a new man, losing the brand of the prodigal. Among his new neighbors, “one camp of witnesses insisted that local public opinion played a decisive role in determining the trustworthiness of an individual’s name, independent of institutional court rulings.” Not only the names of places and materials, but even of categories of person rested on “a fluid and collective process of identity formation,” Elrod concludes. Neither
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commercial branding of products nor the stigmatizing legal branding imposed by regional courts was sufficient in early modern Germany to ensure stability in the thing so identified. Branding, in turn, points toward another fundamental characteristic of naming, namely the fact that names create distinction: some things fall under a name, but other things are excluded. In consequence, naming remains a key practice in larger cultural circuits of identity formation and boundary maintenance, phenomena that have been a pressing scholarly concern both in cultural studies and in recent social science. Identity relies in part on the names we use to manifest it: in consequence, the analysis of names is one direct way to study how identities in a society take shape, mutate, and dissolve over time. Many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate that naming in this sense played a major role in early modern German culture, with particular attention to how the landscape of religious self-consciousness was changing. One of the most striking features of the period from the 1520s to the 1650s, after all, was the emergence of distinct confessional identities, coupled with diverse confessional cultures that supplanted the diffuse and internally diverse sense of Christian unity among Latin Christians of the late Middle Ages.5 Other dimensions of identity were in movement in the sixteenth century as well, producing new boundaries along proto-national and even proto-racial lines (see the discussion of Carina Johnson’s contribution, below). The recent five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s first public protest of 1517 has focused scholarly attention on the Reformation and its manifestation in names. Every aspect of the early Reformations has been scrutinized for generations, of course, and characterizing the causes, course, and consequences remains a challenge and site of contention, as much as it ever was. Yet even among the most recent wave of reassessments, most authors have continued to use a familiar quartet of names—Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Radical—to divide the religious landscape that was emerging out of late medieval Latin Christendom.6 Critiquing this practice is a key contribution for several authors in this volume, as discussed below. Their chapters perform a salutary refocusing on the names that both embodied this transformation and provided labels for the generations of historians who have studied it. In chapter 1 Amy Burnett examines the very earliest phase of these new namings in her chapter on “Picards, Karlstadtians, and Oecolampadians,” arguing that the way historians now categorize the early Eucharistic debates among the activist reformers of the 1520s have reduced a complex process into a simple split between two positions, the Lutheran and the Zwinglian. By resetting this debate in an intellectual landscape reaching back well into medieval theology and noting how personal and political dynamics encouraged the consolidation of the more radical sacramentarian view on the Eucharist under a single moniker, Zwinglian, Burnett allows us to see just how fractured both the issues
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and the parties were in the 1520s and 1530s. Burnett’s meticulous analysis leads her to conclude that the emergence of this duality “has as much to do with polemics as it does with theology.” Evangelical defenders of the real presence found Zwingli’s work crude, and they therefore attached his name to the position as a form of condemnation—a common pattern in Reformation polemics into the seventeenth century, nota bene, in which attaching a person’s name to a position devalued it in contrast to the Christian position of the attacker. After Zwingli’s death in 1531, however, his successor Bullinger found it opportune to attribute the emerging Reformed consensus to Zwingli (even while rejecting the name Zwinglian); other Zurich theologians chimed in, characterizing the entire debate as one between two leaders. This consensus, in turn, found its way into scholarly literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Burnett concludes, “Historians have a powerful influence in the naming of movements. The Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper developed out of a complicated cross-fertilization of ideas from a number of sources, but that origin has been obscured by historians’ naming of the movement as Zwinglian.” Birgit Emich focuses in chapter 2 on a comparable trajectory of self-naming by which certain actors in the post-Reformation Roman church appropriated the idea and substance of the Council of Trent in order to postulate a Tridentine church. Here, too, we see a long process in which actors’ and historians’ views intersected or fed into each other. From the beginning of the council of Trent, both supporters and enemies of the old church and its effort to reform itself used the term Tridentine simply because the council had taken place in Trent and issued consequential decrees that clearly related to the ongoing schism of the mid-sixteenth century. But neither Martin Chemnitz’s attacks as a supporter of Luther nor Paolo Sarpi’s critiques as an anti-papal Italian affected the idea of a Tridentine church nearly as much as the papacy’s own official history by Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, which treated the council as a key part of a papal agenda for improvement (even if the popes themselves had been notably absent from Trent). It was thus the papacy itself that placed this council in a special position, a view then amplified by Catholic authors right through Hubert Jedin in 1951 and, in a historiographically critical way, John O’Malley. “Ideas connected to the term Trent served as a founding myth for the Roman Church of the modern age,” Emich concludes, recognizing the power in a name. In a bold analysis in chapter 3, David Mayes applies a parallel perspective to the entire empire. Rejecting the view heard in most classrooms that “Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed populated the territories of the Holy Roman Empire from the later sixteenth century onward,” Mayes insists instead that the empire was populated only with Christians until the Peace of Westphalia transformed such epithets into legal categories in 1648. Epithets, of course, help create identities by drawing boundaries and excluding others: Mayes does not dispute that political divisions resting on exclusive religious identities shaped the history
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of sixteenth-century Germany, nor that terms such as Lutheran and Protestant were used as exclusionary insults. Not until Westphalia, however, whose treaties “compelled each confessional party to concede that the other two parties could also invoke the name Christian,” did this situation change, according to Mayes’s account, with profound consequences for the naming of religious identities. It is not uncommon, perhaps, for epithets to turn into labels of pride in one’s identity—but as Mayes demonstrates, legal and polemical contexts are critical before such a transformation can take place. In chapter 10 David Luebke traces the same transformation in which “labels morphed from pejoratives into terms of official self-description,” but by looking at local practice far from the magistrates’ councils and university polemicists studied by Mayes. Luebke argues not only that the application of confessional names to everyday life “distorted sixteenth-century realities severely,” but also that the way common people talked about religious difference served not to divide, but rather “reflected customs and practices for dealing with religious pluralization.” In keeping with Mayes’s results, Luebke also shows how legal categories and, in particular, the critical establishment of 1624 as a normative year (a specific point in time that had precedential value for controversies after 1648), shaped the terminology used in formal disputes, which were most likely to be transmitted in written sources. By contrasting such contentious labeling with the language found in parishioners’ own discourses, though, Luebke takes us a step further in recognizing not only that confessional epithets were highly dependent on the precise legal and linguistic frameworks in place at any given moment, but also that most Germans understood these rules and were capable of manipulating or eluding them when the situation demanded. Local actors fit hybrid realities into various contentious schemes of naming—whether naming themselves or naming their others—meaning that historians need to apply double caution in how they interpret the use of such names. In chapter 8 Carina Johnson expands the scope of how others were named by interrogating the ways German named, and represented visually, their imagined foes in the Islamic world, manifested on the German lands’ borders by the Ottoman Turks. Johnson draws on a novel source—the plates in various accounts of the outside world and in costume books, on which individual specialist artisans chose how to hand color the skins of people in the printed illustrations—to unpack the multiple layers of meaning in representations of those conceptualized as “Europe’s enemies” in the sixteenth century. Skin color had already been a marker for certain regional identities before the Ottoman advances in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but was also unstable: black Ethiopians contrasted with the tropes of white Moors and black Moors in the Islamic world, and with other regional distinctions, in unsystematic ways distinct from religion. Indeed, for many European in the early sixteenth century, the heterogeneity of the ethnic groups under Ottoman rule—which could be signaled by
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representing them as having different skin colors—was a sign of the empire’s strength, and thus something to be feared. As the sixteenth century progressed, however, racializing representations became more common, with skin color emerging next to costume as a sure marker of alien and hostile identity. The many editions of Nicolas de Nicolay’s Books of Oriental Travel that were hand colored in different shops around Germany document this shift, in which the use of brown-toned coloration increasingly assimilated rather than differentiated individuals from as far apart as Mauretania and Mecca. Although overt racial discourse remained in Europe’s future and grew out of multiple confrontations in Iberia, the Americas, and beyond, one dimension of its foundations appear in these colored prints from sixteenth-century Germany. The complex evolution in naming traced, in part, by the chapters in this volume has profound implications for scholars’ work in this period across the disciplines. Since we depend on historical naming practices even as we also deploy anachronistic distinctions in our analytical scaffolding, the study of how shifting religious movements or identities were named is simultaneously a challenge to our own conceptualizations. These chapters thus make visible a general tension in the historical humanities between historicism and anachronism: as scholars working today, we can neither passively reproduce the distinctions and imputations of past naming, especially when controversy lay behind such practices, nor simply impose our own set of distinctions, categories, and resulting (particular) names.
Closing Reflections Naming, it is clear, is no more a transparent practice, historically and historiographically, than writing, sensing, knowing, making archives, making things, and many other fields of human action that have experienced turns in the scholarship over the past generation. Each of the approaches developed in these chapters, therefore raises questions not only about early modern Germany, but also about how scholars have apprehended Germany and its historical context. Moreover, despite the methodological and conceptual range of the chapters in this book (not all of which could be discussed in this afterword), other approaches to naming as a cultural practice remain to be explored. For example, none of the chapters address baptism or similar phenomena. Baptism, for one, is a particularly visible form of naming, and one that combines identity-formation with another key power of language, namely the performance of speech-acts. In the early modern German world, where giving a name to a person or thing could establish myriad connections or disjunctions, naming was frequently a speech-act with weighty consequences indeed—though the analysis of naming as a speech act will also face the same interpretive tension
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between actors and historians that makes naming such a challenging and productive question in the first place. Much remains to be done, therefore—and the scholars who do it will be able to draw on both methods and conclusions from the pioneering chapters presented here. Randolph C. Head earned degrees at Harvard and the University of Virginia, and is professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons (1996), Jenatsch’s Axe (2008), and A Concise History of Switzerland (2013); a monograph on Making Archives in Early Modern Europe is forthcoming. His research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Newberry Library, and the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.
Notes 1. See Weber, On the Methodology. 2. Leopold von Ranke’s specific critique was appended to his first major work, but then also published separately (see Ranke, Zur kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber). 3. On brands as one material way of identifying individual humans, see Groebner, Who Are You?, esp. Chapter 4. Groebner argues that the etymology of the term branding goes back to marks, often inscribed by fire or hot metal, on specific products made by a particular producer or region, for the purpose of distinguishing them from other similar products. It thus, not coincidentally, shares a history with the modern French term appellation (naming!) d’origine contrôlée. 4. On stigmatization through names, see Bering, Der Name als Stigma. Bering uses an approach founded in linguistics for the way specific names could carry social stigma in a later period of German history. 5. For a plea to abandon the idea of “confessional identity” altogether, see Volkland, “Konfession, Konversion.” The entire course of the discussion is well known and cannot be rehearsed in detail here. The roots of scholarship treating religious division as a matter of emerging identities lay in Ernst Walter Zeeden’s work in the 1960s, which proposed new approaches to confession-formation (Konfessionsbildung). Zeeden’s impulse reached a novel and productive (if problematic) theoretical formulation in the works of Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard under the moniker Konfessionalisierung. More recently, and as a response to certain weaknesses of confessionalization theory, Thomas Kaufmann, Thomas Maissen and others have proposed renewed studies of Konfessionskulturen, in effect reviving and revising questions already adduced by Max Weber a century earlier. The literature on national identity represents another entire field of debate, but one that is not directly addressed by the papers in this volume. 6. Each of these terms already has its own extensive genealogy in earlier scholarship, of course; the chapters in this volume put names themselves in the center of attention, by which means they also contribute to larger historiographical developments that are ongoing.
Afterword
261
Bibliography Bering, Dietz. Der Name als Stigma: Antisemitismus im deutschen Alltag 1812–1933. Stuttgart, 1987. Groebner, Valentin. Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe. New York, 2007. Ranke, Leopold von. Zur kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber: Eine Beylage zu densselben romanischen und germanischen Geschichte. Leipzig, 1824. Volkland, Frauke. “Konfession, Konversion und soziales Drama: Ein Plädoyer für die Ablösung des Paradigmas der ‘konfessionellen Identität.’” In Interkonfessionalität—Transkonfessionalität—binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese, edited by Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann, and Hartmut Lehmann, 91–104. Gütersloh, 2003. Weber, Max. On the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Edited and translated by Edward Shils and Henry Finch. Glencoe, IL, 1949.
INDEX
Accidentien, 112, 115 “Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis,” 49 Adam, 1 Adamites, 17 advertisements, 5, 149, 150, 152, 157 Africa, 5, 179, 182–85, 195 Algeria, 179, 184 Barbary, 183–85 Ethiopia, 183, 258 Libya, 183 North Africa, 173, 179, 183–84, 195 Against the Heavenly Prophets, 24 Against the Impious Error of Master Ulrich Zwingli, 22 Against the New Error Concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, 19 Agricola, Franciscus, 67 Ahaus, 240 Ahlen, 234–36 Alberigo, Giuseppe, 51 Albert II Alcibiades (margrave), 131 Albrecht V of Bavaria (duke), 91–92, 94 Albrecht of Prussia (duke), 90–91 Aldrin, Emila, 7 Alvares, Franciscus, 185 America, 41, 134, 158, 174, 180, 259 Amman, Jost, 180, 182 Amsdorf, Nicolaus von, 19 Anabaptists (Tibben), 6, 24, 29, 66–68, 239–42 Andreä, Jacob, 65, 66, 69 Angelmodde, 233 Answer to Strauss’s Pamphlet, 22 Antichrist, 67, 173 Antwerp, 176, 194 Apology . . . Concerning Christ’s Supper, 23 Apology from Sacred Scripture, 17 Apology of the Augsburg Confession, 63, 65
Aragon, 195 Aristotle, 1, 174 Arius, 26 Armenians, 179 Asia, 5, 178–180, 185 Augsburg, 63, 90, 91, 235, 238 Augsburg Confession, 6, 27, 63–67, 70–72, 74–75, 230, 232, 234–38 Augustine of Hippo, 1, 90 Ave Maria, 92–93 Azamoglan, 179 baptism, 66, 259 barber-surgeon, 133–36 Baroque, 4, 8n20, 55n10, 110, 119–20, 121n5, 122n29, 122n30 Basel, 23, 24, 65, 149–50, 153–55, 157, 194 Bavaria, 91–92, 94 Beck, Georg, 68–69 Becker, Cornelius, 91 “Benedictus Deus,” 47 Bergius, Conrad, 64 Bern, 149–50, 155, 157, 160, 255 Bertelli, Ferdinando, 178 Bèze, Théodore de, 90–91 Bible, 1, 64–66, 69–70, 89, 96 Bien, Hans, 136 Billican, Theobald, 19, 20, 22 bishops, 40–42, 44–46, 48–49, 53 Bocholt, 236–38 Bohemia, 17 Bohemian Brethren, 16, 17 Bonn Songbook, 95 Book of Concord, The, 37, 65, 75, 232 Borromeo, Carlo, 49 Bourdieu, Pierre, 113 Bourgeois, Loys, 90 Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 63
Index
Brenz, Johannes, 18, 20, 23, 29 Breton, Richard, 178 Breydenbach, Bernhard von, 183, 194 Brillmacher, Petrus Michaelis, 242 ( Jesuit) Brüggemann, Wilhelm, 236–37 Brussels, 174 Bucer, Martin, 19, 22–23, 28 Bugenhagen, Johannes, 19–20, 22 Bullinger, Heinrich, 16, 24–25, 27, 30, 257 Ca‘ da Mosto, Alvise, 183 Cairo, 173 Calicut, 195 Calvin, Jean, 63, 66, 88, 90, 242 Calvinist, 4, 6, 25, 29, 64, 66–68, 75, 76, 91, 96–97, 100, 230–33, 236–38, 240–42, 252, 256. See also Reformed Capito, Wolfgang, 18, 19, 28, 30 Casimir (margrave), 131 Castellio, Sébastien, 234 catechism, 44, 69, 96–97, 232, 234 Catholic Church, 44, 47, 51–52, 96 Catholic, 3–4, 6, 20, 22–23, 42, 44–45, 46, 54, 62–65, 70–77, 87–88, 91–94, 97, 99–100 Catholic Reformation (see Counter-Reformation) Catholicism, 3, 40–42, 44, 46, 96 definition of, 63–65, 71 Roman Catholic, 40, 74–75, 234, 240–41 Roman Church, 47, 52, 65, 71, 257 Charles V (emperor), 26, 65, 195 Chemnitz, Martin, 45, 257 Chios, 179 Christian and Trustworthy Instruction on the Words Instituting the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ, 27 Christine of Sweden (queen), 46 church councils, 46, 64, 235 Council of Basel, 17 Council of Trent, 3, 40–54, 63, 257 Lateran IV, 16 Vatican II, 3, 44, 50, 51 Church Fathers, 18, 24, 889 Chyträus, David, 234
263
Clear Instruction on Christ’s Supper . . . for the Sake of the Simple, A, 22, 23 clerical marriage, 233 Clicthove, Josse, 20 Cochlaeus, Johannes, 20 Codex of Costumes, 184 Collection of the Various Styles of Clothing Which Are Presently Worn in the Lands of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Islands of the Savages, All Realistically Depicted, A, 178 Cologne, 20, 95–96, 99–100 Commentaries on the State of Religion and the Republic Under Charles V, 26 Commentary on True and False Religion, 18 Communion. See Eucharist Complaint of Some Brothers to all Christians against the Great Injustice and Tyranny Shown to Andreas Karlstadt by Luther, 20 Concerning the order of public worship, 89 conciliarism, 46 Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 23 confessionalization, 2–4, 68–70, 72–73, 76, 87, 90–91, 231–33, 235–38, 240–42 confessional identities, 3–4, 173, 230–31, 233, 251, 256–58 Constantinople, 184–85 Cook, Harold, 5 Cosmographia, 178, 183 Costumebook, 178, 195 Costumes of Nearly All People of Our Era, 178 Costumes of the Nations of the World, 180, 182 cotton (Baumwolle, Barchent, Gansauer, muslin, indienne, persienne, calmander), 5, 149–60, 254–55 Council of Trent. See under church councils Counter-Reformation, 3, 40–41, 87, 119, 222. See also church councils: Council of Trent court society, 110–11, 114, 117, 119–20 craft guilds, 235 Crawshaw, Jane, 130 credit, 111, 113–14. See also debt Cyclops, Wolfgang, 19
264
Index
Dachser, Jakob, 90 Dackerman, Susan, 174 Damhoudere, Joost, 211, 216 Danckwardt, Marianne, 87 Danet, Louis, 176 Danish Asiatic Company, 151–52 Dathenus, Petrus, 96 debt and debtors, 149, 204–5, 209–13, 215–18, 255 Declaratio Ferdinandea, 235, 236 dervish, 176, 177, 188, 190, 193, 194 Deserps, François, 176, 178, 180, 184 Detailed History of the Disturbance between the Evangelical-Lutherans and the Reformed, 28 Development of Lutheran and Reformed Church Doctrine along with their InnerProtestant Differences, The, 29 Dialogi sacri, 234 Die Psalmen Davids in allerlei Teutsche gesangreimen bracht, 88 Dieckhoff, August Wilhelm, 29 Diekmannshenke, Hans-Joachim, 231 Diest, Samuel, 27 Diet of Augsburg, 66 Diet of Speyer (1526), 68 Dietrich, Sixt, 90 Dingel, Irene, 238 diplomacy, 4, 47, 52, 111–19 Ditchfield, Simon, 42 dowry, 210, 223 Dresden, 87 Dressler, Gallus, 90 Dungersheim von Ochsenfurt, Hieronymus, 17 Dürer, Albrecht, 174, 175 early modern Catholicism. See Counter-Reformation Ebrard, J. H. A., 28–29 Eck, Johannes, 22 Edinger, Rutger, 95 Elisabeth of Gemen (countess), 238 Elizabeth I of England (queen), 179 Enchiridion or Handbooklet, 89 English East India Company, 151 epidemic, 127 plague, 125, 127–34, 137–38, 140
Epistle to Matthaeus Alber Concerning the Lord’s Supper, 18 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 16, 18, 22, 24, 174, 233 Ernst of Bavaria (prince-bishop), 234, 235, 240 Esser, Nikola, 97 Esslingen, 206 Eucharist, 15–30, 66, 93–94, 100, 136, 232, 241, 256–57 both kinds in, 18, 93–94, 233, 235–36 debates over real presence in, 15–18, 20, 22–23, 26, 257 pre-Reformation debate, 16–17 Evangelical Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper in the Age of the Reformation, The, 29 Evangelical (Evangelisch, Evangelischen), 6, 15–16, 19, 62, 65–67, 70–72, 74, 76, 231, 233, 238, 241 Evidiotheca, 242 Examen Concili Tridentini, 45 exoticism, 149, 150, 156, 158, 160 Exposition of the Faith, 24 Fabricius, Theodosius, 26 Ferdinand I (prince-bishop), 240 Findlen, Paula, 5 First Four Books of Oriental Navigation and Travel, The, 174–195 (passim), 259 First Short Answer to Eck’s Seven Theses, The, 22 Fisher, John, 20 Formula for Ecclesiastical Prayers and Songs, 90 Formula of Concord, 66, 234 Fornaçon, Siegfried, 97 France, 150, 152, 154–55, 205 Franck, Jörg, 209 Frankfurt, 64 Frederick I (margrave), 130 Freiburg, 212 Freising, 91–93 Friedrich III of the Palatinate (elector), 91 Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Lictenberg (count), 67, 72 Friendly Exegesis, 23 Fulda, 70, 73, 75
Index
Gansöder, Stefan, 132 Gelling, Margaret, 127 Gemen, 231–33, 238 Geneva, 88, 90–91, 96–100, 157 Georg of Hesse-Darmstadt (landgrave), 67, 70 Georgiević, Bartholomäus, 189 Georgius of Hungary, 188, 190–91 Gerlach, Dietrich, 176, 194 German Mass, 89 German Psalms: Sacred Psalms for Three Voices, 99 German Psalter, The, 89 Gnesio-Lutherans, 27 Gordon, Bruce, 63 Gospel. See Bible Gotthard, Axel, 235 Granada, 195 Gregory of Valencia, 71 Groote, Inge Mai, 87 Grüdt, Joachim von, 22 Grünemberg, Konrad, 195 guaiac wood, 134–35, 138, 254 guardianship (legal), 206–9, 211, 213–18, 219, 255 Guevara, Antonio de, 194 guildmasters, 236–38 Gutknecht, Dieter, 97, 99 Gyldenklou, Anders, 114–19 Habsburg, 63, 194–95 Haguenau, 215–18 Hamelmann, Hermann, 233 Hammacher, Johannes, 233, 238 Hanau-Münzenberg, 62, 67, 68, 76 Happel, Siegfried, 75 Hausvater (paterfamilias), 206, 208, 219 Heidelberg, 24, 64 Heidelberg Catechism, 232 Henry II (French king), 176 Heppe, Heinrich, 231 Herdesianus, Christoph, 27 heresy, 24, 26–27, 64, 66, 67, 94, 95, 194, 234, 240–42 Herr, Michael, 183 Heshusius, Tilemann, 64 Heussler, Johannes, 231
265
Historical-Irenical Dissertation on the Religious Peace and Quarrels of Evangelicals, 27 History of the Augsburg Confession, 27 History of the Council of Trent, 45 History of the Development, Changes, and Formation of our Protestant Doctrines, 28 History of the Origin and Development of the Sacramentarian Controversy Concerning the Lord’s Supper, 25 History of the Sacramentarian Controversy, 26 Hoë von Hoënegg, Matthias, 64 Hoen, Cornelis, 17–18, 19 Holland, 152 Holy Roman Empire, 41, 53, 62, 66, 72, 76, 111, 130–31, 142, 174, 207, 212, 237–39, 257 Holy Roman Emperor, 27, 63, 65, 76, 131, 178, 195, 231 imperial diet, 231, 238, 241 imperial law, 230, 234, 236, 238, 242 Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court), 130–31, 205 Honwaert, Jan Baptista, 194 Hospinian, Rudolf, 25–26, 27–28 Hunnius, Nicolaus, 64–65 Hussites, 17–18 Hutter, Leonhard, 68, 69 hymnals, 89–90, 94–95, 97 Iberia, 173, 178, 184, 259 Ickelshamer, Valentin, 19 Index of Prohibited Books, 44 India, 150–52, 157–58, 161, 180, 183–85, 254 indulgences, 99, 128 Isabella of Gemen (countess), 231 Islam, 6, 173–195 (passim), 258 Istanbul, 176, 179 Italy, 41, 48, 130, 150, 152, 198 Itinerary of the Portuguese in India, 183 Jacobi, Daniel, 68 Jardine, Lisa, 5, 163n36 Jedin, Hubert, 3, 40, 42, 46, 257 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jhan, Maistre, 87
266
Index
Johann III of Jülich-Kleve-Berg (duke), 239 Johnson, Carina, 239 Johnson, Christine, 174 Jonas, Justus, 89 Jörgensen, Bent, 231 Jud, Leo, 22, 30 Justinian‘s Institutes, 206 Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von, 16, 18–20, 22, 24–30 Karlstadtians, 3, 16 Kattenbusch, Johann, 235–36 Ketteler, Wilhelm von, 57, 233 Köhler, Walther, 15, 29 Koolman, Jan ten Doornkaat, 239 Krautwald, Valentin, 28 Kulturkampf, 87 Landsperger, Johannes, 23 Langenmantel, Eitelhans, 23 Laué, Christian Friedrich, 152, 153 Lavater, Ludwig, 25–29 Lazareth (plague hospital). See Nuremberg: hospitals of Leest, Antoon van, 176, 194 Leipzig, 183 Leipzig Convent, 70, 72 Leisentrit, Johannes, 94–95, 99 Leitch, Stephanie, 174 Lepp, Friedrich, 231 Leppin, Volker, 42, 44 leprosy, 129, 135, 141 leper house, 129–30, 138 litanies, 92 Little Silesian Songbook, 94 Little Songbook, Including the Whole Psalter of David and Other Sacred Songs, 90 liturgy, 41, 44, 88–90, 95, 97 Lobwasser, Ambrosius, 90–91, 96, 99, 100 Lobwasser Psalter (see Psalter of the Royal Prophet David in German Verse) Lohse, Bernhard, 30 Lollardy, 16–17 London, 45, 152 Lord’s Supper. See Eucharist
Löscher, Valentin Ernst, 28 Lossius, Lucas, 90 Low Countries, 174, 178 Luels, Gabriel de, Sieur d’Aramon, 176 Luther, Martin, 3, 15–16, 19–20, 23–26, 30, 65–69, 71–72, 88–90, 92, 94–96, 98, 100, 129, 173, 242, 251, 256–57 Lutheran (Lutherisch), 3, 4, 6, 15–16, 19–20, 22–30, 45, 62–65, 67–69, 71–77, 87–95, 97, 100, 111, 229, 231–38, 240–41, 251–52, 256–58 Mack, Georg, 180–82 Madrignani, Archangelo, 183 Magdeburg, 206, 207 Mamluk, 173, 194 Marbach, Johannes, 27 Marburg, 70 Marburg Colloquy, 25 Marburg consistory, 67, 71, 74 Marot, Clément, 90, 97 marriage, 42, 48, 113, 215. See also clerical marriage Marshall, Peter, 63 Mass. See liturgy Mauretania, 173, 259 Maximilian I (emperor), 195 Melanchthon, Philipp, 27, 28, 65, 131, 234, 238 Philippists, 27 Melissus, Paul Schede, 96 Mennonite, 239–40. See also Anabaptists Michel, Martin, 209 Milenus’s Complaint about the Great Tyranny of the Romans, 194 Moisi, Stephanie, 89 Montalboddo, Fracanzano da, 183 Moor, 173–95 (passim) Moritz of Hesse-Kassel (landgrave), 66, 68, 69, 71 Most Christian Letter on the Lord’s Supper, 17 Mosul, 157, 165n51 Muhammed, 179, 190 Müller, Conrad, 213, 214, 217 Muller, Cornelis, 176 Müllner, Johannes, 138 Munich, 91, 94, 99
Index
Münster, 235–36 Münster, Sebastian, 178, 183 Müntzer, Thomas, 28 Murner, Thomas, 22 music. See liturgy Muslim. See Islam Myconius, Oswald, 30 Nas, Johannes, 67 Nestorius, 26 Neuser, Wilhelm, 30 New Little Songbook of Sacred Songs, A, 94 New Unfamiliar Land, 183 New World. See America Newly Found Lands, 183 Nicodemism, 242 Nicolay, Nicolas de, 174, 176–81, 184–94, 259 Nuremberg, 5, 125–41, 176, 180 city council, 127–32, 134, 137–38 hospitals of, 125–41 Oberbronn, 204, 212–19, 255 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 16, 18, 20–30, 33n63, 34n83 Oecolampadians, 3, 16 O’Malley, John, 40–41, 44, 51, 52, 257 On Both Forms of the Eucharist, 18 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 16 On the Genuine Exposition of the Words of the Lord, “This is my Body,” 18 On the Origin and Development of the Sacramentarian Controversy on the Lord’s Supper between the Lutherans, Ubiquitists, and the Orthodox, who are called Zwinglians or Calvinists, 25 On the Variety of Opinions Concerning the Words of the Lord’s Supper, 20 onomastics, 1–2, 5, 7 Orthodox Confession of the Faith of the Ministers of Zurich’s Church, 24–25 Ottoman Empire, 150, 173–95 (passim), 239, 258 Palatine-Electorate, 64, 66 Pallavicino, Pietro Sforza, 45–46, 257 Pancheri, Roberto, 49
267
papacy, 3, 28, 40, 42, 44–49, 51–52, 58, 65, 67, 92, 95, 173, 194, 242, 257 papists (Papisten), 26, 33, 63, 64–65, 66, 68, 71, 75, 87, 229, 242. See also Catholic Church Pareus, David, 64 Paris, 20, 176 Paros, 179 Passau, 91–93 paterfamilias. See Hausvater Peace of Augsburg, 63, 68, 235, 236 Peace of Westphalia, 3, 6, 62, 71, 72–74, 76, 96, 230–32, 239, 241, 257–58 Peasants’ War, 28 Pellikan, Konrad, 22 persecution. See under religious toleration Persia, 155, 157 Pfinzing, Paul, 139 Philip II (emperor), 194–95 Philipp Ludwig II (count), 76 Philipp Ludwig of Palatinate-Neuburg (duke), 77 Picards, 3, 16, 17 Piccolomini, Aneas Sylvius, 17 Pidoux, Pierre, 97 Pietschmann, Klaus, 87 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 20, 29, 134 plague. See under epidemic Planck, Gottlieb Jakob, 28–29 Plato, 1 Pohlig, Matthias, 238 pope. See papacy Pope Pius IV, 47–48 Pope Sixtus V, 48 post-Tridentine Catholicism, 41, 234 Prester John, 185 printing industry, 5, 174 Prodi, Paolo, 42 prodigality laws, 206–11 prodigus. See debt property, 118, 150, 204, 206–13, 215, 217–18, 220 Protestant, 4, 41, 44, 62–63, 69, 71–72, 74–76, 87–88, 90–97, 99–100, 194, 205, 208, 230–31, 235–38, 242, 258. See also Calvinist; Lutheran proto-ethnographies, 173, 178 psalmody. See Psalms
268
Index
Psalmody for Vespers, 95 Psalmody, that is, Select Sacred Songs of the Ancient Church, 90 Psalms, 4, 88–97, 99–100 Psalms of David, 99 Psalms of David in Sundry German Verse, The, 96–100 Psalter. See Psalms Psalter Davids Latyn unnd Teutsch, 95 Psalter of the Royal Prophet David in German Verse, The, 91, 94, 99, 100 Qualandar, 180–181, 188 Qur’an, 185 Querhammer, Caspar, 94 racialization, 5–6, 173–195 (passim), 256, 258–59 Raesfeld, Philip, 237 Ranke, Leopold von, 253 Rape of the Maid of Antwerp by Spanish Soldiers, The, 194 Reasonable Answer, 20 Reformed (Reformed Protestants, Reformierten, reformirt), 3, 6, 26, 28, 30, 62–64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72–77, 90–91, 230, 231–33, 236–38, 257. See also Calvinist; Zwinglian Regensburg, 91–93 Regnault, Antoine Ravaille, 46 Reichshofen, 214–16, 218 Reinhard, Wolfgang, 3, 260n5 Reinhart, Martin, 18 Rejoicing of a Christian Brother Due to the Agreement Between Luther and Karlstadt, The, 20 religious pluralism, 62, 72, 242 religious toleration, 76, 118, 236, 242, 249 persecution, 16, 76, 128, 240 public exercise of religion, 73, 238 Renner, Franz, 134 Response to Oecolampadius on the True Flesh and Blood of Christ, 20 Rhegius, Urbanus, 19, 20, 22 Roggendorf, Christoph Freiherr von, 178 Roman law, 6, 205–7 Ross, Elizabeth, 174 Rouillé, Guillaume, 176, 194
Ruchamer, Jobst, 183 Rudolph II (emperor), 63 Ruppert, Simon, 64 Ryss, Conrad, 20 Sachs, Hans, 89 sack of Antwerp, 176, 194 Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics, 23 Sacrament of the Eucharist Against Oecolampadius, 20 Sacramentarian (Sakramentarier), 3, 16–19, 22–26, 31n4, 68, 256 sacred music, 4, 88–89 motet, 87–88 vernacular hymns and psalmody, 4, 88–91, 94–95, 99–100 Sacred Songs and Psalms, 94 Saint Lazarus, 129 Saint Paul, 65, 69, 89 Saint Rochus, 132, 140 Saint Sebastian, 128, 131, 132, 135, 140, 254 saints, 92, 128, 129, 131–32, 136, 140, 174, 254 veneration of, 49 Saldörffer, Conrad, 176 Salzburg, 91–92 Sarpi, Paolo, 45–46, 257 Sasse, Hermann, 30 Schilling, Heinz, 3, 260n5 Schindling, Anton, 230 Schirling, Bartholomaeus, 76 Schmidt, Benjamin, 158 Schmiedberg, Adam, 212–18 Schnewyl, Johann, 23 Schöffel, Matthäus, 91 Schreyer, Sebald, 128, 140 Schütz, Heinrich, 87 Schwenckfeld, Kaspar (Caspar), 24, 28, 66–67, 242 scripture. See Bible Scultetus, Abraham, 27 Scythia, 173 Selected Psalms and Canticles in Song, 90 Senfl, Ludwig, 90 (composer with Lutheran sympathies) Short Confession, 24
Index
Silvius, Willem, 176, 194 skin color. See racialization Sleidan, Johannes, 26–27 Society of Jesus, 44, 94, 99 Socrates, 1 Sodomy, 191 Solzbacher, Joseph, 97 Some Christian Songs or Book of Eight Songs, 89 sound and soundscapes, 88, 97, 100, 213, 217, 233 Spalatin, Georg, 89 spendthrift, 204–11, 213, 215–21. See also debt Speratus, Paulus, 89 Spiritualist, 29 St. Gallen (place), 150, 156 St. Sebastian (hospital) (Sebastianspital, Sebastian Hospital, St. Sebastian Lazareth, House at St. Sebastian), 5, 125, 128–29, 131, 134, 135–40 Stoltzer, Thomas, 90 Strasbourg, 19, 20, 22–23, 24, 26, 28, 90 Strauss, Jacob, 22–23 Stumpf, Johannes, 25 Stuttgart, 209 Subsidium . . . on the Eucharist, 18 Süleyman, Sultan, 178 sumptuary legislation, 157, 164n47, 179 Swabian League, 130 Sweden, 46, 110–12, 114, 117–19, 121 Swiss cantons, 149–60 symbolic capital, 113–14 Syngramma on the Words of the Lord’s Supper, 18, 20 synods, 42, 48, 66, 91 syphilis, 5, 125, 127, 132–40, 254 Taborites. See Hussites Tanner, Adam, 65 Tartars, 180, 185 taxonomy, 2, 151, 156, 158–60 Te Lutherum damnamus, 87 textiles, 149–60, 254–55 That These Words of Christ Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, 23 Thirty Years’ War, 72, 115, 139, 150, 240 toponymy, 1, 5
269
Toppler, Konrad, 127 Tossanus, Daniel, 66 Tremonius, Johannes, 236–37 Tridentine Reform. See church councils: Council of Trent Triller, Valentin, 94 Troy, 173 Truth of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist, The, 20 Tschackert, Paul, 29 Tupinamba, 195 Turbans, 179 Turk, 173–185 (passim). See also Ottoman Empire Ulenberg, Kaspar, 88, 94–100 Ulenberg Psalter (see Psalms of David in Sundry German Verse, The) Ulm, 135, 150 University of Königsberg, 90 University of Wittenberg, 88 Ursulines, 40 Vehe, Michael, 94–95, 99 Vehe’s hymnal (see New Little Songbook of Sacred Songs, A) Vendrix, Philippe, 87 Venice, 42, 129–30, 134, 178 Vico, Enea, 178 visitations, 42, 91–94, 100, 234–35 Volkland, Frauke, 4 Vos, Lambert de, 186 Vreden, 240 Walch, Johann Georg, 28 Waldensian Brethren, 17 Wale, Christopher, 234 Walther, Hans, 2 Warendorf, 239–40 Wassilowsky, Günther, 51 Weber, Max, 4, 118, 119, 251 Weiditz, Christoph, 178, 180–181, 195 Weidmann, Hans Ludwig, 212 Weidmann, Philipp Hector, 204–5, 207, 211–21, 255 Weigel, Hans, 180 Werbeck, Walter, 87 Werth, 236–37
270
Index
Whether One Can Prove from Holy Scripture that Christ is in the Sacrament, 22 Whole Psalter of David, The, 90, 95 Wildegg, 152 Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel (landgrave), 64 Wittenberg, 12, 20, 25, 68, 88–89, 90, 96, 131, 173, 194, 231 Wittenberg Concord, 27 Witzel, Georg, 71, 94, 95 woodcuts and engravings, 95, 132, 156, 175, 177, 181, 182, 186–93 Wörth, 212, 214–19, 251
Wurm, Nikolaus, 206 Württemberg, 205–11, 216 Wyclif, John, 16–17 Wylich, Adolf von, 237 Ziegler, Jacob, 17 Zurich, 16, 19, 22–30, 157, 257 Zwickau prophets, 28 Zwingli, Huldrych, 3, 15–16, 18–20, 22–30, 257 Zwinglian (Zwinglianer) and Zwinglianism, 15–16, 23–26, 29–30, 66–67, 237, 256–57