Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World 9780674067653

Citation preview

harvard historical studies Published under the auspices of the Department of History from the income of the Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest Robert Louis Stroock Fund Henry Warren Torrey Fund

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Paper Memory 

A S I X T E E N T H - C E N T U RY TOW N SM A N W R I T E S H I S WOR L D

M AT T H E W L U N D I N

H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2012

Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lundin, Matthew, 1974– Paper memory : a sixteenth-century townsman writes his world / Matthew Lundin. p. cm. — (Harvard historical studies ; 179) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-06594-9 (alk. paper) 1. Weinsberg, Hermann von, 1518–ca.1598 2. City council members—Germany—Cologne—Biography. 3. Cologne (Germany)—History—16th century. 4. Cologne (Germany)— Intellectual life—16th century. 5. Europe—Intellectual life—16th century. 6. Europe—Church history—16th century. 7. Catholic Church—History—16th century. 8. Diarists—Germany—Cologne— Biography. 9. Cologne (Germany)—Biography. I. Title. DD901.C77.W46 2012 943'.551403092—dc23 [B] 2012005059

Contents

Introduction 1 1 A Secret Legacy

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2 My Father’s House

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3 The Patriarch 64 4 The Middle Is Best

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5 A Holy Household

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6 As If We Had Never Been

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7 Spare No Quill, Ink, or Paper 8 A New World Conclusion

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Notes 261 Bibliography

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Acknowledgments 317 Index 319

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Paper Memory

Introduction

On the morning of March 3, 2009, the Historical Archive of the German city of Cologne collapsed. Subway construction nearby had undermined the building’s foundation. Though archivists and researchers managed to escape in time, thousands of irreplaceable historical manuscripts were buried in the rubble. Among the documents trapped in the mud and debris were texts by the scholastic theologian Albertus Magnus, letters from rich family archives, minutes of the medieval City Council, wills dating back to the twelfth century, and records of criminal interrogations from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—not to mention documents by modern luminaries such as Hegel and Marx. In the weeks following the disaster, firefighters, scholars, and volunteers set about the grim task of salvaging books and papers found in the ruins. Journalists lamented the scope the destruction, calling it one of the worst cultural losses in Germany since the end of World War II. A London Times article somberly announced that “the German city of Cologne woke up yesterday without a memory.”1 In a country that saw many of its cultural treasures in ruins less than seventy years ago, the calamity offered a sobering reminder of the fragility of the historical record. A retired director of the Cologne archive expressed his shock: “I can’t believe that the archive managed to survive the war and now this happens in peacetime.”2 Newspaper reports were quick to highlight the ironies of the story. Ensconced in a building considered state of the art when it was constructed in the 1970s, the archive even had a nuclear-safe vault, though this room had recently been used to store

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cleaning supplies instead of historical treasures.3 Meanwhile, only weeks before the calamity, the archive had acquired the manuscripts and correspondence of eminent postwar German writer Heinrich Böll, after lengthy wooing had fi nally won over the author’s heirs.4 There was another, quieter irony in the archive’s collapse. Among the manuscripts initially feared lost was the massive diary and autobiography of Hermann Weinsberg (1518–1597), a sixteenth-century Cologne townsman who had worried his entire life about just such a destruction of memory. A Catholic lawyer and city-councilor, Hermann Weinsberg had spent over fifty years secretly compiling a massive three-volume Gedenkbuch, or “Memory Book.” Seeking to create a lasting monument on paper, he jotted down everything that he thought future family members would want to know about their forebears—meals, quarrels, baptisms, religious processions, private thoughts, sleeping habits, neighborhood gossip, sickness and plague, games, clothing, and parish elections, to name a few. Haunted by oblivion and disoriented by the Protestant Reformation, Hermann fi lled thousands of pages with mundane records, hoping to save them for posterity. Though a diligent Catholic, Hermann found himself far more preoccupied with his earthly posterity than with the fate of his soul. Where earlier generations of German burghers responded to such anxiety with acts of penance and piety, Hermann forged a written memory that would preserve his life “as it truly was.”5 Hermann Weinsberg’s acute awareness of posterity—his concern to record his world for unknown generations of future readers—can seem eerily prescient, especially in the wake of the Cologne archive’s collapse. During the sixteenth century, few individuals saw fit to document their daily lives. Writing about such low subject matter was considered vain and ignoble. Recognizing that many of his contemporaries would deem his quotidian records “effeminate, childish, foolish, and laughable,” Hermann Weinsberg penned anxious apologies on behalf of his “Memory Book”: May no one blame me that I write so much about insignificant people, sisters, brothers, relatives, neighbors, burghers, peasants, youths, about domestic, simple, and childish things, and about myself. For who will do it if we don’t? In the Bible, in the Roman histories and chronicles, in the Holy Scriptures, in the seven liberal arts, and in other arts and philosophers and poets one cannot really fi nd us. Therefore, if my book and records are preserved and continued, our descendants will also know something to say about us; otherwise, it will be as if we had never been.6

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As preoccupied with preservation as any modern archivist, Hermann often fretted about the durability of his paper memory. Not only did he keep his writings carefully locked away in a chest in his study, but he also instructed his heirs and the executors of his estate to safeguard the volumes in a secure room of the family home, away from heat and humidity, moths and bookworms. The entire collection—which had acquired a prodigious heft by the end of his life—was to be carefully cleaned and examined once a year. When his heirs had enough spare cash, they were to hire a scribe to transfer Hermann’s paper archive to parchment. Underscoring the need for redundancy, Hermann instructed the heirs to “duplicate it and make more copies.”7 The alternative, as Hermann often reminded his heirs, was to be like those who had “fallen from memory, as if they had never been on earth.”8 Hermann Weinsberg and his family did not fall from memory. His attempt to record the details of his everyday life—a project of dubious merit during his own lifetime—has earned him the gratitude of modern historians, who have discerned in him the early stirrings of modern historical consciousness and have gladly taken up the task of duplicating his memory. Ever since the discovery of his “Memory Book” in the mid-nineteenth century, historians have celebrated it as a source of rare details about everyday life in the sixteenth century. In the words of one historian, it is “the most magnificent document of burgher life in German-speaking lands.”9 Finances, kinship, household consumption, neighborhood relations, private celebrations—there is enough data in Hermann’s writings to compose, in the words of the anthropologist, a “thick description” of early modern urban life.10 For English readers unfamiliar with the “Memory Book,” it would perhaps only be slightly hyperbolic to proclaim Hermann Weinsberg the Samuel Pepys of sixteenth-century Germany.11 What his writings lack in wit and verve, they more than make up for in candor and thoroughness. In the Gedenkbuch, one can follow a sixteenth-century townsman through all the spheres of his everyday life—one can watch him quarreling with his wife; one can hear him recount the sad fate of several of his sisters; one can examine the motives behind the various family strategies he pursued. As a result of Hermann Weinsberg’s unusual candor and thoroughness as a chronicler, social and cultural historians have a rare chance to reconstruct the world of a single early modern burgher and his family. Future scholars will no doubt realize these possibilities. But why did Hermann Weinsberg create such a record in the fi rst place? What led

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an obscure lawyer to embark upon one of the age’s most self-conscious and systematic attempts to record his everyday life for posterity—to write an ordinary family into history? The apparent modernity of Hermann Weinsberg’s preoccupation with preservation should not obscure the strangeness of his work. The anxious scribbling that produced the Gedenkbuch seems a symptom of some larger distress or confusion. What, if anything, can Hermann Weinsberg’s unusual project tell us about the hopes, aspirations, and anxieties of sixteenth-century German burghers—men and women who lived through an era of unsettling religious change? This book seeks to answer these questions. It tells the story behind a sixteenth-century Catholic lawyer’s monumental effort to forge a written legacy. It is the fi rst major English-language study of a remarkable cache of private writings that German historians have frequently consulted as a sourcebook but rarely examined as a whole. While other scholars have mined the massive family archive for information about sixteenth-century social, economic, and family life, this book explores one man’s quest for immortality, reading it against the backdrop of the period’s dramatic upheavals. The pages that follow are an exercise in microhistory.12 They show how religious uncertainties and an expanding world of information transformed an anxious man’s perennial ambitions into something far more complex and historically significant. Each chapter seeks to shed light on a larger sixteenth-century phenomenon: lay literacy (Chapter 1), Renaissance family life (Chapter 2), patriarchal ideas (Chapter 3), bourgeois values (Chapter 4), anticlericalism and religious uncertainty (Chapter 5), anxieties about oblivion and memory (Chapter 6), private writing and self-representation (Chapter 7), and print and historical awareness (Chapter 8). The goal is to weave Hermann Weinsberg’s story into the broader social, cultural, and intellectual history of sixteenth-century Germany. Hermann himself often reflected on the problems he hoped the writings would solve. He believed, for instance, that the elaborate last will and testament he devised would protect his modest bourgeois household against the vicissitudes of death, bad fortune, and litigation. In an age of uncertainty, when households were often broken up by death and remarriage, Hermann aimed to rationalize household management and industry and thus secure the type of protection against risk that the state and commercial entities would later provide.13 At the same time, by recording the lives of ordinary men and women in Cologne, Hermann hoped to make up for the absence of commoners from the

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historical record—to preserve a world that would otherwise be lost. The “Memory Book” explicitly defended the values and lifestyles of “middling” folk; it rejected the traditional noble and clerical denigration of bourgeois life. Meanwhile, Hermann framed his own project as a response to the uncertainty the Protestant Reformation had spawned. Religious upheaval upset everything, making the venerable traditions of Cologne—the rites and rituals that brought eternity into time— seem fragile, contingent, and culturally specific. His confidence in the Church shaken, Hermann sought to order his life on paper. In an age before newspapers, he strove to understand the news and rumors that swirled throughout Christendom, systematically comparing reports with one another and setting down those he found most reliable. Meanwhile, he envisioned his family home, the Haus Weinsberg, as a refuge from the self-interest and hypocrisy he found on both sides of the religious schism. Thus was a lively, if eccentric, mind brought to bear on some of the big questions of the age. In its own quirky way, Hermann Weinsberg’s Gedenkbuch offers new insights into classic debates about the early modern period. In his writings we fi nd a Renaissance and Reformation era more transformative than its critics contend, but more complicated than its boosters allege. Hermann was certainly no Renaissance individualist, and his Gedenkbuch no modern diary. The great family archive displayed his lifelong obsession with the honor of the household—with family crests, chivalric ancestral tales, and the symbolism of patriarchal rule. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that there was little new in such preoccupations, just as it would be hasty to conclude that Martin Luther’s preoccupation with the devil and patriarchal order somehow diminished the radical implications of his thought, or that the Protestant Reformation was a “failure” because it did not achieve the most ambitious aims of some of its spokesmen.14 If anything, Hermann’s preoccupation with lineage—something that might seem to indicate deep continuities with previous centuries—was an anxious reaction to the Protestant Reformation and to an unsettling awareness of historical flux. His intense parochialism—a longing that his beloved family home and neighborhood might remain unchanged— was no simple expression of medieval corporatism, but rather a form of nostalgia. And while there was no modern middle class in the sixteenth century, there was nonetheless considerable uneasiness about the place of commoners within traditional social and religious orders and within the historical record itself. Burghers struggled to conceptualize

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the expanding social space they occupied. Hermann Weinsberg, for one, was obsessed with his status as a commoner and frequently pondered what it meant to be a “middling” (mittelmessig) man. Indeed, his writings offer a rare glimpse of a humanist-educated Catholic lawyer struggling to make sense of the Protestant Reformation, the spread of printing and lay literacy, and the reconfiguration of traditional social and cultural orders. Hermann’s responses to these “great transformations” were not always typical. But neither were those of Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, or Michel de Montaigne. The period between 1517 and 1648 was an eclectic age, a time when new and old were mixed together in ways that contemporaries often found bewildering. This was especially true of the period’s writing, which could be wildly experimental, exploring the new opportunities for preservation and publicity made possible by an explosion of paper and print. One should no more expect to fi nd an “average” burgher in Hermann Weinsberg than one would look for a representative Spanish gentleman in Don Quixote or a normal Danish prince in the brooding, indecisive Hamlet. Like these more famous fictional counterparts, Hermann Weinsberg illuminates his age because of his eccentricity, not in spite of it. Exploring an individual’s unusual, even confused thoughts arguably bring us closer to the actual complexity and creative uncertainty of the past, to the jumbled mix of old and new that characterizes every age, than do trends that can be easily mapped onto standard evolutionary schemes. The very oddness of historical relics can serve to highlight the anxieties surrounding a culture’s unspoken assumptions—the aspects of its mental world that lie beneath the realm of conscious criticism. Wherever possible, this book seeks to set Hermann’s own eccentric project within context, highlighting the assumptions, beliefs, and problems he shared with contemporaries. Yet rather than effacing his personal quirks in hopes of revealing a “representative” burgher, the pages that follow seek to do justice to Hermann’s insistent desire to be remembered in all his idiosyncratic detail. That Hermann Weinsberg is remembered today is a minor miracle of historical survival. Far from winning the gratitude of his heirs, his scheme to create an everlasting memorial sparked a rancorous inheritance dispute, during which his brother attempted suicide and a nephew killed his aunt and dumped her body in a well.15 As a result of the sordid affair, Hermann’s writings were confiscated by the Cologne City Council and unceremoniously deposited in a civic archive, where

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they lay unread for over 250 years. It was only in 1859 that Hermann’s “Memory Book” was discovered by Cologne archivist Leonard Ennen, who was cataloging the collections of the city’s Historical Archive— the very documents that would be buried under rubble 150 years later. Thanks to their subsequent publication, Hermann Weinsberg’s writings attained a fame he could have scarcely imagined. More recently, his “Memory Book” has made its way onto the World Wide Web, where it floats in the digital ether, mingling with blog posts and Twitter updates, even as the paper memory to which he devoted innumerable hours risked the oblivion of mud and debris.16 Indeed, with the collapse of the Cologne archive, Hermann’s prediction that his family would be “remembered before many thousands of houses and lineages both inside and outside of Cologne” has proved as prescient as ever, though in a manner that would have caused him deep distress.17



chapter one

A Secret Legacy

When Cologne rentier and Licentiate of Law Hermann Weinsberg died in 1597, few of his friends and relatives suspected the massive cache of papers kept locked away in his study—thousands of pages in all. Though a respected city-councilor and lawyer in one of Germany’s largest and most Catholic cities, Hermann Weinsberg ranked well below Cologne’s most illustrious men. And while his diligent work as a parish churchwarden and civic officer had earned him the respect of his contemporaries, he was unlikely to be remembered for his public deeds.1 Two marriages to wealthy widows had brought him a decent income, but no offspring. For a Licentiate of Law, he had worn modest clothing, preferring plain coats and breeches to the more extravagant dress that had recently come into fashion. 2 A humanist-trained lawyer, his favorite motto was “blessed are those who hold to the mean.”3 At least outwardly, he had proved true to his word, living frugally as a middling burgher and praying for “necessities in moderation, between riches and poverty.”4 Upstairs in his study, however, Hermann Weinsberg had led a secret, troubled life. For over fifty years, this outwardly unassuming lawyer had compiled a vast and intricate family archive. In the midst of a tumultuous age, he had striven to leave behind a solid, impressive legacy. Since his only child was an illegitimate daughter fathered in his youth, Hermann Weinsberg had schemed for other ways to establish a great, enduring house. “Secretly I was eager for glory,” he confessed, “and ambitious to leave a good name and memory behind me.”5 As a

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relatively comfortable rentier, Hermann had had ample time to craft his paper legacy. “With my quill always at the ready”—that was how he described himself late in life.6 A compulsive scribbler, he had used writing to order every aspect of his life and family world, but in a project nonetheless kept hidden from his two late wives, his fellow civic notables, and his siblings. The family archive Hermann Weinsberg left behind at his death was—to use two adjectives of contemporary derivation—both gargantuan and quixotic. Its scope and ambition might suit a prince, not a petty lawyer. A fabricated genealogy laid claim to a providential descent stretching back to a mysterious eighth-century foundling; an elaborate will entailed the estate within the male line in perpetuity; a manual of household governance gave explicit instructions for running the estate; and a massive Gedenkbuch (or “Memory Book”) recorded the events of his lifetime in incredible detail. Little was left unwritten. The archive included account books, copies of family documents, letters to future family members, detailed instructions for the executors of his estate, and endless amplifications of his will.7 The entire legacy was meant to equip a “middling” (mittelmessig) burgher family with all the advantages possessed by more illustrious aristocratic, patrician, and religious houses—an inalienable patrimony, a legendary past, a deeply rooted identity, and an enduring institutional memory. The secret project was Hermann Weinsberg’s calling. Through it he hoped to live on among his heirs. “If my writings are continued and preserved,” he wrote, “the descendents will also know something to say about us.”8 The cache of papers was to be passed down in perpetuity, from housefather to housefather, secure within the confi nes of the Weinsberg household. To guarantee the survival of the family name, Hermann’s last will and testament established elaborate rules of succession to his modest estate. Though he lacked legitimate children, his writings would vouchsafe a legacy. “The housefather,” exclaimed Hermann, “shall be my immortal son, and I shall never be without a child for all eternity.” If all went according to plan, the Haus Weinsberg would be a community of prayer and memory—an “eternal gathering”—in the midst of a changing, uncertain city.9 As an instance of the perennial ambitions and anxieties that haunt human lives, few sixteenth-century collections of private writings are more poignant. Having failed to accomplish anything of public significance and all too aware of his own mediocrity and obscurity, Hermann Weinsberg invented a private theater of fame. Not unlike

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his fictitious contemporary Don Quixote, Hermann stubbornly transformed a shabby estate—“my poverty,” as he called it—into an ancient and enduring house, full of noble tradition and memory. No one could accuse him of having been “in this world in vain” (vergeblich in disser welt).10 Fancying himself the founder of a great family legacy, he fi lled his writings with affectionate letters to heirs, extolling the virtues of the Weinsberg clan: Hark thou honest house of Weinsberg dear, Mark all the kin that have sprung up here! (Hoerzu Weinsberch du erpar hauß Mirckt an ir frundt untsprossen drauß.)11

Though he dared not reveal his writings to contemporaries, he looked forward to the day when his heirs would fondly remember him. In pursuit of these perennial ambitions, however, Hermann Weinsberg was confronted with the particular problematics of his historical era. His search for a meaningful and significant identity was intimately linked with the peculiar uncertainties of his age. The impulse to entail estates and create legacies was far from uncommon in the sixteenth century; indeed, in an era in which the eternal institutions of the Church were called into question, such impulses could take on urgent, existential dimensions. As a humanist-trained lawyer and an admirer of Erasmus, Hermann was acutely aware of historical change and oblivion. Though Cologne had remained Catholic, the collapse of the Church in Protestant lands was unsettling. It is true, Hermann admitted, “nothing in the world is lasting or eternal, that cities, lands, churches, cloisters, religions, and governments are overturned and destroyed.” Nonetheless, he hoped that God might be the “eternal master builder” of his house, turning the modest foundations he himself had laid into something great and lasting.12 Against this backdrop, Hermann Weinsberg’s quest to found an enduring house became something more complex than a simple grasping after fame and immortality.

Unbelievable Care Even if he had not crafted his secret archive, Hermann Weinsberg would still have left behind many traces of his reading and writing habits. A lawyer who lived during an age of burgeoning lay literacy, when the practice of writing was expanding into more areas of everyday life, Hermann delighted in the increasingly eclectic variety of private

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reading that print had made possible. Friends and relatives were well aware of his penchant for holing himself up in his study with papers and books. Like many contemporary burghers, Hermann Weinsberg surrounded himself with paper; it was through the “means of quill, ink, and paper” (mittel der federen, uncks, und papyrs) that he sought to make his mark on the world.13 Hermann never compiled a complete list of his books, but references to the works he read or owned are scattered throughout his writings. His library was substantial. After his death, his heirs paid half a thaler—a decent sum—to draw up an inventory of his books.14 Hermann himself kept track of new publications, reading catalogs of books from the Frankfurt trade fair (Messe) and copying the most notable titles down in his private papers.15 As a university-trained Licentiate of Law, he owned several legal texts, including collections of both Roman and canon law—the Corpus juris civilis and the Corpus canonicum—as well as the essential commentaries of Bartolus.16 Similarly, his training in the liberal arts at a humanist school in Emmerich and at the University of Cologne had introduced him to several Latin grammars, the Vulgate, and to works of Virgil, Livy, Ovid, and Erasmus. Hermann’s father, Christian, who took up learning later in life, had given his son several of Erasmus’s works, and Hermann, who had never mastered Latin, peppered his writings with snippets from the Apothegmata, a collection of classical quotations compiled by the famous northern humanist. Other ancient works Hermann mentioned in his writings include texts by Terence and Boethius, as well as German translations of Livy, Herodotus, Cicero, and Justin. Despite his university education, Hermann Weinsberg took greatest delight in the growing body of vernacular literature available to pragmatically minded burghers. As a city-councilor and parish churchwarden, he possessed copies of civic edicts and policies; a notebook he kept included a 1562 edition of Cologne policies and regulations, as well as handwritten entries on coinage, weights, and other civic concerns.17 A tolerant Catholic who was inspired by Erasmus, Hermann also possessed an eclectic collection of religious texts. Among other works, he read Lives of the Saints by Cologne scholar Laurentius Surius; a rhyming German psalmody by Cologne priest and theologian Kaspar Ulenberg, a convert from Lutheranism; and a volume of sermons by George Witzel, an irenic preacher who had converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism and then back to Catholicism and whose works had been put on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.18 Though

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faithful to the old Church, Hermann showed a keen interest in the middle ground between the two confessions; he sought to balance competing accounts of the Reformation, such as the Protestant historian Johannes Sleidan’s Commentaries on Religion and the State in the Reign of Emperor Charles V (1555) and its polemical Catholic counterpart, Jaspar Gennep’s Epitome (1559). Indeed, Hermann’s favorite pastime was to read histories, geographies, and chronicles. Among the many works he read and cited were Sebastian Frank’s irenic Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel (1531), local publisher Johann Koelhoff ’s Die cronica van der hilliger stat van Coellen (1499), a German translation of Johannes Trithemius’s compendium of Frankish history, a German translation of Johann Carion’s Chronica, Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (an overview of the known world), and the ancient Greek author Strabo’s Geographica. In addition to a sizable collection of vernacular literature, Hermann Weinsberg left behind many of the papers typically found in the desks of lawyers, merchants, and urban notables. As a Licentiate of Law, he was adept at handling testaments, contracts, and inventories. As a wine merchant and, for several years, the husband of a successful textile merchant, Hermann balanced the books of his various businesses.19 Equally important were his records of household expenditures and consumption, of foodstuffs purchased and used. 20 Hermann was hardly unique in keeping such accounts. The papers of some of his kin have survived, including those of in-law Elizabeth Horn and nephew Hermann Weinsberg the Younger; Cologne archives hold rows of similar texts from the period. 21 Hermann’s vigorous record keeping extended beyond the walls of his household. As a parish churchwarden, he had taken upon himself to keep records of the affairs of his church and neighborhood of St. Jacob. 22 In a Memorialbuch he composed for future churchwardens and pastors, Hermann recorded parish elections, gifts to the church, and renovations to the building. He monitored the management of church property, the establishment and execution of endowed masses, the administration of poor relief, and the legal affairs of the parish. And he recounted notable events, such as the “cleaning” of the church cemetery during an excavation and a dispute over the burial of a suspected Protestant who had not received the sacraments. 23 By the standards of the day, this was already a substantial written legacy. The literary footprint of a burgher such as Hermann Weinsberg was much larger than that of notable Cologne burghers one hundred

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years earlier. Yet Hermann Weinsberg’s active reading and writing life had not prepared his heirs for the revelation of a large cache of private papers. There were thousands of pages that had been composed with the utmost secrecy. Only his brother Gottschalk and nephew Hermann knew of his plans. The fi rst document unveiled at the Licentiate’s death was his last will and testament, which attempted to keep the entire family estate in the male line.24 Even though Cologne law limited entails to three generations, Hermann’s will called for the establishment of a “board of executors” to oversee an “eternal” succession to the estate. In the event that all suitable male kin died out, the executors were to elect a “stranger”—a Cologne Licentiate of Law—to take on the name Weinsberg and assume the responsibilities of “housefather.” Although Hermann’s will was notarized in 1557, after the death of his fi rst wife, his kin had not surmised its grandiose ambitions and strict stipulations. A number of additional documents served as supplements to the last will and testament. Chief among these was his Declarationboich. 25 This hefty volume not only explained the various provisions of the will, but also instructed future Weinsberg “housefathers” on how to discipline household members, balance domestic accounts, ensure a steady income, celebrate family memorials, and secure the patrimony against future dissolution. The Declarationboich was accompanied by a manual for the future executors of the estate and a set of instructions for preserving and augmenting Hermann’s archive—his “chest”—of writings. This chest of writings—the repository of Hermann Weinsberg’s memory—lay at the core of the entire project. The archive aimed to preserve the full, true history of the Weinsberg lineage, both past and present. A “register” of kin recorded the names, births, and deaths of the many descendants of Hermann’s paternal grandfather. A “copy book” duplicated the most important legal documents related to Hermann’s estate. The core texts, however, chronicled the history of the lineage. A genealogical volume titled Das Boich Weinsberg told a fantastic story of the Weinsbergs from their alleged origins in the eighth century through the present.26 Filled with fanciful drawings of coats of arms and knightly forebears, Hermann intended this work as a collection of “rough” paper material that future heirs would complete on more durable parchment.27 The largest text was Hermann’s “Memory Book” (Gedenkbuch), an intimate, detailed, and comprehensive chronicle of his own life

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and times. There were three volumes, each corresponding to a stage of Hermann’s life. The “Book of Youth” (Liber iuventutis) recounted Hermann’s life from birth to the age of sixty (1518–1577); 28 the “Book of Old Age” (Liber senectutis) chronicled the decade between sixty and seventy (1578–1587); 29 and “The Book of Very Old Age” (Liber decrepitudinis) dealt with his life past seventy, gradually trailing off and ending with his death at the impressive age of seventynine (1588–1597). 30 This collection was detailed, candid, and massive; in both concept and execution it had grown over time. The hulking volumes covering his later years attested to an increasing preoccupation with systematic record keeping and the preservation of personal memory. Hermann’s aim was to salvage his life and family world from the oblivion that otherwise awaited them. If the Haus Weinsberg endured, so too would a complete account of his life—a “perfect” memory of his person—survive within its bosom. He hoped that the heirs—including the future housefather—would read the work and think kindly of him. Hermann Weinsberg’s heirs struggled to make sense of this unwelcome corpus of texts and its burdensome demands. Far from securing a warm fraternal feeling, the revelation of Hermann’s “secret” appalled acquaintances and relatives. In sixteenth-century Cologne, it was customary for childless burghers to divide their estates equitably among next-of-kin. Hermann, however, had attempted to entail the family’s estate in perpetuity, naming his brother Gottschalk (1532– 1597) and nephew Hermann (1560–1604) as his fi rst two successors. Though the elder Hermann had kept the plans a secret during his lifetime, his sisters indeed feared being shut out of the inheritance. But it was not simply his unconventional will that irked the heirs and bemused onlookers; it was the pomp, circumstance, and obsessive care with which Hermann had sought to secure an everlasting patrimony. In private conversations, relatives complained that their eccentric kinsman had “not settled his affairs well” (er seine dingen nitt richtig gemacht) and that his will had brought “great turmoil” (großen Irthumb) to his family. 31 The affair quickly grew gruesome. Gottschalk died not long after his elder brother, and the estate fell to the nephew, Hermann. Within a year of inheriting the Haus Weinsberg, the young man was suspected of murdering his aunt Sibilla (1537–1598), the elder Hermann’s sister, whose body was found in the well behind the family home. During the investigation into her death, the civic authorities uncovered another

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family scandal—the fi rst heir, Gottschalk, had attempted suicide, allegedly out of embarrassment over the inheritance. After these revelations, the city ordered the younger Hermann tortured and thrown in prison, mockingly referring to him as “the Housefather.” A few years later, he died, the case still unresolved. As the sordid dispute dragged on, observers placed the blame on the elder Hermann’s will and writings. In 1608, over ten years after Hermann Weinsberg’s death, his grandnephew Gottschalk Ordenbach, who had been tasked by the magistrates with examining the writings and summarizing their aims, complained to the City Council that his late kinsman had “taken upon himself to elevate and promote our lineage with unbelievable care (unglaublicher sorgfeltgkeit), establishing no small number of ceremonies and various arrangements to this end.” Instead, the will had produced the opposite effect, bringing “mockery and ridicule” upon the family. The heirs and relatives had found it “impossible to stop the mouths of people.” Where Hermann had intended to create peace and unity, he had instead thrown the family into turmoil: “So many scandals, divisions, errors, and individual thorns have arisen from the will, that the extent of the misery can scarcely be expressed with the tongue.” The lawful heirs were surprised at being encumbered by “such an unbearable burden, the dangerous rule of the housefather.”32 In 1608, ten years after Weinsberg’s death, the heirs were fi nally granted their wish. The City Council sold the Weinsberg house and estate and divided the proceeds among the surviving kin. Ironically, the Licentiate’s will had hastened the very outcome it was intended to prevent—the “alienation” of the family home and the obscuring of its memory. During endless investigations and legal disputes, Hermann Weinsberg’s family archive quietly made its way into a civic archive, where it lay unnoticed for 250 years. Thus were Hermann Weinsberg’s writings dismissed and forgotten. Contemporaries saw his work as little more than the vain ravings of an old man, who dreamed of golden lineages and noble grandeur at the expense of his own kin. Sixteenth-century literature was full of cautionary tales about the dangers of overstepping one’s bounds. Moralizing pamphlets and woodcuts warned of unequal matches—of young men seeking the fortunes of older women, or lecherous widowers blind to the avarice of the young women they wooed. Urban sumptuary laws limited everything from clothing to funerals, reserving luxuries and symbols of status for elite families. Such laws testified to the relentless urge to dress up one’s self and household—to transform

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humble inheritances into splendid legacies. They also attested to the age’s urgent efforts to keep mobility in check, as the timeless medieval orders—clergy, nobility, commoner—gave way to more baroque, and often brittle, systems of social rank, accompanied by a preoccupation with minute markers of social difference. Although elite families commonly sought to document illustrious ancestries and secure the future of their houses, Hermann was only a minor city-councilor, a mediocre lawyer of humble origins, not a noble scion. To the heirs, his work was easy to read as a grasping after status he had no right to claim. Yet even to contemporaries, the unwieldy cache of writings seemed stranger than a simple morality tale. For a man apparently intent on ennobling his family, Hermann had made some unusual choices, stipulating that his heirs live humbly in the family’s urban house, establishing a business and maintaining a “bourgeois” (bürgerlich) lifestyle. The “no small number of ceremonies” he established were aimed less at securing some future noble estate than at preserving the family’s current middling status. Why had this man gone to so much trouble to write so much? Why had he so compulsively sought to secure his home? What was the source of his “unbelievable care”?

The Weinsberg Book It was a very different picture of Hermann Weinsberg that emerged when his work eventually resurfaced. In 1859, Cologne historian and archivist Leonard Ennen discovered the writings hidden “among all kinds of legal documents and supplications.” In announcing his fi nd, Ennen could scarcely suppress his excitement. Despite admitting that Hermann was a bit of a bore—a “gossip” from whom neighbors might flee—Ennen proclaimed that the Weinsberg “chronicle allows insights into the life and activities of the Cologne people that we could obtain in no other way.” Marveling at the author’s foresight in recording his quotidian affairs, Ennen proclaimed that the reader “can clearly imagine what everyday burgher life looked like in Cologne three hundred years ago.”33 Ennen briefly noted Hermann’s vain preoccupation with an “eternal legacy,” but it was the remarkably detailed and empirical Gedenkbuch that caught his eye. The work, which Ennen simply called Das Buch Weinsberg (“The Weinsberg Book”), was an unrivaled historical source. Subsequent scholars have been inclined to agree. Thanks to an abridged five-volume edition published in the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, the Gedenkbuch has long served as an encyclopedia of local history and urban life, consulted on topics as diverse as childhood, religion, travel, old age, household consumption, carnival, art patronage, taverns, laughter, and parish life.34 One nineteenthcentury reviewer compiled a dizzying list of subjects contained in the “Weinsberg Book.” On topics related to “urban life,” for instance, a reader could expect to fi nd entries on trade and industry, guilds, house prices, animal husbandry in houses, . . . medical science and practice, conditions during times of plague, inn keeping, . . . the tribulations of war, . . . dancing, music, card games and chess, customs in patrician houses, furniture, insults, superstition, prophecy, witches, . . . illegitimate children (and their social status), syphilis, feasting and drinking (very widespread), court cases.

The list continued for several pages, encompassing topics as diverse as “children’s games,” “family pride,” “the election of priests,” and the “funerals of mayors.”35 Such copious detail makes the chronicle, in the words of a twentieth-century historian, “an inexhaustible source for cultural history,” a “sort of historical quarry for scholars interested in mentalities and everyday life.”36 More recently, the Gedenkbuch has been published in digital form. For years to come, it will furnish historians of sixteenth-century Germany with a steady supply of tender anecdotes and vivid details.37 To gain a sense for the rich detail and texture of Hermann Weinsberg’s “Memory Book” one need only turn to individual passages. For instance, among his many entries for the year 1552, Hermann Weinsberg recounted “a great quarrel” that erupted between himself (then thirty-four years old) and his younger brother Christian (twenty-three), which ended in a chase through a maze of courtyards and doors: In 1552, on the 28th of June, I came from my house zur Cronenberg and wanted to go through the stable behind the Haus Weinsberg to fetch something from my house zum Torn. It was around one in the afternoon. Just then my brother came stealthily from the pathway door towards me with a bared sword and said, “Now I will pay you back.” I was frightened and ran ahead of him to the house zum Torn. Luckily, the door was unlocked. I quickly opened the door to the courtyard of the Paulus house, which had recently been rented, and pulled it shut behind me. I picked up a stone in the courtyard and waited for my brother there. When I asked him what his grievance was, he thrust his sword through a pretty window and broke it. The people in the Paulus house heard the commotion and ran out to us. My brother opened the door and charged at me. I prepared

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to defend myself. But the others kept us apart, for there were many servants living in the house there.

Hermann went on to explain the causes of this quarrel. Since his father’s death in 1549, he had taken over the disciplinary role of patriarch within the Weinsberg family, sometimes punishing his younger siblings. “It fell on me as an elder brother to do this,” he insisted. Christian, however, resented Hermann’s authority, especially after his brother opposed his election to the City Council, telling fellow notables that Christian was still “childish” (ei, das doit nit, es ist noch kinderwirk mit im). So enraged was Christian that Sophia, their mother, warned Hermann not to come to the family home for several days—a warning he disregarded at his own peril. Hermann, for his part, did not want the quarrel to become public, noting that “it troubled me not so much for my own sake, but rather because it might give my brother a bad reputation and harm his prospects of marriage.” An officer of the peace came to help settle the affair behind closed doors. During the negotiations, Christian accused his brother of wanting to “lord it over him too much” and told Hermann to “govern himself” instead. 38 Hermann’s methodical, matter-of-fact style comes through most clearly in his various descriptions of personal traits, bodily appearance, and daily habits. Eager to preserve his life for posterity, Hermann strove to create a complete portrait of his visible and invisible features. “Because people take delight in paintings and portraits of old relatives and preserve them with care,” he wrote, “so I will now save the cost of a painting and portray myself with the quill (mich selbst mit der federen abcontrafeiten), and I hope that kin will fi nd these descriptions of mine as pleasant as if I were painted in color.” Enamored of writing, Hermann suggested that the pen could capture nuances of his personality inaccessible to the brush. “Therefore, I will also do what no painter can do and write of my nature, my habits and customs, my good and bad traits.”39 A few examples will suffice to convey the detail and scope of these self-portraits.40 In 1578, when he had reached the age of sixty, Hermann drew up a tally of his virtues and vices. His failings included the following: I want to be something special, more distinguished than others. I strive to achieve a good reputation among people after my death. I am also rather stubborn, hard-headed, and unmoveable. I stand my ground in lawsuits

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even if I don’t have the best case. I can make a lot of fuss in quarrels and disputes, and know how to insult people. . . . At times I am not careful and speak too freely of matters of faith and religion. I bear much ill will towards enemies, even though I do not know much about them. I gossip and do not always stay quiet about people’s misfortune and dishonor. . . . I am not sober in drinking and eating. I do not like to fast. I am quick to anger and sometimes swear when I am alone, though I do not let other people notice anger and disfavor in me. . . . I do not like to do works of mercy for the sick, poor, and needy.41

While such an enumeration of shortcomings may have echoed the routine of the confessional, Hermann offered equally clinical descriptions of his daily habits: I usually go to bed around nine o’clock in the evening, approximately one hour after dinner. Although my nephew Hermann used to sleep next to me on a little bed in my bedroom, he now sleeps upstairs next to my servant, so that I can call them from my bed. In the morning around five I call to them or ring for them to wake up. My nephew Hermann prepares for school, while Dietrich [the servant] takes care of the house and helps him study. In the summer, I get up at six, in the winter at five, perhaps earlier or later, depending on how I feel. I sometimes have trouble sleeping. In the evening when I go to bed, I usually fall asleep quickly and sleep for three hours, more or less. After that I need to urinate (beger ich wasser zu machen), or there is some clamor in the street from a neighbor, a baker, or a cat that wakes me up. If my head is full of worries or thoughts or quarrels, I cannot immediately fall back to sleep, and although my head wants to sleep, my eyes will not let me sleep, no matter how hard I try, so that I must stay awake. I have so much to think about that the hours fly by (I can hear the bells ring in two or more places) and so the night does not last long, which is a mercy. . . . I do not often get six or seven hours of sleep, and rarely I get only one or two. Three, four, or five hours of sleep are the most common.42

Several years later, Hermann noted that he preferred the long winter nights to the shorter summer nights, since “it is quiet and there is not such a racket in the streets and houses.”43 Such descriptions continued for pages. For instance, Hermann’s 1578 self-portrait included, among other things, entries on “Religion,” “Speech and Voice,” “Hearing,” “Dwelling,” “Work and Activities,” “Memory,” “Eating and Drinking,” “Appetite and Digestion,” “Heat and Cold,” “Income and Livelihood,” “Estate,” “Sayings,” and “Neighbors,” as well as detailed inventories of clothing and physical characteristics. Hermann provided measurements of his body and

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minute descriptions of each of its parts—head, face, forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, chin, neck, hair, beard, skin, shoulders, arms, back, stomach, bones, hands and feet, complexion, and more.44 Often he wrote about a painful hernia he had suffered from since childhood, noting how he kept it hidden from those around him, suffering the pain in grim silence. He suspected that this hernia had harmed his virility; he claimed it was behind both his choice of a sedentary career and his habit of marrying wealthier widows beyond their childbearing years. His only child was an illegitimate daughter, Anna, whom he had fathered at twenty-eight with one of the family’s maids.45 His lack of legitimate offspring was a painful fact he had to bear with patience. The Licentiate was equally forthcoming when describing the people, places, and things around him. For instance, in 1581, he expressed concern about the sullen, antisocial demeanor of his nephew Hermann (the heir who would later be suspected of murder): He is so uncommonly quiet at meals, much more than other young people, who laugh and are happy. At the table, he eats and drinks stone-faced and never offers a word of his own, but only stands up, serves, reaches for food, and does what is asked of him. When the meal is over, he goes to his room and stays there. On happy occasions, when we all share news, jokes, stories, or when we sing Christmas songs and Easter songs, he keeps silent and does not stay after the meal. If asked a question, he responds briefly, but he does not like to be questioned, and he himself never inquires anything of others. In the house and in the kitchen with my brother and his wife or with the servants and maids he is quiet and initiates nothing. If there are workmen, such as stone cutters, carpenters, butchers, or brewers, he does not like to be around them. I tell him that he should speak more, but he does not do it, which upsets me.

Hermann continued by speculating on the sources of his nephew’s extreme quietness, wondering whether the young man felt intimidated from not yet learning enough in school or whether he had inherited it from his mother, who was “very shy.” Eager to reassure himself that his nephew, whom he had placed second in line to his estate, was not beyond hope, the Licentiate noted in his Gedenkbuch that philosophers and the Bible praised the wisdom of listening before speaking. And yet Hermann worried that others would make fun of his nephew’s muteness, saying that he was ignorant, stupid, haughty, dour, or devious. The boy’s silence might even hurt the family’s future, “for who would want to marry such a person?”46 In light of the later history of the estate, these observations take on a somber cast.

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Though plainly told, Hermann’s accounts of kin and neighbors capture the colorful, often squalid world of a sixteenth-century city. The Gedenkbuch recounts suicides, spousal abuse and abandonment, rumors of witchcraft, thefts, bankruptcies, and quarrels. Hermann’s own siblings, especially his sisters, experienced numerous heartaches later in life, including impoverishment, abuse, death, and separation from spouses. By tracking the lives of neighbors and colleagues over half a century, Hermann testified to the blind workings of “fortune,” telling stories of individuals who climbed into wealth and high office, only to die abject and bankrupt. The Cologne in Hermann Weinsberg’s “Memory Book” was no static, regimented society. Members of the same family could experience vastly different fortunes, often depending on their luck in marriage or, in Hermann’s view, their prudence as householders. For instance, Hermann’s stepson Wilhelm Ross became a respected lawyer and Licentiate, even as his brother Heinrich took to drinking, which caused his wife to leave and threw him deep into debt, forcing him to live in a “hospital” for the indigent.47 Likewise, Wilhelm’s widowed sister Ailetgin also fell into drunkenness and poverty—“no bed, no clothing, no furniture”—and was forced by her family to board with a convent to avoid scandal.48 In countless entries, Hermann told of friends and relatives thrown into prison and interrogated, neighbors who fell foul of the authorities because of their religious views, and parents who grieved inconsolably over the loss of young children. Just as poignant were Hermann’s memories of changes in his family home and neighborhood. During the last decades of his life, Hermann shared meals there with his brother Gottschalk and his family. A short note about embroidered coverings and cushions that were set out in the house at Easter prompted Hermann to marvel at how clean the house was, since neither he nor his brother ran a workshop or business out of it. “In the past,” Hermann wrote, “when it was used as an inn, and horses were stabled here, when we dyed woolens and linens, brewed beer, and served wine, it was much messier than it is now. And there are no longer children, hens, and dogs in it.”49 For a sixteenth-century burgher from an artisanal background, the separation of work and living spaces—which would much later become the norm for middle-class families—was still something of a novelty. Within the Gedenkbuch, such snippets, short and long, followed in strict chronological order. Interspersed with personal reminiscences were reports of wars and Imperial politics, scandals in the

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neighborhood, decisions of the City Council, religious disputes, and much more. Many entries contained news from throughout Christendom, which Hermann gathered from pamphlets, conversations with friends and fellow notables, rumors circulating throughout the city, and from special events in which he was involved as a city-councilor. 50 In 1578, for instance, Hermann recounted how he and other councilors had been invited to a banquet with the Archbishop of Cologne and other noblemen. After eating many splendid courses while the city musicians played, the gathered councilors received a stern admonition to crack down on religious dissent in the city. “It had come to the attention of his princely grace that people were not only preaching the condemned doctrine [i.e., Protestantism] secretly in houses, but publicly, with open doors and that many libelous writings and paintings were being published and displayed in the city.” He requested that the Council “keep watch, so that this fi re does not gain the upper hand, leading to uproars, destruction, violence, murder, and the overthrow of the authorities.” According to Hermann, the rumor had spread throughout the Empire that Cologne was in danger of being overtaken by the heretical Protestant doctrine, since many Protestant and Anabaptist refugees from the Low Countries had fled there and the City Council had struggled to prevent heretical preaching outside the city gates. Hermann, with typical bluntness, concluded that “the rumor was worse than the reality.”51 Disoriented by the Protestant Reformation and the upheavals that followed in its wake, Hermann was particularly keen to document all that had changed during his lifetime, including “ceremonies and customs in preaching, masses, pilgrimages, and processions,” “territories and their rulers,” “ordinances,” “buildings in the city,” “writing styles,” “clothing,” “hair styles,” and “manners of spelling and speaking.” At times, Hermann seemed to anticipate the curiosity of the modern anthropologist or linguist: Even the words that people speak sound different than before. Now in Cologne there are different pronunciations and ways of speaking than sixty years earlier. The letters have been exchanged. ‘E’ has turned into ‘A.’ Words from the Low Countries are used instead of the old Cologne dialect, and Latin words are used instead of German. 52

Many times Hermann told of customs that had fallen into disuse, such as the August 1 festival of “St. Peter in Chains,” a “joyful” occasion when friends and neighbors sang and danced around bonfi res.

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By 1588, this custom had been forbidden by the City Council, presumably for fear of conflagration. The recollection of this defunct celebration prompted Hermann to trace its historical origins back to the Emperor Augustus. 53 More often, Hermann’s thoughts turned to the changes wrought by the Protestant Reformation. In 1592, for instance, he received a visit from one of his in-laws, a monk from the city of Hamm, who arrived at the Weinsberg house in secular clothing and a beard. The brother had adopted this disguise so as to travel safely through Protestant lands. In his Gedenkbuch, Hermann concluded that “it is a sad state of affairs when no one in these territories can let themselves be seen in clerical garb on the highways and fields and unfamiliar places. In the past no one had to worry about this, and I remember how a long time ago the clergy in their habits roamed as freely as secular people.”54 Such was the detail with which Hermann Weinsberg described his world. He applied the same clinical style to matters as humble as his toilet habits and as lofty as Imperial visits—interspersing his anecdotes with countless legal, fi nancial, and familial records. But what had prompted all this writing? What place did Hermann’s autobiographical records have within his entire project—the project that had so offended his heirs? How did his “Memory Book” compare with other texts of the period? And if the Weinsberg archive contains such ample information about everyday life, does it provide equally valuable insights into the sixteenth-century mind? The modern reception of Hermann Weinsberg’s work reveals as much about changing historical assumptions as it does about the text itself. In the late nineteenth century, scholars published a heavily abridged edition of Hermann’s writings under the somewhat misleading title Das Buch Weinsberg: Kölner Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, or “The Book Weinsberg: Memorabilia from SixteenthCentury Cologne.” Guided by positivist methods, Hermann’s fi rst editors aimed to extract hard facts from his cache of writings, leaving behind anything deemed too personal or subjective. According to Konstantin Höhlbaum, “neither a distinctive ethical stance nor a definite sensibility distinguishes Weinsberg from those he described.”55 Thus, as Höhlbaum explained in the preface to the first volume of Das Buch Weinsberg, “we may discard an abundance of trivialities that encumber the second half of [Weinsberg’s] book and recount only the events and contingencies of everyday life, not experiences of universal significance.”56 Rather than examining the archive as a whole—its strange

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unfolding over the course of fifty years—the editors instead mined it for representative information about early modern life. The resulting text was a desultory collection of anecdotes and records, vivid in detail, but lacking any overarching theme or purpose. Excluded from the edition were not only numerous intimate records, but also hundreds of pages in which Hermann fretted about his posterity, constructing elaborate family myths. Because of these omissions, Hermann Weinsberg’s work seemed, at times, more modern than it was. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some readers looked to the source for evidence of the Renaissance individualism that Jakob Burckhardt claimed to have found in the culture of the Italian Renaissance. In the early twentieth century, Josef Stein, one of the editors of Das Buch Weinsberg, wrote that Hermann Weinsberg had crossed over the great divide between the medieval and Renaissance world views: “While men of the Middle Ages only theoretically recognized the individual personality, the Renaissance brought an entirely new valuation of the individual.” A “child of the time,” Hermann Weinsberg demonstrated that this “achievement of the new era” was not limited to an intellectual aristocracy, but rather had spread among the “educated bourgeoisie.”57 As evidence, Stein highlighted Hermann’s sharp historical awareness, his love of Erasmus, and his meticulous self-portraits. Several decades later, Wolfgang Herborn discerned in Hermann’s skepticism towards rumors of supernatural occurrences early signs of the rationalism that would come into its own with Descartes.58 While acknowledging Hermann Weinsberg’s humanist leanings, scholars also scoured his work for evidence in support of another great historiographical theme—the rise of the middle class.59 Evidence in support of such a thesis is not difficult to fi nd: Hermann often referred to himself as a “middling” man and delighted in repeating his favorite saying: medium tenuere beati—“blessed are those who hold to the mean.”60 Following ancient authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Cato, Hermann praised moderation, frugality, prudence, and sobriety. Few things pleased Hermann more than the quiet, leisurely life of the rentier.61 According to several scholars, his writings attest to the “accountbook” mentality of the early modern townsman: pragmatic, guarded, prudent, matter-of-fact.62 Most noteworthy to modern historians, however, is Hermann Weinsberg’s evident care for posterity. By the end of his life, he had become an amateur chronicler, intent on recording the events of his times for

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posterity. Echoing the sixteenth-century Protestant historian Johannes Sleidan, Hermann desired to document each event “as it truly was” (wie es in der warheit were). 63 Lamenting that the past was rarely preserved “actually or correctly” (nit eigentlich ader recht behalten), 64 he developed a rudimentary form of source criticism to confi rm news he received secondhand.65 Not unlike the modern journalist, Hermann Weinsberg strove to record each event “with all its circumstances, such as who, what, where, when, how, etc.” (mit allen circumstancien und umbstenden, als wer, was, wa, wanne, wie und derglichen). 66 Such methods were common enough among humanist authors, but Hermann was somewhat unusual in applying them to the stuff of his everyday life; he quite self-consciously strove to document his mundane world, including his own person, for posterity. At times, his Gedenkbuch seems almost journalistic in its attention to detail and concern for accuracy. His meticulous self-descriptions reveal a remarkable concern for particularity, an attachment to the things of this world. Perhaps not surprisingly, several scholars have sought to situate Hermann’s work within the larger history of writing about the self.67 According to some literary critics, Hermann’s allegedly naïve, annalistic writing style represented a distinctive moment in the evolution of modern autobiography. Unlike medieval chroniclers, Hermann did not pattern his life story after a spiritual or social “type,” such as saint, sinner, warrior, or merchant. Instead, Hermann delighted in the particulars of his world, recording the minute details of his everyday life for their own sake. Yet, according to critics, he lacked the tools to weave these details into a meaningful narrative. Accounts of family dinners mingled with reports of wars and Imperial politics: “The order of the world is completely shattered and the totality is reduced to incoherent particles.” In this reading, although Hermann could no longer count on a given identity, he had not yet mastered the skill of forging an order for his own life.68 Such an interpretation can be sustained only by bracketing off large portions of Hermann Weinsberg’s archive. Far from a quaint diarist, Hermann recorded his daily affairs as only one part of his urgent, secretive project to secure the “eternal” survival and memory of his lineage, the Haus Weinsberg. 69 With no legitimate children to call his own, Hermann was eager to live on through his heirs and successors, to make something great of his otherwise obscure burgher family. Thus, as historians have recently argued, Hermann’s Gedenkbuch (at least in its original intent) was not so much an autobiography and

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diary as it was a “housebook” or family chronicle, which gathered together the history of a lineage. Traditionally written by a patriarch for his successors and descendants, such a manuscript was intended to consolidate and preserve a family tradition.70 Handed down from fathers to sons, family books defi ned the identity and limits of the lineage—they carefully specified its property, commemorated its ancestors, and drew lessons from the family’s past. The providential history of the lineage lent significance to Hermann’s mundane affairs, making them worthy of being recorded. How do the many different aspects of this sprawling work fit together? Despite the exceptional candor of the “Memory Book,” its author has remained an enigma, proving more elusive than the world he so meticulously described. Hermann Weinsberg’s written legacy is so vast and complex that scholars can find passages confi rming any number of a priori assumptions about early modern bourgeois life and private writing. Indeed, one need know little more about Hermann’s life to conclude that his obsessive record keeping was unusual for the time. In the words of one historian, “Weinsberg’s inclination to pass on even the smallest trifle of private life is so unique that we must be careful about presenting him and his family as a typical example of middleclass habits.”71 For this reason, most historians have been content to mine Hermann’s Gedenkbuch for data about the early modern city without inquiring too much into the nature of the source.

The Wonderful Art of Writing Hermann Weinsberg’s work comes into focus if we read it not as a fi nished product but as a fifty-year experiment with the possibilities of bourgeois writing and self-representation. A compulsive scribbler, Hermann found that his pen often outpaced his planning, issuing in reams of material that he could not fit into conventional categories. The obsessions and ambitions revealed in his private pages outstripped his stated goal of securing a family legacy. To defend the honor of commoners, to preserve the memory of ordinary people, to create a stable family business, to fi nd refuge from the religious conflict engulfi ng Christendom, to set the historical record straight for posterity—these were only some of the goals that Hermann sought in his private chronicle. The preservative powers of paper astonished him; the fragile sheets of his “Memory Book” were all that separated himself and his kin from oblivion. At times, he seemed to harbor the hope that he could rectify

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in writing—and in the confi nes of his middling household—all that was out of joint in Christendom and the wider world. Recent scholarship on early modern written culture makes it somewhat easier to put Hermann Weinsberg’s frantic scribbling in context. Older studies often imposed anachronistic notions of genre, narrative, and authorship on sixteenth-century private writings, treating them as if they were, or ought to be, fully modern books—self-contained, logically organized, artfully contrived, and addressed to an anonymous reading public. Early modern private writings were treated as so many naïve precursors of the mature eighteenth-century autobiography and Bildungsroman. Recent research, by contrast, has paid keener attention to the exuberant material culture of early modern writing, to the reams of paper and piles of books and manuscripts that came to populate households, workshops, government archives, courts, and merchant offices and to the myriad types of “ego-documents” that testified to the self.72 Less restrictive in its defi nition of autobiography, this new scholarship has sought to understand the many forms of early modern writing—wills, account books, court testimonies, genealogies, letters, parish registers, family chronicles, prayer diaries—on their own terms. No longer do scholars assume that the ultimate end of all writing about the self is to testify to deep subjectivity and a highly buffered sense of individuality. Nor do they suggest that all early modern paths led inexorably to Rousseau and Goethe. Instead, they highlight the fluid, exploratory ways in which sixteenth-century men and women sought to represent their lives and world on paper.73 To a burgher such as Hermann Weinsberg, paper was more than a blank receptacle for thought, more than a medium of intellectual exchange or self-representation. It was an extension of his person as a patriarch, a potent means of acting in the world. To Hermann, writing had an almost magical quality to preserve life—to “renew, restore, and resurrect that which is forgotten and dead.”74 In the sixteenth century, the word—spoken, written, printed—possessed an aura it would later lack. For Catholics, the words of the priest transformed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and communicated grace to the sinner. To Lutherans, the Word of God was living and active, speaking through the preacher and working forcefully in the world. Looking back at his younger self, Hermann recalled how much power he attributed to words as a young man; he “thought at all times that when someone was cursed it would hurt him, and when someone was blessed, it would benefit him.”75 In warm, paternal letters, Hermann

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spoke hurriedly and directly to yet unknown kin through his quill (in der eill mit der federen).76 He urged family members to continue his writing, so as to preserve an unbroken continuity with the past. The task of forging a family memory and overseeing a household was unending. He even advised his heirs to consider entering the paper trade, so that they might have steady supplies of both income and writing materials. Indeed, for urban merchants and lawyers, paper and writing had become indispensable, as foundational to bourgeois identity as land was to the aristocracy. Once the exclusive preserve of the clergy, writing had penetrated middle-class life in the later Middle Ages, enabling even the most modest of householders to engage in complex economic speculation and planning, to manage fluid commodities and uncertain enterprises. At the same time, urban merchants increasingly relied on writing to secure the transmission of the family name and identity in the absence of a landed patrimony. As a money economy and urban mobility dislodged men and women from the customary identities of the village and its overwhelmingly oral culture, growing numbers of laypeople were compelled to secure their identities on paper. It was no coincidence that Western cities came into their own in the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries, not long after the introduction of paper-making techniques from the East. Practices of writing and record keeping made possible increasingly complex networks of economic exchange and social interdependence. Paper was the means through which a burgher staked out his claims, his rights, his property, his identity. Contracts, bills of exchange, testaments, account books, promissory notes, diaries, family chronicles, genealogies—these, as much as any property, became the means by which the respectable burgher oriented himself in the world.77 Though practices of bourgeois record keeping stretched back hundreds of years, the sixteenth century saw an expansion of lay literacy, as “unlearned” men and women gained access to a wider range of printed material. But it was not simply the increasing availability of relatively cheap paper and printed material that gave rise to new forms of bourgeois writing. Print also served to amplify a growing uncertainty about the future of the Church and traditional institutions. During the Protestant Reformation, polemical pamphlets frequently appealed to the “common man,” offering burghers new occasions to reflect on their place within religious and political orders. In the aftermath of the great religious upheaval, both Protestant and Catholic

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confessions insisted on the importance of an inward appropriation of spiritual realities. Where communal rituals and priestly rites had long been means by which the soul participated in the drama of salvation, the new confessions urged the layperson to play a more active role in his salvation, privately scrutinizing his life for signs of Christ’s presence. At the same time, lay readers confused about the import of the “great schism” in religion could turn to pamphlets, vernacular histories, and chronicles in an effort to make some sense of contemporary changes. Religious uncertainty, cheap writing material, and an increasingly dense culture of literacy all helped to stimulate experiments with “paper memory.” Vernacular writing gave burghers new opportunities to represent their social status; print whet their appetites for learning; and mobility made them eager “to collect and pass on a genealogical tradition” to their heirs. Other incitements to private writing included Renaissance portraiture, spiritual anxiety, “information overload,”78 new pressures to discipline and monitor the self, a new valuation of everyday life,79 and a growing sense of the contingency of cultural artifacts.80 These forces came together in peculiar ways in Hermann Weinsberg’s own experiment with writing, working to transform the seemingly simple act of bourgeois chronicling and record keeping into something far more complex than it might have been one hundred years before. Hermann’s contemporary Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) once claimed that his own collection of Essays was “the only book of its kind in the world.”81 The boast was hyperbolic, but it expressed the sense of novelty with which some sixteenth-century authors, including Hermann Weinsberg, embarked upon their writing projects. Though Hermann knew of no precise precedent for his attempts to memorialize a common bourgeois family, other sixteenth-century burghers were also exploring the possibilities of paper memory. The autobiographical texts of the period were as diverse as the authors themselves, but many shared Hermann’s concern to pass on a legacy and to provide evidence of God’s special blessing. Looking back over the years, the Swiss-born Protestant Thomas Platter (1499–1582) penned for his distinguished sons a remarkable story of his ascent from a humble goatherd to an influential humanist scholar, teacher, and publisher. In it he marveled that the grace of God had made such an improbable career possible.82 His son Felix (1536–1614), a wealthy doctor, continued the family tradition, composing a lively account of

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his early years that he continued in diary form.83 Late in life, Bartholomew Sastrow (1520–1603), a mayor of Stralsund, composed a massive autobiography, in which he defended himself against claims of fi nancial mismanagement by furnishing evidence of God’s blessings throughout his life, including several narrow escapes he experienced as a young Protestant traveling through Catholic lands. Behind Sastrow’s retelling lay a simple, visceral providentialism: We know (according to the highly enlightened Apostle Paul in Romans 3) that all things work for the best of those who love God.  .  .  . My children will see in many ways how miraculously the faithful, true Son often saved me supernaturally from all crosses, misfortunes, dangers, and adversities.84

The autobiographies of Platter and Sastrow rank alongside Hermann Weinsberg’s “Memory Book” as the most vivid fi rst-person works from the period. But other manuscripts showed similar impulses. Around the same time that Hermann began to work on his great Gedenkbuch, Hieronymous Koeler (1517–1573), a respectable Nuremberg burgher who had traveled throughout Europe as a youth and studied for a time in Wittenberg, wrote an autobiography and journal for his descendants. To remind his heirs that “we human beings are nothing other than pilgrims in this vale of tears,” Koeler set out to “show several of my forms, appearances, and changes, as well as some of the apprenticeships and travels of my youth, in the hope that it will teach them to practice patience, honor, and good manners and to fear God all the more.”85 With less apologetic delight in his mutable outward appearance, the Augsburg merchant Matthäus Schwarz (1497–1574) drew pictures of himself at different ages in bourgeois fi nery.86 Other burghers used private writing to express criticism they dared not utter in public. Nuremberg patrician Christoph Fürer (1479–1537), for instance, composed a “Secret Book,” in which he expressed his private disillusionment with the Protestant Reformation that had swept through his home city; he complained that the new Lutheran doctrine would lead to the “loss of all virtue, conscience, and fear of God.”87 The boundaries between such autobiographical texts and other forms of writing were fluid. It was not uncommon for account books to contain personal notes, nor was it unusual for simple genealogical records to grow into something more complex and individualized. As was the case with Hermann Weinsberg’s work, many authors embedded their own life-stories within a wider providential web of kinship.

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For instance, Hieronymous Koeler began the narrative of his own life with stories of his ancestors, which he had been inspired to gather after an in-law showed him his family’s crest in a book alongside those of other “honorable lineages.”88 The practice of passing on family records was exceptionally popular in patrician Nuremberg; the products ranged from splendid illuminated patrician genealogies to plain paper lists. The same patriarch who composed a family history might also keep detailed fi nancial accounts or brief memos of personal events. Several generations might work on the same text, as was the case with the “Family Book” (Geschlechtsbüchlein) of the Behaim family, which was begun by Michael Behaim the Elder (d. 1511) in 1488 and continued by his son Friedrich (d. 1533) and grandson Paul (d. 1568), each of whom, after recording the death and burial of his predecessor, took up the task of documenting family matters.89 In the possession of families were also smaller, more personal texts. These included, for instance, the spare “Memorial of all kinds of things” that Magdalena Behaim jotted down on a single piece of paper in 1568. This act of recollection was prompted by the death of her husband, Paul Behaim I (1519–1568). The list, which was in no particular chronological order, included brief lines recalling the couple’s marriage, the births of their children, and a house renovation undertaken in 1561. The very terseness of the records hinted at deeper emotions: “In the year 1554 he and I were married.”90 (After her husband’s death, Magdalena entered details about her husband’s fi nal illness in the “Family Book” her grandfather-in-law had started, taking it upon herself to provide updates on the affairs of several kin mentioned in the book.)91 Magdalena’s daughter Katharina wrote a “Memory Book” (Denck Buchlin), in which she kept track of the marriages of her siblings and the births of her children. In 1591, she wrote movingly of the death of her “dear” husband, who had gone off to war despite her desperate attempts to talk him out of it.92 One senses that many of these authors were experimenting with how best to represent the intimacies of family life in writing. At the death of his second wife, for instance, Hieronymous Koeler memorialized the thirteen years he had spent with her by listing thirteen brief points about her life.93 Relatively few housebooks and diaries survive from late medieval and early modern Cologne, in part because the city lacked the proud hereditary clans that were famous in Nuremberg. However, one surviving fi fteenth-century family book, that of Teutonic Knight Werner Overstolz, still reflected the mentalities of the older Cologne patrician

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class that had been overthrown in a 1396 guild revolution.94 As the fi nal scion of an old Cologne family—albeit one that had suffered dearly in recent years—Overstolz fi lled his chronicle with accounts of kin, drawings of coats of arms, and a genealogy that stretched back to the Roman settlement of Cologne. This legend of Roman descent had once been common among Cologne’s venerable patrician families, and it still lingered on in chronicles and histories of the city. According to Overstolz, these families had Christianized the city and governed it with “great wisdom, piety, and courage” (groisser wiisheit gotlicheit ind manheit). By telling these stories in the mid-fi fteenth century, Overstolz expressed his nostalgia for the old patrician rule. His text contrasted sharply with another surviving fi fteenth-century housebook—that of the successful merchant Johann Sloesgin. This latter work was full of contemporary affairs, including important family dates, children’s schooling, a list of medicines, and the value of tolls in Antwerp. This was the manuscript of a self-made man, “a calculating merchant” who “rose into the ruling class through his own economic achievement.” The style of the two housebooks reflected each man’s social background, the fundamental sources of his personal status and success.95 One should be cautious, however, about classifying such works too rigidly. In Nuremberg, powerful patricians recorded their quotidian affairs. Meanwhile, in Cologne, Hermann Weinsberg simultaneously wrote fantastical family histories and clinically recorded the events of a lifetime in his “Memory Book.” The latter work, moreover, contained hundreds of smaller genres—letters, recipes, hymns, poems, accounts, contracts, prayers, civic ordinances, inventories. In his genealogical manuscript, Das Boich Weinsberg, Hermann inserted, among other things, letters from his father and a printed commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Hermann’s reading was eclectic, as befit the fi rst great surging age of print. The sources for his work included noble genealogies, legendary accounts of Imperial ancestry, histories and chronicles, humanist and classical literature (much of it in translation), legal works, pamphlets and broadsides, religious tracts, rhymes and hymns, and account books. But his writing also flowed from contemporary oral culture—from household sayings, neighborhood gossip, conversations with Cologne notables, and news and rumors circulating in and around the city. Aware of the gap between the spoken and written word, he sought to document—to fi x on paper forever—the fleeting voices of his lifetime.

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The hybrid, experimental nature of early modern private writings arguably makes more sense to today’s readers than it did to the nineteenth-century scholars who fi rst took interest in such works. In the twenty-fi rst century it is not difficult to relate to Hermann Weinsberg’s praise of a “wonderful” medium; today’s commentary on digital communication often evinces a similar sense of astonishment (and unease). Although writing itself was hardly new in the sixteenth century, the spread of print and paper brought literacy into more areas of everyday life. And just as the digital revolution has generated new forms of publicity and prompted laments about “information overload,” so too did the expansion of lay literacy inspire sixteenth-century men and women to explore new ways of representing individual identity and making sense of the world. During the sixteenth century, the implications of expanding literacy were just as unclear as are the implications of digital media in our own time. To suggest that Hermann Weinsberg’s diary was not typical is to miss the uncertainty about bourgeois identity and writing that lay at the center not only of his work, but also of sixteenthcentury culture as a whole. In its simplest form, Hermann Weinsberg’s project grew out of his anxieties as an upwardly mobile burgher—a timid youth whose father expected “great things.”96 As a young lawyer in the 1540s, Hermann was determined to leave behind a great family legacy. Having noticed how few Cologne families had survived more than a few generations, he devoted himself to securing the future of his own lineage—his “father’s house.” As he later explained, “I began to consider how the Haus Weinsberg might be founded and endowed, so that an honorable household might be held there at all times . . . and it might remain with my father’s blood and heirs for all eternity.” Drawing on his recent legal education, he immediately began to develop plans to secure his family’s fortunes. “Each week, I took the work in hand, preparing all my ideas for it, so I might bring it to completion.” Though he had thus far proved a mediocre lawyer, Hermann nonetheless hoped through writing “to honor God and all my family” (geschlecht).97 Such ambitions were common enough. Elite families throughout German-speaking lands had long sought to secure splendid legacies. If anything, the impulse of Renaissance humanism had stimulated the quest for an “eternal memory.” Humanism heightened the patriarch’s consciousness of posterity, enhancing the status of genealogical research and creating new public spaces, both physical and virtual, for social display. Since the fi fteenth century, the symbolism of elite status

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had grown increasingly elaborate, grandiose, and self-conscious. In the early sixteenth century, for instance, the Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519) had lovingly overseen a massive genealogical and memorial project, commissioning scholars to trace his ancestry back not only to Aeneas, as others had done, but also to every imaginable ancient source: Jewish, German, Roman, and Egyptian. None other than Albrecht Dürer had been commissioned to design a great Triumphal Arch, a monument overloaded with symbols of sacred and secular glory. Though the arch was never built, it perfectly displayed the aggrandizing, omnivorous myth-making that supported the Hapsburg claim to universal priesthood and kingship.98 Although the Imperial genealogy shone with unequaled resplendence, princely and urban elites also sought to bask in its light. In Nuremberg, for instance, patrician families furnished forth their impressive pedigrees in ornate, illustrated “family books” (Geschlechterbüchern); they hired humanist scholars to research their family histories and write laudatory prefaces. The ties between Imperial myth-making and patrician self-consciousness ran deep; the Emperor Maximilian himself had sent portions of his autobiography to the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, apologizing for its rough Latin.99 While Hermann Weinsberg’s hometown of Cologne had no hereditary patrician class, no majestic clans to compare with those of Nuremberg, several of its citizens nonetheless played key roles on the Imperial stage. As Hermann himself was fond of noting in his writings, two of Cologne’s mayors, Arnold von Brauweiler (ca. 1473–1552) and Arnold von Siegen (ca. 1500–1579), had risen from obscure origins to win wealth, knighthood, and the ear of the Emperor. Although Cologne had no great ruling lineages, the city’s leading sixteenth-century families had worked sedulously to consolidate their gains. After converting several houses into a splendid Renaissance mansion and amassing a huge fortune, Arnold von Siegen attempted to keep the estate in the male line, though his will sparked an inheritance dispute lasting over a decade.100 Such men hoped to turn their achievements into something more lasting. Yet even the wealthiest families in Cologne found it difficult to overcome the city’s churning economic and political forces as well as its deeply entrenched customs of partible inheritance. As a middling man, a commoner, Hermann Weinsberg had even less hope of doing so. He facetiously referred to his estate as “my poverty.”101 The closest he had come to the Emperor was as a child, when a Spanish

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gentleman in the Imperial retinue had helped him catch a glimpse of Charles V (r. 1519–1556). Somewhat ironically, Hermann hoped that the modesty of his estate would help to avoid the quarrels that arose over more substantial fortunes. “The same will not happen with my estate,” he wrote, “since I do not have much property and have no children.”102 Indeed, his writings contained frequent apologies on behalf of his grand claims, along with poignant pleas to heirs and contemporaries to give his plan a chance. There were other models for Hermann Weinsberg’s writing project, ones that were closer to home. Many of Cologne’s convents, churches, and monasteries possessed robust institutional memories—archives that vouchsafed traditional identities, commemorated the lives of deceased members, and documented property rights. But it was in the houses of the Devotio Moderna—the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life— that habits of literacy were most intensively cultivated. These houses were voluntary communities of laity and clergy who devoted themselves to manual labor, bible reading, and spiritual introspection. Viewed with suspicion by established religious orders, members of the Common Life used writing to cultivate an exemplary piety and to establish their spiritual legitimacy. The “Devout” showed a “drive to write” that bears striking resemblance to Hermann Weinsberg’s own indefatigable scribbling: “In the documents they amassed to guarantee and defend their communities, they gave shape to, and monumentalized for themselves and their heirs, a distinctive ‘estate’ (status) as their chosen way of life. In the memorials they wrote of departed companions, they remembered those ‘lives’ as a way to kindle and rekindle their own zeal and purpose.”103 Brothers and sisters commonly kept spiritual diaries, in which they tallied their sins and charted their spiritual progress. As scholars have often pointed out, many of the major reformers of the early sixteenth century—Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola—spent time in schools or dormitories run by the Brethren. So too did Hermann Weinsberg. Perhaps not coincidentally, all these men, despite their diverging paths, felt compelled to wrestle with themselves and the world on paper. In seeking to defend himself against accusations of vainglory, Hermann often presented his quest for a legacy as a pious project—an attempt to found and preserve a holy household. Indeed, he shared with the Brethren a need to defend an “estate,” an identity, and a way of life. And yet he readily admitted that he had little interest in engaging in religious polemics or remaking Christendom. Not particularly

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concerned about his salvation, he showed little passion for meditation, fasting, and prayer. Rather, his strange genius was to apply an intense reforming zeal—a graphomania more commonly found among the devout—to worldly ends. If adherents of the Devotio Moderna laid bare their individuality before God, Hermann used writing to secure a worldly heritage, to fi nd immortality among his heirs. But was such a project legitimate? It was in nervous efforts to justify his secret ambitions that Hermann Weinsberg’s writings grew considerably more complex. What right did a middling burgher have to claim such a legacy? Why were burghers and commoners so poorly represented in the historical record? Did paper and new forms of literacy open up new ways for burghers to achieve recognition and legitimacy? Was it sinful to seek fame and recognition? Could burghers trust the Church to preserve their memories? Or might the traditional Church itself change beyond recognition? These questions increasingly preoccupied Hermann, unleashing a cascade of anxious, urgent writing. Humanist training and reading of histories and chronicles had sharpened his awareness of the silence, obscurity, and strangeness of the past. But it was the “great schism” in religion, including the possibility that the Catholic Church itself might “prove transient,” that made Hermann feel he was living through an age of unprecedented change. To Hermann, the religious turmoil of his lifetime made the Church seem less reliable as a guarantor of memory and identity. It seemed prudent to seek other sources of stability, other bulwarks against oblivion. By the end of his life, Hermann Weinsberg had come to see his writing project as a solution to many of the problems, both traditional and modern, that beset the middling burghers of his age. “Hold to this book as an anchor”—thus did Hermann Weinsberg admonish his heirs to weather tumultuous times.104 Even if the Catholic Church itself collapsed, the heirs were to find their certainty and purpose in the family tradition he had established. In his fondest dreams, the pages he bequeathed to his heirs would carry them safely into a “new world.” And yet for Hermann, the act of writing exacerbated the very uncertainty it was meant to quell. Unease about his bourgeois identity and the future of the Church prompted his turn to the consolations of private reading and writing. Yet through the channel of print, the world flooded into his study. The more Hermann Weinsberg wrote, the more he was confronted with a mass of confusing news and information. Even while pining after the stability of an imagined past, he searched

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frantically for new forms of order, stability, and certainty. In this, if nothing else, his writings mirrored the experience of the age. Long after his death, commercial society and the modern state would eventually forge institutions that tamed the forces let loose by print and the fragmentation of Christendom. But to Hermann Weinsberg, the struggle to fi nd order in a confusing, uncertain world had become a lonely, all-consuming task. How it became so is the subject of the next two chapters.



chapter t wo

My Father’s House

Within the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the first half of the sixteenth century was a period of profound cultural upheaval. The traditions of Christendom had lost much of their coherence. The agrarian and clerical values inherited from earlier ages awkwardly fit the emerging realities of a more mobile mercantile society. To many contemporaries, the selfishness at the heart of a money economy seemed to threaten the ideals of the Christian community. An ecclesiastical hierarchy hungry for cash had exploited the penitential rites and teachings of the Church. And Christendom itself threatened to splinter apart into competing dynastic and territorial states. The Holy Roman Empire remained fragmented—a mess of cities, abbeys, bishoprics, fiefdoms, and territorial states. Caught in a dense tangle of competing jurisdictions, the various estates of the Empire clamored for clarification of their own rights, privileges, and “freedoms.” By the 1520s, these demands had become ever more urgent, erupting in violence throughout the Empire.1 Perhaps no group in the Empire entered the heady decades of the 1510s, 1520s, and 1530s with a greater restlessness or sense of possibility than burghers. Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne—the Empire’s largest cities were enjoying the peak of their prosperity and political influence. With trade connections throughout Europe, urban merchants bankrolled the enterprises of great dynastic houses and even the election of emperors. The expansion of secular education and printing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries offered laymen new opportunities for social advancement and learning, and ambitious burghers could seek out prestigious careers as princely or civic bureaucrats. Humanist

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literature and Roman law offered the prospect of rationalizing the governance of both state and household. The cities were centers of printing and cartography, both of which opened up vast new historical and geographical perspectives, not only to scholars but also “simple laymen.” Individually and collectively, many townsmen seemed ready to claim a more secure and prominent place within the Empire. Evangelical and humanist ideas held out the prospect of reform—of a rationalization and simplification of social and religious life. While religious reformers promised to abolish a corrupt and oppressive ecclesiastical system, humanists looked to a new era of peace and unity. Hermann Weinsberg grew up during this era of intellectual and cultural ferment, and his writings testify to its limits and ambiguities in his hometown of Cologne. Indeed, Hermann’s immense private archive had its origins in Renaissance family ambition and burgher self-assertion; it was an attempt to create a proud patrilineal house and lineage. But by the time Hermann began to write in the 1540s and 1550s, his adolescent optimism had begun to give way to a more sober awareness of intractable problems and an indefi nite future. Composed in 1561, Hermann Weinsberg’s account of his youth beautifully captures the expectancy and uncertainty of the 1520s and 1530s. Entrusting his recollections to his growing Gedenkbuch, or “Memory Book,” Hermann jotted down stories as quickly and candidly “as if he had told them to a friend.” With evident affection, he recounted childhood games, family pets, and fi reside jokes. With equally evident gratitude, he remembered his narrow escapes from life-threatening illnesses and accidents. Despite their homey aura, the written recollections show a man struggling to reconcile himself with his own past, to convince himself of a “calling” to forge a great family tradition. As if compelled to offer an apology for his mediocre career, Hermann crafted an unheroic tale, full of pathos and self-doubt, which narrated the personal crisis that had led him to seek refuge in private writings. Wittingly or not, he explored the roots of his own heightened self-consciousness about his place in the wider world. In the retelling, his struggles as an adolescent and young man were intimately bound up with the larger problems facing sixteenth-century Cologne burghers.

The Setting In the early sixteenth century, the Imperial Free City of Cologne was still, in many respects, a medieval town. With a population of approximately 40,000, Cologne was one of Germany’s largest and most

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prosperous self-governing cities. It dominated the economy of the lower Rhineland and was well integrated into international trade routes. Its handicrafts, including its famous silks and woolens, were shipped as far abroad as England and Eastern Europe.2 Like other Imperial Free Cities, Cologne was a fortified community, encircled by an imposing ring of walls, moats, and towers. Comfortable burgher residences, ships and mills on the river, a great gothic Town Hall, a renowned university, a cathedral under construction, countless churches and spires—all these attested to the city’s pride and wealth.3 Coellen ein kroin boven allen steden schoin—“Cologne, a crown, most beautiful of cities.” This was one of the slogans Cologne burghers proudly repeated.4 Few towns in Germany had more venerable or sacred traditions. An ancient Roman town and the seat of an Archbishop, Cologne was overloaded with saints, relics, and religious houses.5 During the Middle Ages, the city was a popular pilgrimage destination, home to St. Ursula and her 11,000 martyred virgins, as well as the relics of the Holy Three Kings. A visitor to the city would have been struck by the density of its religious institutions: nineteen parishes, ten collegiate churches (seven male, three female), a Cathedral chapter, thirty-five hospitals, and, by the best estimates, twenty-seven chapels, fifty-six religious houses and monasteries, and numerous beguinages.6 Centuries of pious bequests from burghers had piled up within the churches and monasteries— paintings, altars, windows, gravestones, and liturgical objects. Burghers were particularly fond of their parishes, whose ritual life reached deep into the fabric of the community.7 Hermann Weinsberg estimated that, in his youth, a hundred priests sat daily in the Cathedral, waiting for someone to hire them to say Mass.8 Side by side with ecclesiastical Cologne stood the self-governing community of burghers. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Cologne become a center of trade and commerce, its great merchants and ruling patrician families had grown powerful enough to win independence from their former overlord, the Archbishop of Cologne. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the townsmen of Cologne had developed increasingly sophisticated and complex forms of economic and political interdependence. A revolution in 1396 led to the establishment of a more communal form of governance, codified in the city’s famous constitution, the Verbundbrief.9 Though hardly democratic, the document nonetheless laid the foundation for a remarkably open and participatory urban culture. Conceived as a contract between the City Council and the “entire community,” the Verbundbrief

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attempted to prevent a small circle of families from acquiring exclusive or hereditary power by imposing strict term limits for city-councilors and creating a rudimentary system of checks and balances. All men in the city were required to belong to one of the city’s twenty-two Gaffeln—military and political associations that elected members to the City Council. As a check on magisterial power, the constitution mandated a frequent turnover of city-councilors, who were limited to one-year terms but could be reelected after a hiatus of only two years. As a further check on ruling elites, the Verbundbrief provided for the election of a second representative group, the “Forty-Four,” which was required to approve the Council’s most important decisions, including those pertaining to war, treaties, and public fi nances.10 In an era before print, the city had developed a complex system of communication between burghers and magistrates. The magistrates proclaimed their decisions to the entire community in regular announcements (Morgensprachen). Meanwhile, city-councilors communicated Council decisions to the individual Gaffeln to which they belonged, while the Gaffeln (at least in theory) provided a means for burghers to communicate their demands to the Council.11 A revolution in 1513 forced an amendment to Cologne’s constitution. This Transfi xbrief affirmed a burgher’s right to freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure: “No burgher, burgheress, or resident may be dragged from his or her house with force, unless caught committing a crime,” stated the document. Imprisoned individuals were to be given a speedy hearing. The amendment affirmed the dignity of simple householders, protecting them from slurs and slights by powerful magistrates. Most importantly, the Transfi xbrief guaranteed the community’s right to assemble and demand change if a recalcitrant Council refused to redress the citizenry’s grievances. The Transfi xbrief was one of the clearest codifications of burgher rights from the later Middle Ages. It forbade the formation of an executive cabal, requiring that all magisterial decisions be made by the entire Council. Similarly, it sought to ensure public oversight of civic finances; no new taxes could be levied or rents sold without the consent of the entire community.12 As one Cologne saying had it, “the master of the house shall be as free in his house as an Emperor in his land.”13 Compared with many cities, Cologne had a broad stratum of prosperous, middling householders—respectable, independent burghers who could be justly proud of their political rights and responsibilities.14 Though the City Council was dominated by a handful of merchant

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oligarchs, Cologne’s ruling elite was nonetheless open, and the names at the top of civic society and politics were constantly changing.15 As Hermann Weinsberg himself often pointed out, one of Cologne’s most powerful mayors during the sixteenth century, Arnold von Brauweiler, was the son of a “cartwright” (assenmecher); he had attained political power after amassing a large fortune as a textile merchant.16 The Gaffeln brought together men from all classes and walks of life—artisans, merchants, and rentiers.17 Voting was open to all male residents (Eingesessene) who had sworn an oath to a Gaffel, although only full burghers—men who had been born in the city or immigrants who had purchased citizenship for the hefty sum of twelve gulden—could sit on the City Council and engage in the lucrative wine trade.18 Even poorer artisans could become councilors, though they were easily dominated by the wealthy merchants who held the most prestigious offices. “There is a great difference among the councilors,” wrote Hermann, “for some are wealthy, talented, powerful, and well-connected, some are middling, and some are unpropertied, poor, unconnected, simple, and untalented.”19 Cologne government may have been oligarchic, but it was not closed. The economic environment in Cologne was similarly fluid. Most Cologne guilds were open to newcomers, and any burgher could become a merchant if he had enough capital.20 Money flowed from household to household, and a number of women and widows ran their own businesses, some independently of their husbands. 21 The Weinsberg family itself had benefited from the city’s economic mobility. After climbing his way out of poverty, Hermann Weinsberg’s grandfather Gottschalk van Schwelm (1439–1502) won recognition for his “honorable good life and understanding nature”—not to mention his marriage to a respectable tailor’s daughter. As a result, his neighbors elected him to serve as a city-councilor and parish churchwarden.22 The many corporate bodies of Cologne—parishes, confraternities, guilds, and Gaffeln—gave even modest householders opportunities for political influence and advancement. Many parish communities had won the right to elect their own pastors, while parish churchwardens oversaw church affairs and matters of local governance, such as poor relief and fi re control.23 The communal life of the parish, of course, was not always harmonious. In St. Jacob’s parish in the 1590s, a knifegrinder grumbled loudly in a tavern about the churchwardens, allegedly calling them “knaves and thieves, who gorge and guzzle what belongs to the poor.”24 Even so, Cologne’s relatively large number of

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parishes—nineteen—provided opportunities to simple burghers that were lacking in cities with more centralized governance. The sheer density of parishes, fraternities, and Gaffeln meant that newcomers could be quickly integrated into civic life. At the same time, with the expansion of the territorial state and the strength of city-based commerce, burghers could participate in an increasingly cosmopolitan world of learning, court-life, trade, and social advancement. During the sixteenth century, many of Cologne’s most powerful councilors, such as Arnold von Brauweiler and Arnold von Siegen, had personal dealings with the Emperor. 25 When Charles V visited the city in 1521 and 1531, he stayed at a mansion on the Neumarkt that had been built by a wealthy Cologne burgher who served as Imperial “stable master.”26 Even modest, respectable burghers rubbed shoulders with princes and prelates. In 1531, when the illustrious electors of the Holy Roman Empire descended on Cologne for the election and coronation of Charles V’s brother Ferdinand as “King of the Romans” (the successor to the Imperial throne), Hermann Weinsberg’s father, Christian, a middling wine merchant and city-councilor, helped to prepare the city for the upcoming festivities. Like many burgher families, the Weinsbergs hosted an eminent foreigner, a Spanish duke, who helped his hosts to peer through a window at the Emperor Charles V dining alone. The duke also offered to take the young boy Hermann (then eleven) into his service, though the family declined the offer.27 Such was the power of the city to bring together high and low, noble and commoner. Yet for all its dynamism, Cologne had also run up against the limits of its medieval development. Though the burgher community had grown up in and around ecclesiastical Cologne, flourishing in the midst of the city’s dense spiritual infrastructure, it increasingly found itself hemmed in by institutions it could not control. As was the case with all free cities, Cologne’s economic influence outstripped its political power. Despite impulses towards centralization, Cologne was porous and vulnerable, less a seamless, self-contained polity than a loose conglomeration of corporate bodies. 28 As elsewhere, burghers remained uncertain about their relation to Cologne’s large clerical population, which was exempt from civic jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the city still faced threats from its former overlord, the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, who, in addition to retaining authority over ecclesiastical affairs, had control over Cologne’s high criminal court (Hohe Gericht) and an exclusive right to capital punishment within the city. 29

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Cologne was particularly vulnerable because, unlike many free cities, it had no territory outside its walls. Thus, even though Cologne burghers were heavily invested in the surrounding countryside, such investments were subject to the “foreign” authority of territorial courts. The result was an extremely complex legal system, in which the boundaries between ecclesiastical, civic, and territorial jurisdictions were not always clear. To defend itself and protect the interests of its burghers, the city ran up huge debts, nearly bankrupting itself. The bulk of the city’s debt was incurred during a costly campaign in the 1470s against Charles of Burgundy, who aimed to win the city back for the Archbishop. To raise money for its defenses, the city had not only levied taxes, but also sold over 100,000 gulden in rents and annuities.30 These external pressures exacerbated growing internal tensions. The city’s mounting debts meant that many households did not receive income on annuities they had purchased. Meanwhile, several trades had become sharply stratified, and the Gaffeln, for all the opportunities they provided, were increasingly dominated by their wealthiest members. Cologne residents were restless. Three times—in 1481–1482, 1512–1513, and 1525—the burgher community rose up in revolt, gathering in armed Gaffeln and submitting grievances to the City Council. Accusing the oligarchic Council of corruption, nepotism, and fi nancial mismanagement, the rebellious burghers demanded a return to the ideals of Cologne’s Verbundbrief, including communal oversight of civic fi nances, free elections to the City Council, protection from arbitrary arrest, and equality before the law.31 On the whole, these were conservative revolts, rooted in the communal ideals of the medieval city. Economic grievances aired during the uprisings were protectionist in nature. Many complaints were directed against groups outside the household economy—beggars, prostitutes, beguines, clergy, usurers, and large merchant fi rms.32 Burghers accused these groups of benefiting at the expense of “poor householders” and the “common good”; they complained of unregulated trade and production, abuses in weights and measures, price gouging, and inflation, demanding that the authorities punish all transgressors equally, “the rich as well as the poor.”33 Many of the grievances were aimed at the clergy. Burghers demanded a simplification of Cologne’s jurisdictional system, arguing that clergy should be subject to the same dues, obligations, and punishments as burghers. “Every cleric, secular or regular, young or old, who has committed a misdemeanor or felony against the council,” read a

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grievance of 1513, “is to be taken to the dean of the Cathedral chapter, who should punish the cleric as though he were a lay person.” More radical were the demands that the clergy share civic burdens: “Let the clergy pay taxes on the wine they tap themselves. . . . Clerical persons shall from now on bear the same civic burdens as burghers. . . . Let the clergy be asked to make a substantial loan to the city.”34 In both 1513 and 1525, there were demands to rationalize the salaries of pastors, which were usually drawn from a combination of rents and livings, as well as the fees taken in for baptisms, marriages, funerals, and memorial masses. “Every pastor should be paid a fi xed annual salary,” read the 1513 grievances. “In return for this the pastor shall perform his offices without making a charge.” Particular worrisome were the activities of the mendicant orders, which had accumulated huge amounts of wealth in exchange for their spiritual intercession. Unlike parish priests, who served the communities, monks were less integrated into communal life. Thus, one grievance insisted that “no monk shall henceforth become a parish priest.” Elsewhere, burghers insisted that monks “stay in their monasteries,” so that “the sacraments are not bartered to the faithful for money.” During the 1520s, violence broke out against the clergy; roving gangs of journeymen and artisans plundered the cellars of religious houses.35 In the tense atmosphere of 1525, a rumor went round that all the clergy in the city were being slaughtered. 36 The greatest support for these revolts came from the less influential guilds—from journeymen, artisans, and wage laborers eager to eliminate what they perceived as unfair competition. During each revolt, gatherings of burghers remained armed for days or weeks, sending delegates with grievances to the Council. Pent-up frustration found outlet in sporadic violence; in 1513, for instance, mobs attacked the houses of several of the most prominent city-councilors. The ruling magistrates, meanwhile, made a show of listening to the delegations from the aggrieved Gaffeln. According to Hermann Weinsberg, in 1525, the Council went so far as to ask individual burghers what they wanted to see improved in the city. As the rumor had it, when the Council asked a toilet cleaner—euphemistically called a “gold digger” (goltgreber) in Cologne—what he would improve, he replied, “May God have mercy if people are asking the likes of me about the city’s affairs.” When pressed to give an answer, he replied that abolishing winter would help burghers quite a bit. Despite such humorous anecdotes, however, the stakes were deadly serious. In 1482 and 1525, the ringleaders of the

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revolts were tortured and executed; in 1513, the situation was diff used only after several offending councilors had lost their heads.37 While Cologne’s prosperous burghers balked at violent revolution, they sympathized with many of the grievances aired during the revolts. Showing a condescension typical of notables and councilors, Hermann Weinsberg remembered the delegates from the Gaffeln in 1525 as a “large, clumsy, unskillful assemblage.”38 Yet many of the grievances drawn up by the disgruntled burghers—including frustration with elite arrogance—met with vigorous approval in the secret pages of his Gedenkbuch. Fair treatment and security, respect and honor, freedom from arbitrary arrest—these were values that humble artisans and householders took to heart. Targeting oligarchic and clerical privileges, the revolts aimed to make the world more secure and predictable for the urban householder. The Council, too, was eager to protect the interests of the burgher community, if not always in ways the wider populace might have wished. For decades, the Council had tried to limit the independence of the clergy. It was particularly worried that religious houses would accumulate too much real estate in the city, removing it forever from secular hands, and it had struggled in vain to prevent testators (the “dead hand”) from bequeathing property to the mendicant orders.39 Townsmen expressed similar alarm in their grievances, demanding that inventories be made of “all precious objects in churches, monasteries, and convents.” In both 1513 and 1525, they spoke out against the accumulation of clerical real estate, demanding that the city close loopholes in its laws against the “dead hand.”40 During 1525, the threat of popular anticlericalism enabled the Council to force concessions from the clergy, who agreed to pay civic dues for six years.41 Such anticlericalism, as yet, showed few signs of Protestant influence. Even during the “rebellious” year of 1525—the year when calls for religious reform exploded into revolt throughout the Empire—anticlerical sentiment in Cologne remained relatively untouched by Lutheran ideas. There was, to be sure, a demand to for pastors “who can correctly interpret and preach the word of God”; there was also a demand that mendicants “teach nothing than the true word of God and to utter no lies or fables, but rather be silent altogether and say nothing.” But the wording of these demands was the same in 1513 as it was in 1525.42 Even as Cologne burghers sought to rein in alleged clerical abuses, they remained, for the most part, committed to the customs of the parish. Because of Cologne’s traditional religious culture, the reforming

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message of Erasmus arrived in the city later than it did elsewhere, becoming popular in the 1520s—precisely when it was beginning to fall out of favor in cities that turned Lutheran.43 Despite the absence of a robust popular Reformation movement, the City Council found itself in a precarious position, having to contend with the Archbishop, a powerful clergy, a conservative university faculty, regional princes, and the Emperor. No less than Protestant magistrates elsewhere in Germany, the Cologne Council aimed to extend its power throughout the entire city. But unlike a city such as Nuremberg, which had attained relative autonomy within its territory, Cologne could not eliminate traditional clerical jurisdictions without fear of reprisal. Cologne possessed no territory beyond its city walls, while its former territorial overlord, the Archbishop of Cologne, was one of the seven Prince-Electors responsible for electing each new Emperor. In its ongoing struggles with the Archbishop, the city could not always rely on the full support of the Emperor, its most important ally. This vulnerability became particularly evident in the 1510s and 1520s, when Archbishop Hermann von Wied insisted on referring to Cologne as “our city and citizens” and demanded more subservient forms of homage from the burghers. In response, the City Council refused him entry into the city. Since the Archbishop had recently supported Charles V’s bid for the Imperial throne, the new Emperor was peeved by the Council’s actions. Eventually, he forced the city to welcome the Archbishop under threat of Imperial Ban.44 Long after internal unrest died down, Cologne councilors remained on the defensive, forced to protect their interests within a volatile political and religious environment. Cologne’s traditional vulnerabilities were exacerbated by the Protestant Reformation, which not only threatened the city’s sacred patrimony, but also changed the dynamics of Imperial politics. For the Emperor, Cologne was an important bulwark in the northwest. Charles V was determined that the city remain Catholic. In 1520, during his fi rst visit to Cologne, the Emperor watched as the theology faculty of Cologne burned Luther’s books in front of the Cathedral. The city could not afford to alienate the powerful clergy and university faculty within its walls. Neither could it risk angering the Archbishop, who was likely to use any pretext to encroach upon the city’s independence.45 Though strongly committed to the old faith and determined to deny Protestants a foothold in the city, the Council remained cautious, concerned that religious disputes might provide the pretext for ecclesiastical or princely meddling in civic affairs.

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Even so, the prospects of the city seemed bright, and educated Cologne burghers had good reason to be expectant. Despite growing political and religious uncertainty, the changes of these decades were as much a source of hope as anxiety. Cologne continued to dominate trade along the Rhine, and its university remained a major intellectual force, notwithstanding charges of obscurantism leveled by reformers. Humanist texts arrived in the city en masse during the 1520s, fueling anticlerical sentiments and hopes of a renewal of spiritual and cultural life.46 Printing had begun to penetrate deeper into burgher life, as the religious and devotional books of the late fi fteenth century made room for a wider variety of literature, both sacred and secular, Latin and German.47 Within the city, the full force of the religious schism had yet to be felt. For Catholic traditionalists, especially those inspired by Erasmus, the Lutheran revolt could even appear as an inevitable, if overly violent, response to ecclesiastical abuses—a breach that would be mended as soon as cooler heads prevailed. Meanwhile, the spread of humanist ideas and Renaissance art and architecture offered ambitious townsmen new visions of order, and new ways to think about their identities and their place in the world.

The Father: A Renaissance Man During the heady years of the 1520s and 1530s, Renaissance print and learning could descend suddenly on the sturdy artisan households of German cities. And when they arrived, they could change the course of a family’s history. Such, at least, was how Hermann Weinsberg recalled his own childhood and adolescence in the Imperial Free City of Cologne. Hermann Weinsberg was just a boy in the 1520s—the eldest son of respectable, hardworking, and ambitious burghers. But during his adolescence and young adulthood, he personally experienced the dynamics of the Renaissance and Reformation as they burst upon one of Germany’s most traditional urban centers. In his own recollection, Hermann found himself thrust out of the comfortable parochial world of middling Cologne and increasingly conscious of oblivion, posterity, and historical change. Hermann Weinsberg wrote his recollections of childhood in 1561, when he was forty-three. Though wholly innocent of modern notions such as “the Renaissance,” Hermann nonetheless perceived in his own past a decisive shift—one that, in his recollection, dramatically changed the trajectory of his own career and self-awareness. For the Weinsberg

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family of Cologne, the change took place in the late 1520s—at least as Hermann remembered it. This was the period when Hermann’s father, Christian, discovered classical literature in translation, including a vernacular adaptation of Cicero’s On the Orator. It was a momentous event, which opened up to Christian new horizons of opportunity and self-understanding and forever changed the dynamics of the Weinsberg family’s development.48 Prior to this discovery, Hermann’s parents, Christian (1489–1549) and Sophia (1498–1575), had worked as respectable, prosperous wine merchants in the parish of St. Jacob’s, a middling neighborhood of petty merchants and artisans.49 The couple owned a comfortable three-story burgher dwelling called the Haus Weinsberg, which Christian had inherited from his parents. Though they began life together as linendyers, practicing the trade that Christian had learned from his mother, the couple soon shifted their interests to the more lucrative wine trade, opening up the foyer of their house as a tavern.50 Like most householders, Christian and Sophia combined industry and domestic life, raising a growing family amid the bustle of the household workshop. After the birth of their fi rst son, Hermann, in 1518, their family grew at a steady pace, though a pox in 1522 claimed two infant daughters.51 The children often helped out with the family industry, serving wine to guests or helping their mother and the maids spin yarn.52 Later in life, Hermann fondly remembered the parochial setting of his youth. The Bach, the street on which the Haus Weinsberg stood, was lined with narrow, steeply gabled row houses, the type commonly found in Cologne’s many middle-class neighborhoods (Figure 3). The Bach ran along the city’s old Roman walls, which were incorporated into the structures of courtyards and houses. A small stream flowed from west to east down the street’s center, mostly contained within a stone channel, but widening where the Bach intersected with the Hohepforte, several yards down from the Haus Weinsberg. During warm weather, children flocked to the stream, and “geese, ducks, and pigs swam in it, which was very pleasant to see.” Though often forded by carts and horses, the open part of the stream was “always filled with women and maids, who stood there washing, dyeing, and chatting.”53 On the other side of the Bach stood the Waidmarkt, which often stank because of the dung and refuse that piled up there, and St. Jacob’s Church, where Hermann was baptized and his grandfather Gottschalk was buried.54 The Haus Weinsberg was a respectable burgher dwelling. At three stories, it was one of the larger houses on the street, having previously

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served as an inn. Its fi rst level was made of stone, and it had two entryways: a large door, “like a great gate,” and a smaller door with an iron trellis. As in most burgher houses, the front room, or Vorhaus, was a large, open space that could function as a shop or storeroom. Next to it was a kitchen, stove, and servants’ sleeping quarters, and behind them a “deep, dark painted room” used for dining and entertaining. Upstairs the rooms were lighter; one of the “pretty” chambers was hung with tapestries. From the street, the first story overhung the ground floor slightly, offering passers-by a facade of black wood, gray stone, and red shutters. Hermann remembered that birds nested above the windows; they proved a tempting target for stone-throwing children, who often damaged the glass. Behind the house was a courtyard, with a selfstanding workshop, or “dyeing house,” and a private well.55 Thanks to their industry, Christian and Sophia were among the prominent burghers in their neighborhood. Beginning in 1517, Hermann’s father, Christian, had the distinction of serving as a civic officer, elected every third year to the Council by his peers in the Gaffel Schwarzenhaus.56 This was no small honor, and Christian owed his good fortune to his father, Gottschalk, who had entered the magisterial elite late in life—a reward for his “honorable good life and understanding nature.”57 The family’s history revealed just how fluid social mobility and status in late medieval Cologne could be. Gottschalk had risen from poverty and domestic service to marry Maria Keppel, the daughter of a prosperous tailor, textile merchant, and city-councilor. Maria’s brothers enjoyed fortunate careers, one as a canon in the collegiate church of St. George and the other as a successful goldsmith and city-councilor. Meanwhile, Christian’s wife, Sophia, was the daughter of rural notables. Her late father, Hermann Korth (d. 1509), was a tax-collector in the village of Dormagen, in the territory of Jülich.58 Such connections provided an enviable head start towards success, but no guarantee of it. As contemporaries were well aware, fortune was fickle, and families who had edged their way into influence could just as quickly fi nd themselves pushed out of it. It was not uncommon for children of wealthy parents to fi nd themselves impoverished because of poor marriages and career choices, even as their siblings flourished. There was little, as yet, to indicate Hermann’s parents would follow a course different from the one that “honorable” householders in Cologne had known for decades: achieving financial security, fi nding suitable occupations and marriage partners for their children, enjoying their civic honor, and working towards their salvation through the means the Church provided. Early on, Christian’s standing as a

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councilor was modest. Because council membership was not limited to a hereditary patrician class, the magistrates were drawn from a wide range of social backgrounds. Election to the Council, however, did not guarantee influence, since a cadre of a wealthy merchants dominated the body and easily kept the “common councilors” (gemein ratzman) in check. According to Hermann, Christian initially belonged to the latter, uninfluential group. By the late 1520s, however, Christian Weinsberg van Schwelm (as he was then called) had prospered enough as a wine merchant to consider his legacy and political reputation. Sometime during his late thirties, he bought several German translations of classical literature—works by Livy, Cicero, Herodotus, Plutarch, and Justin.59 Such pagan and vernacular texts were still relative novelties to Cologne readers, who had traditionally feasted on a diet of religious, devotional, and Latin works. In Hermann Weinsberg’s recollection, his father Christian experienced his fi rst exposure to classical literature as something akin to a conversion. Like many Cologne householders, Christian’s formal education had ended at the age of twelve, when he had begun an apprenticeship. His learning had thus been limited to the “reading, writing, and arithmetic” (schriben, lesen und rechnen) necessary for success as a householder.60 But now an expanding print culture suddenly allowed him access to knowledge that had long been the preserve of clerics and wealthy patricians. According to Hermann, his father began assiduously to “practice” reading the books he had purchased. What Christian found in these volumes astonished him. “Although he was a layman,” wrote Hermann, “he developed such a taste for books that he read constantly, and he told us what he had read at the dinner table.”61 So enthusiastically did he recount the contents of his reading that his wife, Sophia, often scolded him for talking with his mouth full. (According to Hermann, Christian had a bad habit of choking on his food.)62 As Hermann recalled, his father “praised the study and reading of books, from which one could learn everything that is useful and beneficial (nutzlich und deinstlich) to a person.” In Christian’s excitement, we catch a rare glimpse of the novelty that the fi rst great information revolution held for contemporaries. “He found it wonderful and strange (wonderlich und seltzam) that such things stood hidden in books,” Hermann remembered, “and he intended to learn much more from books in the future.”63 Christian’s eager reading may have been inspired by the example of more prominent councilors. By the 1510s and 1520s, Cologne’s elite families had begun to appropriate the trappings of Renaissance culture,

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which had previously existed in northern Europe more as an academic movement than as the robust “civic humanism” found in Italy. The new cultural forms penetrated burgher culture as a diff use mixture of Christian humanism, classical ideals, and artistic and architectural styles. For instance, beginning in the early sixteenth century, a few of Cologne’s wealthiest men discarded the wooden, steeply gabled houses of the medieval city for monumental stone mansions.64 And during the 1520s, Cologne printers began to publish more humanist and classical literature. The works of Erasmus proved especially popular in Cologne. Many elite families began showing an interest in humanist learning. In the various courts of the Empire, a humanist background was increasingly a prerequisite for lucrative legal, diplomatic, and bureaucratic careers. Even though Cologne itself had few humanist schools, wealthy burgher fathers sent their sons to the northern humanist gymnasiums in the neighboring Low Countries.65 For a man like Christian Weinsberg, education was no longer a clerical prerogative. Thanks to printing, even a “simple layman” could suddenly become a well-read, knowledgeable man. During the 1530s, when he was in his forties, Christian Weinsberg became something of an autodidact, studying a wide range of subjects in the vernacular. In addition to classical literature in translation, he also read laws, ordinances, histories, and court cases, so that he was “knowledgeable in histories and statutes.”66 Rhetoric was another favorite subject, and in the early 1530s, Christian “bought and read through” a “German Rhetoric” (dutzer retorik), which contained practical instructions on speaking and writing.67 Thanks to such practice, Christian “knew how to give a long, pretty speech without stuttering, which was charming and pleasant to hear.” Hermann especially admired his father’s “boldness” in speaking, though he admitted that Christian “had a habit of playing with his hands while he spoke, which he could never get rid of.” Hermann taught his father how to sing—a skill that the younger Weinsberg had learned at school. Christian, meanwhile, discovered that he had a natural talent for architecture and geometry. In his spare time, he often sketched plans for “churches, cities, palaces, houses, arches, and mills,” and frequently served as a “building master” (baumeister) for his parish and his relatives. As his son recalled, Christian once proudly claimed that he knew how to change the course of the Rhine itself, if he had the power to do so.68 As a result of his newfound skills, Christian’s standing in the Council was enhanced. Previously he had been regarded as a “simple layman,” but

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now he won respect as an “experienced, well-read layman and councilor.” Where he had once deferred to Cologne’s most powerful magistrates, Christian now grew bold to speak, able to “apply relevant knowledge to the proposition at hand.” In return, Christian received greater civic responsibilities. According to Hermann, his father threw himself into public service, using his knowledge of German rhetoric to “help many people come to an agreement.” He seems to have become a champion of less powerful councilors, defending those who had been unjustly “taxed and burdened.”69 For this reason, he was “very much praised and loved by the common councilor for the sake of his good will and service.” All this contributed to his growing reputation in civic affairs.70 Though Christian’s own modest wealth could scarcely compare with that of Cologne’s most powerful men, his skills nonetheless won him the confidence and esteem of his fellow burghers. For the same reasons, Christian became a leading man within his local community. In 1531, he was elected to succeed a wealthy in-law of the Cologne mayor as a churchwarden (Kirchmeister) of St. Jacob’s parish.71 As a custodian of the church, Christian managed endowed rents, poor relief, and spiritual foundations, often “scheming how to bring money for building projects from the wills and foundations of which he was executor.” In 1533 and 1534, he served as “building master” during a major renovation of St. Jacob’s, when he oversaw the construction of a new choir. Among friends and neighbors, Christian became a patron and advisor, instrumental in resolving disputes and striking marriage agreements. He was often appointed guardian of a child or executor of an estate.72 Above all, Christian’s encounter with Renaissance culture fueled his ambitions as a patriarch. As Hermann recalled, his father was a proud, headstrong man. He had a taste for fine clothing and used to walk the streets by himself, greeting few people. “Opposition could wring nothing from him,” Hermann recalled.73 In the son’s retelling, Christian had all the ambition of a man who felt that he had prematurely been deprived of opportunities for learning and advancement. As an adolescent, he had experienced several setbacks and frustrations, which he apparently resented. He had spent the bulk of his teenage years helping his widowed mother, Maria, run a dyeing workshop and raise three young girls. As a result, he “could not train to be a merchant or artisan or try his hand at other things.”74 Now, thanks to his reading, Christian gained new hope for the future of his family; the good fortune his own learning had fostered led him to dream of grand careers for his sons. “I will not like it,” he said, “if my children are inclined towards

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heavy labor.”75 From his reading, Christian gained new ways to think about his own honor and dignity as a “housefather.” In the image of the Roman patriarch, he seems to have discovered a self-image commensurate with his ambition. This sense of identity found expression in the family home. Sometime in the 1520s, around the same time that he discovered reading, Christian began to renovate the Haus Weinsberg, transforming it from a bustling workshop into a stately burgher dwelling. In addition to expanding the cellar and foyer to accommodate the family’s growing wine trade, Christian transformed a “dark, deep room” in the back of the house into a large dining hall, with windows facing the courtyard. As a result, the house was “richly furnished and decorated,” so much so that neighbors often requested to use it for weddings and banquets. And in keeping with his new leisure and learning, Christian built private studies for both himself and his eldest son. During the renovation, Christian often recited a passage from Cicero’s On Duties (in German translation), which gave guidelines on what the “house of an honorable, prominent man” should look like. “The dignity of a gentleman can be adorned by a house,” the translation read, “but one should not seek all honor in the house.” Yet even as it warned against ostentation, the passage spoke favorably of a Roman gentleman who was deemed worthy of high office because of his “beautiful” house, which the people desired to see.76 In the 1530s, Christian commissioned two “artful” murals for his own dining hall, one showing Lucretia stabbing herself, the other depicting the naked figures of Fortune and Cupid.77 Such were the trappings of the Renaissance patriarch—a man determined to make his own fortune and to safeguard his family’s honor.78 Whereas medieval authors and artists invoked Fortuna to emphasize the vanity of worldly glory, the Renaissance figure of Fortune implied a greater degree of individual agency—in keeping with Christian’s own social mobility. If Fortune brought down great families, she also enabled new families to rise. A patriarch could thus fi nd profit in changing circumstances, forging his own destiny as opportunities arose. At the same time, the paintings reminded family members jealously to guard their honor—to fend off all that might besmirch the household’s good name.

The Son: Great Expectations Increasingly, Christian’s ambitions came to rest on his eldest son, Hermann, who was entering his teenage years. Because of his own success, Christian was amazed at what “one can accomplish through learning

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and the arts.” And yet he was painfully aware that he had begun his studies too late to accomplish anything of great significance. He openly admitted that his lack of a formal education bothered him; it was a deprivation he had to bear “with patience.” “If, in my early years, I had had the gift from God to be brought up in learning and the arts,” he wrote, “I would have been more thankful for it than for all the gifts and graces that came to me from God and my parents.”79 Instead, Christian now hoped to give his son the opportunities he himself had never had. Beginning in the late 1520s and early 1530s, Christian increasingly groomed his eldest son for an academic career. When he renovated the Haus Weinsberg, he built Hermann a small study, furnishing it with a desk, benches, shelves, and a small altar.80 Such private studies, still relatively uncommon in middling burgher households, were a sign of social distinction. Around the same time he began to read classical literature, Christian started enrolling Hermann in more prestigious grammar schools in Cologne, where he studied with the sons of prominent councilors.81 All this was to encourage the boy’s love of learning. Christian’s fondest dream was that Hermann might someday become a renowned princely adviser or academic, the type of man who might attract the patronage of “great lords.”82 In planning Hermann’s education, Christian likely had in mind an example from his own extended kin. His sister Drutgin was married to textile merchant Peter Heresbach (d. 1540), who in turn was brother to the Rhenish humanist Conrad Heresbach, a man who was just beginning to distinguish himself in the 1520s as an advisor to the Duke of Jülich-Cleve and tutor to his son Wilhelm. No less a personage than the great northern humanist Erasmus had helped Heresbach to this position, recommending him as “a man of great understanding and knowledge, splendid manners, and uncommon kindness, modesty, and loyalty.”83 Though Heresbach studied at the conservative University of Cologne, he had the encyclopedic interests of a humanist: history, ancient languages, agriculture, jurisprudence, pedagogy, and more. Beginning in the 1520s, he helped the Duke of Jülich-Cleve introduce an Erasmian-style reform within his territories, implementing a relatively liberal policy of confessional coexistence. He was an active diplomat, working to negotiate the short-lived marriage between the English King Henry VIII and Anna of Cleve. By the 1530s, his renown had won him and his family a new social standing. In 1536, he married the wealthy daughter of a regional nobleman, a match that brought him numerous properties along with 2,000 gulden in cash.84 Thanks to his

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success, Heresbach was in a position to elevate his kin. He secured a position in the Duke of Jülich’s household for his brother Peter, who had previously dealt in textiles.85 As an adult, Hermann would be drawn to many of the same humanist and Erasmian ideals that Conrad had espoused—most notably an irenic stance in religious matters. Though Christian Weinsberg never met his eminent in-law, he seems to have been inspired by his example. During the late 1520s and 1530s, Christian made schooling decisions both for Hermann and his nephew Christian Heresbach—the son of Peter and Drutgin. For many years, Hermann and his cousin were classmates and fast friends. Indeed, Christian Weinsberg’s own interest in learning seems to have been sparked by these family connections. Marriage connections with Conrad Heresbach indicated the rising status of the entire Weinsberg clan. It fell upon Hermann to lift the family’s fortunes even further. In 1531, instead of placing Hermann in an apprenticeship or sending him abroad, Christian sent his twelve-year-old son to a humanist gymnasium in Emmerich, northwest of Cologne.86 So keen was Christian on an academic career for his son that earlier in the year he had turned down a Spanish duke’s offer to take Hermann along in his service.87 In 1534, Christian obtained a scholarship for Hermann at the University of Cologne in the Cronenburse, a college for law students, where Hermann would remain for the next several years. He used his growing influence as a councilor to obtain the living: “My father did not have many rents and was also inundated with young children; his trade could not always bring in a surplus; thus, my father sought advantages wherever he could.”88 Throughout these years, Christian was intimately involved in Hermann’s education. He sought educational advice from members of the Brothers of the Common Life in Cologne.89 Along with letters of admonition and encouragement, Christian sent Hermann several volumes of Erasmus, including the Colloquies and a treatise on letter writing.90 He engaged the assistance of more learned men to gauge the quality of Hermann’s Latin prose. “I had someone read this letter,” Christian wrote in response to one of Hermann’s missives. “He thought you had not composed this letter on your own (uis dinem heubt gemacht), but rather based it on someone else’s model. So, my dear son, I would like you to tell me whether you composed this letter on your own or not.” Later, in his autobiographical recollections, Hermann confessed that he had copied it from a model, noting wryly that “the letter was not as artful as others said it was, but my father thought that it was exceptionally artful, because

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he knew few—yes, very few—Latin words.”91 Such was the pride of a solicitous father. Hermann Weinsberg’s entry into adolescence was greeted with a great deal of fanfare. Christian deliberately cultivated his relationship with his eldest son, inviting him to become a partner in his ambitions. Hermann was the man who would carry on the family name. Christian showed Hermann genealogical information recorded in a household Bible; he warned him never to alter the family “coat of arms”; and he pointed out paintings in the Carmelite monastery of two alleged ancestors.92 Hermann, in turn, proved an eager and receptive audience for these solemn fatherly rites. By all accounts, he was a sensitive, affectionate boy—though a bit shy. Later in life, he fondly remembered the new sets of clothing his father gave him, including his fi rst pair of pants at age seven, an event symbolizing a boy’s entry into the masculine world.93 A special pleated overcoat that Hermann received at age ten was particularly memorable, since it was newly made. “I was still at the time his only son,” Hermann recalled, “and for that reason, he had a special love for me.”94 It was in 1533, when Hermann was fifteen, that Christian revealed the full extent of his plans. Hermann was in Emmerich at the time, where he had been studying intermittently for two years. He was suffering from a horrific, debilitating fever, which left him paralyzed for six weeks and uncertain whether he would ever see his home again. By all accounts, the fever terrified the young Hermann, who was boarding in a burgher household in Emmerich. As he recalled, he lay paralyzed and lice-ridden in bed, unable to speak: “My mouth stank, and my head was encrusted with lice and scabs.” Once, he overheard his companions giving him up for dead; “they said I would never return to Cologne.” As he later remembered it, Hermann was overcome with sadness. With perhaps some poetic license, he remembered his thoughts at the time: “O you noble city Cologne, I will never see you again! O you dear parents, sisters, brothers, relatives, I will never speak to you again! This world is nothing but misery, sorrow, and suffering upon suffering!”95 As soon as Christian heard about Hermann’s illness, he sent him a “consoling” letter, which offered assurance of his father’s “special love from the heart” for him, as well as a glimpse of the future that might be his if he applied himself. “I have placed my confidence in this,” Christian wrote, “that you use the gifts God has given you and your own understanding in such a way that you might accomplish great things.” Later in the letter, Christian made his hopes even more explicit. “My

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idea,” he explained, “is that God would give you such gifts that I might make a handsome, fi ne, talented orator and doctor out of you.” In particular, he urged Hermann, who was shy, to practice his public speaking. He was to become adept at using “fi ne, decorous, and courtly words, whether in Latin or German.” “Set your whole mind upon this,” Christian wrote, “in case you should happen to speak with great lords, for through such means one can obtain great property and honor.”96 For the fi rst time, Christian fully revealed his ambitions to Hermann: “Now, dear son, you can see where I would like to bring you.” What remained was for Hermann to act accordingly. To remind his son of the benefits of education, Christian pointed to his own success as an autodidact. He hoped that the modest rhetorical skills he displayed in the letter would be a lesson to his son, for if he himself could accomplish so much on his own, through simple “lay imitation” (leilich beiwesen), how much more might Hermann accomplish with the benefit of formal training. Christian invited Hermann to imagine “what I might have become, if my parents had brought me up for learning.”97 The message was clear. Hermann should not take lightly the advantages he had been given; he had a responsibility to his entire family. A second letter carried a warm paternal benediction. “By the power and might that a father has to bless his children with a divine benediction,” Christian intoned, “so I wish for you that God would grant you grace and mercy, prudence and strength, that you may thereby be called to honor God and all your family.”98 The fortunes of the family hung on the success of its eldest son. Later in life, Hermann would confess that he came to place as much faith in this blessing as the patriarch Jacob had in that of his father, Isaac.99 The father’s words were confi rmation of the son’s special calling. At the time, however, Christian’s benediction implied nothing quite so grandiose; it simply expressed the high hopes a Renaissance father had for an eldest son whose talent he had perhaps overestimated. It was a calling that both flattered and frightened Hermann. If his subsequent self-revelations are any indication, these paternal expectations would cause Hermann immense inner confl ict over the years. By his own admission, he was driven by an eldest son’s earnest desire to please his parents; his autobiographical reminiscences show him to have been an obedient, compliant child. As he later exclaimed, “what is more pleasant to say than father, he who conceives, nourishes, raises, preserves, protects, instructs, and rules, who accepts his wife and his dear children, his relatives, friends, servants, maids and all the

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household members entrusted to him with loyalty, love, and friendship, and punishes only from an upright heart and mind?”100 And yet while Hermann took great pride in his father’s attention, he also seems to have chafed under it as well. At times, Christian could be overbearing. While a student at the University of Cologne, Hermann asked his father for permission to learn an instrument, “for most students usually practiced something of this sort.” Christian refused, fearing not only that the instrument would distract Hermann from his studies, but also that such “playing” was beneath him. In Christian’s view, Hermann should apply himself assiduously to his schoolwork, so that someday others would play music for him, not he for others. “My father meant well,” Hermann later sighed, “for he always had something great in mind, if God had granted me the talent and fortune to accomplish it.” Though Hermann was obedient to his father’s wishes, he nonetheless regretted this missed opportunity. “I wish that I had learned to play, so that I might drive away melancholy sometimes.”101 There are hints that Hermann was uncomfortable with the idea of an academic career. For all its grandeur, the world of Renaissance ambition had intruded upon the familiar bourgeois world of his childhood. As a boy, Hermann had been something of a homebody, content within his parents’ bustling household. Indeed, Hermann’s written reminiscences of his childhood are among the most tender and homey that survive from the sixteenth century. In his Gedenkbuch, he affectionately recounted numerous childhood episodes—joking with servants, playing in the streets, pulling pranks with fellow students, prancing around the house with a toy crossbow, and attending the local elementary school of St. George (despite its stern schoolmaster). Hermann was born early enough to remember life before his family’s modest social ascent—when his father did the “heavy work” of linen dyeing in back of the Haus Weinsberg and his mother sold wine inside.102 He entrusted to paper several humorous memories of his younger siblings. Once, when his sister Maria accidentally swallowed a spark from a “great fire” in the Haus Weinsberg, she ran and took a deep drink of beer. “When asked why she had drunk so heartily, she said, ‘I had to extinguish the spark, so it wouldn’t catch fire and burn inside my body.’”103 When he himself was a toddler, he had asked his mother to remove the lice from his body by using a net.104 He recalled such “jokes” so that his heirs might someday laugh at their forebears and “know that we were human.”105 To be sure, Hermann’s recollections of his early years lacked the sentimental idealization that would come to characterize modern

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perceptions of childhood. In his Gedenkbuch, he recounted childhood mishaps without any hint of anger or surprise; they were the cost of living in a fallen, fragile world. He had nearly drowned as a toddler when he tumbled into a wash bucket; he had struck his head against a stone (which he feared had “harmed his understanding more than a little”); he had fallen down cellar steps and received a gash on his forehead; he had been plagued by intestinal parasites; he had suffered from a foul infection of his gums; he had had his cheek grazed by the bullet of a neighbor who was shooting crows.106 The warnings and consolation that adults offered in trying times could prove difficult for a young boy to understand. At the age of four, Hermann had fallen ill from a “children’s pox,” which claimed two infant sisters. His elders instructed him to bear his suffering patiently, since “God afflicts those whom he loves.” To this Hermann allegedly offered the “childish” reply that God “did not love him” (hat mich nit leif). On another occasion, Hermann refused to take a bitter remedy for worms, even though he had been warned that he must either swallow the medicine (wormkrut) or “go down into the black earth.”107 Despite such harrowing accidents and illnesses, Hermann expressed great affection for his childhood home. When he left Cologne for the fi rst time in 1531, at the age of thirteen, he experienced intense homesickness. In his Gedenkbuch, he recalled standing on the deck of a departing boat, looking at Cologne from the Rhine, ruing a tiff he had had with his parents the night before. “I was never sadder my entire life,” he recalled, “than when I saw Cologne lying before me and thought how I had sullenly parted from my parents and would not return to them for a long time.”108 His stay as a student at Emmerich was full of tribulations, including the lengthy, life-threatening illness that prompted his father to reveal his ambitions. Though Hermann continued his academic studies after returning from Emmerich, his autobiographical recollections hint that he might have preferred a different career. Indeed, it was with a note of resignation that Hermann later recalled his matriculation at the University of Cologne, at the age of sixteen. “I had to remain with studying, according to my father’s will,” he wrote. “If I had been allowed to learn a trade or gain some experience in a merchant’s household, I would also have been satisfied.” He concluded by acknowledging that he had been an obedient son, “following my parents at all times in this.”109 In other sections of his writings, however, one can discern a clear note of regret and frustration. “I remember,” he wrote at the age of

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sixty-four, “that I remained with studying and was promoted in the arts and law more because of my father’s desire and pleasure than because of my own” (uiß lust und gefallen die min seliger fatter dar zu hat dan die ich selbst dar zu hadde). He suggested that he would have been “more talented” as a merchant had he begun early and had had sufficient capital. “But my father would not allow it.”110 Hermann remembered his father as an overeager booster, who once crouched beneath a courtyard window so that he could secretly listen in on one of his son’s oral examinations.111 Hermann implied that his father, who was unfamiliar with the rigors of higher learning and knew “very little Latin,” was unable to assess honestly his son’s mediocre academic ability. Even so, Hermann strongly identified with his father’s ambitions and interests; indeed, the two men shared an intellectual bond unique within the Weinsberg family. From Christian, Hermann inherited a fierce anticlericalism; both men railed against clerical immorality and greed, calling many clergy “fat swine.” In later writings, Hermann approvingly recalled an episode in which his father, a churchwarden, reprimanded the parish priest, telling him that “a bit of dirt is yours, but the church belongs to the people.”112 At the same time, Christian instilled in his son skepticism towards superstition and witchcraft.113 In Hermann’s account of his father’s youthful participation in a pilgrimage craze, one can perhaps hear echoes of Christian’s own disillusionment—“there was nothing there but a picture of Mary.”114 In 1536, the two men remained unconvinced when Hermann’s mother Sophia attributed a pain in her chest to witchcraft. Fearing malicious magic, Sophia sought numerous remedies, consulting “devil-catchers,” paying for masses to be read in the Cathedral, and ingesting medicine that had been buried underground. Hermann and his father expressed frustration with Sophia. “We wanted to drive these fantasies from her head,” he remembered. In their opinion, the pain had come from the many hours that Sophia spent hunched over her spinning.115 Perhaps more than anything else, however, Hermann and Christian shared their age’s new historical awareness. Both were avid readers of histories and chronicles, and both came to imagine their actions and lives within the wider horizons of Renaissance Europe. While most of Hermann’s siblings eventually trained to become merchants and artisans (and a few of his sisters entered convents), Hermann was singled out for an illustrious academic career. Christian encouraged his son to imagine himself a player on the grander stage of Renaissance Europe, proudly performing his role alongside statesmen, lawyers, advisors,

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noblemen, prelates, academics, and magistrates. In arranging his son’s university studies, Christian encouraged Hermann to study law—a practical pursuit that could secure a rapid social ascent. It was an age that prized practical, worldly learning; the Renaissance prince looked not for scholastic pedants, but for men who could draw on a wide range of knowledge relevant to governance and statecraft. In anticipation of these future glories, Christian and his adolescent son began to construct a new story about the Weinsberg family— indeed, a new identity for the “lineage.” The social arena in which father and son imagined themselves was one of proud family traditions—of patrilines, ancient pedigrees, and coats of arms. Such a legacy was far grander than the one Christian in fact inherited as the son of a rural immigrant. His father, Gottschalk, had climbed his way into respectability through hard work and shrewd marriages, and the family property had been cobbled together from a number of sources.116 Though aware of their humble origins, father and son happily conspired to create the new family identity. Privately, they began to claim that the family was descended from a line of Weinsbergs stretching back to a twelfth-century baron. Indeed, Christian sought to instill in his sons a sense of pride as Weinsberg men. In their imaginings, the Haus Weinsberg was transformed from a simple burgher dwelling into a precious patrilineal inheritance. Though Christian had in fact taken the surname Weinsberg from the house, he now insisted that the house’s name was taken from the lineage, ancestors who had allegedly built the dwelling in the early fourteenth century. Christian urged Hermann to suppress the name “van Schwelm” (which indicated Gottschalk’s village of origin).117 In 1537, Hermann and his cousin Christian Heresbach painted a noble, yet thoroughly fabricated, family tree in an upstairs room of the family house.118 During his formative adolescent years, Hermann seems to have taken to heart the notion that his patrilineal identity was a venerable inheritance rather than a recent acquisition. Hermann and his father, Christian, had begun to borrow against the expectation of future success. It fell to Hermann Weinsberg to consolidate the forces that had driven him and his father forward. “If you do not apply yourself in all these things,” Christian wrote to his son, “all my plans for you will have been in vain.”119 But social climbing was a risky affair, especially in tumultuous times. In the end, Christian Weinsberg van Schwelm overreached himself. His ambition had the ironic effect of casting his son into greater uncertainty. Hermann Weinsberg would be left befuddled

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by the gap between his father’s patriarchal vision and the ambiguities of his actual life. For all their turmoil and tumult, the 1520s and 1530s were an expansive period, when townsmen tried out new roles on the stage of world history. Reforming pamphlets declared the authority of the “common man” to interpret scripture. Printing instilled in burghers such as the Weinsbergs a new self-consciousness of their place in the wider world; it opened up new arenas of fame and distinction. And classical literature gave householders a new sense of dignity and honor. Thanks to an abundance of printed literature, a middling burgher such as Christian Weinsberg gained access not only to new skills and learning, but also to new means of self-representation, learned primarily from texts. Burghers claimed social and ideological dignities previously monopolized by noble and patrician families. The family drama behind Hermann Weinsberg’s remarkable archive mirrors the trajectory of German cities during the sixteenth century. Hermann’s father, Christian (1489–1549), an ambitious wine merchant, was something of a Renaissance man. He belonged to a restless generation of German burghers, one eager to resolve inherited problems and uncertainties. Inspired by the optimism of the age and his own reading of classical literature in translation, Christian hoped that his eldest son, Hermann, would pursue an academic career, thereby securing the middling Weinsbergs a splendid reputation. He hoped, in other words, that Hermann would take advantage of many of the new opportunities available to burghers. Hermann Weinsberg did attempt to take advantage of these opportunities, but not in the way his father had hoped. For Hermann, the expanding horizons of the sixteenth century were more a source of distress than of optimism. As is often the case in periods of intense cultural and intellectual ferment, the fi rst generation rushes forward to embrace a new outlook, exhilarated by a sense of possibility. The second generation, meanwhile, is left to mediate between the new ideas and older cultural traditions. What seemed full of promise to the fi rst generation becomes an ambiguous, even troubling, legacy for the second.120 Christian Weinsberg, a respectable burgher and “simple layman,” was delighted by his arrival on the stage of world history, even if he performed only a bit part. His son Hermann, by contrast, was like a timid player thrust out from the curtains, not entirely sure of his lines.



chapter three

The Patriarch

With his father’s encouragement, the young Hermann Weinsberg came to believe his life had a special significance—that the Weinsbergs rose above the obscurity and oblivion to which Cologne families were normally consigned. His imagination was captivated by the figure of the patriarch, the heir of a great family tradition; he associated this idea with his father’s love and approbation. Such family pride was contagious in the early sixteenth century. In the patriarchal ideals of classical literature and Roman law, urban elites found a powerful social imaginary, one that afforded them a greater sense of self-possession and autarky. Though catechisms had long stressed the importance of stern paternal rule, the sixteenth century saw a wave of pamphlets extolling the proud, independent, and diligent housefather, beholden neither to the clergy nor the nobility. Hermann’s adolescence thus coincided with a period during which townsmen throughout Germany were rushing to embrace new cultural forms. Though hardly individualistic in the modern sense, patriarchal imaginings nonetheless promised to simplify bourgeois identity and to legitimize secular pursuits. And yet Christian Weinsberg’s exuberance outran realities on the ground. During the fi rst half of the sixteenth century, the appropriation of a robust civic humanism in Cologne—including the patrilineal identities found in Roman law and literature and in Imperial mythology—remained more a matter of symbolic identification than institutional change. Christian’s grand dreams were an awkward fit for the conjugal household workshops and traditional religious culture of

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sixteenth-century Cologne. The burgher community remained fragile and embattled; its relationship to both the clergy and outside powers was fraught with tension. A burgeoning historical awareness may have furnished new sources of pride and identity, fi ring imaginations with stories of Greek, Roman, and Germanic forebears. But print also had the power to disorient, yanking parochial burghers out of the cozy world of hearth, guild, and parish. Meanwhile, hopes for the reform of Christendom foundered on the hard rocks of sectarian conflict, leaving Cologne’s Catholic identity—one of the most venerable in all of northwest Europe—adrift amidst the wider wreckage. Erasmians who hoped to salvage an irenic reform movement found themselves confronting a recalcitrant clergy and a bitterly divided Christendom. Hermann Weinsberg’s struggle to achieve a proud identity was bound up in these larger problems. For modern readers, it is not difficult to imagine the psychological stress he experienced as the eldest son of a proud, ambitious father.1 “I regret that I have not been able to bring you higher”—the father’s deathbed words were a goad to further action. Even as his career floundered, Hermann clung anxiously to the patrilineal identity that he and his father had developed—and through which he had experienced his father’s approbation and affection. On paper, he sought ways to prove his capabilities as a patriarch; he struggled to overcome the early ambiguities surrounding his calling as a man. In secret writings, he worked mightily to attain the self-possession that had previously eluded him. Drawings of fecund, proliferating vines offered consolation to a man who suffered from a debilitating hernia and lacked legitimate children. And while marriages to widows would eventually make him a stepfather, Hermann continued to address his imaginary, elective heir, “the housefather,” as his true and only son. The obsessiveness with which he compiled his records hinted at a deeper unease. To the task of securing a proud patrilineal heritage Hermann brought all the rationalizing zeal of a humanist reformer. Inspired in part by his kinsman Conrad Heresbach, the advisor to the Duke of JülichCleve, Hermann sought to rationalize the Haus Weinsberg, his own small kingdom of hearth and home. In Germany, there was a growing body of “housefather literature” (Hausväterliteratur), which combined practical economic advice with moral and spiritual admonitions.2 For many contemporaries, the household was a microcosm of the state; the virtues expected of the diligent householder were similar to those required of the benevolent prince. Drawing on the ideals of Roman law

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and humanist literature, Hermann crafted elaborate plans to ensure continuous rule over an industrious, thrifty, and stable household. No less than the centralizing princes of Germany, he aimed to create a unitary and well-regulated entity out of a patchwork of customs and historical accretions. Even as he despaired of reform in Cologne and the Empire, Hermann dreamed of a household that would remain a bastion of peace and order in an uncertain, violent world. And yet, as he wrote, Hermann could not avoid the anxious, even claustrophobic self-preoccupation that lay at the heart of his project. His frequent protests that his work was for the “common good” of his family betrayed defensiveness about his work’s “vain” ends. The more Hermann Weinsberg sought to support an idealized and often fantastical family identity, the more his writing forced him to contemplate and explain his own situation as a “middling burgher”—including the uncertainties and tensions that had prompted him to write in the fi rst place. His seemingly conventional preoccupations—family status, divine calling, patriarchal order—thus became an occasion for exploring an often unsettling sense of individuality and historical contingency. In his retelling, we catch a rare glimpse of the complex personal experience that could lay behind the stern, unyielding visage of a sixteenth-century paterfamilias.

The Collapse of a Renaissance Dream Hermann Weinsberg’s recollections of himself as a young adult have the quality of a confession, as if he was relieved by the chance to explain why he had not accomplished “great things.” When he composed the retrospective sections of his “Memory Book,” intimate and potentially embarrassing accounts of his own youthful missteps flowed readily from his pen. Writing to his future reader “just as if I spoke of myself and my affairs to you alone as to my great, undoubted friend,”3 Hermann offered many excuses for his lackluster career. He had not received the proper foundation in Latin; he was often sick as a student; he had never had a tutor; he was a slow learner; he struggled to remember details; he was timid and reserved; he had not owned enough law books; he had failed to obtain a lectureship or living; he had had to busy himself with his father’s business affairs.4 In retrospect, Hermann suggested the ambitious masculinity his father sought to instill in him was at odds with his own temperament. From an early age, he had shown signs of bashfulness. A question from

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an adult would cause his face to flare bright red, and he often blushed hotly when he thought of something shameful.5 At the age of twelve, a decision to skip school got the better of his conscience. “I was so scared that I thought the stones were looking at me,” he remembered.6 This innate sensitivity and reserve were only exacerbated by a painful hernia Hermann developed as a child. This secret “cross” or “purgatory” would plague him for the rest of his life, and he took care to keep it hidden from all around him.7 The only remedy he employed was a cloth girdle under his clothes. When he approached his marrying years, he doubted his virility to such an extent that he was afraid to court “younger women,” lest he be held responsible for a childless marriage. Indeed, Hermann tried to keep the hernia secret even from his wives, though he suspected they may have noticed it. As time passed, he allowed his parents to believe that it had healed.8 The hernia forced him to pursue a retiring, sedentary career, since he had to guard against extreme exertion.9 In candid self-descriptions, Hermann admitted to a certain outward passivity, including a lifelong aversion to decisive public action. While Christian was a bold social striver, Hermann was a timid, stammering young man. “I was very shy by nature,” he noted, “and, for that reason, I did not like to be in the presence of great lords, where one had to flatter and pay court.”10 His preference, rather, was to be either “alone” or “with a few, familiar people” (his “equals”), with whom he could easily converse, tell jokes, and laugh.11 As Hermann himself acknowledged, “I was pleased by peace more than was usual, for I could not bear displeasure very well and could not easily say something troublesome to another.”12 Christian himself had told Hermann “you are very shy and must vigorously practice in your youth to speak boldly.”13 Throughout his life, Hermann avoided fights and quarrels, even if his own honor was at stake. When it came time to seek new academic opportunities, Hermann was generally passive, allowing his father to take the lead. Looking back, Hermann had a low view of his own intellectual talents. “I was slow to understand, had a poor memory, and was very shy,” he recalled.14 An unreliable memory was a particular hindrance for law students, who had to memorize large bodies of information for immediate recall in disputations.15 Hermann’s rhetorical skills, moreover, were not the best. He never fully mastered the basics of Latin grammar.16 Lacking the gift of sure recall, he “often went amiss” while delivering an address. By his own admission, he tended to stumble over his words, in part because “shyness” led him to rush through public

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addresses. He succeeded only when his speeches were short. Reflecting on his own rhetorical abilities (or lack thereof), Hermann admitted that “I must set my late father before me in this, for he was a good orator, even though he had not studied very much.”17 The ironies were not lost on Hermann. Where his father had all the gifts of a scholar but none of the formal training, Hermann had all of the formal training but none of the gifts. For a time, at least, the young Hermann Weinsberg was spared the unpleasant task of confronting his own mediocrity. During the late 1530s, when he was in his late teens, he enjoyed the relatively leisurely life of a student at the University of Cologne. Thanks to a scholarship he obtained with his father’s help, Hermann lived and studied for free in the Cronenburse, a college for law students founded in 1431 by a wealthy jurist and churchman.18 Along with his fellow students, he was promoted to the rank of Master in the Faculty of Arts—a distinction he later attributed to the fee he paid than to any special accomplishment of his own. “The regents and masters,” Hermann wrote, “were more interested in the profit that they and the college would have from the promotion than in talent [of the students]; they usually let every student through, after he had studied long enough, had sworn his oath, and had paid his money. There were few students who knew all, let alone half, of the liberal arts.”19 Though uncomfortable with the boisterous male bravado on display in the college, Hermann was soon “corrupted” by his peers, learning to fight, drink, swear, and visit prostitutes. In his written recollections, Hermann insisted that he did not always fi nd these experiences pleasant, and his retrospective accounts attest to his fastidious, secretive personality. By his own admission, Hermann disliked the rowdy atmosphere of the residential college he lived in during his late teens. He found it quite awkward when a fellow boarder from Lübeck—a Protestant who claimed the “saints are a bunch of foolishness” (Ei, es ist auch narrenwirk mit den hilligen)—began to taunt and bully him.20 Hermann was drawn into a fistfight against his will, only because a crowd of onlookers mocked him for his cowardice. Though he had the upper hand in the scuffle, pinning his foe to the ground and bashing his head against a rock, Hermann could not agree with the fight’s apparent logic—to prove one’s manliness by showing that one was willing to carry the violence to its utmost end. Even while being beaten, his foe continued his taunts and said “if you do not strike me dead, I will stab you to death.” Seeing “no end to this game,” Hermann ran into the Cronenburse and locked himself in his room. Later,

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Hermann fought with another student from Lübeck. “We fought until my nose and mouth were bleeding. I was embarrassed about this and didn’t want to be so quick to fight anymore.”21 Likewise, Hermann shrank from drinking contests and their boisterous displays of bravado. For university students, it was a point of honor to keep up with others during toasts. Hermann, however, would secretly pour out his beer to avoid getting drunk. His cousin Christian, “a proud drinker,” once spied Hermann cheating during a drinking contest. Because of an agreement the two had previously made, Christian could not say anything about it in public, but he confronted Hermann afterwards, saying “before God, it is not right.”22 In sexual matters, Hermann acknowledged a particular naïveté. Once, while traveling to school in Emmerich, Hermann found himself caught in a violent storm with two young women from Cologne. As he later remembered it, the three sought refuge at a farmhouse, where they took off their clothes to dry and were led into a “small dark room, with only one bed.” “I was embarrassed,” Hermann recalled, “and did not want to lie with them, but they implored me to, lest I freeze to death.” Both women, noted Hermann, were attractive—“shapely in body and face.” The older of the women said “I have a husband, but you two help yourselves to each other” (ich hab eynen man behelff t ir uch under uch beiden). According to Hermann, the younger woman was “bold and lustful” and drew him “to her breast” to keep warm. “God prevented me from losing my virginity that night, but the encounter later gave me many strange thoughts.”23 In retrospect, of course, Hermann could assuage his conscience by stressing his own “unwilling” participation in sexual encounters, offering his heirs examples of the temptations they might encounter as young men. It was as a university student that Hermann committed his fi rst sexual transgressions. By his own account, he was “misled” (verfort) by fellow students, who “talked about pretty women” and bragged of their exploits. A young clergyman with a reputation for whoring seems to have made a special point of instructing Hermann in carnal matters. “I was simple,” Hermann recalled, “but I nonetheless heard so much that I thought about it and had evil desires.” Finally, Hermann’s friend Joseph Goltberg, who apparently had some experience in these affairs, brought him to the house of an “old woman,” who sent for two silk-spinners, presumably poorer single women. After drinking a good deal, Hermann lost his virginity. “Here,” Hermann later wrote, “I must confess my sins, for which I am most sorry.” Though

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Hermann visited prostitutes four or five more times, he insisted, with a retrospective note of contrition and warning, that it was “a horrible, vicious business to keep house with all such loose whores.”24 Hermann’s description of the prostitutes who “seduced” him not only bore the marks of contemporary class prejudice, but also reflected the strange blend of passivity and aggression that characterized contemporary depictions of male sexuality—and, not coincidentally, Hermann’s subsequent career as the secret savior of his family. 25 This volatile mixture was evident above all in Hermann’s account of his most troubling youthful transgression, his molestation of an older maid in the Cronenburse. As he recalled it, a maid named Stein, who was “rather old,” worked in the college and “let many of the students kiss her and joked around with them.” Hermann’s room was next to hers. One evening, when she was not in the room, he sneaked in, waiting in a corner until she “returned, closed the door, undressed, knelt in her nightshirt by the bed, placed her hands together as if she were praying, blew out the candle, and behaved as if she had not noticed me. . . . I did not know how to interpret this.” After she had fallen asleep, he undressed, climbed under the covers, and “did what I wanted” (ich handelt, wie ich wolt)—“no matter what I did to her, she continued to sleep.” As he got up to leave, she grabbed him and demanded that he tell her who he was. When she threatened to tell the rector, he slipped a coin into her hand, asking her not to “make it difficult for him.” The next morning, after the maid complained that Hermann had disturbed her all night, the rector warned him to “mind his own business” and moved him to another room. That Hermann revealed this episode suggests the relative safety he felt to confide intimate, potentially compromising details details in his Gedenkbuch, but it also reflects the troubled, secretive aggrandizement that pervaded his entire work. A timid patriarch in real life—a man who doubted his own virility—Hermann often sought the satisfactions of manhood surreptitiously. 26 Even as he indulged in the excesses of student life, Hermann continued to be groomed for a legal career beyond the confi nes of Cologne. He expressed relief when he fi nished his course of liberal arts and turned his attention to law, a subject in which his father had a keen interest. Christian helped Hermann purchase used volumes of “both laws”— that is, both canon and Roman law—along with the commentary of the famous jurist Bartolus.27 It was an age of lawyers, and a legal education initiated the student into the discourses of the European elite. A fi ne legal career often brought with it new titles and dignities. In

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some cities, the rank of Doctor was considered equivalent to a noble status. Such a reputation could enhance the honor of a man’s house. Indeed, the young Hermann had many reasons to be confident. He and a handful of his compatriots, including his cousin and close friend Christian Heresbach, became a powerful clique within the college, defending themselves against foreign students. They swore “to be and remain good friends, to live and die together.”28 Imagining the glories that awaited them, Hermann and his cousin Christian, nephew to Conrad Heresbach, researched genealogy and practiced drawing heraldic figures and family trees.29 Such dreams, however, remained little more than a private pastime, especially after Hermann’s academic career failed to progress. In 1539, after spending five years in the Cronenburse, Hermann ran out of funding and was forced to seek alternate means of support.30 His father, Christian, taxed by the fi nancial demands of a large household, tried to use his political influence on Hermann’s behalf. Despite strenuous efforts, the two men failed to obtain a living that might support a longterm academic career—an endowed Mass, a canonry, a lectureship. In 1535, at the age of seventeen, Hermann had been tonsured, so as to be prepared for ordination in case a clerical office fell vacant. At the time, Christian hoped that Hermann would gain a clerical living, one that might support a fi ne academic career.31 Thus, in 1539, Christian used his influence as a churchwarden to claim for Hermann the living from a Mass in St. Jacob’s Church—a “little bit of fat,” as Hermann called it. Soon, however, a more powerful nobleman came forward, claiming that the churchwardens had usurped his right of appointment. The Weinsbergs used a variety of stratagems to acquire the living, bribing local officials and threatening to seize the property that stood as security for the rent. In the end, their only reward was an exceptionally complex and contentious lawsuit, prosecuted on a variety of fronts and eventually appealed to Rome, where it remained unresolved for years.32 Upon failing to obtain the living, Christian encouraged Hermann to stand for the vacant position of rector of the Cronenburse, the law college where he had boarded for the past five years. His application was accepted, but not without the misgivings of some of the college’s overseers, who thought Hermann too young for the post. The rector’s chief duties were to maintain good discipline within the college and to provide daily meals for the students within a set budget. The reward was free room and board. Christian reassured Hermann that the job involved “little more than keeping house.”33 But keeping house in the

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sixteenth century was a daunting task, especially for an unmarried man in his early twenties. There was a great deal to distract Hermann from his studies. He had to purchase supplies, delegate chores, oversee servants, apportion food within a limited budget, keep detailed accounts, and hire laborers for slaughtering and curing (jobs that were done on the premises). The rector’s accounts were audited by the college’s provisors. He was to keep a record of student misbehavior and impose punishments (fi nes and exclusion from meals) for various infractions. Among other things, the rector purchased livestock at market, bolted the gates at night, oversaw the servants, distributed an allowance of cloth to students, and provided for daily necessities.34 More importantly, Hermann had to discipline a group of students whose rowdiness was all too familiar to him. According to the college’s statutes, he was obliged to enforce attendance at lectures and punish students for swearing, betting, whoring, fighting, and ostentatious clothing, as well as any actions that might exacerbate town-gown tensions, such as bearing a dagger or hurling either insults or projectiles from the college’s windows.35 Later, Hermann would lament that he had been “saddled with domestic care for the sake of board alone.”36 Hermann’s greatest problem as rector was his own timidity and lack of gravitas; he was scarcely older than the youths he was supposed to discipline. In early modern Europe, few things signified full manhood so much as domestic governance, and the students were astounded at the dramatic alteration that the appointment had wrought in their former companion. “He used to be wild with us, playing, jumping, and fighting,” Hermann remembered them remarking, “but now he has so suddenly changed.” Yet if crossing the boundary between dependence and mastership seemed at times to have had an almost magical effect on Hermann, the transformation also had its limits. As a young man who had recently engaged in his share of riotous behavior, he found it difficult to rebuke students for excesses to which he himself was still tempted to succumb. “I could not live without transgression, even though it was incumbent upon me to punish others,” Hermann later confessed, “for I was young, and the wisdom of youth is strange fare.”37 At fi rst, Hermann was supported by his “good old companions” in the college; to ensure their support, he gave them better meals than was customary. This, however, caused him to fall behind in his budget. When he tried to cut back on costs by delaying the entrance of several new students, he succeeded only in incurring the anger of the newcomers. Over the next few years, as his “good old companions” gradually

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left the college, Hermann found himself surrounded by hostile boarders, who began to challenge his authority.38 Many of the students’ complaints had to do with the quality of the meals Hermann provided. They demanded to see his accounts. Hermann proposed a compromise; instead of furnishing meals, he gave the students an allowance, with which they could purchase their own food. The students soon spent all their money and demanded more.39 By 1543, Hermann had a small rebellion on his hands. One evening around ten o’clock, several students entered the kitchen requesting a nighttime drink. When Hermann ordered them to go to bed, they stayed in the kitchen and forced the servant to bring them beer. (According to the college’s statutes, students were to return to their room without opposition if the rector requested it.)40 As they drank, they mocked Hermann, scolded the maid, and struck the servant. Hermann lost his composure. He threw his key into the kitchen, telling them “if they wanted to rule, I would no longer trouble myself with it.” That night, he slept in his parents’ house.41 It was only the next morning, when the maid in the Cronenburse came secretly to apprise him of the situation, that Hermann realized the full significance of his actions. The maid informed him that the students had spent the entire night discussing their options and had decided to bar Hermann from the college, since he had “handed over the key and governance.” Few things were as harmful to a man’s public reputation as a rumor that he could not control his own household. Worried about the humiliation that might arise from this affair, Hermann devised an elaborate plan for getting back into the college— he bribed a senior student to smash open a lock from within using a hatchet. Once safely inside, Hermann suspended the guilty students. When both Hermann and the boarders (gesellen) presented their cases before the Cronenburse’s board of overseers, they were greeted with laughter and a sardonic remark that “this seems like an affair for soldiers (kreichzleut handel), not students.”42 Shortly after this debacle, when he was still only twenty-five, Hermann relinquished his position as rector and moved back into the Weinsberg house.43 At the same time he suffered this public humiliation, Hermann watched his proud father’s ambitions founder. In 1542, Christian made a disastrous investment in rural property, purchasing a farm that was secretly encumbered with debts. Not only did he lose a substantial sum of money (approximately 400 thaler), but he also became embroiled in interminable litigation, which persisted until his death in 1549.44 At one

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point, Christian was involved in fifteen lawsuits at the same time, many of them in foreign courts. For a proud, free burgher, a man eager to obtain fi nancial independence, such entanglements were a cause for bitter regret. The family’s fi nancial straits were stressful enough to cause tensions between Christian and his wife, Sophia.45 A certain pessimism crept into his talk. He suggested that the planet under which he was born predestined him to “have no luck in court.” Or perhaps “Almighty God sent him such court cases as a punishment for his sins.”46 Financial difficulties prompted Christian to accept the office of Warden (burggreve) of the Town Hall. For a distinguished city-councilor, this position was something of a setback, since it turned him from a “master” into a “servant.” According to Hermann, the “lowly could not apply for the office, while the illustrious would not take it.”47 At the same time, because of his legal troubles, Christian could not set foot outside Cologne without fear of being arrested. Meanwhile, much of Hermann’s time was spent helping with his father’s lawsuits, traveling back and forth to courts in Dormagen and Düsseldorf. Such work, he later wrote, “greatly hindered my studies.”48 Indeed, while Hermann was in his twenties, it may at times have seemed that he had studied law solely for the purpose of serving as his father’s private advocate. By this time, there was little hope of academic success. Though Hermann was eventually promoted to the rank of Licentiate of Law, he proved a mediocre lawyer. As he admitted much later, he had “not succeeded very well for a Licentiate.”49 In 1544, after almost ten years of schooling, he served as a simple advocate, who lived “hand to mouth” off of small cases. In retrospect, Hermann ruefully reflected on his lack of renown. “There are certainly advocates and doctors,” he noted, “who obtain a great reputation through special talent and good connections, who obtain great dignities, remuneration, offices, commissions, and adventures in addition to their work.” Such men were often consulted by princes and magistrates, or sent on grand diplomatic missions. “They can greatly rejoice at all this,” Hermann sighed, “but perhaps I was not born under the right planet.” For whatever reason, God had not seen fit to give him the gifts of memory and fluent speaking—two skills essential to the practice of law.50 What was left for Hermann was an awkward reintegration into civic society. The descent back into the middling world of his youth seems to have caused him no small amount of confusion. When he returned to the Haus Weinsberg in 1543, he found his childhood home empty,

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since his parents had moved into an apartment “under the Town Hall.” Though Hermann often ate meals with his parents, he took up residence in his paternal home, along with a servant. For the next several years, he would remain there, continuing to study and practice as an advocate.51 Much of his time was dedicated to his father’s lawsuits, and Hermann became hopelessly tangled in the dense web of regional courts and jurisdictions. Once, while working on his father’s lawsuits, he was arrested by creditors in the village of Dormagen. He secured his release only by paying a hefty fee.52 As an unmarried student living alone in his parents’ home, Hermann occupied an ambiguous place in civic society. On the one hand, he was still an unmarried cleric, and he and his father continued in vain to seek clerical livings—a task that had become more urgent now that it was apparent Hermann would achieve no great academic success. On the other hand, Hermann found himself drawn back into burgher society, taking on responsibilities normally reserved for married housefathers. In 1543, when the Council feared incursions from the Archbishop, it enjoined all “unsworn” men in Cologne (excepting clergymen) to vow loyalty to one of the city’s Gaffeln. At the advice of his father and other relatives, Hermann followed family tradition and joined the Gaffel Schwarzenhaus, to which his father also belonged.53 No sooner had he done so, however, than he was elected to the City Council. Initially, Hermann was baffled by this turn of events: “I was frightened by this election. Everyone was astonished that I was elected to the Council since I was a young fellow of twenty-five years and had no wife and no household.” Usually, the Gaffeln of Cologne only elected married men to the Council, since successful governance of a house was deemed a prerequisite for civic governance.54 And it was all but unprecedented for a member of the university to be elected to the Council, since clerics were subject to a separate authority and jurisdiction. “What have they done in the Gaffel Schwarzenhaus?” ran murmurs at the time. “They have elected a half priest and a student (einen halben paffen und einen studenten) to the Council!” And yet despite Hermann’s reluctance, his father encouraged him to make himself visible in the Council—“for the sake of my promotion.” Indeed, Christian seems to have had a hand in Hermann’s election, seeing it as a way of maintaining the family’s political influence and furthering his son’s academic career. 55 What Hermann could not have realized at the time was that his election to the Council signaled the beginning of an important trend in Cologne. At the beginning of the century, most of Cologne’s

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city-councilors were laymen—householders with only rudimentary education. Thus, magistrates hired clerical scribes and academic advisors, though they did not entrust “clerics” with actual civic authority. Not long after Hermann’s unusual appointment, however, more and more academically trained burghers were elected to the City Council, so that by the end of the century, all of Cologne’s top political figures had a university degree. This professionalization of the urban magistracy reflected the broader secularization of education—that is, a growing number of burghers with a university education.56 Hermann Weinsberg, however, perceived only a confusion of traditional distinctions in his new status. In recollecting these unusual events, Hermann lamented that he had been thrust into a position of authority before he had acquired the requisite markers of adulthood, including a wife and a house. In his mid-twenties, Hermann remained uncertain whether he would pursue a spiritual or a secular career. Towards the end of 1543, while Hermann was still sitting out his term on the Council, his father encouraged him to stand for a prestigious prebend in the collegiate church of St. Gereon, second in status only to the noble Cathedral chapter.57 As a result, Hermann found himself in the highly unusual position of petitioning fellow city-councilors for one of the city’s most coveted clerical livings. In the end, the stipend was given to the son of Arnold von Siegen, Cologne’s most powerful mayor and university provisor. In his autobiography, Hermann attested to his own timidity and discomfort in applying for the position. He confessed that he had not spoken up for himself at the decisive moment. “I should have petitioned on my own behalf,” he wrote, “but I did not want to interfere in Herr Arnold’s affairs and anger him.”58 Privately, however, such experiences made Hermann quite critical of nepotism and patronage in Cologne. Not long after the illustrious living eluded him, Hermann grew a beard, signaling his resolve to play the burgher. Seeking new sources of fi nancial support, he courted an older, wealthy widow, who joked that she would take no new husband, even if the Emperor himself offered his hand. 59 Meanwhile, Hermann continued to dwell in the Haus Weinsberg, pursuing his career as an advocate, helping his father with his lawsuits, and awaiting any opportunities that might come his way. Against his wishes, he was appointed civic Rittmeister, the ceremonial head of an annual armed procession of burghers. This appointment was not an unambiguous honor. Because of the expense involved, not all burghers were enthusiastic about serving as Rittmeister. 60

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According to Hermann, his father’s enemies had nominated him to the costly office, in hopes of burdening his family fi nancially and making a mockery of Hermann’s youth and inexperience. Some councilors teased Christian about Hermann’s youth and immaturity, calling the father a “half Rittmeister.”61 As Hermann recalled it, the position as ceremonial head of the burgher community brought unwanted attention to his ambiguous status. For even as he sought to establish himself as a lay householder, he argued cases in Cologne’s chief ecclesiastical court and occasionally presided over the court when the judge was absent. This institution—the Offizialat—was independent of civic jurisdiction and thus sometimes resented by burghers and councilors.62 According to Hermann, “no one had ever seen or heard of a Rittmeister and councilor presiding over the ecclesiastical court.”63 Church court and City Council, sacred and secular—the boundaries between these spheres were hotly contested, and they ran through the heart of the young Hermann’s identity. Indeed, Hermann later sought to explain his ambiguous status by insisting that all people, both laity and clergy, are “part spiritual and part secular.” This awkward holding period seems to have worn on Hermann. For several years, he had had many of the responsibilities of adulthood, but few of its benefits. In 1545, he began an affair with the family maid, Greitgin, who brought meals to him at the Haus Weinsberg. This union produced an illegitimate daughter, Anna. As was customary in such cases, the family did its utmost to keep the affair quiet, fi ring the maid as soon as her pregnancy became known and sending the infant to be raised in the countryside at Hermann’s expense. In addition, in accordance with Cologne statutes, Hermann had to pay Greitgin’s future husband one hundred Cologne marks for her virginity (jonfrauschaft). At fi rst, Hermann doubted that he was the father; he tried to shift the blame to the maid, saying that she was somewhat “loose.”64 He would not see his daughter for over ten years.65 Meanwhile, his career prospects grew dimmer. “I regret that I have not been able to bring you higher.” These were among the fi nal words that Christian Weinsberg spoke to his son from his deathbed in 1549.66

An Identity Crisis Hermann Weinsberg’s personal limbo during the 1540s paralleled that of his hometown. By the mid-sixteenth century, Cologne was experiencing an identity crisis of its own. After the dynamism of the 1510s

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and 1520s had come disorientation, and the Catholic city found itself hemmed in by forces beyond its control. Hopes of resolving longstanding problems were frustrated by the exigencies of Reformation-era politics, which complicated the city’s tense relationship with the Archbishop and the clergy. During Hermann’s first year in the Council, the city faced a new threat from the Archbishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied (r. 1515–1547), who attempted to introduce Protestant reform into his archiepiscopate. Though the Cathedral chapter eventually deposed von Wied, the Council found itself in a difficult position, trying to preserve the city’s traditional “freedoms” in the midst of an increasingly polarized Empire. The magistrates were bombarded by appeals from all sides—clergy, university, Pope, Emperor, Protestant estates.67 The Council could not afford to alienate Emperor Charles V, who viewed Cologne as a bulwark of both Catholic tradition and Imperial prerogative in the northwest.68 The position of Cologne burghers at mid-century was exceptionally complex. If a merchant such as Christian Weinsberg dreamt of autarky and self-possession, the cultural reality for many burghers was one of fragmentation and uncertainty. The older problems confronting Cologne townsfolk remained—tensions between laity and clergy, gaps between social realities and traditional social imaginaries, political and economic insecurities, a confusing judicial system, costly litigation. Now, above these was superimposed a layer of new uncertainties, generated by the Protestant Reformation. In matters of faith, many of the city’s Catholics lacked the passionate certainty and conviction that characterized the early Protestant movement. Within the Council, a precarious political situation resulted in a defensive, apprehensive stance. Among the population, there was a crisis of confidence in the traditional institutions, and pious bequests dropped sharply, as if burghers were not quite sure whether gifts to the Church were still a good investment.69 The need to respond to the Protestant menace precluded (at least for a time) the possibility of a vigorous Catholic reform. Many questions remained. What was the future of Cologne’s churches and monasteries? What was the identity of Cologne within a fractured Empire? How did new social imaginaries (especially those of Roman law and Renaissance patriarchy) relate to local traditions? Hermann Weinsberg was in a unique position to appreciate these ambiguities and insecurities. As a result of his father’s ambitions, Hermann had come to straddle several of the major fault lines of sixteenthcentury society and culture—medieval and Renaissance, burgher and

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clergy, commoner and nobility. Far from clarifying his position in the world, his legal career had only made that position more confused. Indeed, the family identity itself—including the Haus Weinsberg—was threatened by the lawsuits in which Christian had become embroiled. Having hovered for several years between his middling background and the vague prospect of something greater, Hermann was understandably uncertain about his place within Cologne. On the one side stood the ambiguities of burgher life—its flux and fragile, rootless families. On the other side stood the world of genealogies and titles—of distinguished and deeply rooted identities. The former was what Hermann and his siblings could reasonably anticipate. The latter was what Hermann’s father had encouraged him to expect. According to his later recollections, Hermann perceived the family’s recent setbacks as a threat to his very identity, since they jeopardized the proud patrilineal succession for which his father had groomed him. By his own admission, he became preoccupied with oblivion. While living alone in his parent’s house, he began to look around his neighborhood, wondering what type of fame or distinction his fellow burghers had won. To his dismay, he found not more than three houses in his neighborhood that had remained in the same family for more than one hundred years. Even distinguished burghers who had died “not long ago” were scarcely remembered; the most that survived of their lives was a cryptic painting or stained glass window in a church. Otherwise, they had entirely “fallen from memory, as if they had never been on earth, though the Lord God may know their names to their salvation.”70 As they stood, the traditional institutions of burgher life were inadequate; they could not assuage Hermann’s concerns about the future. The anxieties Hermann experienced were acute enough to force him to seek refuge in private plans and writing. “Things are so bad all about / That I will not venture out.” This was one of Hermann’s favorite sayings, which he often drew beneath an image of a snail.71 Such caution was common enough among urban householders, who were jealous of familial prerogatives and well acquainted with the risks of public life. But Hermann had particular reason to take this saying to heart. Smarting from his recent setbacks, he began to search for ways not only to achieve his father’s ambitions, but also to secure the Haus Weinsberg against all loss and change. For the rest of his life, he would desperately try to mediate between his father’s grand dreams and the mundane realities of his middling life. In the midst of intense uncertainty, he fell back on a secret fantasy of autarky, status, and fame.

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Sometime during the mid-1540s, while his father was still living, Hermann made a secret resolution. Walking up and down in his “father’s house,” with his legal education fresh in his mind, he stumbled upon the idea of entailing his family estate in perpetuity, so as to prevent its alienation from the male line. “I began to think and consider,” he recalled, “how the Haus Weinsberg might be endowed and founded, so that an honorable household might be kept there at all times, and that it might remain in good condition and good order with my father’s heirs, blood, and descendants for all times.” Having noted the fragility of most Cologne households, Hermann began to wonder if he could lay a fi rmer foundation for his own lineage. Here, he could use his legal expertise to give his family advantages that other Cologne households did not possess. Emulating noble families, he sought to give legal substance to the genealogical fantasies he and his father had long indulged. He aimed to transform his family estate into an enduring “foundation” (stiftung), not unlike the endowed masses, scholarships, and priestly livings that Cologne burghers had long bequeathed to the Church. It was a surrogate means of success, an opportunity to achieve the security and status that had long eluded him as a student. To echo the words Christian himself had once written, Hermann could use his talents to “honor God and all his family.” What he lacked in wealth and talent he hoped to compensate for through “good instructions” (gutte wegeweisungen). Hermann revealed the idea to his father, who was apparently delighted by it. Though Christian regretted that his own affairs would not allow him to put it into effect, he urged his son to strive after it “with all possible effort.”72 Outwardly, Hermann showed few signs of these preoccupations. In the 1540s and 1550s, he retreated from academic ambition into modest bourgeois respectability. In 1548, he declined the opportunity to ascend to the rank of Doctor with other classmates. Later, he cited pragmatic reasons for this choice. Given his modest scholarly talents, Hermann believed that the 300 or 400 thaler necessary for the promotion could be better invested in rents and annuities. At the same time, he would be spared the expenses of maintaining the “title and dignity” of a doctoral status.73 Instead, he secured his fi nancial situation by marrying a wealthy widow and neighbor named Weisgin Ripgin, who ran a thriving textile business.74 Hermann contributed to the business by keeping her books—a task that was “somewhat demeaning” for a Licentiate.75 Thanks to this marriage, Hermann secured a measure of leisure, which allowed him to devote his time to both civic affairs and his secret

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plans. Though he was “not among the most prominent Licentiates,” he claimed to be content with his “middling” identity—neither the richest nor the poorest, neither the highest nor the lowest.76 Together with his wife Weisgin, Hermann built up a small complex of properties in St. Jacob’s parish. Most of the houses abutted the courtyard of the Haus Weinsberg, which allowed the couple to pass from house to house without venturing out on the street. Weisgin ran her woolens business out of her late husband’s house, where she and her employees made as many as one hundred woolen coats a week, with revenues as high as 2,000 to 3,000 gulden a year. Hermann kept the books for his wife’s business in another house, where he set up his study. He also carried on a small wine trade on the side. Such functional distinctions apparently suited the demands of Weisgin’s business; they afforded the couple a measure of privacy, more than could usually be found in a household workshop. They were also a sign of privilege. While Weisgin conducted business out of her home, the couple slept in the house where Hermann had his study; meanwhile, Hermann sold wine out of the Haus Weinsberg, and the couple dined in yet another house.77 By all measures, Hermann enjoyed a comfortable, upper-middling way of life. In 1549, he succeeded his late father as warden of the Town Hall—not the most distinguished office, but one that afforded a “restful” existence. Though he was “burdened” at the thought of becoming a “servant,” he valued the regular income the position afforded. “This situation is stable, comfortable, and allows me to serve my fatherland. Titles and honors matter little so long as one has the necessities of life.”78 For the remainder of his life, he would follow in his father’s footsteps, eventually leaving the position of warden and serving honorably as a city-councilor and parish churchwarden. Few contemporaries could have guessed the depth of his inner disquiet. Privately, Hermann fostered his grander ambitions. He schemed to promote his “father’s house,” compensating for his own mediocrity with visions of family greatness. As he himself admitted, he was a man prone to seek secret consolations. Though he was generally peaceable, he often “swore” when alone, especially if he was angry. And while he “liked to hide anger” and “appear gentle to many,” Hermann confessed that he grew “hot with wrath within” when someone opposed him. His thoughts fell constantly to his legacy. “Secretly I was eager for glory and ambitious to leave a good name and memory behind me,” he recalled. “I would have gladly seen my lineage and family (stam und geschlecht) elevated at all times, to display my coat of arms, and to boast somewhat in these things.”79

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Unable to part with a lofty understanding of his own family, Hermann worked anxiously to protect it. In the privacy of his study, the young lawyer sought to build a great and glorious lineage. This was the work that would give his life significance. “What good is all your property and all you do here on earth,” he asked, “if your memory is buried with you and disappears among your descendants?”80 If Hermann had his way, the heirs would dwell forever in his family’s comfortable burgher dwelling, the Haus Weinsberg, where they would rest secure in a deeply rooted identity and faithfully preserve the memory of their ancestors. So long as the patrimony was kept intact, the family could survive and eventually flourish. Hermann’s own life would be preserved within the lineage; his fame and memory would be forever preserved among his heirs. Against the uncertainty of his public identity, Hermann could take comfort in the idea of a pure patrilineal succession, immune from change or corruption. Against the centrifugal forces of urban life, he held up the image of a beloved patrimony, made familiar by the generations of kin who had resided there. Indeed, he expressed the hope that his “father’s house” might endure “forever,” distinguishing itself “before many thousands of houses and lineages both inside and outside of Cologne.”81 In all these things, Hermann wrote not as a private self, but as a “patriarch” responsible for the future of his “father’s house.” Hermann’s status as a patriarch was contested; he was a city-councilor who was not yet the master of a house, a failed college rector, a “half cleric,” the father of an illegitimate child, and, by his own admission, a timid homebody. The uncertainties swirling around his identity as a man and the legal difficulties that beset the family, however, proved all the more impetus to secure the Haus Weinsberg. For Hermann, to write the self was to write the house. Thus, beginning in the 1540s, before he had become a full man, he threw himself into a private project to secure the honor and permanence of his household—or his “house-heart,” as he affectionately called it (Figure 5).82

Good Instructions These dreams might have remained innocuous fantasies were it not for the earnestness with which Hermann pursued them. As an educated lawyer, Hermann recognized that even modest townsmen had the tools to shape their own identities and histories. In a remarkably systematic and self-conscious fashion, he worked to provide his middling burgher

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family with all the permanence and splendor of more illustrious houses. It was a task he approached with the utmost seriousness. His aim was to “found” the Haus Weinsberg to the “praise of the Almighty and the consolation and salvation of the housefather and all members of the household.” His role was not unlike that of the Old Testament patriarchs: “I fi rmly believe that I have been called by God and blessed by my father for this.”83 In 1550, not long after his father’s death, Hermann received mysterious confi rmation of this special calling. Asleep in his late father’s favorite “resting chair,” he dreamt that his family and friends, including his father, had gathered in a “pleasant summer house.” Suddenly, a bright light shone in the room, and the Virgin Mary appeared with the infant Jesus, who made the sign of the cross. The Virgin spoke “sweetly” in Latin the words from the Magnificat, Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum (“And his mercy is on those who fear him, from generation to generation”). Later that evening, Hermann went to Vespers at the Carmelite monastery, where the organist suddenly stopped accompanying the choir on the verse of the Magnificat that Hermann had heard in his dream. After the service, the organist told Hermann that an “exceptionally beautiful young woman” had appeared to him, telling him to let the choir sing the verse alone.84 It is possible that Hermann invented this story at a later date in order to buttress an implausible plan. In his autobiography, he recounted that he told no one about his strange dream, but rather took it as a sign that his secret project had met with divine approbation. The vision of Mary, he remembered, made him all the more determined to secure his family’s survival and memory.85 The identity that Hermann sought to salvage in writing was that of the proud patriarch—the head of an enduring household. Hermann, who larded his writings with ancient advice about household governance (oeconomicus), would no doubt have approved of Aristotle’s famous depiction of man as a social animal and of the isolated individual as a hapless, pathetic creature. “No man is born for himself,” Hermann wrote, echoing Cicero. In the sixteenth century, a burgher’s identity depended on his rule. Achieving individual independence and self-possession depended on having a house of one’s own, and the identity of the patriarch found expression in his household. “The honor of the house,” Hermann wrote, “lies chiefly in the virtue of the housefather.”86 At the same time, the behavior of each household member affected the honor of the patriarch. It was likely to reinforce such a

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message that Hermann’s father, Christian, had commissioned a painting of Lucretia to adorn the walls of the Weinsberg dining room. Family members were to sacrifice self-interest for the good of the family. To become an independent adult was not to distance oneself from the social and economic bonds of the family, as modern notions of autonomy might suggest, but rather to master them. Such mastery had eluded Hermann in his everyday life, but he sought to attain it in writing. During the 1550s, he composed an intricate last will and testament, which he quietly deposited with the requisite civic authorities in 1557, after his wife Weisgin’s death.87 Its central clause was a fideicommissum, or perpetual entail, which laid down strict rules to preserve the patrimony within the male line. The house was to be passed down intact through an endless succession of Weinsberg “housefathers,” who, together, would constitute Hermann’s “immortal son.” The legal privilege Hermann invoked in his will—the fideicommissum—was normally prohibited to commoners. Unlike England, where the right of primogeniture came to prevail, many regions of Germany, including the Rhineland, were governed by traditions of partible inheritance. Cologne statutes limited entails to three generations.88 But interest in securing family property in perpetuity was growing. While the upper nobility had the power to develop independent rules of succession for their own families, the lesser nobility and urban patriciate had to rely on special legal mechanisms. Over time, the idea of male succession to patrimonial property (Familienstammgüter) was linked with the Roman law concept of the fideicommissum, a request that the heir pass a family item on to a second party. Such demands had gradually grown more binding, restricting the freedom of distant heirs to dispose of property. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, perpetual entails grew in popularity among the lower nobility and urban patricians and merchants. Indeed, Hermann Weinsberg’s 1557 testament was an early instance of an urban entail. The language he used was not unlike that found in other wills, which forbade alienation (Veräußerung) of the property so as to “honor” and “augment” the name and lineage. One testament from 1596 stated that the family property was “to remain from now on and for all eternity with the name and lineage of B—[full name unknown].”89 Such measures rarely succeeded, at least not in the cities. Even wealthy families had difficulty setting up enduring estates. A mediocre Licentiate and wine merchant who attempted to do the same was likely to draw sharp censure. Hermann himself admitted that his plan

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was “somewhat singular” (singularis und etwas besonders).90 Not only were his resources modest, but he did not even own the estate he tried to entail. By custom, Hermann could expect to inherit only a sixth share of the Haus Weinsberg—the same as each of his siblings. And yet he aimed to bind the family’s entire patrimonial inheritance to the “immortal office” of housefather. He went so far as to draft a petition to the Emperor, to be completed and submitted by the executors of his estate, in which he requested that the “housefather” of Weinsberg be ennobled and that the Haus Weinsberg be turned into a free, noble, and inalienable patrimony.91 Failing such an intervention, Hermann’s only hope was that his siblings, at his death, would relinquish their claims on the property for the “common good” of the family. Despite misgivings, Hermann convinced himself that he could justify such a privilege for the middling Weinsbergs. The alleged longevity of the line was reason for its continuance: “Since the Haus Weinsberg had remained so many years with my ancestors in the lineage, for which God must be praised, so I have, to the present day, striven by his grace to keep both house and lineage together, so long as it pleases him.”92 The Haus Weinsberg, of course, had not been in the family for hundreds of years, but the thought that the family had come “from nowhere” was just as abhorrent to Hermann as the prospect that his beloved family patrimony might be “alienated into the hands of strangers.”93 Throughout his life, Hermann would go to great lengths to explain that the name of the house was derived from the lineage, reprimanding family members at the dinner table who dared to suggest otherwise. Hermann’s testament left little to chance. Along with his own properties, the Haus Weinsberg was to become an inalienable possession of the family, remaining “forever” in the male line. A self-perpetuating board of executors was to elect each new heir from several carefully specified degrees of kin.94 Should all his father’s male descendants die out, the executors of the estate were to choose a Licentiate of Law from the University of Cologne to assume the name of Weinsberg and the office of “housefather.” Though the housefather could use income from rents, the patrimony itself could not be sold, diminished, divided, or alienated in any way. Rather, each particular “housefather” would merely be a custodian of the estate, bound by several oaths he would swear before taking his office—to live honorably, to govern well, to seek the honor and benefit of the house, to dwell personally in the Haus Weinsberg, to leave inalienable properties untouched, to remember the testator and his parents, and to keep the clauses of the will. The

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executors of the estate were to enforce the rules; in extreme cases, they could “depose” the housefather.95 In addition to securing the patriline’s material existence, Hermann also worked to consolidate its less tangible aspects—its identity and memory. In a bulky family history titled Das Boich Weinsberg, he fabricated an elaborate past for his lineage, elaborating upon the genealogy he and his father had already begun to develop. Rescuing his alleged forebears from oblivion, Hermann extended his genealogy back through barons to an eighth-century foundling named Aramond, who had been fortuitously discovered in a vineyard (weinberg). It was his name and identity that the Weinsbergs now bore, pure and unchanged. The history of the lineage was a providential story of survival and continuity, despite numerous setbacks and adversities; it was a saga of twenty-three noble “housefathers,” each of whom had managed to preserve the family identity intact. Hermann drew colorful, chivalric portraits of each ancestor, many of them decked out in armor. From the mysterious foundling discovered in a vineyard, to the great Baron Heinrich von Weinsberg, to the branch of the lineage that had built the Haus Weinsberg in Cologne—such invented tales were meant to root the family in a deep and venerable past. At the same time, Hermann padded the book with symbolic capital—coats of arms, expositions of the family name, allegories, acronyms, letters from his father, meditations on the nature of the “house.” His efforts at consolidation continued. Not long after completing his genealogy, Hermann began to compile the Gedenkbuch, or “Memory Book,” in which he sought to pass on to the heirs an account of the house during his own lifetime. By the early 1560s, he had become an avid diarist, jotting down everything he thought “beneficial” for his heirs to know—fi nances, family events, advice. Hermann began obsessively to record the details of his life; in imagined heirs he found an audience who would keep alive his memory. Fondly imagining the day when his heirs would look back in gratitude at this foresight, he wrote warm missives to his own imagined successor, the housefather of Weinsberg, calling him “my great, undoubted friend” (meinem groisten ungezweifelten frunde) and a “son.”96 “To the honorable, diligent, future housefather of Weinsberg, my dear heir: I, Hermann Weinsberg, Licentiate, wish you great fortune and blessing”—such was the fanfare with which Hermann greeted his heir.97 His longing for someone who might carry on his identity was poignant: “The housefather shall be my immortal son and I shall never be without a child for all eternity.”98

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Thus, within ten years of his father’s death, Hermann Weinsberg had developed an elaborate, secret scheme to fulfill his father’s ambitions— to protect the Weinsberg family against oblivion and dissolution. After so many early frustrations, writing gave Hermann the opportunity to play the part of a bold and circumspect householder—a man who had planned adequately for his family’s future. If he could not fulfill the ideals of the classical paterfamilias in person, he could at least do so in his study. Indeed, Hermann created a private space to preserve the proud Renaissance subjectivity he had inherited from his father. He found a fantastical means of accomplishing his father’s dreams of establishing a great lineage from within the modest confi nes of middling Cologne. In the genealogy, Hermann transposed his own family history onto a grander sphere. Not long after the death of his own father, for instance, Hermann fabricated a pious story about the demise of the family’s alleged eighth-century founder, asserting that “the children of Aramond were very distraught after his death, not only because of his passing away (which is common to all men), but also because of the change in governance . . . and everyone now thought, there was no longer a head of household.”99 In such legendary form, Hermann could resolve the ambiguities of his own identity as his father’s successor. He could create an ideal, undying patriarch. Hermann’s quest for a lasting legacy became even more urgent during his second marriage. In 1558, after the death of his fi rst wife, Weisgin, he married another older widow named Drutgin Bars. Not long into the marriage, however, he found himself embroiled in bitter quarrels with his new wife, who suspected him not only of sexual infidelity, but also of withholding information about his own fi nances.100 At the same time, Drutgin disliked the cramped quarters of Hermann’s apartment under the Town Hall; after much pleading, she eventually convinced him to return to her more comfortable bourgeois house in St. Peter’s parish.101 Once there, however, Hermann faced new threats from Drutgin’s children, who apparently resented his presence. In the mid-1560s, tensions grew between Hermann and his stepson Heinrich Ross, who lived extravagantly in the house with his new bride at Hermann and Drutgin’s expense. “He is still inexperienced and young, and wants to follow his own head instead of sound advice,” wrote Hermann. “I cannot be too hard on him, as no stepfather can be. If he were my son, I would not allow it.”102 Once, Heinrich stumbled back drunk to the house with two swords, calling his stepfather from the street with the challenge “if he now has courage, let him come out and fight me.”

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Instead of responding directly to this provocation, Hermann woke his stepson early in the morning and gave him a paternal lecture, telling him “how much his disordered and dissolute life displeased me” and warning him “that I was obliged on God’s behalf to punish and scold him and was not at all afraid of him.”103 The household that Hermann and Drutgin formed never fully cohered. As was often the case when widowed parties married, husband and wife retained individual ownership of some of their existing properties and kept separate personal accounts. This contrasted with the “community of goods” that fi rst-time spouses normally established.104 Both Drutgin and Hermann suspected each other of withholding money from each other, and Hermann once secretly skimmed through her account book.105 By his own admission, Hermann often felt a stranger in his wife’s household. His wife, meanwhile, accused Hermann of caring more for his mother and siblings than for her. She reminded him that a husband was supposed to leave his parents and cleave to his wife. Hermann, meanwhile, cited the Decalogue’s command to “honor thy father and mother.”106 All this set the stage for a bitter inheritance dispute between Hermann and his stepchildren after Drutgin’s death from dropsy in 1573. During the quarrel, the stepchildren secretly split all the moveable property in the house, before a settlement had been reached. Wearied by the rancor, Hermann wrote that “my kin were more angry about it than I was.”107 By that time, however, Hermann had plunged all the more fervently into his private plans. During the late 1550s and 1560s, after he had deposited his will in the Schrein (the civic registers for all property transactions), Hermann remained restless. He began work on an addendum to his will—a Declarationboich meant not only to explain and justify the clauses of the testament, but also to provide instructions for future householders.108 Written as a dialogue between a testator and a lawyer, this tome explained and justified the perpetual entail he had established in his will; it attempted to anticipate every conceivable obstacle to his family’s survival, anything that might plunge the family into oblivion. “According to Holy Scripture and Roman law,” Hermann exclaimed, “the last will and testament of a man should and must be held inviolate, the same as a law.”109 Not unlike the “houselaws” composed by the upper nobility, the Declarationboich created intricate rules for the transmission of family property.110 As befit his own training as a lawyer, Hermann’s work placed great faith in procedural rationality. Like his Renaissance father, Christian,

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who dreamed of redirecting rivers, Hermann dared to think that he might control his future, anticipating all contingencies. Though he insisted that family longevity was a divine blessing—“unless the Lord builds the house, the builders work in vain”—Hermann nonetheless did all that was humanly possible to help ensure the survival of his house.111 Concerned about the dispersal of capital through death and remarriage, Hermann hoped to tie all wealth in the Haus Weinsberg to a corporate entity and an “immortal office.” For instance, to avoid the economic uncertainty endemic to the household workshop, Hermann urged his heirs to found a permanent household trade, employing staff with the requisite skills. Such a business could survive the death of any particular housefather, providing the Haus Weinsberg with an uninterrupted source of income and a steady accumulation of capital. As befit his own fascination with paper and writing, Hermann recommended that a permanent scriveners’ office be established in the Haus Weinsberg; such a business could easily branch out into a modest trade in paper and ink. The paper shop, of course, would also further his own goal of encouraging record keeping within the house.112 Hermann envisioned the Haus Weinsberg itself as a form of insurance for all kin—an “everlasting” refuge for family members in need. Likening the Haus Weinsberg to a charitable bequest, he imagined that family members might endow special livings for kin, such as room and board in the house for an indigent student, widow, or widower.113 Paper offered burghers such as Hermann new ways to rationalize household management. During the later Middle Ages, the independent household had become the central form of economic and social life and was widely seen as the central building block of the civic order.114 Books on household management, inspired in part by the revival of ancient literature, had a particular appeal to burgher householders, whose livelihoods depended on careful management of money, time, and honor. The most famous of such manuals was Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della Famiglia, a dialogue that offered patriarchs advice about children, wives, economics, and friendship. According to one scholar, the characters in Alberti’s book “confront much of what it means to be consciously urban—to experience social mobility, to recognize the psychological as well as the practical importance of purchased commodities, to wish in vain for stable families and fi rm public authority amid fluctuating fortunes and alliances.”115 In Germany, the experience of mobility generated a growing body of “housefather literature,” which treated the household as the bulwark of social and economic order. Since the small

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household was a microcosm of the state, the virtues expected of the diligent householder were not unlike those required of the benevolent prince. In his Declarationboich, Hermann Weinsberg attempted to lay the foundations of an enduring little kingdom, a household that would remain a haven of love and unity in what seemed an ever more violent and uncertain world. As the years wore on, Hermann began to see increasing significance in his plan, penning numerous prayers that God would be “the eternal architect” of the Haus Weinsberg, so that it might endure “forever.”116 Scripture offered ample inspiration here, and Hermann often compared his work to that of the Old Testament patriarchs, to whom God had promised a great and lasting progeny. Later in life, speaking of himself and his sole surviving brother, Gottschalk, Hermann prayed, “O great God, because you have not given us any legitimate heirs, so may you join together the housefather and the Haus Weinsberg in matrimony as our heirs. May they grow, flourish, bloom and bring forth good fruit to your praise and honor.”117 In the midst of quarrels with Drutgin, Hermann suggested that the true, “immortal” bride of the Weinsberg housefather was the house itself. Such a mystical view of the Haus Weinsberg was the yearning of a lonely, heirless man. The gap grew between the grandiosity of Hermann’s secret ambitions and the modest prospects of his life. His aim was to establish an enduring house, a bourgeois lineage that would rival the great aristocratic houses of Europe in fame and memory. His writing was intended to provide the Weinsberg family with a legacy few bourgeois households possessed. However, such hopes could not be sustained indefi nitely. The more Hermann worked on his secret, the more he was forced to confront his actual obscurity and insignificance as a middling lawyer.

Not in This World in Vain Thanks to rents inherited from his wives, Hermann had ample time to reflect on his secret endeavors. A self-description from 1578 offers a glimpse of his daily habits. Apart from cranking the pulley of the well in back of the Haus Weinsberg, Hermann had no “coarse manual labor” (kein besonder grobe leibsarbeit) to do. Rather, he spent most of his days occupied with reading, writing, legal work, and business, including “affairs of the council, parish, Gaffel, kin, and strangers.” Excepting meals, he preferred to be alone to attend to his own

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business. His kin no doubt assumed that his legal and civic affairs brought him a great deal of paperwork. Similarly, his duties as a parish churchwarden—sifting through parish documents, receipts, rents, and accounts—took up much of his time. In his free hours, he liked to read histories and chronicles of both clerical and secular affairs, to paint, to gather genealogical and heraldic material, and to look after the affairs of his house. Above all, he devoted himself to his secret work. Within the house he paced “up and down, thinking, scheming, imagining, and singing for pleasure,” sometimes covering a mile or more indoors.118 So much time could give rise to darker thoughts. Age brought no slackening of Hermann’s lust for immortality and recognition; he pursued them relentlessly, at the cost of his own equanimity. His writings grew more and more elaborate, as he nervously thought through every dimension of his project and schemed to fi nd advantages for himself and his kin. His secret archive—especially his massive Gedenkbuch— had created space for endless reflection and reconsideration. There, in lengthy entries, he brooded over the obstacles to his own identity as a middling burgher, defended his plans, and tried to make sense of his historical awareness. If he worked assiduously on behalf of his family, it was to ensure that no one could accuse him of being “in this world in vain” (vergeblich in disser welt gewesen). He worried that his labors were not sufficient; he fretted that he would be forgotten after his death; he was concerned about the “great transformations” of his day. For all his eccentricities, Hermann participated in the growing self-consciousness of middling men about their place in the world. He belonged to a group of men who straddled traditional boundaries— who could not take their place in the world for granted. Hermann recognized that his contemporaries would accuse him of vainglory and ambition. The legacy he claimed was far grander than his modest status could support. As one scholar has suggested, the fabricated nature of Hermann’s genealogy would have offended contemporaries less than the sheer audacity of his claim to an ancient pedigree.119 Hermann himself anticipated the voices of critics: Some may say, “It is wondrous and strange that Hermann the testator has made such a great work and ceremony of his origin, name, coat of arms, lineage, family, house and foundation, hoping to preserve such things eternally and for all time, since he himself is humble, unpropertied, and poor, while even many great, splendid, and powerful things prove transient.”

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Who was he to think that his house could survive “eternally,” when so many magnificent institutions had “fallen to the ground”? Such voices made Hermann defensive. “Should not I as a humble man begin and pursue something with humble good intention and hope?” Hermann asked. “Who knows what will come of it.”120 He came back to such arguments often in his work. Could not burghers also plan for their futures? Were not burghers also worthy of ancestries and deeply rooted identities? “Where nothing is founded, nothing can last,” he reminded his readers.121 In defending his plan, Hermann fell back on citations from Roman law and classical literature. Such sources supported his belief that the family was a small kingdom. As Hermann put it, the housefather “represents” the entire family, “because he and they are one body, and the housefather is the head and prince of this body.”122 In Roman law (at least as it was received in early modern Europe), family identity was passed down from father to son. Ownership and governance were consolidated in the paterfamilias, who had relative freedom to dispose of his property as he saw fit. Such a view of the family was more voluntaristic than Germanic tradition, which placed the bonds of blood and kinship above the will of the patriarch. For Hermann, Roman law provided justification for his own arbitrary decision to “adopt” the future housefather as his true and only son.123 But the classical literature Hermann read also promoted family piety—honoring the legacy of one’s paternal ancestors. Thus, Hermann’s will severely restricted the freedom of his successors; they were mere custodians of an estate they had no power to alienate. In Hermann’s view, the housefather had a task similar to that of a prince: to preserve the order and identity of the Weinsberg name and patrimony, handing it on intact to his successor. His household would thus stand fi rm in perpetuity, never disturbed by the vicissitudes of mortal life and the rancorous disputes they precipitated. As if only dimly aware of the idealized nature of contemporary patriarchal imaginings, Hermann worked to implement them literally, to preserve his household “in one state” forever. Though increasingly popular among European elites, such straightforward visions of patriarchal identity remained a poor fit for the culture and ethos of middling Cologne. Unlike the Italian cities that gave birth to Renaissance culture, Cologne was a community of households, not lineages. Though the city was dominated by a handful of oligarchs, these leading men nonetheless had difficulty transforming themselves

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into a hereditary patriciate; there was a constant turnover at the top of burgher society.124 As a result, Cologne had few great patrilineal traditions and scarcely any public monuments for its famous men. Cologne’s middling culture placed a premium on modesty and sanctity; there were strong prejudices against those who thought too highly of themselves, who set themselves above the “common good.” Care of the commonweal was as much a religious ideal as a secular duty. “Those who perish here for the sake of the common good,” read an inscription in the Town Hall, “will live forever with God in joy.”125 The end of political life, in other words, was not worldly fame, but eternal blessedness. The transience of burgher households—a fact that Hermann deplored—only seemed to confirm the vanity of secular affairs and the longevity of the Church. The patrilineal biases of Roman law contrasted sharply with the customs of Cologne, where partible inheritance was the rule and the conjugal household took precedence over the lineage. Households were constantly broken up by death and remarriage, while capital flowed through both husbands and wives. Indeed, it was common for a young husband and wife to pool their resources when they formed a household, and widows were usually entitled to the property that they and their late husbands had earned during the marriage. However, if a woman brought substantial wealth, or even a business, into a marriage, she often retained the right to administer her own affairs. Property relations within individual Cologne households could be exceptionally complex and contested. Inheritance custom favored the equal distribution of property to all children over patrilineal succession. Compared with many cities, Cologne offered women considerable freedom to manage their affairs and run their own businesses. Not only were there three guilds run by women, but several guilds accepted women as full members and allowed them to become masters.126 To be sure, women possessed few of the political rights enjoyed by men, and the low economic status of many female trades, such as silk spinning, created a large underclass of single women. During the fi fteenth century, several guilds moved to exclude women from their ranks. In the words of Martha Howell, the Cologne guild “was transformed from an association of family shops into a political organization made up of individual male artisans.”127 But despite these setbacks, women in Cologne were no mere wards of their husbands. Hermann’s wife Weisgin continued to run a flourishing textile trade, managing a number of workers and servants after their wedding. Marriage contracts

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customarily ensured an equitable distribution of property on the death of a spouse, and widows, including Hermann’s own sisters, showed tremendous initiative in supporting themselves and their children. After their mother’s death in 1574, Hermann’s sisters were full participants in sibling gatherings to plan for the family’s future. Though they agreed to allow Gottschalk to rent the family property, they fully expected to be given their fair share once the house was sold. Hermann Weinsberg was aware of all these obstacles to his last will and testament. To imagine his project succeeding, he had to work around several inconvenient facts. Though he wanted to entail the entire Haus Weinsberg, he himself stood to inherit only a sixth of the house—the same as the other siblings.128 In his later years, he would go to great lengths to hide the will’s “secrets” from his sisters, who were effectively disinherited.129 He did, however, write letters to them, to be revealed after his death. In these he tried to explain how his plan was for the “common good” of the entire family; he encouraged his sisters to leave money to the house, perhaps even to establish some sort of memorial foundation.130 These, however, were desperate attempts to buttress a plan that had little chance of success. All this might have remained an eccentric sixteenth-century psychodrama were it not for Hermann’s earnest efforts to justify his plan—to situate it within a wider context. Hermann was quick to defend himself against the accusation that he had sought only “self-interest and idle glory” (eitel ehre und eigen nutz) in his writings.131 Such uneasiness kept him from indulging in guiltless flights of fantasy; it forced him to address his actual situation. To justify his plan, Hermann began to think seriously about the relationship between the ideal of the patriline and the somewhat messier realities of burgher life. To this task, he brought not only his ambitions, but also the zeal of a reformer. He shared with many Renaissance moralists a desire to bring clarity and good order to the household. For Hermann, the patriarchal household stood in sharp contrast to the actual ambiguities—the “confusion”—of sixteenth-century social and familial identities. In countless instructions to his successors, Hermann attempted to create the conditions for an ideal patriarchal order within the city. He did so above all in his Declarationboich, which was originally intended as an explanation of his will but soon developed into a comprehensive manual for the urban housefather.132 A pedantic legal exposition interrupted by bursts of passionate pleading, the volume was packed with citations from the Bible, Roman and canon law, medieval authors,

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and classical authorities such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Xenophon. Hermann justified his invocation of the noble fideicommissum as a means of securing the identity of urban patriarch. In his view, if more housefathers in Cologne had put their affairs in order, there would be far less bitter litigation and social disorder. “Where every household in the city is well governed,” he wrote, echoing a common theme in sixteenthcentury patriarchal literature, “the city itself is well-nigh governed” (wan eyn jeder hauß inn der wol regeirt worde, daß were scheir die ganße stadt regeirt).133 In a self-congratulatory dialogue, Hermann the Licentiate reassured Hermann the Testator that his will was not only just, but would also benefit the urban good. Such a work, he suggested, would have positive social effects in a time of confusion. Like the ancient examples on which he drew, Hermann praised the piety that deeply rooted family traditions could yield; indeed, he justified his testament as an attempt to bring such goods to the burgher household. Hermann often reminded his heirs that they were not born for themselves but rather for their “kin and lineage” (nemans ist sich selbst geboren, dan mit vur sin frunt und gesclecht).134 Like many contemporaries, Hermann worried that money was weakening the wholesome bonds of blood, kinship, and loyalty. There were abundant popular sayings to lend weight to his critique. “Loyalty is gone, treachery has won.” “Money, money, cries all the world!” “When the penny comes before God, and perfidy before good faith, then the penny and perfidy have so much power, that no one cares about good faith and God.”135 Hermann, by contrast, worked for the “common good” of his family; he envisioned his plan as a defense against the rampant self-interest he saw in his city. Hermann was not alone in his yearning for a simple patriarchal order. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, secular and ecclesiastical reformers praised the paterfamilias as a defender against the forces of disorder and ignorance. Though the Church had long sought to indoctrinate the laity, the upheavals of the later Middle Ages elicited more urgent calls for catechesis and paternalistic discipline. In a departure from earlier tradition, churchmen set the Decalogue and its insistence on filial obedience at the center of their catechisms. Reformers sought to bring monastic discipline into the secular household. They urged fathers to train their households in piety and to chasten their children and servants as vigilantly as abbots corrected their subordinates. Thus did late medieval reformers pay tribute to the increasing social and economic importance of the independent conjugal household, even

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breaking with ascetic tradition to praise married love and child-rearing. During the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers amplified many of these themes, deeming the well-ordered marriage the exemplary form of the Christian life. But the concern with paternal oversight was shared by all the major confessions of the sixteenth century. Under the careful watch of the patriarch, children and servants would become good citizens and Christians.136 Historians have long debated the reasons for the rise of “patriarchal ideology” during the early modern period. The dominant explanation is that it was a product of “social discipline”—the push by elites to instill greater obedience and self-control in their subjects.137 Appalled by the disorder they perceived in contemporary society, reformers enlisted patriarchs as co-workers in the tasks of training a disciplined, orderly populace. Seasons of misrule that had been sanctioned by traditional culture were now frowned upon, as were most forms of popular excess. Instead there emerged a vision of a uniformly ordered, hierarchical society, one that served the interests of an ever more powerful and solicitous confessional state.138 A related argument links the popularity of patriarchal ideals with the economic distress experienced by many peasants and burghers during the later fi fteenth century. Inflation, population growth, and the rise of powerful merchant-artisans helped to swell the ranks of the indigent and place new pressures on guildsmen and householders. In this environment, strict notions of patriarchal honor appealed to artisans eager to suppress competition from women and unmarried journeymen.139 Another view reads the emerging patriarchal consensus as a reform of traditional Church teachings on marriage and sexuality, which exempted clergy from civic responsibilities, denigrated married life, imposed unrealistic ascetic demands on the laity, and sanctioned ill-advised clandestine marriages.140 Hermann Weinsberg’s story could furnish ample evidence in support of any of these explanations. Like other early modern men who dreamed of patriarchal stability, Hermann Weinsberg viewed the disorder of the household as a sign of troubled times. He was a sober, methodical man, who found popular excesses distasteful. Having imbibed the new manners and forms of civility popularized by Erasmus, Hermann noted with displeasure that his brother Gottschalk “made a lot of noise with slurping and spat” at meals, wiping his fi ngers on the “clean linen.”141 At the same time, Hermann had many reasons to feel insecure about his own honor as a patriarch. To make up for his lack of success as a

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lawyer, he married wealthy businesswomen. But he remained a weak partner in these marriages. His response was to consolidate his own economic and social status by asserting rule over his paternal home. As a young man, he had personally experienced many of the insecurities facing urban housefathers: their ambivalent status, their uneasy relationship to Church and clergy, and their lack of stability and security. Hermann expressed frustration with many of the same legal and ecclesiastical problems that roused the ire of Protestant reformers (see Chapter 5). But Hermann Weinsberg’s story also suggests more intimate, visceral reasons for the appeal of patriarchal ideals. His autobiographical records not only betray his own sense of inadequacy as a man; they also reveal how his broader anxieties about fame, oblivion, and memory came to be focused on the burgher household. Because of his own awkward integration into civic society, Hermann was preoccupied with the fragility of the household—with its ephemeral nature and complex legal and contractual entanglements. In this, the strength of the independent household—the flexibility it afforded men and women to pool their resources and seek new opportunities—was also the cause of its instability, as this same flexibility discouraged the formation of lasting family identities. Hermann himself lived in several different households during his adulthood; none of them fit the model proposed by contemporary “housefather” literature; and none of them resembled the happy conjugal household of working parents, siblings, and servants he remembered from his childhood. Retreating from these messy domestic arrangements, Hermann sought a unitary identity in images of simple patriarchal rule and an unbroken patrilineal identity. For Hermann, the task of uniting such a vision with the realities of Cologne life was never done. In the pages of his Gedenkbuch, he meditated on his identity and legacy as a patriarch. Could a burgher legitimately claim such a proud legacy? What would the memory of a burgher family look like? How exactly could the fragile urban household be made more secure? What was the place of a “middling” family within the wider sweep of history? Remarkably for a sixteenth-century family chronicler, Hermann addressed these questions at length within his Gedenkbuch. The titles of some of these digressive entries hint at his strange earnestness. “Apology on behalf of this book,” “Why I like to write more than others,” “How difficult it is to preserve the male line,” “Whether it would be better to found the Haus Weinsberg or to endow something in the

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churches,” “I am not among the most prominent Licentiates,” “My thoughts on not having any children,” “Why I occupy myself so much with the house and lineage of Weinsberg,” “Whether my works about the house and lineage of Weinsberg will be ridiculed after my death.”142 Such preoccupations would prompt Hermann Weinsberg to embark upon a number of unusual thought experiments.



chapter four

The Middle Is Best

Why had the burghers of Cologne not done more to secure the future of their families? This was a question that Licentiate of Law Hermann Weinsberg asked himself again and again in his secret writings. “I cannot sufficiently express my astonishment,” he wrote in 1578, “that among all the forty-five old, splendid lineages in Cologne, and among the families of burghermeisters and prominent men, not one can be found that has established and endowed a house for its descendants.”1 The families that Hermann invoked here were not only the city’s old patrician lineages (many of them now defunct) but also the new mercantile elites that had arisen after the guild revolution of 1396. According to legend, Cologne’s medieval patrician families had been able to trace their ancestry back to “noble Romans” who had settled in the city. 2 And yet, Hermann lamented, they had so poorly planned for their own posterity! None had seen to it that their house, blood, descendants, name, and coat of arms “might remain together forever.” The result was not only a confusion of identities, but also oblivion. “It follows from this,” Hermann concluded, “that it is not now generally known where the old lineages lived or what houses in Cologne they possessed.”3 Determined to avoid the obscurity that befell most Cologne clans, Hermann Weinsberg turned to writing. With his “quill always at the ready,” he sought to achieve the longevity enjoyed by great religious and aristocratic houses. He recalled his decision as a young lawyer to entail his estate so that it might last forever:

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I found in the parish no more than three houses that had remained with the heirs and blood descendants for three generations, or with the family for one hundred years. . . . Against this, I considered what splendid things are the foundations and endowments of churches, cloisters, and hospitals, etc., and how they remain constantly of one nature for the memory of the residents and for an eternal household (stetich in einem wesen zu der inwoner gedechtnis und zu ewiger haushaltung), and that there are also secular patrimonial houses (stamheuser) among the nobility, where the branch and lineage have been maintained for several hundred years.4

Could not a burgher family model itself after the more permanent and stable institutions of the clergy and aristocracy? Legal privileges, venerable origins, a strong corporate identity—could not burghers claim such advantages as well? Hermann’s answer to these questions was a tentative, but hopeful, yes. But did a burgher family merit such advantages? It was in answering this question that Hermann Weinsberg’s writings took an original and somewhat unprecedented turn. Had he simply claimed an aristocratic ancestry, Hermann Weinsberg might have produced one more predictable early modern attempt to mimic the nobility. Yet in the pages of his secret chronicle, Hermann freely admitted that he and his kin were simple, middling burghers; he urged his family to maintain a burgher lifestyle; he insisted his heirs dwell frugally in his urban house and pursue a productive trade; and he memorialized the humble affairs of his family in his massive “Memory Book” (Gedenkbuch). Thus, as it evolved, his family archive became less a direct assertion of a noble status than a somewhat subtler attempt to claim for a burgher family the permanence, memory, and sacrality of aristocratic and religious houses—their institutional and ideological advantages. Hermann labored obsessively to justify the privileges that his archive would confer upon his “middling” family—an inalienable estate, a rich institutional memory, legendary origins, and a deeply rooted identity. The more he wrote, the more convinced he became that burghers and simple laymen had been unjustly deprived of such privileges in the past.

The Third Estate Burghers had long been underrepresented in medieval visions of the social hierarchy, which had developed at a time when the Church and aristocracy monopolized wealth, memory, and institutional power. It was the clergy and aristocracy that possessed sacred legitimacy,

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though the competing claims of both groups often brought them into conflict. By contrast, commoners, including city-dwellers, were those who worked and died in relative obscurity, supporting the higher tasks of the fi rst two estates. Though this vision had been long out of date by the mid-sixteenth century, the aristocracy persisted in denigrating trade and manual labor, while many Catholic clergymen continued to insist that marriage and family life were inferior to celibate religious vocations. Merchants and artisans could become understandably frustrated with this theoretical division of labor, believing that their roles as citizens, workers, and heads of household held moral and spiritual significance. The ascetic ideals informing many confessional manuals were at odds with middling conceptions of honor, propriety, work, and family life.5 Meanwhile, burghers were painfully aware that their trade-based wealth was less prestigious than the ancient titles and landbased holdings of the aristocracy.6 Many sixteenth-century German townsmen found comfort in the ideas of Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation, each of which offered a more robust, positive valuation of secular life and a sharp critique of clerical values and ideologies. The Reformation in the cities, it is commonly argued, helped to consolidate nascent bourgeois ideologies by legitimizing secular vocations and establishing the values of the patriarchal household as norms for all of society.7 Whereas worldly affairs had previously been considered distinct from or even opposed to higher spiritual callings, Protestantism sanctified the work of male heads of household—in providing for their families, governing their domestic affairs, and doing service for the community. Such ideas, we are told, dramatically resolved longstanding tensions between burgher self-awareness and medieval visions of the social order.8 In Protestant regions, the married citizen-pastors who adopted bourgeois lifestyles were living symbols of this radical transformation.9 Likewise, the civic humanism that emerged in Italian cities in the fi fteenth century and spread through Germany in the sixteenth, endorsed wealth and marriage, promoted a “kind of spiritual egalitarianism,” and challenged “ideological bases of clericalism, hierarchy, monasticism, and the subordination of political to religious ends.”10 Since few burghers of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries recorded their opinions, the best evidence of their frustration is found in grievances registered during urban unrest and in popular pamphlet literature. In Cologne, many male householders had come to resent the clergy’s exemption from civic dues and responsibilities. During the

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revolts of 1513 and 1525, for instance, disgruntled Cologne burghers (mainly artisans) complained that the clergy sold wine, beer, bread, and textiles free from civic dues and guild regulations.11 But burghers aspiring to hereditary privilege were also suspect. During the great revolt of 1513, which recognized the equality of all burghers before the law, several oligarchic councilors lost their heads. The message that spread through the cities during the 1520s—the fi rst decade of the Protestant Reformation—affirmed the values of the simple householder over the hypocrisy of the clergy and great lords. Whereas the ascetic values of the medieval Church were seen as demonic tricks used to oppress the laity, the discipline and communal service of the householder were presented as true godly behavior.12 Meanwhile, anticlerical unrest mixed combustibly with broader resentment of “great lords.” Hermann Weinsberg’s work can be placed within this larger context. As the previous chapter argued, his secret writing project grew out of uncertainty about the future of his family. Like many ambitious burghers, Hermann envied the stability and longevity of religious and aristocratic houses. He worried that Cologne families lacked deeply rooted identities, memories, and traditions. Even “prominent people” (vernoimder leut) faced the prospect of oblivion, in which the identity of their graves, houses, wealth, and surviving relatives was utterly effaced. Compared with unstable burgher households, great monasteries and patrimonial houses were “splendid things.” They possessed a clear and continuous identity, “remaining constantly in one existence.” They were sites of memory, in which former residents were honored forever.13 And, because of their traditions, they provided a means by which living members could orient themselves in the world. “The middle,” or present, Hermann wrote, “is known from the beginning. . . . The river and stream come from the spring and source, the tree from its roots.”14 Remembering the virtues of one’s ancestors, learning from their examples, knowing who one was and where one had come from—these were among the benefits that a fi ne family tradition provided. Collective identity through time—the survival of a house and name—was a form of immortality. “Through inheritance and succession,” explained Hermann, “comes eternity, such as when a man, an animal, a building, or a thing follows in place of another, so it becomes lasting and eternal. In this way, nothing is transient.”15 To guarantee such permanence for his own family, Hermann claimed institutional privileges normally reserved for elite families, fabricating an ancestry and constructing an elaborate legal plan to secure the

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estate. Yet while he could fantasize about an everlasting lineage on paper, what right did he have to avow it publicly? The splendor and longevity of great noble houses and monasteries, after all, was an expression of their actual preeminence. Such institutions endured because they possessed the resources and privileges to do so; their claims to ancient pedigree were credible not because they could furnish forth a horde of documentary proof, but because they were powerful and revered. In a hierarchical “society of estates,” there were essential differences between the aristocracy and commoners, as well as between the clergy and laity. What right, then, did a minor burgher have in claiming such permanence? This question would remain with Hermann for the rest of his life. By the 1560s and 1570s, as his own circumstances worsened, Hermann anxiously sought to defend his grandiose claims. Could he lay claim to a great family tradition? Could he transform the fragile, fluid gains of a bourgeois family into something more stable and lasting? Soon, however, the questions became more complex. Eager to defend his right to a legacy, Hermann began a desultory, yet wide-ranging study of the two highest estates of medieval Europe. Why had they succeeded? What was the secret to their power? And why did burghers lack the advantages that these two estates possessed? Why, despite their evident wealth, influence, industry, and virtue, did they lack the legitimacy of the nobility and clergy? Seeking to understand why burghers had been slighted in traditional visions of the social order, Hermann developed a keen, if unusual, analysis of the ideological advantages the fi rst two estates enjoyed. Like other contemporary authors, Hermann developed a shrewd “hermeneutics of suspicion,” noting the ways in which nobility and clergy had abused their authority to suppress, intimidate, and exploit the “common” man.16 Drawing on humanist literature, popular pamphlets, biblical stories, and homey proverbs, Hermann challenged noble and clerical claims to exclusive status. Yet he did not reject the institutions and privileges of the nobility and clergy outright; instead, he sought to make them common, accessible to all. The result was a spirited defense of bourgeois values, such as hard work, modesty, and thrift. In Hermann’s view, middling lifestyles were just as noble as those of the aristocracy—if not more so. Thus did Hermann Weinsberg’s attempt to transcend commoner status evolve into its very opposite—a vigorous critique of noble and clerical hubris and an eloquent defense of all things humble and

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ordinary. As such, his project participated in a larger trend, one that philosopher Charles Taylor has aptly called “the affirmation of ordinary life.” According to Taylor, “the valorization of everyday affairs” began with the Renaissance and Reformation and culminated in “the founding revolutions of the eighteenth century and beyond, with their ideals of equality, their sense of universal right, and their exaltation of sexual love and the family.” In the new ideal of life, “sober and disciplined production was given the central place, and the search for honor condemned as fractious and undisciplined self-indulgence.”17 In Hermann’s writings, one can witness a sixteenth-century man thinking through these developments from within his local culture, when their direction was still unclear. But how had Hermann Weinsberg’s seemingly conventional status anxiety developed this critical edge? Two causes stand out. The fi rst was northern humanist education and reading, which led him to praise moderation and gave him tools to critique the powerful and privileged. The second was his own ambivalence about his “middling” status and identity, which was rooted in his experience of the city.

In Praise of Moderation As a university-trained lawyer and admirer of Erasmus, Hermann Weinsberg imbibed many of the values and ideas of northern humanism, including its critique of the warrior nobility and its emphasis on moderation and self-control. Hermann encountered northern humanism as a teenager, when his father Christian sent him to a respected Latin gymnasium in the town of Emmerich.18 The training he received there in grammar and rhetoric displayed the strongly pedagogical character of humanism in northwest Europe. In addition to studying several humanist Latin grammars,19 Hermann also read the gospels in Latin, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Tristia, and Johannes Murmellius (1480– 1517) on “the composition of poems.”20 Works by Erasmus, including the Colloquies, arrived by mail from his father.21 By his own admission, Hermann lacked the talent to become a humanist scholar. Despite years of schooling and university training in both canon and civil law, he never mastered Latin grammar. 22 Throughout his life, Hermann felt much more comfortable writing in his native tongue, as attested by his earthy, conversational style. To his heirs and future readers, he explained, “I have written this Gedenkbuch of my lifetime in the German language because we are German

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by birth and originated and live in Germany (auß Deutzschlandt untsprossen und darin woenen). Several famous people have written several books in their mother tongues, such as Francis Petrarch and Johannes Boccaccio in Italy.”23 As a lawyer, city-councilor, and part-time merchant, Hermann preferred vernacular literature on contemporary events (especially histories and chronicles) to the scholarly curriculum of his youth. 24 More than its scholarship, Hermann Weinsberg absorbed the ethos of northern humanism. Even though Hermann had failed to accomplish the “great things” his father had hoped, he could nonetheless count himself among Europe’s new professional elite—learned men who filled the growing bureaucracies of princely and civic governments.25 As a university-educated city-councilor, he was a member of an emerging class of professionals that included lawyers, doctors, Protestant pastors, and civil servants. Unlike corporate-minded guildsmen, these learned functionaries anticipated the values of the modern bourgeoisie. Simultaneously bookish and worldly, they trafficked in words and information. Less bound to older social forms, they relied on emerging ideals of civility, social discipline, and self-control. And because they owed their status to studies, members of this new elite were, on the whole, averse to the violence and bravado of the knightly class as well as the “superstitions” of the clergy. To many humanists, the old nobility seemed coarse and uncouth, prone to fighting and carousing—in short, all too willing to disturb the peace for the sake of selfish interests. Since many humanists had benefited from the opportunities afforded by education and prided themselves on their training, they were inclined towards notions of meritocracy—and impatient with aristocrats who lived only off of their inherited titles and status. Among such men there circulated the idea of a nobility based on virtue rather than birth. A virtuous character was a truer sign of nobility than the luck of inheritance.26 With the revival of classical traditions also emerged a stronger sense of the “public good,” of which many humanists involved in governance saw themselves the defenders. Naturally, such a view served the interests of princes and magistrates, who were looking to increase control over their domains. Humanists in the employ of princes became ardent reformers, working to reorder and rationalize various aspects of territorial governance and imposing the more uniform standards of Roman law. At the same time, humanist authors promoted the concept of responsible governance, reminding rulers that they had been entrusted

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by God with the material and spiritual welfare of their subjects. As Erasmus put it, if a ruler “wants to guide the ship of state, he must think continually of the public welfare, not his own.”27 Similarly, “the man who is chosen as prince should act as a servant and not try to take precedence over others except in trying to do good for them.”28 No one—not prince, not nobleman, not priest—was above the good of the Christian community. One of the chief proponents of these values was Hermann Weinsberg’s distant relation, the Rhenish humanist Conrad Heresbach (1496–1576)—a friend of Erasmus and a proponent of princely moderation, self-discipline, and sobriety. First tutor and then advisor to the Duke of Jülich-Cleve, Heresbach worked tirelessly to implement legal and religious reform. During the 1520s and 1530s, he helped the duke to develop pragmatic, Erasmian church ordinances. His irenic plan established visitations to eliminate clerical abuses and secured confessional coexistence by simultaneously retaining the Mass and allowing clerical marriage and communion in both kinds.29 Thanks to these measures, the duchy enjoyed a relative degree of peace and tolerance. Many parishes held both Catholic and Protestant services.30 Moreover, during the 1540s, Heresbach helped to unify the legal codes of the territory in an “Order and Reformation of Legal Cases.”31 An energetic and wide-ranging reformer, Heresbach published influential volumes on pedagogy, agronomy, masses and weights, law, and theology. In a work on the education of princes (an area in which he had considerable expertise), Heresbach urged tutors to train future rulers to exercise sobriety in all things. Princes were to dress modestly, lest they set a bad example for their subjects, and they were to eat good, healthy foods in moderation. In Heresbach’s view, good training and education could ensure upright governance of the realm. For this reason, the Christian prince had a duty to ensure that all the young noblemen at court were trained in good manners and discipline. Princes were not free to treat their territories as their own domains; rather, they were responsible for the welfare of their subjects. The ruler was not above the law; rather, he was the “servant and defender of the law.” Above all, the prince was to show absolute impartiality in executing his law, making no distinction between rich and poor.32 Moderation, decorum, simplicity, fairness, peaceful coexistence— such values had a powerful appeal not only among princely advisors, but also in the cities. To many humanist reformers, towns were models of responsible governance and peaceful coexistence. Indeed, cities

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were also the places where northern humanist works were published and fi rst disseminated. Thanks to their strong communal ethos and substantial literacy, townsmen were also receptive to the humanist idea of the “public good”; humanist ideas justified the rationalization and simplification of political life that many cities had already undertaken. Moderation not only helped individual householders save and prosper; it also helped to preserve peace and order in densely populated towns. Like the new humanist elites (many of whom were bourgeois by origin), sixteenth-century townsmen were peeved by the disruptions that the special privileges of the nobility and clergy could create within a city; they looked askance at individuals who tried to set themselves above the common good; and they regarded with horror churchmen, princes, and knights who disrupted the peace of the town.33 Though he could not avoid a note of condescension, Erasmus praised the peaceful industry of townsmen. “Crude and vulgar they may be,” he wrote, “common folk found noble cities, administer them sensibly, and enrich them with their labors. On these cities descend predators, and though unproductive themselves, they steal what workers have accumulated.”34 Despite Erasmus’s disparagement of “common folk,” it is not difficult to imagine how townsmen might have felt vindicated by such attitudes. Hermann Weinsberg’s attraction to humanist values is amply evidenced in his writings. Sewn into the pages of his family chronicle and genealogy, Das Boich Weinsberg, was a published introduction to Aristotelian ethics by the Alsatian humanist and friend of Erasmus, Beatus Rheanus (1485–1547).35 This work was an exposition of the Aristotelian idea that virtue is a mean between two extremes. On one side of the moral spectrum stood the “excess” of a particular character trait; on the other side stood its “lack.” Courage, for instance, stood as the mean between audacity and timidity. Similarly, modesty was the mean between ambition and lack of honor. As an introduction to Aristotle, the work treated each of the main virtues in turn: temperance, liberality, magnanimity, and so on. The ethical concept of the mean suited Hermann Weinsberg’s image of himself as a middling burgher, a man of prudence and modest circumstances. At the same time, however, Hermann’s reading of Rheanus showed the more “popular” side of his appropriation of humanism. Hermann inserted several marginalia in the work, including illustrations and popular sayings, which turned the staid and scholarly Aristotelian commentary into a confirmation of burgher values and a fiery denunciation of the powerful and wealthy. To be sure, the text on vanity

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and magnanimity already had a mildly subversive potential, since it suggested that virtue alone made one worthy of good fortune, while reprimanding those who thought themselves superior simply because of their good fortune. But Hermann intensified the criticism of vanity here by adding the popular saying “When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?” He also jotted down a line attributed to the Emperor Maximilian I: “I am a man as other men, although God has given me honor.” The moral lesson of “mediocrity” was summed up in the following couplet: “An office is given to you for a short time / You should therefore not think yourself too fine.”36 In the section on justice, Hermann lashed out against the rich and powerful. On one side of the page, he drew a picture of a large fish gobbling up smaller fish, with the caption “powerful, unjust, violent, selfish lords, guildsmen, merchants, and usurers gorge on the bodies of the common man.”37 On the other side of the page, he drew a picture of a dog chasing a deer, with an epigram: “Whoever has rights and power finds his rights are honored (geacht). But whoever does not have power, will fi nd himself being hunted (gejagt).”38 In other words, “might makes right.” These were popular sentiments in the early sixteenth century, when it seemed to many Germans that venerable customs were being corrupted by money and power. Contemporaries worried that they would no longer be able to tell the difference between true honor and self-interest. In the margins of his writings, Hermann inserted the following rhyme: If there were a man like Judas The worst that ever there was His mother a whore, his father a thug, If he had money, he would be loved. 39

To many, it seemed that powerful usurers, wealthy merchants, unjust lords, and self-serving clergy—men perceived as parasitical to the Christian community—were preying upon the “common good.”40 Thus, even as he praised moderation, Hermann Weinsberg was drawn to the more critical side of the humanist tradition. Some of his fiery disposition and frustration came from his father, Christian, who was known to call priests “fattened swine.” But Hermann also drew on Erasmus, whose works he had fi rst encountered in his youth. He shared Erasmus’s idealism and irenicism—his longing for a Christian community bound together by peace, humility, and charity. But he also sympathized with Erasmus’s scathing critiques of human vanity

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and greed. The great humanist had excoriated knights and noblemen for their dissolute lifestyles, merchants for their duplicity and litigiousness, and commoners for their credulity and superstition. Erasmus, however, saved some of his harshest words for the clergy, whom he deemed a vain and incompetent lot, competing with one another for meaningless spiritual honors. “By these tricks,” he wrote, “they succeed in feeling superior not only to ordinary laymen but also to one another.”41 Not caring about the flocks entrusted to their care, priests instead used their positions to enhance their own power, wealth, and prestige. Similarly, monks and priests imposed burdensome and mechanical rituals on the laity, obscuring the poverty and simplicity of Christ’s example. The Erasmian stance was one of intellectual and moral modesty; it looked askance at all those who claimed to possess absolute certainty, supernatural powers, or moral and spiritual superiority. Such inordinate claims were seen as opportunities for human folly, pride, and selfishness to work their worst. Those who insisted that they alone were right and holy were usually pursuing some ulterior motive. This message appealed especially to an educated elite eager to simplify and rationalize the institutions of Christendom. But the humanist praise of a modest, simple life could be read as a leveling message. As Hermann Weinsberg saw it, the early German humanist Sebastian Brandt, author of Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff, 1499), “is less inclined to put humble and poor people in his ship of fools than those who seek great riches, and he says many good things about poverty, which leads to the development of skills and building of cities.”42 Since no form of vanity or selfishness fell outside its purview, the humanist concept of folly could easily be used to skewer the selfish pretensions of the vainglorious, the mighty, and the hypocritical. Hermann himself inherited northern humanism’s suspicion towards self-assertion and pride, explaining in his writings that “self-praise stinks” (eigenlob stinkt).43 Of course, as Hermann well realized, his own efforts to establish a great family tradition could be seen as a species of human folly and vainglory. Erasmus, after all, had made fun of commoners who “flatter themselves with incredible complacency on an empty title of nobility. One man derives his family tree from Aeneas, another from Brutus, still another from King Arthur, and each has busts and family portraits to prove the connection.”44 Indeed, Hermann suggested that Sebastian Brandt would have put him in the “ship of fools” if he had known about his plan to found an “eternal household.” What was more foolish than

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to understand that “nothing on earth is lasting” yet to seek immortality nonetheless?45 But it was precisely Hermann Weinsberg’s stubborn insistence that his humble bourgeois family merited such longevity that made his criticism of the nobility so unusual. Despite affirming a “nobility of virtue,” very few humanist authors disputed the prerogatives of the hereditary nobility, which could be maintained only so long as commoners and burghers were excluded. Very few suggested that the exclusive ideological legitimation the nobility enjoyed was in itself unfair or unjust. And almost no one in the sixteenth century was willing to demolish the noble estate in the same way that Protestants tore down the clerical estate. Hermann Weinsberg, for one, was not about to attack noble traditions and institutions. And yet he did challenge their exclusivity. In laying claim to a great family tradition, Hermann used the critical discourse of humanism to expose the ways in which noblemen had abused their exclusive rank. Hermann drew on the humanist idea of a “nobility of virtue” to prove his own family’s distinction. But he came to associate such virtue almost exclusively with nonaristocratic values and lifestyles. Commoners were noble not because they transcended the petty affairs of household and marriage; they were noble because they were modest, thrifty, and industrious, because they lived an unpretentious, ordinary life. In Hermann’s view, burghers could achieve the ends of family piety—the goals of “lineage” and “ancestry”—better than the nobility, if only they were given a chance.

Bourgeois Values Hermann Weinsberg took evident pride in his identity as a “middling” (mittelmessig) burgher—a man of modest wealth, influence, and esteem. In his words, he was “not too learned, not too unlearned,” “not the richest, not the poorest,” “not the highest, not the lowest.”46 He liked to think of himself as a simple, straightforward man, not prone to the pretensions of the high and haughty. He defended his modest habits: “I wear simple clothing, according to my estate (minem stande gemeis). These do not cost as much in material or labor as those worn by other men equal to me in estate.” His wardrobe thus gave him “no cause to confess the sin of pride” (darf der kleider halber kein beicht von hoichfart sprechen).47 As he grew older he proudly wore the same plain, inexpensive breeches that he had worn for three decades— pants that younger, more stylish men mocked as “apostles’ pants”

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(apostelhoesen).48 His favorite motto was medium tenuere beati, or “blessed are those who hold to the mean,” and he turned to ancient authors for reassurance that virtue consisted in moderation.49 Modern historians might question Hermann Weinsberg’s self-characterization as a middling burgher. Though he may not have been one of the most powerful city-councilors in Cologne, he was nonetheless a respectable, influential man. As a Licentiate, city-councilor, and parish churchwarden, Hermann belonged to what modern historians would call the “ruling elite” of the city. And yet, as scholars are quick to point out, there was no straightforward social stratification in early modern cities, no clear line separating the upper classes (Oberschicht) from the middle (Mittelschicht). There was certainly no simple correspondence between money and honor. Some lucrative occupations were dishonorable, and the guild system was an intricate hierarchy of prestige and influence that did not always correspond with productivity. As burghers like Hermann were acutely aware, earned money was less distinguished than inherited wealth. If industry and good luck could improve a family’s fortunes, they could not sweep away the corporate rights and privileges to which many townsmen fiercely clung.50 Determining an individual’s honor was an arcane art, made more complicated by Cologne’s fluid political and economic life. A broad range merchants and artisans participated in civic government, making it impossible to draw a simple connection between council membership and high status. As Hermann put it, there were many “unpropertied, poor, unconnected, simple, and untalented” men on the Council.51 Because the city had an open and constantly changing elite, men could retain political power even after their personal and family fortunes had begun to decline. Moreover, the same men who consorted with the Emperor had personal dealings with servants, artisans, and merchants. And since fortunes were made quickly, it was not uncommon for the kin of the most powerful councilors to work as artisans or modest merchants. Business transactions in a city of 40,000 were largely faceto-face; economic specialization did not yet imply anonymous labor or segregated neighborhoods. Like many burghers, Hermann Weinsberg lived in multiple worlds. The local neighborhood of artisans and petty merchants was his familiar world, into which he had been born and in which many of his siblings still lived. Like many burghers, he scraped together his income from many sources. He sold wine from his home, took law cases, invested in rural property, married widows with incomes, and served as

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the warden of the Town Hall. Many of his immediate kin, meanwhile, made their livings as artisans. Later in life, Hermann withdrew from productive activity and survived off of his rents, which barely covered his expenses.52 Yet as a Licentiate and city-councilor, Hermann continued to associate with more powerful, learned, and illustrious men. For these reasons, Hermann remained insecure about his place within Cologne’s social hierarchies. His frequent defense of his middling status betrays a struggle to justify his own mediocre career. He often “consoled” himself with his favorite saying—with the belief that “in the middle are many good things, there one can seek much good.” At the same time, he reminded himself that “what does not remain in the middle and moves to the extreme, rarely turns out for the best.”53 His rush to embrace a middling identity seems at times to have been a case of overcompensation, as if he strained to convince himself that a mediocre status was his true destiny. As a university-trained lawyer and regular city-councilor, he could have accomplished much more, and he often noted, with a hint of regret, the accomplishments of his former classmates. In 1548, when he had married a wealthy widow and businesswoman, he helped keep the books for her woolens trade, recording “how many woolen coats were made, how many spools of yarn were spun.”54 Looking back, he admitted that it was “somewhat demeaning” (etwaß verachtlich) for a Licentiate to be involved in his wife’s business, but he insisted that it was necessary to support the household. Referring to his dual identity as a Licentiate and a merchant, he concluded, “one need not exclude the other” (Eynß dreiff daß ander nit auß).55 Hermann could sometimes be quite defensive about his lack of accomplishment. During the latter half of the century, he fell into a dispute with two of his fellow city-councilors, Junker Thevis Wolffskehl and the eminent burghermeister Constantine Lyskirchen. When Hermann refused to yield in the debate, the two gentlemen began to belittle him. “I wish that you had either learned and read somewhat more,” they said, “or somewhat less.” This, at least, was how Hermann remembered the incident, which he recorded in his Gedenkbuch.56 The implication of their mockery (schimpfwonschong) was clear. Had Hermann learned more, he might have known what he was talking about. Had he learned less, he would not have had the boldness to prattle on about matters beyond his ken. At the time, Hermann bore the embarrassment patiently. Later, however, he defended himself in the secret pages of his family chronicle. “I stick by my opinion [in the debate],” he insisted,

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though “I too would certainly wish that I had learned and read more.” While he had studied “a fair amount” when he was young, he had not always been able to practice and retain what he had learned.57 Nonetheless he concluded, somewhat defensively, “I will stick by my favorite saying, medium tenure beati.” As a man in “the middling estate” (im mitteln stand), his status was “more that of a burgher than a doctor.” And for a middling burgher (mittelmeissigen burger), his knowledge “of Latin and German, of law and histories” was impressive enough.58 “Not everyone can be a doctor or great master and gentleman,” he protested. “Middling people also eat bread and become honorable people, if they act justly and piously.”59 While admitting that he was “not among the most prominent Licentiates,” Hermann claimed that “God had ordained that it all was for the best, better than for many who studied much more diligently and were much more talented, yet for whom things have not turned out so well.”60 Privately, Hermann resented the handful of men who dominated Cologne politics, controlling access to civic offices and honors. Such nepotism, he believed, was contrary to the spirit of Cologne’s communal constitution, the Verbundbrief, and he often lamented the great power wielded by Cologne’s best families. “Virtually all rule and authority among the entire citizenry belongs to them,” he wrote. They had the “fi rst say and vote” in the council; they controlled the city fi nances; they were greeted in the Council chamber by “bared heads” and “honor and reverence”; they could often dispense civic offices on their own authority; and they kept much of civic government “secret.” For these reasons, Cologne’s elite could “fi nd high and rich marriage partners for their children, relatives, friends, and servants and promote them to lucrative offices and honors; they could gain a ready audience with princes and lords, judges and courts.” The powerful magistrates easily cowed the “common councilors,” who were little more than “yes men” (jaherr). “When they [the common councilors] see that the deliberations are partial, that the affair will bring no honor and benefit, they grow worried and doubtful, not knowing what to do or not to do. Several follow out of friendship, several out of fear.” Hermann prayed that the small circle of councilors who effectively ran the city would avoid arrogance, abuses, and partiality—that they would seek the “common good” of the city above their “own benefit.”61 There was more than a hint of envy in this criticism. Secretly, Hermann took comfort in his dreams of future family success and perhaps even ennoblement. He often acknowledged that if he had had riches

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enough, he would have done even more to secure his family’s future. “It would be beneficial,” he wrote, “if I had money and property according to my good pleasure.”62 He hoped that his family would grow into the great destiny that he had prepared for it in his writings. Hermann often held up examples of social mobility, in which humble beginnings blossomed into something great. Cologne’s most important politician, Arnold von Siegen, a man whom the Emperor had knighted, was the “son of a shipman,” while another extremely powerful mayor, Arnold von Brauweiler, was the “son of a cartwright.” And yet the children of these two men had become “great young lords and gentlemen.”63 Likewise, most of the apostles were “coarse folk and fishermen” (grobe leuth und fi scher), and yet the Pope, whose throne was “higher than that of Emperor and kings,” traced his succession back to Peter.64 Longevity, Hermann believed, would eventually prove the family’s true worth, while careful management of an undivided patrimony would allow for a slow accumulation of wealth. Yet for all his ambition, Hermann Weinsberg remained deeply attached to his middling status. He did not simply brush aside his relatively humble background as a temporary setback in a lineage’s otherwise distinguished history, nor was he so wrapped up in quixotic fantasies to deny his family’s actual mediocrity. He began to rationalize his middling identity, arguing that a humble burgher family could even better realize the ideals of the lineage—the Stammhaus—than more haughty noble clans. In Hermann’s interminable instructions for his heirs, he explained that even if the “housefather” was ennobled (a good that Hermann most fervently desired), he was nonetheless to dwell “forever” in the family’s modest house and maintain a burgher lifestyle. The Haus Weinsberg, Hermann explained, was a “bourgeois” (burgerlich) house.65 The three-story building, with its shed, well, and courtyard, was glorious not because it resembled large noble estates, but because it was the sturdy dwelling of free, proud, and hardworking burghers. Though he may once have hoped to win renown for public deeds, Hermann resigned himself to a respectable, if undistinguished, career as a petty lawyer, merchant, and rentier. His siblings, meanwhile, all married and worked within Cologne’s relatively broad class of respectable, middling burghers. Within the family, there were few prospects of sudden wealth or renown. While his will would not immediately thrust the family into the upper echelons of German society, Hermann nonetheless hoped that it would provide his heirs a secure, if modest, sustenance.

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During the 1570s and 1580s, Hermann’s sisters Maria, Catherine, and Sibilla suffered from several years of bad wine sales. Maria struggled to support her household as a widow, while Sibilla became estranged from an abusive husband and had to fend for herself.66 Considering their “cramped” circumstances, Hermann acknowledged that “because of indigence (nairloissigkeit), their children will not immediately help my lineage prosper or rise so high.” Although they pleaded with Hermann and his brother Gottschalk to sell the Haus Weinsberg and split the proceeds, Hermann believed his secret plan would better benefit them and their descendants. He was convinced that he had “done a good thing in establishing the housefather of Weinsberg as my perpetual heir, so that at least one of my brothers’ or sisters’ descendants might be maintained with my poor portion (bei myner armut), to the honor, welfare, benefit, and joy of all.” In Hermann’s mind, a middling lineage maintained in perpetuity was far superior to the oblivion that would result if his “small property” were “divided and split up.”67 Hermann’s realistic assessment of his prospects is evident throughout his writings. In 1579, more than thirty years after he fi rst developed the plan to entail his property, he situated his successor, the Weinsberg “housefather,” in the middle of Cologne’s three social strata. At the top of Cologne’s social hierarchy were the “six gentlemen” who controlled Cologne’s most prestigious offices, along with “noble and distinguished lineages, advisors to the Archbishop-Elector and princes, and the most splendid civic officers, doctors, rentiers, and merchants.” Beneath them were the “respectable” burghers among whom Hermann counted himself—“city-councilors, licentiates, jurors, civic officers, churchwardens, honorable families, propertied merchants, and the most prominent artisans.” The “third grade” of Cologne burghers consisted of “shopkeepers and guildsmen who did not belong to the City Council,” along with “servants, workers, notaries, and good honorable common burghers.” In Hermann’s view, the housefather of Weinsberg belonged to the “second” of these three grades—“a good grade.” His heirs, however, could easily move into one of the other two. If they slipped into the third grade, they would have “to be satisfied with it until things became better.” There was, of course, always a chance that one could fall out of the ranks of respectable householders altogether, joining the “mass of people, honorless and despised” (heffe deß folcks, erlose und verachte leuth). This, however, would not happen so long as the heirs “avoided idleness” (moissichganck scheuwet), since “good work that provided sustenance” was “abundant enough” in Cologne.68

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Hermann’s adherence to a middling lifestyle was as much a matter of temperament as it was of necessity. Moderation in all things—this was the import of his favorite saying. He praised careful record keeping, sobriety in drinking and eating, modest clothing, and freedom from debt. He was a retiring man, guarded in his habits and expenditure. “I believe,” he wrote, “that if people maintain a good diet and habits, if they eat and drink moderately and are sober (drinckens meissich und soberlich hilten), if they guard against guzzling and gorging, they by no means shorten their life.” Such discipline, he reckoned, could extend the lifespan to one hundred years.69 In economic matters, he was particularly cautious, reminding his descendents that “a small, certain income earned through work is more beneficial than great trading with risks.”70 Both “superfluous wealth” and “poverty” brought temptations. While the rich were haughty and “ran astray in pride,” the indigent were driven to “lies and stealing.” “Lord,” he prayed, “give me neither riches nor poverty, but only what is necessary to the moderate maintenance of my body.”71 Everything depended on careful bookkeeping and “governance.” When his own illegitimate daughter Anna became the mother of a convent, Hermann admonished her in a letter to “keep your accounts so that you don’t consume more than you take in and earn and don’t fall into debt” and to “write down all income and expenditures, reckon often during the year, and balance the entire account annually.”72 The future housefather was to nourish his dependents with “good, common, healthy, fresh, pure food and drink,” but “not extravagantly or foolishly.”73 Though willing to spend on banquets and gifts “for the sake of honor,” Hermann contented himself most of the time with “customary food and drink and simple clothing.”74 Somewhat shy, he preferred to be among a few familiar friends and social equals (mines glichen) than to flatter or defer to “great lords.”75 Throughout his family archive, Hermann praised frugality and hard work. These were urban values; to survive in a fluid, uncertain city required vigilance and sobriety. Stories of fellow burghers provided abundant examples of negligent and wasteful householders, and Hermann peppered his writings with admonitions to work and industry and warnings against debt and indolence. “One who does not work diligently is not worthy of bread.” “Work is work.” “Debt makes frets.”76 “Gain, be frugal, protect, and save.”77 “A wise man always protects his soul, his body, his honor, his property.”78 “A living before all else” (Al ab vur narung).79 Hermann had heard many such proverbs around the

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house as a child. He considered them the “good teaching” of Cologne householders, passed down to him through his grandparents and parents. When they read the sayings, future Weinsbergs were to remember their ancestors for the best—“that they were not high people, but rather simple, true, honorable, good people” (schlechte, echte, erlich, gutte leuth). 80 Hermann was aware that such proverbs were at odds with traditional views of vocation. Cicero, for instance, had belittled craftsmen and petty merchants for engaging in “demeaning” work.81 Although Hermann often deferred to ancient authorities in his work, he rejected their denigration of manual labor and “coarse work.” If everyone avoided trades that the ancients had considered “stinking and indecorous” (stinkendt und gar unzirlich), “much good and necessary work would be neglected.” Any trade was acceptable, so long as “one could win one’s bread piously and honorably.” Some occupations were preferable to others, but a “housefather” was not to neglect the trade he had learned simply because he was ashamed of it. He should “practice this trade for his sustenance, before he suffers want, and not be ashamed of it (schame sich deß nit). I would consider this honorable, for he must eat and drink and clothe himself and keep a wife and children.”82 Though material goods were easily lost, a man with a strong work ethic and self-discipline could adapt to changing circumstances. Hermann’s advice here was akin to the Protestant doctrine of vocation—the idea that all work is pleasing to God, if done in the right spirit.83 Such praise of humble work was echoed in many of the popular sayings Hermann quoted approvingly in his writings. “All trade is good if one has the diligence one should.”84 Elsewhere Hermann affirmed that “work is good for you and provides necessities,” regardless of whether it is “with the mind” or “with one’s hands and body” (though prudence did prompt him to note that “some trades are not so risky and dangerous as others”).85 The Bible furnished him with many affirmations of hard work, humility, and modesty. When the Psalmist asked God “to prosper the work of our hands,” explained Hermann, he did not distinguish between different types of manual labor.86 If Hermann vigorously defended industry, it was because he knew as a burgher how specialized work benefited the whole commune. As highly differentiated societies, cities tended to produce a functionalist view of work and vocation. This contrasted with the medieval view of estates, in which there were essential differences between, say, a knight and cartwright. For burghers, one’s work was not the whole

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of one’s identity. Not only did many townsmen work at several trades simultaneously, but they also fought and prayed for the entire community. Reminding his heir of the many ways one could earn a “living” (narung), Hermann compiled a long list of Cologne occupations, ranging from theologian to merchant or shopkeeper (grain, jewelry, oil, meat, textiles, leather, etc.) to artisan (carpenter, roofer, metalworker, baker, etc.). Though some of these trades were “indecorous,” all could be honorable, provided one worked diligently and piously.87 The point was to show the future housefather just how varied were the ways one could make a living in Cologne. There could be no excuse for idleness when there were “so many” occupations where the housefather could fi nd a “good income” (gutte narong). 88 If he selected a “high dignity or great trade” without the requisite knowledge or experience, he would be “acting unwisely.” As Hermann reminded his heirs, “everything is not granted to everyone.” Rather, his successor should go “where he is called and where his ability and talent lie.”89 “Seeking a living,” wrote Hermann, “is honorable, praiseworthy, and useful for men of all estates, however high, noble, rich, or poor they may be.”90 There was an equality in labor; all men, regardless of their station, were called to work. So enthusiastic was Hermann about the stolid values of the burgher household that he created countless reminders of them for his heirs. Accounts of kin and neighbors in his Gedenkbuch warned of the perils of bad household management and the rewards of thrift and discipline. An inveterate rhymester, Hermann penned verses extolling the virtues that would prosper the house: Good teaching and good rule Profit, savings, and investment Will be the house’s jewel And bring it honor and embellishment.91

In 1592, Hermann adapted a hymn derived from Psalm 126, encouraging heirs to sing it during future house celebrations. To the original— “When God does not build the house / Nothing will be made out of it / The workers will labor in vain”—Hermann added verses of his own, including “If the Weinsberg house is not ruled / The common good will not improve / Weeds and neglect shall lay waste to it.”92 To provide a daily reminder of these solemn duties, Hermann recommended that one of his favorite sayings—“a living before all else”—be painted on a wall in the Haus Weinsberg.

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For Hermann, the Weinsberg family’s social standing at any given moment was less important than its long-term survival and security. Saving and steady industry—these were the keys to longevity. Here he believed that “middling” families had an advantage over great noble and patrician lineages, insofar as they had more economic options. From his experience in the city, Hermann knew that social mobility was inevitable. “Fortune is inconstant,” Hermann often warned, noting the many men who had suddenly catapulted to great wealth, only to see themselves and their children fall again. “O how many great people have I known or know still,” he exclaimed, “who rose from humble people to become great gentlemen and rulers!” And yet, warned Hermann, “I remember many great Junkers and lords whose children fell into poverty and became obscure” (dunckel worden syn).93 As a “teaching” and “example,” Hermann often told stories of burghers who had gone bankrupt, such as Hermann Vaitzbel, the son of a rich brewer, who had learned the reliable trade of cooper, but preferred to try his luck in the wine trade. Though he “beautifully” renovated his father’s house, Vaitzbel eventually fell into debt, lost his patrimonial inheritance, “had his wife taken from him because of his poverty,” and died bankrupt. It was to protect against such vicissitudes that Hermann advised his heirs to learn a productive trade, something that could provide a steady income even in difficult times. Even as Hermann Vaitzbel had floundered, his father’s servant had worked “diligently” as a brewer, eventually becoming a rich city-councilor. The important thing, Hermann insisted, was “not to trust fortune too much, but rather prudence (vorsigtigkeit) more.” The heirs were not to despise a “simple trade” (sclechten handel) that was “good and useful,” for “in small waters, one can also quench one’s thirst.”94 Prudence and thrift—these were the values that Hermann sought to instill in his heirs. Provided the lineage remained diligent and pious, a decline in fortune would not lead to its dispersal or oblivion. In 1594, when his nephew Gottschalk, a carpenter, bought an ox for thirtythree gulden, despite his fi nancial difficulties, Hermann advised him “to be frugal and not spend more than his income,” saying “if a man spends more than he earns and if none of his relatives want to give or lend him money, then his property will be impounded and taken away, or he must go begging with his children or steal something.” Above all, the uncle wanted to remind his nephew and niece to “plan, work, acquire, and save and rely on no one’s death [i.e., inheritance] and remember that they are simple artisans, who must be humble and not

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proud or extravagant.”95 Hermann preferred steady effort to an ostentatious display of wealth and status. In 1580, while considering how his teenage nephews might best prepare for marriage and adult independence, Hermann gave priority to career training and character development. “They should fi rst make themselves qualified and talented for a good marriage, for skill helps more than money and property.”96 As an admonition to future housefathers, Hermann held up the example of pious “young householders,” who begin their married life “in God’s name”; “although they do not possess much at fi rst, yet they are frugal and industrious, gaining and saving, so that they have enough not only for their necessities, but also for their honor, while also laying something aside as a precaution” (vurrhaidt).97 All this could be accomplished through hard work alone, apart from inheritance. Hermann suggested that considerations of immediate status could interfere with the survival of the house and lineage. In 1578, he compiled a long list of reasons for “the extinction of the male line”—infertility, lack of planning, clerical careers, and so on. Sometimes sons married too late because a suitable marriage partner was lacking. At other times, a family seeking to maintain their customary standard of living placed too many children in cloisters, collegiate churches, and monasteries. There were also the demands of conspicuous consumption, which led children to seek their own personal splendor and wealth rather than caring for the lineage. Perhaps most damaging (at least in Hermann’s view) was the aversion of wealthy aristocratic and merchant families to “coarse work” (grobe arbeit). Rather than taking the middle way of steady industry and prudent planning, noble families did not prepare adequately for hard times. For Hermann, the primary goal was for the family to “remain in existence,” waiting patiently for the day when it might rise again. During these times, the heirs were “to look only to maintain the lineage and name with God’s grace . . . not letting anything hinder its survival.” If the “sons and male descendants were not immediately of such a high standing, this may nonetheless come about in time, so long as they maintain the family name and insignia.”98 Hermann believed that his own testament would guarantee this survival; he had established elaborate rules of succession and even prepared for the possibility that all Weinsberg males might die out. To be sure, Hermann Weinsberg’s arguments were a rationalization of his own middling status—of his own failure to accomplish the “great things” his father had hoped. Through these explanations, he could turn his own mediocrity into an advantage; he could also

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fantasize about the day when his family would eventually rise to greatness. “However small the seed or kernel thrown, sown, laid, or planted in the earth,” he exclaimed, “nonetheless it grows forth, is built upon, and becomes great, beautiful, honorable, and splendid.” Though “extreme poverty” (uterste armoit) was to be avoided, necessity could act as a spur to industry and virtue, for it forced one to “think sharply, acquire, develop skills, seek a livelihood, earn one’s daily bread, and act humbly and peacefully.” As some in the city said, “Poverty is good for you.”99 The implication here was that too much wealth could make a man lazy, idle, and undisciplined. Had not God pledged to bless the humble and the lowly? One of Hermann’s favorite biblical passages was Mary’s Magnificat, which expressed faith that God would raise the humble and cast down the proud.100 Later in life, Hermann wrote a secret (unread) letter to his sisters and their children, encouraging them that things would get better—that God would “give them income and good fortune again.” For if God let a lineage fall, he would also elevate it again when he ordained. “If families do not ascend so high in honor, power, and riches, yet if things go well for them in the middling estate (im mitteln stant), they have much to thank God for.” Hermann took great comfort in biblical stories in which God blessed ordinary people, such as Abraham or Peter, rewarding their faith and patience with future greatness. There was a certain elemental faith to Hermann’s hopes for his progeny. Those who stuck to the middle way would be less prone to the “pride” and “arrogance” that ruined noble lineages. The Weinsberg patriline, by contrast, could win God’s blessing by cleaving to the path of modesty, humility, and virtue. “The high and haughty fall; the humble and low are raised up.”101 Such blurring of the boundaries between aristocrats and commoners was nowhere more evident than in Hermann Weinsberg’s reflections on genealogies and ancestry—perhaps the most important of elite status symbols.

A Common Nobility Even as he offered a stout defense of bourgeois values, Hermann Weinsberg secretly claimed that he was descended from nobility. Not only did Hermann fabricate an impressive genealogy stretching back through barons to a mythical eighth-century foundling, but he also tried to establish an “eternal” patrimonial house. To do so, he relied on a legal

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mechanism normally reserved for the nobility—the fideicommissum or perpetual entail.102 In the secrecy of his study, Hermann delighted in drawing his burgher insignia as a great noble coat of arms. He told chivalric tales of his ancestors, explaining, for instance, how Herr Heinrich von Weinsberg was made a baron because of his valor during Emperor Frederick II’s siege of Milan, or how the same Herr Heinrich had escorted the relics of the Holy Three Kings to Cologne.103 Though the Weinsbergs were a middling family, they could gather courage from such great deeds, confident that their virtue was rooted in a noble past. To modern readers, such claims to status can seem all too transparent. As one scholar has put it, Hermann Weinsberg’s writings were “an exemplary case of writing as a means of status formation and status legitimation.” Hermann thus engaged in a “methodical reflection on kinship and genealogy.”104 Like other ambitious burghers, Hermann self-consciously patterned his work after the family traditions of the patriciate and aristocracy. In a hierarchical “society of estates,” true status rested on the combination of wealth and symbolic capital. It was inherited, not made. The phrase “an old, honorable lineage” (ein altes, erbars geschlecht) was commonplace in contemporary sources, as if longevity and prestige were synonymous. The best way to secure one’s social position was to convince others that it was rooted in the distant past—that one belonged to an “undying,” divinely ordained succession. Individual and family status was symbolized, above all, by the lineage (Geschlecht). Thus, powerful families and institutions usually dressed up their wealth with ancient titles and legendary pasts, while ambitious burghers sought to consolidate their social gains by investing in land and extending their genealogies. In Nuremberg, patrician families outdid one another in commissioning family chronicles designed to “represent the honor and dignity of the lineage.”105 The truth of a genealogy had less to do with its factual accuracy than its correspondence to actual social power. A family that was powerful enough could convince others that its legendary claims were true. The more prestigious the institution, the more ancient and illustrious its origins.106 Though Cologne no longer possessed great patrician lineages, Hermann Weinsberg nonetheless understood the role that history and memory played in enhancing a family’s status and legitimizing wealth. “Everyone loves antiquity and age” (antiquiteit und altheit), Hermann once wrote, “which has a worthiness in and of itself.”107 Referring to his fabricated genealogy, Hermann told his heirs that “in reputation, you and my lineage will have not a little honor and praise from this

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book, since it shows that you are descended from legitimate, honorable, pious people, from which it can be assumed that you walk in their ways and gladly follow their virtues.” Not many people, he proudly noted, were able to “show clearly their origins and ancestry several hundred years back”—and he added, with perhaps a little gloating, that “many rich and great people have researched their origins with great desire and have not succeeded.”108 Indeed, it would difficult to imagine a sixteenth-century burgher who strove more systematically to enhance his family’s reputation through writing. This is how most historians have interpreted Hermann Weinsberg’s strivings. They speak of a man who was eager to “erase the stigma of his lowly rural origins,” constructing his family history as a “means of status formation and status legitimation.”109 None of this is false. And yet, when scholars speak of the bourgeois urge to “ape” the nobility, the implication is that townsmen appropriated aristocratic status symbols uncritically. Such generalizations do justice neither to the complexity of Hermann Weinsberg’s fascination with lineage, nor to the efforts of early modern townsmen to test the boundaries between themselves and their noble betters. Here, sociological generalizations can only give us one more predictable case of status anxiety. But Hermann’s own work was a highly personal and historical thought experiment, born of his own uncertainty about the place of middling folk. Like many early modern townsmen, Hermann Weinsberg struggled for ideological representation in a culture that had long been dominated by the aristocracy and the clergy. His work was not simply a flight from reality, for while he used aristocratic and clerical models to reshape his family, so his middling values also reshaped the ideological traditions he invoked. In many ways, his work can be seen as a unique, if somewhat eccentric attempt to make an exclusive status common. In reflecting on his “origins,” Hermann was forced to acknowledge that he was seizing upon an identity, a self-representation. At times, he hinted that his family legends were fabricated (gedicht); he compared them to the saints’ lives, which were aids to piety.110 To belong to a proud house was to know where one stood in an ever-changing world. To care about a family—about the past and future—lifted one out of the selfish immediacy of commercial life. The Haus was a source of order, unity, stability, and mutual concern—a transgenerational bond linking the living and the dead. Such an idealization of the Haus, of course, was precisely what noblemen held up as proof of their difference from

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burghers, who were perceived as rootless and money-grubbing. Acutely aware of this gap, Hermann asked a simple question: Why could not burghers also enjoy these goods? In his private writings, Hermann became increasingly insistent that modest burgher families also had a past, an identity, and a right to longevity. His argument for ancestry and family antiquity was an argument on principle: Burghers and peasants were equally worthy of such distinctions. He considered the following argument: “Some might say that only great authorities, powers, and nobles can remember their origins and ancestry, that such is not for the common householder, burgher or peasant.” Here Hermann correctly identified one of the purposes of such origin myths—to establish an essential, unbridgeable divide between nobility and commoners. But no sooner had he presented this argument than he denied any such difference. “In truth,” Hermann protested, “such ancestry is allowed to one as much as the other, as pleasant for the humble as for the great.” The problem was the negligence of the “common man” in commemorating his ancestry. If commoners paid heed to such things, they could produce their ancestries just as well as the nobility.111 God’s blessings were not limited to certain families; no one knew to whom God would grant honor and fortune. Elsewhere, Hermann insisted that “common people, burghers and peasants in cities and fields” were no less able to trace their ancestries than “princes and noblemen.” Such commoners, he declared, “have a human ancestry, and are not made of stone or wood, nor have they fallen from apple, pear, or oak trees” (nit von appel, birn, eichenbeumen gefallen). The only difference between the two groups was that the descent of commoners was “obscure” (obscur und unkundich).112 Without entirely realizing it, Hermann was challenging the ideological functions of genealogy and ancestry. To claim a descent was to posit an essential difference between oneself and one’s social inferiors. Though Hermann yearned for the prestige that came with a genealogy, he argued that the social status of one’s ancestors mattered less than the simple fact that one did indeed possess an ancestry—that one was fully human. To be sure, this argument was somewhat self-serving, since Hermann’s own fabricated family ancestry was an illustrious one, in which he stemmed from an unbroken noble line, a branch of which had settled as burghers in Cologne. Such providential survival was obviously meant to distinguish his family above other Cologne “lineages.” And yet in his arguments, Hermann bristled at the idea that a humble ancestry was any less virtuous or honorable than a splendid

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descent. The common folk did not come from nowhere; they too had pasts and identities. Hermann reassured his heirs that “though you are not so highborn, noble, prominent, and famous, nonetheless you are not beasts or unreasoning animals (kein bestien oder unredlich their), but rather men—and good men like them [i.e., the nobility].”113 Commoners had every right to commemorate their ancestries. In pursuing this line of thought, Hermann distinguished between the outward trappings of nobility and true nobility, which was inward. Here, he drew on the Renaissance concept of a “nobility of virtue,” most famously developed by Erasmus.114 By the fifteenth century, social mobility and the emergence of a new educated elite called into question old social hierarchies, particularly those of the warrior nobility, whose conspicuous consumption was at odds with emerging ideals of discipline and decorum. Though the preeminence of birth was generally acknowledged, some authors distinguished between a nobility of birth and a nobility of virtue. The accident of being born noble was not enough to make one inherently superior. One could not live only on the credit of one’s ancestors, but rather had to exhibit nobility in personal virtue and character. There was, of course, a fundamental ambivalence in this idea, since it could be used either to legitimize the current ruling class by insisting its nobility proved its virtue or to critique it by claiming its lack of virtue called into question its nobility. According to Jonathan Dewald, “already by the mid-sixteenth century ideas about nobility had lost much of their coherence. Radically incompatible ideas circulated even among those who praised nobility.”115 For instance, although Erasmus may have ridiculed “false knights” for being all show and no substance, he allowed for either “noble birth or virtue.”116 Given Hermann Weinsberg’s northern humanist background, it is not surprising that his work shows similar ambiguities. On the one hand, he did not radically challenge the hereditary nobility—that is, the hierarchies of rank and title in what he called the “high secular estate.” As he explained to his heirs, at the pinnacle of the social order were kings and queens, princes and Prince-Electors, and powerful counts. Just beneath them were “common counts” (gmeine graven) and barons (friherren und baronen), followed by knights who had “cities, villages, palaces, castles, and splendors.” Finally there were many “common noblemen”—knights and Junkers—who had “free property” and “feudal land and rents.”117 On the other hand, Hermann insisted that there was an invisible form of nobility, beyond the outward distinctions. After listing the worldly hierarchies, he concluded

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that “here I speak only of the nobility of birth, but otherwise virtue can make anyone noble.”118 The lack of character was enough to call into question an aristocrat’s status. “Whoever without virtue would nobly shine / Is little more than a crowned swine, / Whose pleasure is all dung and dirt, / Whose crown brings shame instead of worth.”119 Noble titles were not an inherent, inalienable possession. God rewarded the virtuous and industrious and humbled the proud. Comparing his own descent with those of the high nobility, Hermann told his heirs that “it is an open question whether their lineage or yours is more noble in virtue” (tugentedler).120 Such ideals emboldened Hermann to level harsh criticisms against the contemporary nobility. Though by no means a revolutionary, Hermann could pen as strident a critique as any pamphleteer from the 1520s. The status of birth, he wrote, was “greatly abused by princes, lords, and nobles, who think themselves superior because of their ancestry and fortune and pretend to be much better than others who cannot produce their ancestry.” Such men mistook the accident of birth for actual worth, thinking that “they deserve all of it.” They betrayed their “arrogance, pride, and lack of humility,” acting as if “the burgher and farmer were subjects created for their sake.”121 A popular saying Hermann quoted was more blunt: Princes, lords, knaves, and knights However they get it, they think it’s their right.122

Against the hubris of great lords, Hermann invoked the ideal of the common good, a cherished urban value, and called for responsible governance. Princes and noblemen were deluded in their sense of entitlement. According to Hermann, they “do not know they are ordained for the sake of the common man.” In such words were clear echoes of prophetic traditions and Renaissance ideas of the common good. If God placed men in high places, it was as stewards of what was entrusted to them. They were given their authority not to exploit their subjects, but to serve them. Though Hermann did not countenance rebellion, he did warn all those who “abused ancestry,” who took their superiority for granted, that “God can certainly fi nd them and unseat them as they deserve.”123 Titles and riches were not granted in perpetuity, because “great and rich things rarely remain in that state.”124 Conversely, God could elevate a lineage that was humble and virtuous. According to Hermann, “if my lineage and the members of the Weinsberg household fear God and keep his commandments, I do not doubt that he will

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preserve them and the house for hundreds and hundreds, even thousands, of years.”125 Though he would not have put it in quite these terms, Hermann came close to arguing for a functional—as opposed to an essential— distinction between nobleman and commoner. If society was organized hierarchically, there was nonetheless an equality of origins. No matter how great, all men and women had humble roots. Fortune ensured that all families moved from low to high and back again. Referring to families of low estate, Hermann reassured his heirs that “if they are not now as rich, mighty, great and noble as great people, fortune may nonetheless grant that they become so, just as the great people were simple and low in the beginning.”126 Like most sixteenth-century men, Hermann Weinsberg was no egalitarian; inequalities were an integral part of the economic and social order. Yet even his arguments for inequality suggested that any given hierarchical arrangement was functional and provisional: If all of us had wealth and might And were equal in each other’s sight, Then when at the table we took our seat Who would serve the food we eat?127

Hermann remembered a saying that made the rounds of servants during the Peasants’ War of 1525: “Today you are master; tomorrow I will be master. Today it is yours; tomorrow it will be mine.” To be sure, Hermann disapproved of the saying, because many servants at the time refused to work.128 Yet the mobility he had witnessed during his own lifetime could make social hierarchies seem contingent and provisional. For Hermann, the crucial task was to maintain one’s character—and the virtue of one’s lineage—in the midst of change. Any social station could be honorable, so long as one lived honestly and with dignity. To instruct his heirs on this point, Hermann drew a “wheel of fortune,” with eight virtues written along its spokes, their fi rst letters forming the name WEINSBERG: Weisheit, Eindracht, Narungh, Sparligkeit, Bescheidenheit, Erbarkeit, Redlichkeit, Gedolt—wisdom, unity, industry, frugality, modesty, respectability, honesty, and patience (Figure 7). These wholesome, middling values—the opposite of aristocratic pride, vainglory, and arrogance—would enable the family to weather the changes of fortune “when the wheel turned”; they would help one to endure, “no matter what happened, if one became rich or poor, high or low, had good or bad fortune.” So long as his heirs drew on the

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appropriate virtues, “they will never fail, and eventually all will turn out for the best.”129 Industry and patience would help a lineage through hard times. For the “maintenance of the male line,” the common nobility, burghers, and rural householders “should always learn an art or good trade in case their descendents cannot so quickly marry rich and high enough.”130 If male heirs could not wed an illustrious bride, they should nonetheless court “other honorable, capable young women, with whom they could practice their trade, support themselves, keep house, and raise legitimate children.” In the end, the God “who would certainly raise the humble” would see to it that their name and lineage were “maintained with honor.”131 If nobility was common, then commoners could be nobler than noblemen. Hermann suggested that middling families were more capable of wholesome family piety than aristocratic lineages. Though pride in one’s descent could lead to arrogance, it was not evil in and of itself. Rather, it was a thing indifferent (adiophora), a “middling” thing, neither good nor bad in itself, such as eating, drinking, or sleeping. “The correct intent and goal of ancestry,” wrote Hermann, “is that one uses it at all times for the best, to the praise of God and the honor, welfare, and benefit of one’s kin.” In its true form, it was a goad to discipline, not arrogance. In the ancestors, one saw “the virtues and goodness of the fi rst men, how they received grace, honor, and property from God, how pious they were, how industriously and frugally they kept house, and with what care and work they fed and raised their children and left behind an honorable descent.”132 If many noble families foundered because of their pride, Hermann imagined the Weinsbergs as a steady, diligent clan, surviving precisely because of their commoner values. He concluded that “if I were richer, it might have hindered my plans.”133 Though many great families abused their ancestry, lording it over the common man, the correct use of “origins” was evident in the memory of religious founders and the lives of saints. The Bible was full of ancestry and origins, those of Christ, Mary, Joseph, David, Abraham, the prophets, kings, and patriarchs. The Pope took his origins from Peter, and the Church from the Apostles. “How could all this be wrong?” Hermann asked plaintively.134 Here, Hermann used the Bible’s praise of lowly origins—its endorsement of fishermen, carpenters, and shepherds—to call into question the exclusivity of noble status. The era’s most potent use of such biblical authority, of course, was found in Protestant critiques of the Pope and clergy. During the 1520s, for instance, Protestant pamphleteers

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contrasted the luxury and splendor of the papal court with Christ’s humiliation on the way to the cross. And yet, as Hermann also was keen to note, the Bible placed a great emphasis on Christ’s royal genealogy—his descent from King David. The ambivalence of these scriptural ancestries was not lost on Hermann. Even as they aimed to prove the royal, exclusive ancestry of Christ, they testified to the power of God to raise the downtrodden. For Hermann, biblical genealogies were inclusive: They affi rmed the equality of all men in Adam and the humanity of the humble and hardworking. The sixteenth century saw numerous attempts to reconcile a more egalitarian conception of the social order with the traditional hierarchy of estates. The most radical changes emerged in the Church, as Protestants propounded the “priesthood of all believers.” The period’s reformers championed the spiritual equality of all men and women and challenged clerical prerogatives (see Chapter 5). Critiques of worldly hierarchies were somewhat subtler. Propertied men were not prepared to challenge the prerogatives of noble birth— and the Peasants’ War of 1525 made them even more concerned about uproar and rebellion. Even so, the boundaries between townsmen and hereditary elites had been blurred. As urban communalism and new forms of mobility collided with a hierarchical society of estates, men such as Hermann Weinsberg sought new ways to legitimize their distinctive values and lifestyles—to close the gap between their actual clout and their traditional denigration as mere commoners. Such questioning of aristocratic privilege would continue throughout the early modern period, persisting into the twentieth century. Anxieties about the place of burghers within a static vision of the social order could produce extreme intellectual and cultural tensions. Even in the sixteenth century, the bourgeois urge to emulate the nobility was hardly a simple case of mimicry. The traffic between middling and aristocratic cultures ran both ways. Indeed, Hermann Weinsberg’s secret project was not only a poignant case of bourgeois yearning for significance and stability; it also anticipated some of the ways in which aristocratic values would continue to be shaped and transformed by the emerging secular order, with its emphasis on discipline, moderation, frugality, and self-control. If nothing else, his plans reveal just how uncertain some early modern burghers could be about inherited social categories.



chapter five

A Holy Household

If the boundary between commoner and aristocrat had grown problematic by the sixteenth century, the line dividing laity and clergy was a site of open cultural and religious confl ict. Many German burghers resented the idea that the religious life was a higher calling, set apart from the sinful affairs of the world. From the very beginning of the century, anticlerical sentiments ran high. Some of the fiercest critics of the clergy, such as Erasmus and Luther, were clergymen themselves.1 The most dangerous opponents of the independent clerical estate, however, were magistrates, who had long been frustrated by the clergy’s meddling in civic affairs and its exemption from taxation. Seeking to stave off internal unrest and citing new doctrines of the “priesthood of all believers,” cities and territories that turned Protestant drastically reduced the number of clergy and clerical institutions. More radically, they did away with the very idea of a separate clerical estate, secularizing ecclesiastical properties, encouraging churchmen to marry, and abolishing all religious institutions that did not directly minister to the laity. Though few in the sixteenth century dared to suggest dismantling the noble estate (as the French Revolution would do in the eighteenth century), many were ready to lay waste to traditional clerical prerogatives. 2 Such a radical step, of course, was not taken in Cologne. Poised precariously amid ambitious territorial princes and dependent on the Catholic Emperor’s continued support, the city was under immense external pressure to remain loyal to Rome. However enviously the

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City Council might have eyed ecclesiastical properties, it could not afford to let an evangelical movement take root.3 And yet the reasons for Cologne’s adherence to the Catholic faith were not merely negative, as if vigilant gardeners simply weeded out all heterodox shoots. If anything, it was the luxuriant growth of Cologne’s indigenous religious traditions—its many saints, religious houses, and clerical institutions—that helped to crowd out alien Protestant plantings. The city’s nineteen parish churches were deeply rooted in the everyday lives of Cologne burghers. They were as much civic institutions as they were spiritual, jealously tended by notable laymen. Neighbors gathered in the parish churches to discuss local affairs and to elect pastors and churchwardens. In graves and altarpieces, they saw reminders of their own kin and of other prominent families in their communities. The churchwardens, for their part, oversaw church renovations, administered church properties, and doled out poor relief. At the same time, many families had unmarried kin in the city’s numerous monasteries, convents, and beguinages. A religious habit was a common alternative to marriage, especially for young women, and families drew up careful fi nancial agreements with convents, celebrating their daughters’ new status as “brides of Christ.” Destroying the clerical estate in Cologne would have disrupted much of civic life as well.4 Hermann Weinsberg, for one, always considered himself a loyal Catholic, a man “satisfied with the customs of the parish” (myt kirspels gebruch genogen). Throughout the religious controversies of the century, his allegiance remained with the “old Catholic religion (der alten catholischen religion), to which my ancestors belonged” and “the old creed, as my ancestors and conscience has taught me” (bleib ich bei dem alten Credo, wie mich min voreltern und min gewissen geliert).5 Hermann accepted the traditional division between the clerical and worldly estates. “The governance of popes and bishops is as dear to me as that of emperors, kings, and dukes,” he wrote in 1588. Though aware of the ambitions of princes and kings who sought “monarchy,” he preferred the traditional dual-authority structure of Christendom. Pope and Emperor, church and state were mutually interdependent; “each one,” he wrote, “grew alongside the other.”6 The highest levels of Christian government were mirrored in Hermann’s own familial experience. He had many friends and relatives, including sisters, who belonged to the clerical estate. As he explained, “I myself had and still have relatives who are religious. Should I then hate my own flesh and blood?” (sult ich min eigen fl eisch und blut dan hassen).7

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Attachment to tradition, however, did not blunt anticlerical sentiment in the city. While families continued to look to the Church for both spiritual and secular assistance, they also complained of inequities between the lay and clerical estates. If anything, the pride Cologne burghers showed in their parish churches—the earnestness with which they had so richly endowed them—only increased their frustration with clerical wealth and privilege. In the grievances of 1513 and 1525, burghers lashed out against the special economic and legal privileges of the clergy, including its independent system of ecclesiastical courts. In subsequent years, the uncertain future of the Church—and the absence of a viable Catholic reform from the Archbishop of Cologne—left open a number of questions. What was the proper relationship between clergy and laity? Who in the city best exemplified Christian piety? How could abuses of clerical prerogatives be curtailed? In puzzling over these questions, several burghers turned to the reforming vision of Erasmus, whose works became increasingly popular in Cologne even as they fell out of fashion elsewhere.8 Hermann Weinsberg was one such burgher. As he struggled to defend the rights of commoners to a lasting legacy, he channeled the most potent currents of popular and humanist anticlericalism.9 Hermann bristled at the thought that preachers might deem his plans sinful and vainglorious. The clergy’s condemnation of worldliness, he suggested, was deeply hypocritical. Who had established more earthly institutions than the religious? And had not they done it precisely by convincing the laity that seeking worldly goods was sinful? The more Hermann reflected on his secret plan to found an eternal household, the more he saw it as a means of redressing inequities in the traditional relationship between clergy and laity. As he explained, in working for the benefit of his house, he was merely emulating the clergy, who had displayed much shrewdness in building their own comfortable institutions. Like Protestants, but in his own eccentric way, Hermann Weinsberg struggled to rethink the relationship between spiritual and worldly pursuits—to close the gap between clerical ideologies that denigrated secular life and his honor as a middling housefather. He took great delight in the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs, for whom the preservation of the lineage was a divinely blessed work. Against clerical asceticism, he insisted that God blessed the mundane affairs of the burgher household—its industry and thrift, its procreation and child-rearing. These were no inferior callings, but rather demonstrations of God’s blessing and providence. And yet, despite some affi nities

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with Protestant teachings, Hermann’s vision of the “holy household” was distinctively Catholic. Hermann imagined his household as a pious foundation, a contribution to his and his kin’s salvation.

Clerical Housefathers For all his talk of “blood” and “lineage,” Hermann Weinsberg found as much inspiration for his plans in clerical houses as he did in landed patrimonies. Within the walls of Cologne, the most splendid and prominent institutions—and the most visible symbols of permanence—were not great ancestral houses, but rather the city’s many churches, monasteries, convents, hospitals, and collegiate chapters. To Hermann, these seemed “splendid things,” because they remained “constantly of one nature to the memory of the residents and for an eternal household.”10 By comparison, burgher houses were fleeting and unstable. In seeking legal advantages for his family, Hermann was nothing if not opportunistic; he turned towards the most stable institutional models he could fi nd. These were the houses of both the nobility and the religious. “O Lord God,” he prayed, “may the feudal and ecclesiastical right of inalienability and indivisibility find its place within the Haus Weinsberg.”11 But in ensuring longevity, the clergy possessed a particular advantage. Whereas secular holdings were dispersed at death, clerical property was inalienable, entrusted to the institution rather than to a mortal person. Clerical houses thus did not depend on the vicissitudes of biology and reproduction. Not even the greatest noble lineages were exempt from the whims of fortune. “How difficult it is to maintain the male line,” Hermann often exclaimed, listing the many reasons that families became extinct.12 Clerical institutions, on the other hand, were independent of biological succession; they were endowed “offices” that could be filled by any suitable candidate. As one of medieval Germany’s most renowned spiritual centers, Cologne had a particularly rich collection of such houses.13 As he surveyed his hometown, Hermann Weinsberg was astonished at the number of “clerical housefathers” (geistliche hausfetter) who were able to live comfortably off of foundations and rents.14 The most illustrious of these were Cologne’s illustrious Domherrn—the men who made up the city’s Cathedral chapter (Domstift) and elected the Archbishop. Drawn from the region’s high nobility, the Domherrn indulged in a lifestyle befitting their status. They lived in splendid residences around the Cathedral, often banqueting and hunting with their aristocratic

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peers. In addition to the Domstift, there were ten additional chapters (Stifte) in Cologne, seven male and three female, each of which provided livings for several canons or canonesses.15 Hermann estimated that approximately 150 canons were supported by the richly endowed chapters—each canon enjoying “his own special house and courtyard, with his own yearly rent and income, so that he can keep himself splendidly at the house and be a housefather.”16 And these were only the chapters. When Hermann added the monasteries, abbeys, parish churches, cloisters, and chapels—all institutions endowed with buildings and rents—the total number of clerical “housefathers” enjoying a guaranteed livelihood rose to 300. Some of the abbots were quite powerful, governing small walled complexes of gardens, vineyards, residences, cellars, and churches. But even the fathers of more modest cloisters were “well cared for,” able to reside in their “courtyards, chapels, houses, and residences” whenever they desired.17 By clerical “housefathers,” Hermann meant only men who were in positions of household governance—who had charge of a religious house or were able to maintain, from a clerical living, a household of their own. This group, of course, hardly encompassed all the religious in the city. One historian has estimated that in 1573 Cologne had around 1,600 clerics and religious, out of a population of approximately 37,000.18 As Hermann noted, there were hundreds of nuns, beguines, and canonesses who were “well provided for” by the religious houses to which they belonged.19 And beyond these livings, there were many other types of spiritual foundations in Cologne—university scholarships, hospitals, funds for the poor, lay convents and confraternities, endowed masses. Hermann himself had enjoyed a five-year scholarship as a law student in the Cronenburse, a debt he owed to the late Hermann Dwerg (d. 1431), a man from Hervorden who had acquired “immense, immeasurable property” as a Roman prelate during the early fourteenth century. To found the Cronenburse and its twelve scholarships, this successful churchman had left behind the hefty sum of 6,000 gulden, which yielded an annual income of 240 gulden.20 Not all endowments were quite so magnificent; others had accumulated slowly over the years, the sum of generations of pious bequests. As a churchwarden, Hermann himself kept track of the many endowments men and women had established in St. Jacob’s parish. Hermann Weinsberg marveled at the continuity, stability, and antiquity of Cologne’s churches and spiritual foundations. The collegiate churches (Stifte) were so richly endowed that they had survived for

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centuries. Though they had been established “500, 700, 800, or 1,000 years ago,” they were “still flourishing (im floir) today.” Since ecclesiastical property was inalienable, initial investments had grown over the years, until the religious houses became splendid and wealthy, furnished not only with gilded paintings, altars, and chalices, but also with real estate, rents, and vineyards. “All this,” Hermann exclaimed, “could be accomplished by founders and endowers.” In Hermann’s view, if burghers followed the “example” (spegel) of the clergy, they would fi nd a simple solution to family security—“found a burgher house, endow it with rents, forbid its alienation, . . . and set at all times one of your own blood in it.”21 Only a slight shift of focus was required to imagine the burgher household itself as a spiritual foundation—a community of blood relatives dedicated to the memory of its founder. So simple did this idea seem to Hermann that he was surprised no one had thought of it before. If the clergy had been successful in founding enduring institutions, why had not townsmen established their own “secular” foundations? “Still I ask, not without astonishment, where has a burgher’s house been founded and furnished with a building, supplies, and means of subsistence so well as the clerical housefathers?”22 Hermann returned to this question again and again, often chastising townsmen for their negligence: “I still cannot console myself when I compare the laity’s lack of foresight (der geringer vorsigtigkeit der weltlichen leien) with the clergy’s great prudence in founding lasting things.”23 There were, of course, complex reasons for the ephemeral nature of burgher households. Bourgeois wealth was based on commerce and economic specialization, rather than land or institutional endowments. Urban prosperity required a constant circulation of money and property. Hermann, however, fell back on a simple explanation: The clergy had outwitted the laity. Not only had burghers shown less foresight than the clergy, but they had also been persuaded by monks and priests to leave their properties with the Church, rather than with their own families.

Anticlericalism in Cologne The accumulation of clerical real estate was not a preoccupation unique to Hermann Weinsberg. For a long time, the Cologne Council had worried that religious institutions were acquiring too much of the city, since land owned by the clergy was exempt from taxation. Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, magistrates had passed a series of

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measures against the “dead hand”—that is, against the power of testators to bequeath property to individual clerics and clerical institutions. The city was particularly concerned about the popular mendicant orders, which, despite their initial reforming impulses, had become wealthy landowners. Since the late fourteenth century, the Council had passed measures requiring that all real estate transferred to clerics or religious houses be returned to secular ownership “within a year and a day.” The goal was to prevent the further ecclesiastical accumulation of inalienable property. Policing such measures proved difficult, however, and many families managed to evade them. Wealthy burghers, in particular, valued pious bequests as a means of displaying their piety, winning spiritual merit, and leaving something to a religious institution to which a child or kinsman belonged. 24 As recently as the burgher uprising of 1525, guildsmen and householders were demanding that measures against the “dead hand” be more strictly enforced.25 And during the second half of the sixteenth century, a report on “spiritual houses” commissioned by the Council concluded (perhaps with some exaggeration) that over two-thirds of the city was in the hands of the Church—“abbeys, cloisters, parish churches, convents, and similar clerical houses, along with their great estates, their many large vineyards, and other heritable property belonging to them.”26 For the council, clerical immunities represented a threat to civic order, revenue, and control. At the same time, simple householders could grow frustrated with a system in which the religious benefited from the peace and security of the secular city, but seemed to contribute little to it. The exemption of clerics from civic dues meant that they possessed a competitive advantage in trade. Within Cologne, many religious houses engaged in profitable trade and industry, selling their wares tax-free. Monks and nuns brewed beer, sold wine, and wove textiles, while many monasteries, convents, and beguinages had their own looms and mills, which they used for productive trade.27 During the great uprising of 1525, disgruntled artisans demanded not only that the clergy bear the burdens of citizenship, but also that they pay damages for decades of unfair competition. Suspicious of clerical wealth, citizens requested that all precious items in churches and religious houses be registered. In the months before the uprising, there had been attacks against the clergy, as small groups broke into religious houses and raided the kitchens and cellars. Some clergymen had even received death threats, prompting the clerical estate to petition the City Council for protection. To stave off

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anticlerical violence, the Council forced the clergy to sign a concordat, in which they agreed to pay civic dues for six years. 28 In theory, clerical exemptions were rooted in the spiritual economy of Christendom. The clergy constituted a separate estate, set aside for lives of prayer, devotion, and holiness. Unlike burghers and commoners, priests and monks were not caught up in the daily preoccupations and selfish interests of worldly life. It was only through their mediation that the laity could achieve salvation; they alone could provide the sacramental remedies for sin and corruption. If the clergy did not have to make a living in the same way that burghers did, if they could support themselves with institutional endowments and pious bequests, it was because they specialized in intercession and holiness. Within late medieval Christianity, spiritual grace and merit were relative goods— an individual and community could always have more of them. Even though they did not defend the city, they played a vital role in sustaining its spiritual economy. In the traditional view, there was no limit to the number of clergy a city might require. The exchange of transient worldly goods for lasting spiritual assets was an essential part of late medieval religion. To do penance for sins, to redeem the fi lthy lucre of trade, to lessen time in purgatory—these were some of the reasons that burghers left money to the Church. They richly endowed ecclesiastical institutions with pious bequests—with chalices, windows, paintings, private altars, gravestones, vestments, masses, rents, land. 29 An estimated 90 percent of Cologne wills from the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries contained pious bequests. 30 Such spiritual donations were not limited to churches and monasteries; one could also give money to a hospital or poorhouse. Hermann Weinsberg spoke favorably of burghers who gave money either for “worship and the poor in churches, cloisters, and hospitals.”31 Those wealthy enough could establish a new charitable foundation, whose beneficiaries would remember one’s name and pray for one’s soul. Often burghers hedged their bets, distributing their pious bequests among several institutions, perhaps giving something to both a parish church and a mendicant order. Such an influx of wealth enriched the clergy but weakened its credibility. 32 Ironically, it was the ascetic, penitential teachings of the Church that proved its greatest fi nancial boon and contributed, in turn, to its growing reputation for worldliness. Thanks to their popularity as reformers and servants of the laity, new mendicant orders such as the Franciscans had became powerful landowners, enjoying

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a comfortable, leisured existence. And thanks to priestly celibacy, property donated to a religious house remained with the institution—and not mortal heirs—in perpetuity. Meanwhile, the clergy’s near-monopoly over learning and writing had secured it key roles in courts and chanceries. To meet the fi nancial demands of its burgeoning bureaucracy, the Church exploited its penitential system, encouraging the laity to make pious contributions—to buy indulgences, pay fees, endow masses—in exchange for spiritual merit. An abundance of ecclesiastical livings tempted prelates to amass multiple benefices and to exempt themselves from the duties of their offices. In Cologne, ambitious families used their influence to secure sinecures for their members. Hermann Weinsberg and his father, for instance, had opportunistically sought “a little piece of fat” that might support Hermann’s studies. For such families, sacred vocations had become a means to worldly ends. Long before sixteenth-century Protestants secularized ecclesiastical properties, many clergymen were perceived as being too “secular”—too ambitious and avaricious. If the Church’s worldly power blurred traditional boundaries between clergy and laity, so too did the piety of late medieval urban dwellers, who increasingly brought religion and spirituality into their everyday lives. As burghers acquired wealth and learning, and as they internalized the penitential teachings of the Church, they increasingly strove to participate in the Church’s sanctity and holiness. It was during the later Middle Ages that many Cologne communities gained control over their parish churches—and the right to elect pastors and oversee the church’s building, rents, and spiritual foundations.33 The fifteenth century saw an increase in private chapel building, as burghers quite literally brought the church and clergy into their homes.34 The period also witnessed an increase in memorial masses, as lay testators sought to secure the intercession of the Church for themselves and their families. Some men and women chose to be buried in religious habits, while others established family chapels and altars in Cologne’s churches.35 Within church paintings and altarpieces, images of donors moved from the margins to the center of the piece. Whether kneeling at the foot of the cross, pleading intercession from a saint, or witnessing a biblical scene, burghers were often depicted as participants in sacred events. And it was no longer only noblemen and patricians who could afford to found memorials. Even poor and middling burghers could strive to acquire a part of the Church. Confraternities enabled guildsmen to pool their resources and hire a clergyman to read masses and say prayers for

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dead members.36 At the same time, printing gave burghers access to a wide array of religious literature, allowing for increasingly private and intimate forms of devotion. The clerical monopoly on education had been broken, and growing numbers of laymen were not only well read, but also university trained. Such developments made the idea of a distinct religious calling—one sealed off from the worldly preoccupations of lay life—seem less plausible than it once had. Even if Church doctrine insisted that the clergy were separated from the laity by the “indelible mark” of the sacrament of ordination, the actual differences between the laity and clergy had been blurred. Some clerics “kept house” openly with concubines, adopting a bourgeois lifestyle. But there were other, loftier visions of spiritual vocations lived out in the midst of the world. The Brethren of the Common Life, or Devotio Moderna, held up a model of humble, heartfelt faith accessible to laity and clergy alike. Though their ascetic theology did not depart substantially from Catholic tradition, they discounted the trappings of clerical life—its glitter, grandeur, and garb. In the Brethren’s austere religious houses, laity and clergy prayed and worked side by side.37 While a student in Emmerich, Hermann Weinsberg had boarded in a house of Brethren; at the time, he complained to his father about its strict regimen. Erasmus, too, was famously trained by the Brethren of the Common Life, who in turn would help to popularize his writings among new generations of students. Like the Devotio Moderna, Erasmus contrasted simple, heartfelt piety to what he viewed as the arrogance, superstition, and folly of the clergy. His goal was not to attack religious vocations, but rather to refine them. Protestants pursued a more radical course. Stressing the shared helplessness of sinful humanity, pamphleteers and preachers challenged the very idea of priestly asceticism. All individuals were equally dependent on God’s grace; no special spiritual merit could be achieved through religious vows. In a startling reversal of the traditional clerical denigration of secular endeavors, Protestant polemicists denounced Catholic doctrines of salvation as human fictions that enabled the clergy to prey upon gullible individuals and to evade the responsibilities of civic and domestic life. Protestant pamphleteers rejected the idea that clerical institutions were inherently more sacred than burgher institutions. They insisted that clerical claims to superiority and special privileges were an excuse for idleness and economic exploitation.38 If salvation was a free gift from God, then good works performed for the sake of one’s soul were not only useless—they were also a selfish waste of resources that

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could otherwise be devoted to the community.39 To seek a grace that God had already freely given was tantamount to blasphemy. Viewed in this light, the medieval clergy’s relationship to the secular community was revealed to be parasitical, based on a fiction. Wherever put into effect, Protestant views required the dismantlement of a medieval city’s complex penitential and ecclesiastical system.40 The Protestant understanding of the clergy was functional. Pastors were citizens, full members of the secular community, like other men in all things except their particular occupation. A community needed only as many priests as were necessary to proclaim God’s word and administer the sacraments. God did not require additional offerings, masses, prayers, and worship—especially when there were no souls present whose faith might be awakened by such services. Since Christ had already fully paid for humanity’s sin, there was no incremental debt to be repaid, no cosmic scale to be balanced. Thus, over the course of the sixteenth century, Protestant cities and territories not only drastically reduced the number of clergy and clerical institutions but also did away with the very idea of a separate clerical estate. They dragged churchmen down into the secular sphere, turning priests into citizens and abolishing all religious houses that did not directly minister to the laity. Meanwhile, the idea that all believers were equally priests conferred a new dignity on laymen, but also new responsibilities. The housefather was to serve as a minister to his children and servants, training them in the gospel. The patriarch was to set an example of godly living in the midst of secular life—to be in the world but not of it. For complex reasons, such a solution was not arrived at in Cologne. During the 1520s, Protestant doctrine made little headway in the city. To many burghers, novel “evangelical” teachings likely appeared as a threat to local, communal control over the parish church and to the “good old customs” that structured neighborhood life. Even if a Protestant movement had gathered momentum in Cologne, simplification along Protestant lines would have remained unlikely. The city’s highest ecclesiastical institutions were too entrenched, too powerful, too connected with the regional aristocracy to be subject entirely to civic control. The City Council, for instance, would not have dared to secularize the illustrious Cathedral chapter, whose members came from the upper nobility.41 In all religious matters, the Council pursued a pragmatic, cautious policy, lest it provide external powers with a pretext for challenging the city’s freedoms. For his own part, Hermann Weinsberg had no thought of secularizing monastic or collegiate properties. Though

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he envied their privileges, he considered religious houses “splendid things.” In keeping with the traditional hierarchy of estates, he still listed high clergymen fi rst when he described the Cologne social hierarchy, above the city’s powerful mayors.42 Indeed, Cologne burghers continued to express pride in their city’s visible communion of saints—the spires that crowded its skyline, the saints that watched over its affairs, the churches that housed paintings and gifts bestowed by ancestors, and the clergy that prayed over the bones of the dead. The preservation of this sacred patrimony, however, meant that deep structural tensions between the clergy and laity remained unresolved. It was Erasmian humanists and churchmen who made the fi rst attempts at reform. In 1536, with the help of the irenic scholar and advisor Johannes Gropper (1503–1559), Archbishop Hermann van Wied initiated efforts to reform the diocesan clergy. The proposed statutes, which were published widely throughout the Empire, aimed to eliminate absenteeism and concubinage and enforce pastoral training and discipline through church visitations. There was little question of abolishing clerical celibacy or the idea of a distinct religious vocation; rather, the goal was to improve the quality of the clergy. The efforts proved abortive. Much of the resistance to reform came from the Cologne City Council, which was opposed to the Prince-Archbishop’s intervention in civic affairs and shrewdly deferred to scripture and church councils. Moreover, since the reforms were aimed at improving pastoral care, they did little to address burghers’ frustration with the clergy’s special economic and legal status.43 Catholic reform became even less likely when Archbishop Hermann von Wied converted to Protestantism and attempted to implement an evangelical reformation in his territory. The city joined forces with the clergy, the university, a spurned Gropper, and much of the Cathedral chapter to rebuff the Archbishop’s attempt to impose Protestantism from above.44 The result was a prolonged period of religious and political uncertainty. Though the Council remained fi rmly Catholic, it was forced to play competing interests off one another. Sometimes it sided with the clergy and conservative university against the Archbishop; at other times (especially when clerical immunities were at stake) it found itself opposed both to the clergy and Archbishop; occasionally it appealed to the Pope for leverage against the Archbishop and clergy; and at still other times it worked with the Archbishop to suppress religious dissent. With the emergence of a sizeable Protestant underground from the 1550s onward, the situation became even more complicated. While

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many Cologne councilors remained concerned about clerical immunity, they were even more alarmed by popular complaints against the clergy, fearing that they hid either Protestant sympathies or more general revolutionary sentiments.45 All the old questions about the boundaries between the sacred and secular remained. And they were now compounded by the unknown future of the traditional Church itself, which had been dismantled, often violently, in many parts of Christendom, including regions in the neighboring Low Countries. It would not be until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that Tridentine reforms and an expanding Jesuit presence began to transform the city’s religious life in earnest. The lack of change could prove frustrating to some burghers. The city remained Catholic, but Hermann Weinsberg feared that the “common man had other ideas” (der gmein man aber war anders gesinnet). 46 Violence against the clergy erupted sporadically. In 1555, with the cooperation of the City Council, the Archbishop of Cologne removed a popular anticlerical preacher from the Church of St. Laurence, replacing him with his own chaplain. The parishioners did not receive this intrusion kindly. According to Hermann, the deposed pastor of St. Laurence was well liked by Cologne burghers because of his anticlericalism. “He was fairly guarded in his preaching,” wrote Hermann, so that he could not be suspected of bad “doctrine.” Nonetheless, “he censured the clergy for their abuses, and for this reason had a great following among the citizenry, but was altogether hated by the clergy.”47 When his replacement, the Archbishop’s chaplain—an “exceptionally eloquent preacher”—was about to ascend the pulpit for the fi rst time, “the steps were taken away, so that he could not climb up.” A woman began to strike him on the back with her fists. Others descended upon him. The chaplain fled the church, with a mob running after him, some throwing stones and crying “Hit him! Strike him dead!” The chaplain managed to make it safely to a house near the Cathedral, and the gathering mob was dispersed by the city’s officers of the peace. That night, the city kept watch for fear of an uproar. The instigators were taken to the city tower, and the Council threatened to imprison more of the participants.48 Though this particular disturbance was calmed, an influx of refugees from the Low Countries heightened religious tensions in the city and put the Council on alert. The extent to which Cologne magistrates identified heterodox preaching with threats to civic order and security was evident in its response to an incident in 1582, when,

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despite strong prohibitions from the Council, around 400 people went into the countryside to hear a preacher who was “not Catholic.” According to Hermann, this incident prompted the Council to consider “how troublesome, rebellious, and foreign (widderwertigen und uff rorishe und uiswendigen) people might be driven from Cologne.”49 Particularly fearsome was the specter of Anabaptism and the calamitous example of Münster in the 1530s. The City Council developed elaborate measures to police religious dissent, investigating reports of residents who had not baptized their children or received the sacraments in the Catholic manner. 50 Although Catholic faith became a formal requirement of Council membership in 1562, some of Cologne’s Gaffeln (including Hermann’s own Gaffel Schwarzenhaus) continued to elect Protestants to the body. 51 Perhaps exaggerating the threats to the city’s orthodoxy, Hermann believed that most burghers wanted Protestantism and feared that “the Catholic religion will not last long here in Cologne” (hie zu Coln entlich nit so stanthaftich wirk in der catholischer religion will sin). As he explained in his writings, “I worry that if the bishops and clergy did not put up such a fierce defense and opposition, together with the temporal authorities, the events would run their course.” In his opinion, “the common man among the nobility, cities, and countryside” could not resist the new religion. “I hope that my prophecy fails,” he concluded.52 Yet while Hermann supported the Council’s actions, he sympathized with popular grievances against the clergy. His private writings are filled with complaints about clerical greed, indolence, and luxury. In Hermann’s view, the ecclesiastical system provided incentives for the clergy to seek easy livings and avoid work and pastoral care. In 1579, for instance, the preaching posts in two Cologne parishes remained unfilled, because there was not enough income from “rents” to pay the salaries the pastors expected. As a result, the pastorates were not as attractive as lucrative canonries in the chapters. “Previously,” wrote Hermann, candidates “rushed and pleaded for the pastorates in Cologne, but now all they want are good prebends in the chapters, where one can be idle and not have to preach or care for souls, but rather live off rents like lords and great rentiers” (wie hern und groiss rentener).53 Such clerical abuses, Hermann feared, would provoke Protestant movements within the city: What will come of it? Who now gives reason for change [i.e., Protestantism]? Is it not these dear unreligious religious men (die liebe, ungeistliche geistlichen)? One must not speak of their abuses, but nonetheless it is the

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truth. Their authorities [i.e., the ecclesiastical hierarchy] should improve the situation, but they do not. I worry about a catastrophe more than I hope for a solution.54

In 1581, the problem of funding for the pastorates was still unresolved. To protect the spiritual welfare of its citizens, the City Council took action, appealing directly to the Pope. In exchange for a substantial sum, the Council received a papal indulgence that authorized it to eliminate several prebends in the chapters and to use the funding instead for pastors’ salaries.55 Hermann himself was appointed to the committee tasked with relaying the news of the indulgence to the chapters, which all responded that they could take no action without the approval of the Archbishop and the “entire clergy” of Cologne.56 The clergy opposed the elimination of the lucrative livings, proposing instead to merge the pastorates with existing canonries. All this infuriated Hermann. “The pastors have enough and receive enough,” he wrote bluntly.57 In his opinion, the Council had to waste precious time and money on the dispute, all because the clergy placed selfish gain before the cure of souls. Despite benefiting from the town, the pastors “will not give anything for the sake of the Council, churchwardens, burghers, or the parish. Like fat swine, who live in luxury, they side with other priests and the chapters against the City Council.”58 Along with accusing the clergy of neglecting the spiritual good of the city, burghers such as Hermann also complained that they did not contribute to its common governance and defenses. Yet despite efforts to extend its authority throughout the city, the Cologne Council could only chip away at clerical immunities piecemeal. In 1532, when the city had to contribute to the Emperor’s campaign against the Turks, it decided to impose a tax on the clergy, on the grounds that they had property in the city and enjoyed the protection of the Council.59 In 1566, upon failing to extract similar concessions, the Council commissioned an “index” of all ecclesiastical holdings in the city, so as to assess how much of its tax base was lost to clerical exemptions.60 And in 1583, when wars over Cologne’s archbishopric were raging in the surrounding region, the Council declared that the clergy would pay taxes for the city’s defense, “the same as burghers.” (In typically cautious fashion, Hermann absented himself from the session, lest he fi nd himself suspected of heterodoxy.) According to Hermann, there was general agreement among the councilors that “it was a priests’ war (paffenkreich), and the burghers and the entire region had fallen into great danger, unrest, and harm on their behalf.”61 In Hermann’s

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view, the Council was only able to extract concessions from the clergy because they felt endangered, both by anticlerical unrest and by the devastation that the troops of the Protestant Gebhard von Truchsess had visited upon churches in the region. “Now, this once, the clergy are willing to pay taxes,” Hermann remarked, “because the affair concerns them, the war is before the gates, and the water is up to their mouths.” In times of peace, he complained, the clergy contributed nothing to the city, whose prosperity and defense they nonetheless enjoyed.62 None of this is to say that the city’s burghers wanted to convert to the new religion. Cologne was an ancient Roman city, filled with saints and relics, and its citizenry was deeply attached to its sacred identity. As Catholics, most Cologne burghers still relied on clerical intercession for their salvation. The common good in Cologne was unthinkable apart from its Catholic saints and institutions. And yet this was precisely what made it impossible fully to integrate the clergy into the city—to subordinate the clergy to the commune. Tensions between townsmen and clergy remained high, and some suspected the clergy of conspiring against the town. In 1583, for instance, there was a “great rumor” that “the clergy were secretly hiding soldiers, weapons, and knights in their houses and cloisters and that they wanted to ambush, rob, and kill the burgher population, especially those of the new religion, and to bring the city entirely under their control.”63 As religious wars raged in the countryside, there were also several rumors that burghers in Cologne were planning to attack the clergy. Lamenting the “division,” “partiality,” and “mistrust” that reigned in the city, Hermann spoke of a general “suspicion and hate against the clergy and their adherents.”64 All this made the mid-sixteenth century a time of deep uncertainty. The Protestant Reformation had shaken confidence in traditional ecclesiastical institutions. But the future remained unclear. To speak too openly against the clergy was to invite suspicion of Protestant sympathies, as Hermann Weinsberg himself discovered late in life, when his brother’s wife accused him of “not being spiritual enough” (nit gut geistlich), since he and his brother often railed against the clergy at the dinner table.65 Erasmian-minded burghers such as Hermann could fi nd few clear paths to reform. Down one route lay the radical, destructive excesses of the Protestant Reformation; down another stood conservative forces arrayed against any reform of the clergy; and down still another lay papal reforms that, while improving the Church’s pastoral care, also threatened to increase its power to meddle in lay affairs. Catholic reform did not always proceed in ways that burghers wanted.

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When Jesuits arrived in the city in the second half of the sixteenth century, they both commanded respect and aroused suspicion. Though their missionary zeal contrasted sharply with opportunistic churchmen, it could also seem one more example of clerical power and arrogance. By the time the Catholic Reformation had arrived in earnest, Hermann Weinsberg had already taken matters into his own hands, developing his own private solution to enduring tensions between the clergy and the laity. In so doing, he gave voice to sharp Erasmian critiques of the clergy, sometimes even expressing sympathy with Lutherans. His suspicion of clerical ideologies was as potent and sophisticated as anything found in the Protestant pamphlet literature of the 1520s. Just as he rejected the notion that there was an inherent difference between commoners and nobility, so he challenged the idea that the clergy possessed a unique sanctity or status because of their ordination. To Hermann, the ascetic teachings of the clergy were suspect not only because they were unrealistic, but also because they were used to enhance clerical wealth and power.

Both Estates Are Honorable Could a burgher found a house to rival Cologne’s most enduring monasteries, convents, and churches? In defending his ambitions, Hermann Weinsberg ran up against the ascetic teachings of the Church. To be concerned about one’s temporal future rather than one’s eternal salvation was sinful. Establishing a charitable foundation or giving money to a religious house was one thing. Seeking to perpetuate one’s own family and name was quite another. Aware of these norms, Hermann vigorously sought to defend himself against the accusation that he had only sought “vain honor” (eitele ehr) in his will and had committed the “sin of arrogance” (in hoichfertigkeit gesondigt). He imagined the voices of his critics: “It would have been much more holy and beneficial to endow something to the honor of God or to help poor people or students, etc.”66 Similarly, he considered the question of whether it was “more useful to found the Haus Weinsberg or to bequeath something to the churches.”67 Indeed, within the spiritual economy of the Middle Ages, burghers gave gifts to the poor and to the Church precisely in order to make amends for the inherent sinfulness of their secular pursuits. Hermann Weinsberg was the fi rst to admit that he was not particular devout. “I go to church,” he wrote in 1574, “and like to hear preaching,

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but I do not pray so diligently or often, and bother myself little with the Holy Scriptures, but rather more with worldly, temporal things.”68 On difficult matters of doctrine, he deferred to the “pious scholars.” For Hermann, the “good old customs” of the parish were familiar and comforting. As a churchwarden, he took great pride in helping to elect new pastors, in overseeing parish fi nances, in keeping records of neighborhood affairs, and in caring for the physical structure of the building. In the local churches and monasteries he could find the graves of his kin. By all accounts, Hermann experienced little anxiety about salvation. He was less gripped by the logic of penitential piety, less anxious about paying off the penalty for sin with good works, than some of his contemporaries. Suffering in this world seemed to repay much of the penalty for sin; the pain of his hernia was thus a “purgatory.” Confession was not particularly bothersome. He “confessed his sins to the Lord and was absolved.” God’s reckoning of sin was not much more mysterious than his own record keeping as a patriarch. In asking for forgiveness, Hermann simply prayed “please pass over my previous account” (voriger regnong). 69 More urgent to Hermann than penance was the welfare of his house and kin after his death. If God, the “richest housefather,” looked after the whole world, sustaining it down through the centuries, so Hermann hoped to emulate his example and preserve the name and house of Weinsberg, to the benefit of all its residents. On the whole, Hermann showed far greater interest in the secular dimensions of churchly endowments—in their ability to preserve the worldly memory of their founders—than in their spiritual efficacy. Categories of honor and reputation loomed larger in Hermann’s imagination than those of salvation and purity. Still the question remained: Was it selfish to care to care for one’s heirs, to establish a worldly legacy? Here Hermann insisted that his attempt to establish an enduring house was “as good a spiritual work (geistlich wirck) as any other.”70 In writing his last will and testament, he had “constantly sought the honor of God and the welfare of his neighbor.”71 He bristled at the idea that his own familial concerns were less pious because of their alleged worldliness. “A housefather,” Hermann explained, “goes to church, hears masses and preaching, prays, gives alms, and works to improve his wife, children, and servants, maintaining them in piety.” Could it be wrong to support such a man, to furnish him with rents so that he might remain an “honorable burgher,” so that his wife and children might have an “honorable income

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and sustenance”? After all, “clerical prelates and priests also want to be viewed as honorable, not poor.” Hermann’s conclusion: “Both estates are honorable” (Und syn beide stende erlich).72 There was much in these arguments that was self-serving. To suggest that gifts to one’s own “blood” were as spiritual as gifts to the poor was to redefi ne Christian charity, at least as it had traditionally been understood. The Church’s ascetic teachings, after all, were meant to wean the laity from easy natural affections and to make them aware of their wider spiritual kinship. By protesting that his motives were altruistic, Hermann sought to legitimize his otherwise unseemly ambition. Yet however opportunistic his arguments, Hermann Weinsberg also tapped into a growing unease with the traditional clerical denigration of business, fame, and family life. To communally minded burghers, the value of the spiritual life lay not in ascetic self-denial but in contribution to the common good. This message was particularly pronounced in the Protestant pamphlets of the 1520s, which shockingly depicted the clergy as “gorgers on the dead” (Totenfresser), who exploited fictitious doctrines of purgatory to drain resources away from the community of the living.73 But Catholic townsmen in Cologne could express similar sentiments. The more Hermann wrote, the more he lashed out against the apparent hypocrisy of the clergy, who enjoyed the immense temporal benefits of their institutions, even as they condemned the laity for trying to acquire the same. In his view, the clergy were more worldly than they had pretended to be, while burghers were more pious than they had been alleged to be. To Hermann, a strict separation between the mundane concerns of worldly life and the higher callings of prayer and contemplation seemed artificial and unrealistic. Pointing to the numerous “clerical housefathers” who lived comfortably in Cologne, Hermann insisted that the standards the clergy imposed on the laity were hypocritical—indeed, that they were used for the very worldly ends they purported to condemn. Preachers taught their flock “how to feed the soul,” but they neglected to mention an equally important lesson that they themselves practiced all too well—namely, “how to care for the body with honorable necessities and sustenance” (wie daß leib mit erlicher noitturff t und underhalt versorgt sol werden).74 Conversely, Hermann implied that the laity surpassed the clergy in their care for the spiritual community. The clergy, he wrote, “were no less inclined towards splendor, good drink and meals, and their kin than worldly men, but they do less for the poor and the church than the laity in the parish.”75

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Hermann was willing to grant the religious the right to honor, comfort, and respect. What he was not ready to concede was the clergy’s right to browbeat burghers who sought the same. As indignant as any Protestant pamphleteer, Hermann accused the mendicant orders of “wheedling and scaring” money out of “good people” by “begging for alms under the pretense of poverty.”76 As a result of clerical threats and blandishments, too many laity had neglected their kin, instead seeking costly assurances of their own salvation. Lamenting the apparent readiness with which other burghers gave money to “strangers” in the Church, he heartily approved of a saying he had often heard in the city: “Leave the monks and beguines alone and help your own!” (Laiß monchen und beginen, und hilff den dynen).77 There could be no doubt that the Cologne laity had left an immense volume of goods to the Church. Hermann suspected that clerical intimidation and manipulation had prevented many laymen from attending to their posterity. That many townsmen had enough property to secure a fi ne patrimonial estate was evident from the sheer amount of wealth they had bestowed upon churches and monasteries—“great heritable properties, farms, lands, and rents.” “I am worried,” wrote Hermann, “that several were advised by the clergy that to found such patrimonial houses would be a great sin, arrogance, and temporal honor” (zeitliche ehre).78 To be preoccupied with one’s worldly future rather than one’s eternal salvation was sinful. Within the traditional spiritual economy, burghers gave gifts to the poor and to the Church in part to make amends for the inherent sinfulness of their secular pursuits. And yet such worldly interest was precisely what the clergy pursued. The hypocrisy here was evident in the fact that the clergy had established more lasting institutions than anyone else. Not without hyperbole, Hermann asked, “Cannot one perceive that they gained and grabbed the authority and riches of the entire Christian world?” (die oberkeit und richtumb der gantzer christenwelt).79 Because of the Church’s immunity and autonomy, because of the clerical right of “nonalienation,” what passed to religious institutions remained there in perpetuity, forever “set apart for God.” Such opportunities, Hermann believed, had only given the clergy incentive to “deal harshly with the laity,” demanding more and more property, bleeding the worldly estate until it grew “weak.” Through such means “they have previously gained almost half the world as their property.”80 The parasitical nature of the clergy, believed Hermann, was plain for all to see. When he looked around Cologne, he found that the burghers

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had actually “built” many of the city’s religious institutions—“the four mendicant orders, the nunneries, and many chapels.” But they had no ownership of these institutions, no “name” from them. “Who has governance over them?” Hermann noted somewhat sardonically that the clergy had never given money and bequests to burghers. “Who among the laity are supported by the clergy? Sadly, in truth, I cannot fi nd many.”81 Instead, the clergy rode the laity as harshly as the prophet Balaam rode his donkey.82 Previously, it had been assumed that only the clergy were capable of managing lasting institutions, but Hermann was determined to change this. “It would be a foul dishonor and great disgrace to all secular men,” he complained, “to say that they could not maintain anything permanent except through the clerical estate, as if they were donkeys and not men.” The insult could not be tolerated. Hermann rebuffed with an “ugh” (pfui uber pfui) the idea that “whenever the secular estate founded, built, or created anything, the clergy have to stand in authority over it.”83 All this was caused by the “negligence” of the laity, who allowed the clergy to enjoy the benefits of their labor. In his view, those burghers who kept pious bequests, such as funds for masses or poor relief, under their control were to be praised. In Hermann’s view, the clergy had abused their spiritual authority over burghers, convincing them that their salvation depended on giving gifts to the Church. Here, his criticism of the clergy echoed Erasmus, according to whom the religious, “with their petty little ceremonies, their trifling formulas, and loud mouths . . . can wield a practical tyranny over the laity.” The clergy, wrote Erasmus, “are particularly in their element when describing hell down to the last detail, as if they had spent many years in that part of the world.”84 Similarly, Hermann argued that if mendicant preachers made hell and purgatory so “terrifying,” they did so “for the sake of their benefit and profit.”85 Had the laity not been so intimidated by the clergy, “the clerical estate would have been broken up, and not as many properties would have fallen to it as is now the case.” Through such means, “the simple, unlearned laity have been played for fools.” The clergy’s claims to sanctity and superiority had long given the religious an unfair advantage. “Against their cunning, miserliness, scheming, and power,” wrote Hermann in his secret chronicle, “no one has until now been able to speak, lest they be considered heretical or rebellious.”86 Although pastors “know how to censure the flaws of the worldly from the pulpit,” he lamented, they did not speak so clearly about the clergy’s “hypocrisy, deception, greed, arrogance, pluralism, concubinage, whoring, etc.” And how could the

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laity denounce these clerical sins? In this “one estate has the advantage over the other,” since “laity cannot ascend the pulpit and chastise the clergy for their abuses.” Rather, burghers had to confine their comments to the “dinner table,” lest they be suspected of heresy.87 These were fighting words, and Hermann considered his own family estate as a corrective to clerical power. He lamented that “the clergy have received great properties (of which they are masters) from the laity,” and he prayed that “not too much would be taken away through persuasion and guile” (mit uberreden und listen). 88 By entailing his burgher properties and making them inalienable, he was protecting them against clerical “encroachment and seizure” (foisswentz und griff ). 89 This would be one way, at least, for the burgher community to ward off the dangers of the “dead hand.” In his view, townsmen had every right to compete with the churchmen at their own game. If the clergy set such an example, surely the quest for an enduring house could not be so great a sin as was often suggested. The Haus Weinsberg would stand as a rebuke to the implication that laymen were somehow less competent or worthwhile than the clergy. If burghers secured their own “secular” houses in the way that the clerical estate had established its institutions, townsmen would be less vulnerable to clerical avarice and ambition. Indeed, they would attain a status and security that, in Hermann’s view, the clergy had long denied them. Such considerations made Hermann sympathetic with Protestants— up to a point. He could understand why Lutherans might be outraged when “poor secular children and heirs fell into poverty and misery because they never received the property of their parents and kin, while the clergy lived well and enjoyed more than they needed from it.” Indeed, the Catholic clergy bore much of the responsibility for the Protestant revolt. “Our opponents,” Hermann wrote, “would not have striven so hard against purgatory had they not witnessed the great abuses, ambition, and avarice of the clergy.”90 The clergy’s “stratagems of greed,” Hermann suggested, “are perhaps not the least reason for the great quarrel in Christendom today.” Hermann found a certain justice in the Protestant confiscation of ecclesiastical goods, even if he resented the force and violence with which it was carried out. “And just as the Catholics seized so much power and property through the old religion, so now their opponents scheme through the new religion (from which wars and revolts have arisen in all lands) to dispossess the clergy of their goods. Perhaps they intend to fetch back with force and the sword what the clergy schemed to get through craft and flattery”

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(mit list und smeicheleien).91 However much he was “saddened” by Protestant violence against the old Church, Hermann could not help but note a certain poetic justice in Protestant revolt: The clergy had gotten what they deserved. At the same time, Hermann was reluctant to follow Protestants all the way in their criticisms. To do so would have been to reject not just clerical abuses, but Catholic doctrine itself. This, of course, was precisely what made Reformation ideas so potent. By denying the validity of purgatory and prayers for the dead, Protestants made the vast majority of clerical activities superfluous. If all humans were equally unworthy, if God’s grace was received through faith alone, then clerical intercession lost its chief reason for existence. Hermann, however, could not bring himself to reject the doctrines of purgatory, good works, and prayers for the dead. Though he could not say exactly how purgatory worked, he nonetheless “fi rmly believed” that God would not damn an individual for a “little evil,” but rather, “for the sake of that little evil,” require the individual “to suffer and do penance after death whatever he had not already suffered in life.” If Hermann accused preachers of making “hell and purgatory terrifying,” it was because he had a fairly liberal view of divine justice. “After a man dies,” he wrote, “he must suffer a little for that little evil for which he has not already suffered, and this is rightly called purgatory.” This, to Hermann, was a more “merciful” doctrine than that propounded by Protestants, who argued that humans could contribute nothing to their salvation. Hermann did not believe that “a pious person would be damned for a little evil and never become blessed, having no chance to suffer for his sins and never being rewarded for his good.” Thus, he stood on the side of “pious works,” such as “worship, prayers, and alms,” which were “always good.”92 Prayers for the dead were a “Christian and humane custom.”93 Hermann was horrified by the specter of popular Protestantism—its smashing of icons and altars, its persecution of clergy, its rejection of so many “good old customs.” It was no better for Protestant magistrates violently to secularize clerical property than it had been for the old Church craftily to obtain lay property. Among Cologne Catholics, it was common to lash out against particular clerical abuses—against greed, selfishness, superstition, and vice—and yet still support the idea of an independent clerical estate. Indeed, many of Hermann Weinsberg’s anticlerical laments have this quality. In this regard, Hermann learned much of his anticlericalism from his father, Christian, who was influenced by humanist literature.

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While “quite favorable towards the clerical estate,” Christian compared “the many untalented clergymen” in the Church to “fattened swine (mastferken), who eat and drink and act foully.”94 Hermann, too, claimed to be well disposed towards the clergy, even as he was angered by “their abuses, greed, envy, and arrogance.”95 Not surprisingly, Hermann praised individual pastors for their virtues—for a combination of personal decorum, faithful service, learned preaching, and gifts to the Church. For instance, Gerhard Lyth, who served as the parish priest of St. Jacob’s from 1534 to 1555, was a “pious, learned, and strict man,” who had not only reformed record keeping within the church, but had also endowed several vespers for the parish. His successor, Johann Neuenhausen (1555–1573), “promoted his friends and relatives and gladly shared with the poor.” According to Hermann, “the people say that they wish all clergy could be like him, for then there would not be so much trouble from the clerical estate.”96 Such statements would seem to imply that moral amendment, rather than structural reform, was all that was needed among the clergy. Such praise did not necessarily mean, however, that Hermann wanted an austere or assertive clergy. Later in the century, he expressed ambivalence towards the Jesuits and the forces of Counter Reformation. While he respected the Jesuits’ educational initiatives and energetic institution building, he also worried that they, like clerics before them, used ascetic teachings to encroach upon the freedoms of the burgher household. He had firsthand acquaintance with the new piety during his later years, when he lived in a joint household with his brother Gottschalk. According to Hermann, Gottschalk’s wife, Elizabeth, and her daughter from a previous marriage were fervent supporters of the new order. Hermann often expressed dismay at the immoderate zeal with which his in-laws practiced their faith. In 1580, for instance, Hermann noted their stringent Lenten fasts; they skipped a mealtime every day except Sunday. In Hermann’s view, this was a departure from the “Catholic custom, common throughout the city” of abstaining from meat until Easter and skipping only a few meals during the week.97 On another occasion, Hermann noted the departure of a household maid, who “often went to sermons and was a good Jesuit (gut jesuitischs), constantly wanting to argue and reform things at the dinner table.”98 Around the same time, Hermann entertained a “Calvinist” pastor who shared with him the duties of guardianship over an orphaned young woman. Before the visit, Hermann warned his guest that he should be careful at the dinner table, because the women in the household were “good Jesuits.”99 As in

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all things, Hermann’s desire for peace—his concern to avoid “disputation”—trumped his concern for confessional purity. Even so, Hermann may have come closer to Protestant ideas than he realized. At the heart of his argument was a rejection of clerical asceticism—and the dichotomy between soul and body, sacred and secular, that it implied. Though Weinsberg accepted a social division between the clerical and secular estates, he advocated a more holistic view of human nature, saying that “each person has both estates within himself (beide stende in sich), the clergy have them both, the secular have them both. At times the clerical are more worldly, and the secular more spiritual, as one often sees, for we are all human, adhering to one more than the other [i.e., to either the religious or secular life] for the sake of self-interest” (umb deß eigen nutzs willen).100 Just as the clerical institutions were not solely devoted to secular ends, but pursued their own temporal interests, so the burgher house was not only a worldly institution, but rather encompassed both the sacred and the secular. The clergy had to attend to their worldly and bodily needs no less than the laity, just as the laity could live pious and holy lives. “I will follow both Magdalene and Martha,” exclaimed Hermann, “and remain both spiritual and worldly.”101 This view was akin to that of Protestants, who considered secular vocations no less spiritual than the ministry and insisted that pastors were full members of the secular community. While Hermann did not advocate clerical marriage, he did develop an eclectic vision of clerical integration into lay society; he allowed for the appointment of a clergyman as his family’s “housefather,” provided the individual was “especially inclined towards and loyal to the secular estate.”102 Like Protestants, but in his own inimitable way, Hermann Weinsberg strove to undo the medieval division of humanity into the lay and the religious. Protestants expected housefathers to act as pastors to their children and servants and priests to take on the duties of marriage and family life. Hermann, by contrast, did not advocate clerical marriage. But he did insist that there were no fundamental differences between religious and secular houses. Whether a man was more spiritual or more worldly depended on the particular roles he played.

A Sacred Community Hermann Weinsberg’s vision of a religious household for laity was not altogether unprecedented. In Cologne, there were several precedents for such a “half-clerical” life. As a student, Hermann Weinsberg had boarded with the Brethren of the Common Life, or the

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Devotio Moderna, who founded houses in which clergy and celibate laity together could dedicate themselves to reading, work, and simple devotion. Likewise, he suggested that the housefather could be “clerical” in the same way that Cologne’s Cathedral choir singers, who had wives, were clerical.103 Hermann tried to place his own household within the relatively large and ambiguous middle ground between secular and sacred institutions in Cologne. Though he hoped that his own household would become great, he knew better than to set “his poverty” on the same level as Cologne’s illustrious abbeys and collegiate churches. At more sober moments, when he wondered whether his family would be able to survive without many rents, he situated the Haus Weinsberg within a more modest social and spiritual space— that of the many convents, beguinages, and poor houses established in the city for unmarried or widowed women, of which he himself could count sixty-five. Such houses had been founded by Cologne’s burghers, and many of them had survived hundreds of years on little more than the “sewing, washing, and begging” of their residents. Though women who were supported in this way had taken no religious vows, they lived a “clerical or half-clerical” (halbe geistliche) life, supporting each other and maintaining the foundation. “I have never heard of any of these houses that have fallen into disrepair,” Hermann remarked, and several of them had survived “200, 300, 400 years or even longer.” And though they were not fully consecrated convents, those who founded them had performed good, pious works. The “commemoration of patrons and founders” remained there “eternally.” The same, he believed, could also happen to the Haus Weinsberg, even if it fell into poverty.104 A pious family foundation, suggested Hermann, could improve upon conventional spiritual endowments insofar as it united filial piety, middling industry, memory, and unity in one house. In his view, if there was one thing lacking in clerical houses, it was that “blood relations do not keep house there.”105 The bonds of blood, he believed, would only strengthen the ties of Christian charity. If he had founded a community or “college” for four academics or four widows, for instance, each beneficiary would have had little intrinsic interest in the house, but rather would have stayed “only so long as it pleased him, and would then only seek his particular interest, trying to divert any savings or gains to his own relatives.” Such beneficiaries would have little thought for the “common good” of the house.106 None of this was meant to detract from the various pious works that other burghers performed. “I must certainly confess,” he wrote, “that it would have been just as good to have invested money in worship services

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and the poor in churches and hospitals, so long as it was intended for the praise of God and the consolation of the poor.” Indeed, as a parish churchwarden, he had done just that, “furthering the renovation, worship services, and rights of the church, as well as the funds for the poor, as the account and copy books of the parish will show.” If he had not given much of his own money, he had nonetheless “done much through soliciting, planning, organizing, and other industry and work, which may be better than those who simply give a little. And certainly, gifts to the Church were better than leaving one’s money to prodigal heirs, who would “quickly spend it on unnecessary things and waste it, so that one can not tell where it has flown to.”107 Pious bequests were a prudent and deliberate investment. In theory, they remained perpetually set aside for the ends for which they were intended. Yet Hermann remained wary of bequests to the Church, not only because they went to support “strangers,” but also because they were an uncertain investment in an era of religious tumult. As a churchwarden, Hermann himself had seen all too often how endowments “were also misused in churches and cloisters, so that founded masses, memorials, and donations are not held, or are used for other purposes.” The “authorities,” for instance, often abused the endowments over which they had control, using them “as they please for their courtiers and flatterers” or “for their tables and their courts.” But the most compelling reason for caution was the uncertainty of the time. During the late 1570s, reports of iconoclasm in the Netherlands confi rmed his decision to “found and endow” his family rather than giving his money to a religious institution. “Since my time is sadly full of heresies and abuses” (voller ketzerien und missbrauch), he wrote, “as well as the destruction of all church order and changes in property [i.e., the secularization of Church holdings], endowing the Haus Weinsberg and housefather is prudent and useful compared with the danger of standing by the churches” (die gefar bei den kirchen zu stain).108 Because of the “quarrels in religion,” Hermann worried that many Cologne burghers would soon look in vain for their endowments in the churches. In 1579, Hermann renovated an altarpiece he had commissioned over twenty years before. On fetching it home from the painter, he decided not to return it to the church, mainly out of fear of iconoclasm, which “has now occurred for several years in the Netherlands, so that church ornaments and images have been torn down and despoiled.”109 Such uncertainties were part of a larger “crisis of confidence” in Cologne ecclesiastical institutions. The years after 1525 witnessed a

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major decline in pious bequests to the clergy, which reached its nadir in the 1570s. Based on a wide sampling of wills, Gérald Chaix has shown that bequests to the four mendicant orders dried up during the 1520s. This was partly the result of a measure the City Council passed in 1520, which prevented the participation of the mendicant orders in funerals without the permission of the magistrates. But according to Chaix, the decline in giving also reflected a “global crisis of confidence in ecclesiastical institutions,” mirrored in the experience of other Catholic cities from the period.110 Beginning in the 1520s, burghers tended to leave money primarily to their parishes and foundations for the poor. These institutions not only served the burgher community, but also were controlled by laymen. Memorial masses had also begun to drop by midcentury. It was only late in the century, with the growing popularity of the Jesuits and Catholic reform, that pious bequests to clerical institutions once again revived and the authority of the institutional Church was once again fi rmly reestablished.111 It was in the midst of this profound religious uncertainty that Hermann formulated a distinctive vision of a “holy household,” in which the secular tasks of child-rearing and household industry were fused with the spiritual work of prayer, memory, and catechesis. To many burghers, the old division of humanity into those who prayed and those who worked—into religious and lay—no longer made sense. This was especially true of Protestants, who argued that all believers were priests. Even as they insisted that priests possessed no special merit, Protestants sanctified the domestic work of householders—their provision for their families, their domestic governance, and their service to the community. Rejecting the religious specialization of the Middle Ages, they insisted that men and women pleased God within worldly structures, that they served God while carrying out the tasks of everyday life. So too did Hermann suggest that all houses, whether religious or not, were a mix of the spiritual and secular. Unlike Protestants, however, his goal was not to eliminate the clerical estate, but to claim that its sanctity and legitimacy could be shared with burghers. Hermann went so far as to suggest that a burgher household, bound together by blood relations, could be a site of Christian charity and spiritual kinship. Just as clerical households ate and worked, so burgher households prayed and worshiped. Was it not therefore just as pious to establish a religious community in one’s own home as it was to found one for strangers? Prayers for the dead, mutual support and charity, religious training—all these could happen as well in the Haus

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Weinsberg as they could in a convent. “My relatives,” he wrote, “can keep my memorial and pray for my soul as well as strangers” (Myn frunde wurden auch myn memoriam so wol halten und vur mich bitten alß frembden).112 His house would be a spiritual community, “in which the entire corpus, body, and members would live as Christians in honor and unity and pray to God the Lord for the living and the dead, which is a good path towards both the salvation of the soul and remembrance” (eyn gut wech syn zu der selen heill und memorien).113 In seeking a legacy, he had performed a “pious work.” His testament would promote the blessed memory and “salvation” of all family members.114 “In the Haus Weinsberg,” he explained, “the praise of God can be sought, the poor fed, the young brought up in honor and discipline just as well as these things are accomplished elsewhere.”115 His secret plans could thus be considered an act of charity, meant for the sustenance and support of poor heirs. In 1581, after he had entered into a semi-retirement, Hermann developed a theological argument to support these efforts.116 As a Catholic layman, he normally professed an aversion towards metaphysical speculation and doctrinal disputes; his guiding principle in religious matters was to adhere peaceably to the faith of his ancestors until the Church taught him otherwise. Now, however, Hermann sought to reassure himself that there were good theological reasons for his hopes. The question he posed himself was simple but unusual: Can “my blood” (i.e., lineage) and “my father’s house” survive together “eternally”? He answered in the affirmative, basing his argument on a standard medieval assumption—namely, that human blessedness consists in becoming ontologically like God. Since God is the “highest good” (hoigste gut), contended Hermann, humans are united with him and share in his eternal nature when they are “good, pious, and just.” Therefore, he concluded, “if my lineage and the members of the Weinsberg household fear God and keep his commandments, I do not doubt that he will preserve them and the house for hundreds, even thousands of years through his mercy.” On the other hand, if his family persisted in sin, they would lose the divine attribute of eternity.117 This, admittedly, was a strange syllogism. Hermann himself acknowledged that most theologians would consider the hope for his house’s eternal survival irredeemably vain. The historical evidence for everlasting households, he confessed, was not good, unless one considered Adam’s offspring one “blood” and the earth its “house.”118 On another occasion, he reminded himself that “all things are transient,

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the entire world will pass away, many cities and castles have fallen to the ground. . . . Nothing temporal is eternal” (nichtz zitlichs ist ewich). But even this conventional wisdom could not dampen the hope that his house would prove an exception, especially if God were its “eternal master builder” (myneß fatters hauß ewiger bawmeister).119 And while Hermann’s theological argument may have been fl imsy, it drew on the rich language of biblical promise—God would bless families who loved him and kept his commandments down through the generations. Hermann Weinsberg was not always able to attain such spiritual heights. His arguments were opportunistic. If he claimed the legitimacy possessed by venerable spiritual institutions, it was largely because he envied the worldly privileges that such legitimacy brought. Often he presented his family’s survival as a purely human achievement—a product of thrift, saving, and planning. In this particular vision, however, the middling Haus Weinsberg was a sacred community. The house was a microcosm of the body of Christ, sharing in the latter’s mystical, transhistorical identity. Such arguments show the extent to which this Catholic lawyer, for all his restiveness, continued to share traditional assumptions about corporate sanctity, in which particular places and spaces were charged with divine power. Both secular and religious, both middling and noble—such was the Haus Weinsberg, at least in Hermann’s idealized vision of his modest burgher family. As a meditation on these traditional boundaries, the Cologne lawyer’s writings are the product of a transitional age; they express the tensions and contradictions to which traditional value systems could give rise in an age of social and cultural change. The tensions he experienced were great enough to prompt some sixteenthcentury thinkers to reject the traditional conceptual frameworks altogether. Hermann Weinsberg, on the other hand, continued to think within the old systems, trying to make sense of them in his own eccentric way. In modern terms, we might say that Hermann was searching for an ideological representation and historical significance commensurate with his sense of dignity as a householder. The result was an original socio-theological vision of his burgher house, in which he insisted on the inherent dignity of secular life and work, even as he claimed for the burgher family the sort of “eternal” existence that had traditionally set noble and clerical institutions apart. Like many Protestants and humanists, he felt that aristocratic and clerical ideologies failed to do

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justice to the realities of burgher life. Yet rather than rejecting these ideologies and values outright, he tried to adapt them to the lives of commoners, or at least his own family. The result was a unique social imaginary—an original vision of the burgher household and its place within the wider social world. And yet this is not quite the fi nal word. For all his idealism, Hermann Weinsberg could not, in the end, escape his urgent desire for fame and even immortality. What he envied above all about noble and aristocratic houses was their longevity and collective memory. In reflecting on his “foundation,” Hermann looked forward to the day when his heirs would fondly remember him. He spoke enviously of spiritual foundations that “bear the name of their patrons and founders, whose memoria [memory] remains there eternally.”120 Similarly, Hermann hoped that his own house would be a place of memory. But what type of memory was appropriate to burghers? What aspects of burgher life should be commemorated? It was in puzzling over these matters that Hermann Weinsberg’s writings perhaps most fully expressed the tensions and contradictions of his age. The next two chapters will take up these questions.

figure 1. Hermann Weinsberg’s self-portrait at age sixty (1578). This drawing adorns the title page of the second volume of Hermann’s “Memory Book” (Gedenkbuch). Hermann appears as a pious founder and patriarch, nestling his beloved Haus Weinsberg in one hand and displaying his last will and testament in the other. (All photographs courtesy of Historiches Archiv, Stadt Köln.)

figure 2. A sample page from the “Memory Book” with neatly dated entries. The Gedenkbuch contains over 4,000 similar pages.

figure 3. A sketch of the Bach, the Weinsbergs’ home street. Drawn in 1578, this picture shows the Haus Weinsberg, the largest house on the street (L), as well as the Cronenberg (T), Hermann’s own dwelling.

figure 4. The title page of the “Book of Youth” (Liber iuventutis), the fi rst volume of Hermann’s “Memory Book.” Bedecked with family shields (and Hermann’s own self-bestowed coat of arms), this frontispiece affi rms the providential destiny of the Weinsberg lineage. The top panel reflects Hermann’s belief that the Virgin Mary had singled out the house for blessing.

figure 5. “Don’t joke about / My dear house-heart / That causes me to smart.” This small drawing and verse attest to Hermann’s affection for the Haus Weinsberg.

figure 6. A drawing of a snail, one of several in Hermann’s manuscripts. The image of the snail expressed Hermann’s strong identification with his family dwelling and his desire to retreat from a dangerous and confusing world.

figure 7. A drawing of a “wheel of fortune,” with an accompanying verse: “If luck goes your way, watch out. It often turns . . .” Hermann used the letters of the name Weinsberg to illustrate the middling virtues that would enable the house to weather hard times.

figure 8. One of several title pages Hermann drew for his genealogy, Das Boich Weinsberg. The page mimics the frontispieces of printed books, suggesting that Hermann imagined a wide sphere of publicity for his writings.

figure 9. “I am the true vine.” A drawing in the Boich Weinsberg that plays on the meaning of the name Weinsberg (“vineyard”). Hermann kneels before Christ, the gardener, who tends the house.



chapter six

As If We Had Never Been

Why had the townsmen of Cologne not done more to secure their own memories? Just as Cologne Licentiate Hermann Weinsberg wondered why urban households were so fragile and fleeting, so he also asked why burgher life was poorly represented in the written records that had come down to him. When he looked through chronicles and histories, he could find few records resembling his ordinary life. “One will not truly fi nd us,” he lamented. The most past burghers had hoped for was some sort of posthumous survival in church windows, altarpieces, and memorials. But these, in turn, told little about their lives. Within fi fty years, “such a short time,” even notable urban families were forgotten.1 How could a minor sixteenth-century lawyer escape the obscurity to which burgher families had previously been consigned? For Hermann Weinsberg, the solution came in the form of pen and paper. Writing offered an opportunity to claim for his “middling” burgher family the cultural forms of the clergy and aristocracy—estates that had monopolized the means of social representation for much of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the new prospects afforded by writing could be exhilarating. Literate burghers had within their hands a powerful means to secure their own fame, memory, and identity. Like other men and women of his age, Hermann intuited (though not always consciously) that writing offered commoners new possibilities. Irked at the ways in which burghers had been slighted and manipulated in the past, he insisted that commoners were entitled to the dignity, stability, and institutional security that the fi rst two estates had traditionally enjoyed.

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But what exactly should the memory of his own life look like? This question would become one of the major preoccupations of Hermann Weinsberg’s life, especially as he began to work in earnest on his family chronicle and Gedenkbuch. The concern was rooted in his sharp historical awareness, acquired during his early humanist education and from his love of histories and chronicles. Such an awareness heightened Hermann’s sense of the flux and alienation of urban life, leading him to look longingly at the providential, timeless identities of the clergy and aristocracy. An “eternal household,” an ancient patriline, a community of living and dead Weinsbergs, an everlasting “bond of blood”—it would be tempting to read Hermann Weinsberg’s fascination with such ideals as a simple expression of the allegedly naïve social symbolism of premodern culture. However, Hermann Weinsberg’s preoccupation with permanence was also a reaction against his own, often troubling historical awareness. His appropriation of the memorial forms of the Middle Ages was already an expression of nostalgia. The symbolism of the “eternal household” and deeply rooted lineage seemed an antidote to the loss and oblivion that he saw all around him in the city. And yet Hermann Weinsberg’s attempt to construct a transhistorical unity only made him all the more aware of the alienation and disenchantment at the heart of the bourgeois experience of time. Far from offering a simple escape from his historical awareness, his quest for an enduring house led him to compare the relatively stable memories enjoyed by noble and clerical houses with the rootlessness of commoners. The result was an unusually rich contemporary reflection on sixteenth-century memorial culture.

Historical Awareness and the Middling Family At the heart of Hermann Weinsberg’s preoccupation with memory was an acute historical awareness. As a city-councilor, humanist-trained lawyer, and avid reader of histories and chronicles, Hermann Weinsberg was conscious of the power of writing to fi x and preserve the past. Among the many historical works he cited in his own writings were Sebastian Frank’s Chronica, Zeitbuch, und Geschichtsbibel (1531); Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia (1544); Johann Carion’s Chronicle (1546); Johannes Sleidan’s Commentaries on Religion and the State in the Reign of Emperor Charles V (1555); Jaspar Gennep’s Epitome (a Catholic response to Sleidan, 1559); Laurentius Surius’s Lives of the

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Saints (1570); and a biography of Ignatius Loyola (1590).2 Hermann followed the events of his day with keen interest, especially those pertaining to the great “religious schism.” Lamenting the harsh polemics of the era, Hermann learned to detect the bias of his sources. For instance, he read both the Protestant historian Johannes Sleidan and Catholic chronicles and broadsheets, trying to balance their accounts off one another.3 Hermann’s familiarity with history and his affection for the written word heightened his awareness of the silence of the past. In 1561, he noted that “whatever men speak, hear, do, or leave behind commonly dies with them, and if it remains a little while afterwards in stories and retelling (durch verzellung und nachsagen), it quickly disappears or is not truly or correctly preserved (nit eigentlich ader recht behalten), for human memory is weak and forgetful.” Against such oblivion the only remedy was record keeping. “For this reason,” Hermann explained, “God has left behind the wonderful art of writing (die wonderschone schreibkunst), which preserves all things immortally and renews, restores, and resurrects that which is forgotten and dead.” For this divine gift, humans ought “greatly to rejoice and be thankful.” It was only because of writing that “all histories and arts” had been preserved for thousands of years. Cultures “well practiced” in writing, such as the Jews, Greeks, and Romans had left behind records of their manners of living, “describing all their affairs so truly” (so eigentlich). The result was that even their “wives, children, and servants” were remembered. Their histories were “more clearly in the light” than those of other “barbarian, rural, or unlearned peoples, which have been entirely forgotten.” If anything among “transient things” was lasting, it was writing, which, “according to the testimony of many admirable people,” was the “longest and most eternally enduring work” (das allerlangwirigst und zu ewicher zit daurhaftigst wirk).4 Praise of written memory was a common theme in humanist culture. One of Hermann’s favorite chroniclers—and the scholar whose genealogical fabrications Hermann’s own forgeries perhaps most clearly resembled—was the Abbot Johannes Trithemius. In his In Praise of Scribes (1492), a work that defended the value of monastic copying in an age of mechanical reproduction, Trithemius contrasted fleeting oral transmission with the longevity of written memory: It is the written word which, so to say, gives you immortality and survival after death. Whatever a man may have done, whatever glory he may have acquired in executing the duties for which he was trained, only the

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written word will perpetuate his memory after death. The sacred books, as it were, renew the memory of their creators. Those who fail to write, as soon as they are dead, will quickly be forgotten, as if they had never lived. But you will be remembered through the books you have written; your memory will gloriously be passed on to posterity.

Of course, as a monk, Trithemius knew better than to praise worldly glory alone. Even though he had spent much of his career as a court historian of Emperor Maximilian I, working to enhance the pomp and prestige of the Imperial throne, Trithemius expressed his age’s typical ambivalence about fame. He admonished monks not to seek “empty desires and vain glory as a reward for your labor.” Rather, they should “ask those who come after you for their prayerful intercession and to suggest that they follow your example. Only with this intention can you unhesitatingly and by right affi x your signature to your books.”5 In the culture of northern humanism, the boundary between intercessory remembrance and secular fame could be thin indeed. For Trithemius, scribes were not the subjects of the books they copied; they merely transmitted the mysteries of the sacred texts. Other authorities Hermann consulted, however, praised the power of writing to preserve contemporary events. One such source was Die chronica van der hilliger stat von Coellen (1499), also known as the Koelhoffsche chronicle, after its Cologne printer. Though this vernacular work showed traces of early humanism, it was a medieval chronicle, which situated the history of Cologne within salvation history, beginning with creation. Even so, the work reflected the growth of urban history writing in the later Middle Ages.6 Some of Hermann’s praise of writing was lifted more or less verbatim from this source. The author of the chronicle, for instance, insisted that history was invented so that human memory would not be “extinguished or hindered.” Through history writing, “past times from year to year are renewed, restored, brought back to life, and, so to speak, brought before the eyes and ears” (widderumb leventich gemacht und also zu sagen widder vur die ougen und oren gebracht). The author also noted that because the Jews, Greeks, and Romans were in the habit of keeping histories, the things that happened in their day were preserved and protected. “So it would be improper,” he wrote, “if our things, which happened during our time (nu zer zit bi unsen dagen gescheen) should pass away silent and unrecognized, as if they were less important.”7 If the author of the Koelhoffsche chronicle applied this insight to the contemporary city, so Hermann Weinsberg applied it to his own

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burgher family. When he looked around, he noted that few Cologne families had seen fit to record their own past. Though most Cologne burghers were literate, they entrusted their names and memories to the vicissitudes of oral transmission. As a result, all that remained of most burgher lives was silence. Even great families had failed to leave traces behind, slipping off the face of the earth (als weren sei uff erdrich nehe gewesen). 8 Hermann Weinsberg was determined to avoid the same fate. But how exactly could he overcome oblivion? How could he secure the memory of his family?

Traditional Memoria Thanks to Hermann Weinsberg’s voluminous Gedenkbuch, we know more about his personal and family life than we do about almost any other sixteenth-century burgher. But if Hermann had done nothing unusual to secure his family’s future, what would his memory have looked like? What type of posthumous memory could a middling burgher expect? The most common form of commemoration that burghers engaged in was the Catholic “cult of the dead,” through which the living offered prayers for departed souls.9 This practice, of course, stretched back to the earliest Christian era, but it had received a more complete theological elaboration during the Middle Ages, with the doctrines of penance and purgatory.10 By praying for the dead and fulfilling the tasks of religious observation, the living could help to speed the souls of their kin through purgatory. Within the framework of the Church, the ultimate purpose of memory was salvation. Though Hermann “sadly” acknowledged the Protestant critique of priestly intercession, he nonetheless affirmed the “Christian and humane custom of praying for the deceased.” There was little doubt in Hermann’s mind that such prayers “helped the dead.”11 Memory had a real effect on souls, which had to “suffer a little” in purgatory after death.12 But in addition to their salvific purpose, prayers and masses for the dead were also occasions for family remembrance. During the later Middle Ages, Cologne testators were keen to ensure that their heirs would not forget them. Wealthier burghers endowed perpetual masses for their souls, often in both a parish church and a monastery. Gravestones, paintings, names read out from the pulpit, spiritual foundations—such measures would prompt the living to pray for a dead individual. They also ensured that the deceased would continue to

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participate in the communion of saints—to share in the power of the Mass and the merits of the Church—even after death.13 It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of such memorials to the men and women of late medieval Cologne. As Hermann explained, “making memorials is daily practiced among Christians.”14 The rites of memoria were no mere tokens of remembrance. They were a real participation in the communion of saints, the mystical body of Christ, which in turn was embodied in the Christian city itself. Such forms of memory were based on a realistic view of mental acts—a belief that commemoration was efficacious in this world and the next, bringing one into contact with the thing or person commemorated. In the traditional understanding, memory was less an end in itself—less a form of posthumous worldly survival—than a means of sharing in the merits of Christian communion. The most obvious example, of course, was the Eucharist, which transformed bread into the Christ, thus making fully present his original sacrifice.15 In liturgical practice, there was no sharp distinction between the act of remembering and the thing remembered, no sense of recollection as something limited to the mind alone (as was the case for reformed Protestants who viewed the Lord’s Supper as a simple reminder of a past event). Images, relics, tombs, ritual gestures—all these were part of a complex memorial culture, in which sacred realities remained perpetually present. By the late fifteenth century, it was difficult to avoid the dead’s urgent requests for remembrance. The wills of late medieval Cologne burghers were full of pious bequests. Wealthy testators sought to ensure not only that they would be commemorated in perpetuity, but also that prayers for their souls would be read in multiple churches and religious houses.16 The more masses one endowed, the safer one’s passage through purgatory. It was quite common for individual testators to hedge their bets, giving money to multiple institutions, lest one of the endowments fall into disuse.17 The desire of burghers to vouchsafe such intercession is evident in the popularity of confraternities during the late Middle Ages; these institutions enabled more modest towndwellers to pool their resources to secure prayers and memorial services after their death. The uses of medieval memoria, however, were not purely spiritual. At a time when secular fame and memory were deemed sinful and vainglorious, spiritual endowments and churchly memorials served as a means of social representation. There was no sharp division between religious and secular memory, and many dynastic and civic legends drew heavily on Christian symbolism. In the late

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medieval city, churches were the most important public spaces, and a well-placed altarpiece, gravestone, window, or spiritual foundation could attest to a family’s honor, wealth, and status.18 The church’s central role in mediating family memory is apparent in Hermann Weinsberg’s accounts of his own family’s commemorative practices. Long after his parents had died, he and his siblings continued to remember them on All Saints’ Day. Each year, on November 1, the surviving Weinsberg children gathered at the Carmelite monastery, where their parents were buried in the chapel dedicated to St. Joseph. An entry in Hermann’s Gedenkbuch from 1584 provides a detailed account of a typical All Saints’ Day.19 First, the family prayed at their parents’ grave, while Hermann’s younger brother Gottschalk lit a candle (graff kerzen). Hermann also set a candle and greens (groin krut) on the grave of a recently deceased young woman named Maria Luchelgins, for whom he had served as a guardian.20 After “vespers and vigils,” the group participated in a procession “with holy water.”21 Later that evening, the immediate family and kin gathered at the Haus Weinsberg for a festive meal among “good relatives.” Gottschalk had bought a hare for the occasion, while Hermann supplied several bottles of good wine. A fi re warmed the Weinsberg dining hall, where portraits of the Weinsberg parents, Christian and Sophia, and seven of the siblings hung on the wall.22 After the table was cleared, Hermann and his siblings “remembered” their parents and their recently deceased sister Catherine with a Pater Noster and Ave Maria. Those present at the meal also prayed for all “Christ believing” souls from the family who had died. On the following day, the Feast of All Souls, Hermann remembered his late wives and others whose commemoration had been entrusted to him, paying for candles to be lit at their graves.23 He then ate lunch at the Carmelite monastery, as a gesture of good will to the monks responsible for his parents’ memoria.24 Christian commemoration in Cologne usually followed a carefully specified timeline, with the greatest flurry of activity occurring in the fi rst year after an individual’s death. This, of course, was the period of greatest grief, but it was also the time when supplication for a soul in purgatory was most urgent. After his second wife, Drutgin, died on May 1, 1573, Hermann saw to it that all the ceremonies specified in her will were observed. On the evening of her death, four torches were set outside the house—four being the number allowed to “honorable” burghers, compared with the eight torches allowed to city-councillors and the nobility and the ten or twelve torches allowed to burghermeisters

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and other prominent men. 25 Two days later, a large procession accompanied the body from the “death house” (sterbhaus) to the parish church of St. Laurence, where she was buried with her parents and her fi rst husband and children. In the procession were members of the four mendicant orders, as well as choirs from three parish churches—St. Martin, St. Laurence, and St. Jacob. The funeral service took place two days later, with twenty-four masses said in her memory. For nine subsequent months, on the date of Drutgin’s death, masses were said at her grave, while beguines were hired to pray for her soul. Hermann also arranged for prayers to be read in her name in six parish churches throughout the year. An offering in Drutgin’s name was sent with one Sister Hilgin, who made a pilgrimage to Aachen. Finally, on the fi rst anniversary of his wife’s death, Hermann ordered a “very honorable and stately” ceremony in St. Laurence’s church—with five large candles, vigils, many masses, and four beguines to pray at the grave. Tallying up the total funeral costs for the year, Hermann arrived at the very large sum of 124 gulden and 10 albus. 26 After the somber rites of the fi rst year, commemoration settled into a routine pattern. The dead were usually remembered on All Saints’ Day and the anniversary of their death, especially if they had founded some sort of perpetual mass. Indeed, many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century testators hoped to ensure at least some sort of “eternal” remembrance within the church. While modest laity had to content themselves with simple funerals, wealthier burghers could afford the capital necessary to set up more splendid and lasting foundations. A perpetual mass, a scholarship for students, a special religious service, a fund for the poor, a preachership, income for a convent—such endowments were not only pious works, but were also meant to secure the memory of the founder.27 Hermann spoke favorably of burghers who had established convents and beguinages, “since the patrons and founders are remembered by the residents and their memoria remains there forever” (zu ewigen zeiten).28 Hermann’s own records attested to the power such bequests had to secure remembrance. In recounting his grandmother Maria’s death and burial in 1540, Hermann mentioned that she was buried in the middle of St. Jacob’s Church, next to the grave of Paul van Sichen, “who had endowed the Friday Mass of the Holy Cross and the Tenebrae and a fund to feed the twenty-four ‘house-poor’ (i.e., worthy poor) every Friday.”29 Often, men and women donated paintings and stained glass windows to the church in the hope that those who passed by would say a brief

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prayer for their souls. Hermann himself noted many informal moments when he was prompted to think of friends and family members who had died. These reminiscences were often imbued with sentimentality. On the tenth anniversary of Drutgin’s death, for instance, Hermann tenderly recalled her “jealous nature,” even though it had tormented him during her lifetime. Since her death, Hermann explained, he had not “touched” a woman, save for “innocent” public dances. This led him to joke that if Drutgin could witness his discretion from “that other world,” and if she were as “jealous” there as she had been on earth, she would certainly “rejoice” at his behavior.30 In 1590, when he was seventy-two, the trimming of ivy around the Haus Weinsberg prompted Hermann to remember his father, Christian, who had planted it. Though the vine had grown somewhat large, and its leaves blew into the house in the fall, the Weinsberg siblings had “allowed it to remain in honor and memory (zu gedechtnis und ehren) of our father.” (To Hermann, it was also a symbol of the future fecundity and prosperity of the lineage.)31 Indeed, in his writings, Hermann often recalled specific character traits or objects as a “memorial” to a particular person. The portraits of his parents that hung in the family house were particularly dear to him. In a letter to his heirs, he requested that the family portraits remain together in the Weinsberg hall—“as a memorial to us all.” The portraits, he explained to his heirs, could then be viewed “whenever you desire,” for “it is pleasant to remember elders through images and to pray to God for them.”32 Recollection was a ritualized act, honoring both God and those remembered. Hermann often concluded his memorial writings with an invocation of divine blessing, thinking of the descendants even as they would someday remember him, to the mutual benefit and salvation of all family members. Like a last will and testament, his writing itself was a way of reaching out from the grave, since his heirs would read his work only after his death. At the end of a letter to his future heir, Hermann wrote, “and now I commend you and all future housefathers of Weinsberg, together with all members of the house, to God the Almighty, that he might share his grace with you for all virtue here on earth and for eternal salvation in the next world, and I kindly ask that you will remember me fondly and pray to God for me” (und bidt fruntlich willt myner hie bei in allen goden gedencken und Godt vur mich bidden). 33 Though such instructions were perhaps more explicit than many burghers left for their descendants, they nonetheless capture the impulse behind much of late medieval memorial culture.

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There was, of course, a more macabre side to the memory of the dead, reminiscent of Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick!” This was perhaps inevitable in a Catholic city, where bones piled up within churches and churchyards. (During the sixteenth century, many Protestant cities, which abolished the cult of the dead, were free to move cemeteries to the outskirts of cities for hygienic reasons.)34 Because space for burial in Cologne was limited, the bones of old bodies were often moved into a charnel house to make room for the recently deceased. Wealthier families, such as the Weinsbergs, could afford family graves within churches. To maximize space, whenever a new family member was buried, the bones of the grave’s previous resident were gathered up and laid in a small chest, which was placed back in the tomb. At times, descendants were careful to keep track of the bones of their ancestors. In 1540, when Hermann’s grandmother Maria died, she was buried in a new grave in St. Jacob’s church, since the grave of her late husband, Gottschalk (d. 1502), was about to be destroyed during the renovation of the building. Hermann’s father, Christian, who was in charge of the renovations, made sure that Gottschalk’s bones and those of the couple’s deceased children were transferred to a chest and laid with Maria in the new grave. Gottschalk’s skull, meanwhile, was set prominently in the churchyard’s ossuary (beinhaus). 35 Similar practices were followed in religious houses. In 1580, when a nun in the Maria Bethlehem convent died, she was buried in the grave of Hermann’s own sisters, Agnes (d. 1541) and Feigin (d. 1567). According to Hermann, his sister Feigin was “still whole, but decomposed.” Her bones were gathered up and placed in a special receptacle; her skull, however, was washed by Hermann’s neice Beilgin, who removed the hair and placed it with the bones but set the skull itself on a “stone cross” in the middle of the churchyard, “where there stood the skulls of several former nuns, whom she had known in life and could still name now.”36 Obviously, a good deal of confusion could result from mismarked graves. Hermann himself recoiled in horror at the pranks that some men played with skulls, including drinking from them.37 Anyone who visited a churchyard or ossuary, especially when any sort of digging was taking place, would have been greeted by a spectacle of anonymous bones—not unlike the Dance of the Dead depicted in contemporary paintings and woodcuts. Hermann himself lamented that no one knew where the bones of once prominent men lay.38 To ensure that no one in his own family would suffer the same fate, he was a conscientious

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tender of graves during his own lifetime. In 1551, for instance, Hermann commissioned a new stone for the grave of his grandparents; it bore the family’s insignia and an epitaph.39 In addition to serving as a means of social display, such markers had a pious purpose. “So far as pictures, insignia, and epitaphs are concerned,” Hermann once wrote, “I believe that, as long as they are meant for devotion rather than ambition, they are not only permitted, but also help the dead.” This was a traditional Catholic understanding of memory. “When relatives and friends view the graves and signs,” explained Hermann, “they are thereby prompted and made mindful to offer their prayers for the deceased to the Lord.” For this reason, desecrating Christian graves was a gross sacrilege. “The graves of the dead are houses.” Anyone who vandalized a grave or stole its decorations would be “punished harshly for such transgressions.”40 In his last will and testament, Hermann laid down specific rules for the observance of his own memoria. Like most Cologne testaments, his will of 1557 began with a prayer that his soul might be brought into the “bosom of eternal peace” (in den schoiß des ewigenn fredenß). Though his corpse was destined for the ground, he commended his soul to “God the Almighty, our creator and redeemer, Mary his blessed mother, and all the heavenly host.” His own burial place would be with his fi rst wife, Weisgin, under the “clock tower” of St. Jacob’s Church, “directly in front of the altar.”41 For the specifics of his commemoration, Hermann referred to the will that he and Weisgin had written together in 1554. The joint testament specified that the survivor would ensure that the deceased was buried “with vigils, masses, commendations, and other good works.” But the will also established an “annual memorial,” to be said in St. Jacob’s church “to the praise of God and the salvation of both their souls and the souls of their dear relations.” To fund this perpetual mass and memorial service, the couple had set aside one hundred gold gulden, which would produce an annual rental income of four gold gulden. Knowing that such endowments often went amiss, Hermann and Weisgin specifically admonished the pastor and churchwardens of St. Jacob to ensure that the memorial was “founded and established.” An additional twenty thaler were set aside for a gravestone, epitaph, and altarpiece.42 The image was completed by Barthel Bruyn the Younger in 1556. Painted in the realistic style of the Renaissance and set off by a gilded frame, the altarpiece’s central panel showed Hermann and Weisgin (with their burgher insignia) kneeling piously before Christ on the cross, while

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John the Baptist and Mary interceded for them. The wings depicted Moses and Abraham, surrounded by the four evangelists. The models for all these saints were relatives and acquaintances of the couple.43 Hermann’s brothers Christian and Gottschalk, for instance, provided the faces for two of the evangelists. In his manual of household governance (the Declarationboich), Hermann explained these provisions in more detail. The memorial service at St. Jacob’s was to be “perpetually endowed” (ewichlich fundeirt) and observed faithfully. It was to be held each year over the course of three days at the beginning of May. On the fi rst of the month, a painter and stone-carver were to appear at the grave, pray for its occupants, and perform any necessary restoration or cleaning. On the second day, Mass would be sung with two priests, the sextant, and the schoolmaster and students of St. Jacob’s. Those attending would include the executors of Hermann’s will, the parish churchwardens and overseers, and the neighborhood’s twenty-four “house” poor, all of whom were to “pray for the salvation” (selen selicheit) of the couple, their parents, and all their relatives. On the third day, the memorial rites would be concluded with a “solemn Mass” in honor of Christ’s Holy Cross, sung by students and accompanied by the organ. In return for their presence, all participants were to receive monetary gifts. The epitaph on Hermann’s gravestone was to read “In the year 15—, on the day of—, died the Honorable, Learned Hermann von Weinsberg, a Licentiate of Law and a Churchwarden of St. Jacob’s. May God be merciful to him.” If others were buried with him in the future, special care was to be taken not to obscure his gravestone or insignia. His name, moreover, was to be read from the pulpit of St. Jacob’s four times a year, with the request that congregants pray for his soul. And after each meal, the future members of the Weinsberg household were to pray for the souls of Hermann, his parents, his wives, and all deceased kin.44 Though Hermann may have been a bit punctilious in programming his memorial service, his requests were not unusual for a respectable burgher. During the later Middle Ages, many laypersons were eager to endow “eternal” masses, so that they might not be forgotten, nor their souls left to languish in purgatory.45 In an age that frowned upon blatant claims to secular fame, church memorials transformed social representation into a good and holy work. Hermann himself protested that he had not promoted his grave and memory for the “sake of idle glory,” but rather that “through the renewal of my grave and the memory of my name,” those who passed by might be “all the sooner prompted

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to pray to God the Lord for me and my kin.” Even church memorials, after all, could be established out of vanity rather than piety.46 By the time he had written his will, Hermann had other reasons to be concerned about accusations of vainglory. Not entirely satisfied with ecclesiastical memory, he had developed a secret and somewhat immodest obsession with his worldly reputation and posterity.

The Alienation of Burgher Memory If Hermann Weinsberg had only endowed his churchly memorial, if he had not searched for other means to perpetuate his memoria, historians would know little about his life today. The Haus Weinsberg itself has not survived. The church of St. Jacob, the location of his gravesite, was destroyed in the nineteenth century. His gravestone has long since disappeared. All that survives of Hermann Weinsberg’s altarpiece is the central panel, which is located today in the Cologne City Museum.47 Though a fi ne example of Cologne Renaissance painting, the altarpiece panel itself reveals little about the lives of the figures it depicts. Despite a realistic style, the iconography in the painting is conventional. Two patrons, a middle-aged husband and wife, kneel with folded hands before Christ on the cross, while Mary and John the Evangelist stand ready to intercede for them. Although the format is traditional, the detail of the painting has a Renaissance realism. The patrons are lifelike, present at the foot of the cross, unlike the diminutive figures that hover on the margins of medieval altarpieces. The wife wears a wimple and stares across the painting. The husband, on the left, is stout, with a large, bushy red-brown beard and balding pate. He wears a long brown coat, lined with fur. He, too, looks impassively into the distance and, like his wife, is identified by the burgher family crest against his knees. Their clothing is respectable, but not ostentatious, indicating solid and respectable burghers. Their insignia are simple shields, in keeping with their status as town-dwellers. These are the only markers of identity in the painting, which simply depicts the pair as a pious, honorable couple. The most a casual viewer can conclude is that the patrons were wealthy enough to afford a modest altarpiece. Hermann Weinsberg himself had the uncanny prescience to realize the limitations of traditional memoria. As an academically trained lawyer, influenced by northern humanism, he had begun to develop an acute self-consciousness about his place in the wider world. Unless

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he acted decisively, his life would pass into oblivion. “Otherwise,” he wrote, “it would be as if we had never been.”48 But what more could an individual expect? In 1592, when he had reached the age of seventy-four, Hermann Weinsberg reflected on the transience of human life—a thought much on his mind in his later years. “I considered,” he wrote, “that all men are mortal, and that the body of man is transient (vergencklich), excepting the soul, which may live eternally with God in heaven.”49 Though Hermann was pious enough, the idea of heaven seems to have had little concrete reality for him. However much he may have looked forward to the afterlife, he wrote about it rarely. When he did mention it, he spoke obliquely of “the other world” (jhener welt) where the dead went. In his words, “one lets the dead dwell and enjoy themselves with the dead in the other world in heaven with our Father and Creator.”50 More pressing in his mind was survival in this world. About the forgotten families of Cologne’s past, Hermann acknowledged, “God may know their names to their salvation.” But this seemed a small consolation compared with the fate of begin forgotten. At times, Hermann’s fears of oblivion threatened to overwhelm all sense of continuity, in this world or the next. Thus, in 1592, after noting that an individual’s soul “may live eternally in heaven,” Hermann immediately turned his thoughts to melancholy reflections on his earthly future. Apart from his soul, “a man has nothing more than his name, and even if he leaves behind a good name, the name will die, if it is not renewed.” Names might last a while on gravestones, but they “wore out and disappeared over the long course of time.”51 Anxiety about oblivion and mortality, of course, was nothing new to European culture. In expressing his own concerns, Hermann Weinsberg drew on age-old vanitas motifs, which stressed the fragility and futility of worldly goods and pleasures.52 “All things are transient,” Hermann warned. Even the greatest glories of the past had come to ruin (zu bodem gangen). Indeed, the entire world would someday “pass away,” since “nothing temporal is eternal” (nichtz zitlichs ist ewich).53 About the great men of his own youth—emperors, kings, princes, bishops, prelates, counts, barons, mayors, doctors, officers, councilors, and “other splendid and good men and women” he had known—Hermann wondered wistfully “where are they now?” Though some of them were still living, “in the end they too must follow the others, for everyone is destined to go the way of all flesh.”54 Most medieval last wills and testaments contained the pious formulation that “nothing is more certain

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than the hour of death and nothing less certain than the hour thereof.”55 These were traditional themes, which helped individuals prepare for the disease, death, and loss that inevitably awaited them. In an age of high mortality and endless economic risk, such sayings had a cathartic effect, helping the soul strike a stance of calm resignation. More often than not, however, Hermann Weinsberg’s nascent historical awareness—his insecurity about his own obscurity—made it difficult for him to achieve such a stance. His work bears witness to a struggle to reconcile himself with oblivion. Even though Church teachings admonished him to rest content with a pious anonymity in the expectation of eternal bliss, he chafed at the thought of being forgotten. “When I am dead and buried, one will seldom think of me,” he complained. Such obscurity, of course, was the general destiny of humankind, and, rebuking himself for his own preoccupation with posterity, he was forced to admit that, unless some dispute or unusual occurrence prompted others to gossip, the deceased were “soon forgotten or little heeded, for who can remember them constantly?” (wer koin and darff irer auch stedich gedencken). If there was any consolation in this, it was in the fact that “there were so many thousand persons of high and low estate who were once full of merit and who are now forgotten.” He tried to adopt a stoical attitude towards death. “Why should I desire to console myself with a few more uncertain days or place my hope in long life?” he asked late in life. “If I die, then I am dead, and will no longer see and hear what I don’t like to see and hear.”56 Such resignation, however, often eluded Hermann. “What good is all your property and all that you have done here on the earth,” he demanded in 1562, “if it is buried with you and your memory disappears among your descendants?”57 Observation had taught Hermann Weinsberg that oblivion was the fate of most burghers, including those who had entrusted their memory to the Church. Though a dedicated Catholic layman, he lamented that townsmen had few forms of memory proper to themselves. Pious bequests may have served their particular purpose, but they were inadequate to guarantee the full remembrance of donors. Hermann was particularly troubled by the scant traces that Cologne men and women had left behind. “In churches and houses,” he explained, “one finds old paintings and windows commissioned by prominent people who died not long ago.” Such relics, however, were indecipherable fragments, which had an effect opposite of the donors’ original intent. Where they were meant to commemorate, these relics instead made one all the

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more aware of the individual’s absence. According to Hermann, “one cannot tell who their blood relatives are, where their bones lie, where they lived, or where their great property has gone to.” The result was oblivion, at least in this world. “If the paintings had not survived,” Hermann explained, “so these persons would have fallen from memory, as if they had never been on earth.”58 As a parish churchwarden, Hermann had seen too many instances when ecclesiastical memorials had fallen into disrepair or disuse. To be sure, he applauded men and women who had endowed masses in St. Jacob’s Church, including individuals from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose names were still preserved on an old “memorial table” (Memorien taiffel). “They performed a praiseworthy work in establishing their memorials,” he avowed, “so that they are remembered even today in honor and blessedness.” And if they had not performed these pious works of memory, “their names would have been long forgotten.”59 But his own experience as a churchwarden and civic officer taught him about the confusion that could reign where public records were not well kept: It irks me that so much is founded That does not remain as it was grounded, But is blindly strewn and forever gone If mischief to rents and one’s last will is done.60

Hermann expressed concern that foundations “in churches and cloisters are often abused, and endowed masses, memorials, and donations are not kept, sometimes used for other ends.” Indeed, the “dangers” of “standing by the church” became even more pronounced in an age of religious uncertainty, when rumors about iconoclasm in the Netherlands raised fears that Cologne’s richly endowed churches might be similarly ransacked.61 Increasingly, it seemed unwise for town-dwellers to entrust their commemoration entirely to “strangers.” But what was the alternative? Traditionally, the most enduring forms of memory were institutional and corporate. Memory adhered to particular houses, churches, corporations, confraternities, and guilds. In addition to memorial objects, whether religious or secular, such institutions often had their own archives, with founding documents, records, letters, and historical information. As a parish churchwarden, Hermann was himself a careful custodian of the records of St. Jacob’s. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, he not only brought order to the parish archive, but he also began to compose a new, more

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detailed Memorialbuch, to prevent any further confusion.62 The survival of corporate memory was intimately connected with the survival of particular institutions. Not only that, but memory was itself embodied in particular corporate bodies, which bound together their members in a larger, transhistorical union. Medieval memoria posited a real (rather than purely mental) connection between the mind remembering and the thing remembered. When Christians gathered to commemorate Christ’s death in the Eucharist, the priestly ritual transformed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This ritual was not merely commemorative; it was a true reenactment of an original event, a “real presence.” Likewise, the full power and personality of the saints continued to reside in their bones and relics. In Cologne, the communion of saints was visible in the many graves, paintings, and commemorative altars that clustered within churches. By purchasing a gravesite near an altar, a testator could continue to share in the power of the Mass and the prayers of the Christian community even after death.63 Similarly, the unity of a great lineage was not merely symbolic; it was embodied in the “blood” of the heirs. In honoring ancestors, one was reminding oneself of one’s own identity. The ancestors continued to be present in the lives of their offspring. Thus, when he began writing in the 1540s and 1550s, Hermann viewed memory as more than simple recollection. It had a substantial, almost metaphysical, quality. The identity of a family was not merely lodged in the consciousness of future family members; it was embodied in the real, transhistorical existence of the lineage. Hermann hoped that his own house might be “an eternal gathering (eyn ewige vergaderung) of persons and goods under the name and insignia of Weinsberg.”64 Conscious recollection merely reminded one of a real unity that already existed. To use the philosophical language of his day, we might say that Hermann Weinsberg wanted to be a “realist”—he wanted to believe that the Weinsberg name and identity had a substantial existence, one that encompassed all the particular things within the house.65 The problem, in Hermann’s view, was that burghers lacked the institutional stability to support such memories and identities. He felt acutely the gap between the real presence of corporate memory and the alienation and oblivion that lay at the heart of burgher life. In his view, the commercialization of urban real estate was a corrosive force, which precluded strong family traditions and memory. As early as the 1540s, Hermann lamented that few burgher houses remained in

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the same family for more than one or two generations.66 The contrast between religious houses and bourgeois lineages was particularly stark: “The ancient houses of cloisters and chapters usually remain inalienably with them, while [bourgeois] lineages die and are ruined, their property divided, sold, and transferred into the hands of strangers.”67 Hermann frequently complained about the “alienation” of burgher property into “strange hands” (frembde hende). Indeed, his entire plan was an attempt to secure his posterity against an otherwise inevitable dissolution. He was troubled whenever family property, both moveable and immoveable, was sold and divided, and he never tired of recounting instances when debt or negligence had led to the loss of a patrimonial inheritance: Whatever is not solidly founded Seldom stays as it was grounded. It is soon split, sold, and endangered And comes through many ways to strangers.68

In 1582, Hermann filled four pages with accounts of the various ways in which Cologne families had seen their patrimonial goods “alienated”—through marriage, inheritance, bankruptcy, and the like. Such property transfers were horrifying to Hermann because they meant the destruction of any institution that could sustain family memory.69 But the alienation of property was also a symbol of loss in general—of the alienating effects of time. Without stable family traditions, ancestors were soon forgotten. Few townsmen could trace their descent back more than a hundred years. Looking forward, Hermann realized that unless he founded his family, he too would be forgotten in time. Even his voluminous writings could not change the fact that the “living preoccupied themselves with the living.”70 The city made absence palpable. Hermann expressed astonishment that the recently deceased were so quickly forgotten. He found traces of their lives in churches, but could not discover anything further about them. If he recoiled at the transfer of property into the “hands of strangers,” it was in part because of the close anonymity of urban life. As he surveyed the city, Hermann was constantly confronted by signs of human lives that could not be known. The back of his house Cronenberg was built into the city’s old Roman walls. In the 1570s, workmen renovating the house discovered an old coin: “The stonemasons showed me a brass penny, small, very rusted, on which one could barely see two small pictures. They had found it in the middle of the walls, so it should be as old as

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the walls themselves.”71 As a councilor, churchwarden, and civic officer, Hermann was constantly examining contracts and public records, where he found fragments of past existences about which little more could be learned. Even the public records provided few clues. The most extensive burgher archives were the “property registers” (Schreinsbücher), which kept track of real estate within the city—both houses and heritable rents. Whenever “immoveable” property was sold, the sale had to be registered with the appropriate Schrein. These were usually sparse entries, noting the house or rent transferred, along with the names of the parties involved. Such records were meant primarily to prevent property disputes; in the fluid urban economy they aimed to provide public proof of ownership. If, for instance, some stranger emerged to claim an annual rent—say, of four gulden—on a house one owned, one could consult the Schreinsbücher to confi rm or disprove this. Yet these records themselves were often disputed, especially since the records of various Schreinsbücher were neither systematized nor centralized.72 And such public archives, of course, were scarcely full records of past lives. “One may fi nd in the Schrein,” wrote Hermann, “who owned this or that house, but one cannot know for certain whether they simply possessed it, whether they built it, or whether they were born or died in it.”73 In other words, one could not know what relationship individuals had to the property they owned, beyond that of mere possession. In this respect, most of the houses in Cologne were blanks; they bore few traces of the family histories they had witnessed. This is not to say that the sixteenth-century city produced the same anomie as the modern metropolis; most individuals were bound up in a dense network of kin, neighbors, and associates. Yet in any neighborhood, and especially in the artisanal streets of St. Jacob, there was a steady flow of “strangers” who moved in and out of houses. In 1578, when he penned a brief history of his own neighborhood, Hermann noted that several houses had changed hands more than once during his own lifetime; indeed, he acknowledged that he scarcely knew several of his neighbors.74 Likewise, in walking the streets on his way to the Town Hall, Hermann would have daily encountered faces he did not know, even if he could discern their occupation or status from their dress. Though this experience was modest by modern standards, Hermann was nonetheless disturbed by the rapid circulation of goods and property, which prevented memory from being attached to any particular place or thing. As he complained, “Testators and all ‘alienators’

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(alienerer) often bring it into strange hands, so that the blood does not remain forever with the dwelling, but rather is divorced and divided from it—the blood from the dwelling and the dwelling from the blood.” Hermann attributed such neglect to a lack of family piety. “I observe that many people have little forethought or love for their blood or for the dwelling of their ancestors.”75 Unlike the aristocracy and clergy, burghers seemed to have no secure sites of memory, no stable institutions where the memory of an individual or group could reside. Many of the anxieties that led Hermann to look beyond ecclesiastical memoria were similar to those that had drawn many generations of burghers to it. In some ways, the “traditional” system of priestly intercession was already a response to urban mobility and its attendant disruptions. In the fluid world of the city, where family traditions were tenuous, the need to secure prayers for kindred souls became more urgent. Mobility disrupted the more “timeless,” unreflexive forms of remembrance that characterized an oral, agrarian world—in which individuals felt securely bound up in larger corporate entities. With the Black Death and subsequent plagues came horrific images of mass, anonymous burials, and of corpses thrown out on the street for fear of contagion. Such crises threatened the bonds of memory and fi lial piety. They also made individuals more anxious about death and salvation, fueling the frenetic activities of late medieval penitents and leading to a surge in endowed masses and pious bequests. Within the city, the urban clergy served as professional memorializers; the Church was the chief repository of individual and family memory. And yet even as the Church proffered penitential remedies, its doctrines of purgatory and prayers for the dead added incentive to secure a posthumous remembrance. In confraternities, men who might not be able to afford elaborate memorials on their own pooled their resources to ensure remembrance of their names and prayers for their souls; they “refused to allow the dead to be abandoned without prayer.”76 Wealthier burghers established perpetual masses in their names. Such “eternal” endowments served as insurance against an indeterminate posterity; vastly inflated reckonings of purgatorial time reflected the diff use unease at the heart of late medieval piety, the fear of being lost and forgotten once one ventured beyond the grave.77 Despite asking for prayers for his soul, Hermann Weinsberg saw the entire ecclesiastical system as something of a halfway measure, inadequate to guarantee the true memory of the laity. The chief problem was that it was not “proper” to burghers. It had no grounding in

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actual burgher houses, but was rather controlled by the clergy. Hermann wanted to return to an idealized, full-bodied notion of memoria, in which the living were bound up in a larger, purposeful unity. If aristocratic and clerical houses possessed this, why could not a burgher house? Hermann Weinsberg was particularly concerned with the towndweller’s relation to time. Giving voice to complaints that would be echoed by commentators on bourgeois life in subsequent centuries, he lamented the ways in which commoners seemed to pay attention only to the present moment, neglecting their histories. For Hermann, the lack of a past and future signaled the absence of a full identity—indeed, it made present-minded men little better than “beasts.” Hermann thus took great comfort in the thought of being linked to past and future generations through memory. Following Augustine, he emphasized the relative nonexistence of the present moment. “The present is now at hand,” he wrote, “and if one views the present time, it is no more than a moment long (ein augenblick lank), for after a moment the next comes and the fi rst is gone.”78 One of his goals in writing, then, was to overcome the transience of the present moment—to gather the past, present, and future of his family together. Hermann prayed fervently that the Haus Weinsberg might fi nd union with the Highest Good, which was God, and so share (however meagerly) in God’s eternal present. Of course, because temporal things were subject to constant change, the family could only fi nd “perpetuity” and not full “eternity,” which was beyond time.79 Nonetheless, Hermann hoped that commemoration might bind the ancestors and descendants together in a real and lasting presence. In its ideal form, memory was less recollection of a past than participation in a higher, timeless unity—in which past, present, and future were mystically joined.80 Particularly appalling was the apparent lack of concern among burghers for their ancestors and descendants. In Hermann’s view, most townsfolk were content to satisfy their desires, ignoring the higher ends of honor and piety. It was an attitude he sought to uproot from the thinking of future Weinsbergs. The person who did not delight in his ancestry was “a complete block of wood” (eyn gar hultzen bloch). Such a person “thinks neither of the past nor the future, but rather like the beasts, asses, and donkeys, which do only their present work and eat, drink, and sleep and do not trouble themselves with anything else.”81 In this vision, it was memory—and the identity it created—that set humans apart from other creatures. Elsewhere, Hermann spoke frankly

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to those heirs who might be tempted to forget the family tradition. “Is then everything for the sake of selfish gain or the stomach?” (umb deß geitzs nutzs oder bauch nutzs), he asked angrily. “So help me God, those who would say so are coarse fellows, who do not understand the benefits of honor, decorum, teaching, and memory.”82 Hermann Weinsberg was not content with the bare, unknowing survival of his “blood” through time. Hermann’s private scribbling gave him the chance to lay claim to “an ancestry and origins.” To prove that one had not come “from nowhere”—such a boon would embolden the heirs and vindicate their honor. Thus, Hermann envied noble and clerical houses for their enduring institutions and memories even more than for their status. The stable corporate memories enjoyed by the first two estates seemed an antidote to the oblivion that awaited commoners, to the dissolution that he feared so much. Such memoria seemed capable of binding together the contingencies of his everyday existence into a timeless identity. In seeking to construct such a memory, however, Hermann only exacerbated the anxious historical awareness that he sought so earnestly to quell. His exceptionally self-conscious attempt to create a family legend made him all the more aware that the transhistorical unity he yearned for was a fiction, preserved only in the fragile paper pages of his secret archive.

Constructing a Family Memory In the early 1550s, shortly after his father’s death, Hermann Weinsberg began to forge a written memory for his family. Then in his midthirties, he compiled a bulky family chronicle and genealogy titled Das Boich Weinsberg. Though “raw” and incomplete, the work was not unlike the splendid genealogies and housebooks that German patrician families commonly commissioned. In it, Hermann claimed descent from an ancient and unbroken succession of “housefathers” and touted the benefits of a rich family memory. Hermann often presented his genealogical “research” as a heroic work. From the dark obscurity of the past he had resurrected and “brought to the light of day” the stories of his ancestors.83 As detailed in Das Boich Weinsberg, the history of the Weinsberg lineage was a providential story of survival and continuity, despite numerous setbacks and adversities. Hermann told in turn the story of each of the family’s housefathers, of which he himself was the twenty-fourth. In

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Hermann’s story, God had seen to it that the Weinsberg name and identity had survived unchanged for centuries. Unlike most burghers, the Weinsberg family’s past was now neither anonymous nor obscure. Future Weinsbergs could take comfort in their undying house. In reviving his ancestor’s memory, Hermann was overcoming the darkness that usually shrouded the origins of commoners. Against the confused and contingent identities of burghers, Hermann asserted the integrity and self-sufficiency of his family’s past. To make the identity of this “blood” as clear and distinct as possible, he invented a masterful origin myth for his family. The family’s alleged founder, an eighth-century foundling named Aramond, was the illegitimate son of a noble German daughter and a young Roman aristocrat, who was traveling with a papal retinue through German lands. Thus, in one deft move, Hermann placed his family at the very origins of German culture—at the confluence of Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions. And yet at the same time, the family’s founder was sui generis—the clear origin of a new line. Aramond’s mother, fearing scandal, gave birth to the child secretly and ordered it to be placed in a vineyard (weinberg), in hopes that a kind stranger might fi nd it. As fate would have it, her brother discovered the infant while hunting and gave it to his sister to be raised, though no one in the family suspected she was the mother. Since that time, Aramond’s identity had been handed down intact by a long succession of housefathers. This was the identity that Hermann sought to preserve as he wrote. The “Weinsberg Book” intertwined the family’s history with events from aristocratic, Imperial, and sacred history. The name Aramond recalled the legendary Frankish king Pharamond, whose life was detailed in Trithemius’s Frankenchronik. But Hermann also claimed that his forebears were instrumental in Emperor Frederick II’s siege of Milan and the arrival of the relics of the Holy Three Kings in Cologne.84 Not surprisingly, these stories built on medieval chivalric traditions. Hermann drew colored portraits of each ancestor, many decked out in armor. Attentive to the details of the chronicles he read, Hermann used his portraits to imagine changes in fashion over the course of eight centuries. He also padded the book with symbolic capital—coats of arms, expositions of the family name, allegories, acronyms, letters from his father, and meditations on the nature of the “house.” The latter portions of the narrative ingeniously charted the lineage’s alleged transformation from a great noble house into an honorable burgher family in Cologne.85

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Hermann explained the methods and motives behind this memorial project in a remarkable preface to the Boich Weinsberg, which he composed in 1560, after fi nishing the bulk of the book. Written as a letter to the future “housefather” of Weinsberg, the preface began with an apology for his having spent so much time on what might seem a frivolous undertaking to others. Aware that his genealogy might be deemed unseemly and overreaching, Hermann suggested that the Boich Weinsberg had been a means of passing the time. “Human nature can never be idle,” Hermann explained, and even in times of rest, it had to “begin something as a pastime” (etwaß vur zeit verdrieff anfangen). Where other men “found their enjoyment” in “games, singing, drinking, walking, listening to news, socializing, working with their hands,” Hermann himself wondered what he might begin that would not only be “pleasurable,” but also “honorable” and “useful.” And what more honorable way was there to pass the time than to “research” and “remember” the origins of his family? Such work, he professed, had been an immense pleasure—a “rest and amusement” (eyn raw und kurtzweil). According to a popular saying, “willing labor is a rest (rast), forced labor is a burden” (last). 86 But Hermann was also keen to prove that the family history was no idle pastime. He offered a lengthy argument for the benefits of genealogy, reciting traditional justifications of memory and history writing. Why should one remember one’s ancestors? In the fi rst place, such commemoration was an expression of filial piety, a means of fulfilling the commandment to honor one’s father and mother. “It occurred to me,” explained Hermann, “that through God’s grace I had received body and life, blood and property, honor and virtue from my ancestors.” Not only had his own parents conceived, fed, clothed, raised, and married him, but their parents had done the same, successively down through the generations. The quality of such care could vary, of course, and Hermann praised his own parents for nourishing him “with care and industry” and for raising him “in the fear of God and good doctrine.” Yet while some parents did more for their offspring and others less, all children were “obliged to show their parents honor and gratitude.” And there were few “more fitting or pleasant” ways to show ancestors thanks than “to renew their old, darkened memories and histories and to bring them once again to the light of day, so that their descendents might be moved to think the best of them and pray to God for their souls.” Honoring the ancestors—this was one of the oldest and most venerable forms of human memory, and Hermann

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claimed to take great delight in it. “The more I thought of my forebears,” he explained, “the more and more pleasure and joy I took in their memories.”87 The pleasure Hermann took in his ancestry had as much to do with his own identity as it had to do with the ancestors themselves. This was evident in his justification for commemorating only his male line. He admitted that there was some arbitrariness in following only paternal descent; after all, an individual’s full heritage included forebears in both the male and female lines. Such a method, however, would endlessly multiply the number of ancestors and quickly make his research futile, since each child was born to two parents, and so on. If all these ancestors were remembered, the family history would “divide as abundantly as the roots of a tree.” Though Hermann was eager not to bypass his “female line” altogether, he decided to focus chiefly on his agnatic line, so as to “avoid multiplicity” (mangfalticheit zu vermeiden). 88 Of course, it was not only pragmatic considerations that led him to this decision. The history that mattered to Hermann was the history of the male line, which bore his family name and identity. His entire work was governed by the assumption that only men could pass on that which was “proper” to a family—its distinguishing marks and “qualities” (eigentschaff t). 89 For many sixteenth-century authors, memory was overwhelmingly patrilineal—it was the history of traditions handed down from man to man. Thus, the Boich Weinsberg was a history of the twenty-three “housefathers” of Weinsberg. Each housefather, explained Hermann to his heir, “represents, embodies, and rules the properties of my paternal house” and “maintains unharmed its name and heraldry.”90 In other words, in extending the memory of his paternal line, Hermann rooted the particulars of his own identity in a providential and distinguished descent. In late medieval and early modern Cologne, it was common for surnames to change, as individuals took them from sources as varied as their occupations, their dwellings, their streets, their places of origin, or distinctive physical characteristics. Hermann, by contrast, was adamant that his name and identity were not accidental products of urban mobility, but rather were bound up in a meaningful, purposeful history. In keeping with noble models he emulated, Hermann highlighted the “benefit” memory would bring to the family. Memoria served the larger spiritual or political community—it was a goad to piety, honor, and virtue. The genealogy would remind the heirs of their honor; it would inculcate virtue and piety; it would foster concern for the

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“common good” of the family; and it would provide useful examples and lessons.91 By making the splendid “nature” of the family visible, the ancestry would also redound to the family’s credit. “In reputation,” Hermann explained to his heirs, “you and my heirs will derive not a little honor and praise from this book, since it shows that you are descended from legitimate, honorable, pious people (ehelichen, ehrparen, fromen leuthen). From this, it can be assumed that you walk in their ways and gladly emulate their virtues.” The Boich Weinsberg would give the heirs “no small joy and pleasure,” since it traced the family’s roots back several hundred years, which “not many people are able to do,” including many of the “great and rich.” The story of the lineage testified to the “fickleness” of Fortune and the wonders of providence, showing “the transformations that have miraculously come to pass within our lineage” but also “how precarious things have been at times.” The knowledge that the lineage had survived for hundreds of years would embolden the heirs that it could survive in the future, even in the worst of times.92 None of these benefits were cause for pride or complacency. Future housefathers were to expect bad times, so that they might “act and govern themselves accordingly.” Descendants were not to give themselves airs because of their genealogy. “Haughtiness and boasting are vicious,” Hermann wrote. The proper use of the genealogy was to “report its content to your children and friends properly and modestly, without boasting.” “Be measured in this,” Hermann wrote, “so that you and I are not mocked, abused, or ridiculed by strangers, but rather that God the Lord (to whom alone all honor belongs) might be thereby praised.” The history of the family was full of admonitions and examples. It proved that God could bring families low just as quickly as he could raise them up. The stories of the ancestors taught “good housekeeping” (gutte haußhaltung), showing “what they have to be on their guard against and what they should do and not do.” The heirs were to “perceive and learn what honor and benefit your ancestors had from their virtues and piety, as well as what harm and shame they received from their vices.” An illustrious legacy meant little without virtue.93 Hermann, of course, had other reasons for urging such restraint. His ancient noble past was not only wholly legendary, but also far more illustrious than a burgher could reasonably claim. Elsewhere, he wrote more frankly about the Boich Weinsberg: “Although several people will make fun of it and pay it little heed, I believe that secretly it will be of great value, and if this does not happen immediately, it may happen

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over the course of a long time.” In other words, the book was part of a long-term project to elevate and promote the Weinsberg lineage. In missives to the future housefather, Hermann apologized that the work was “rough” and “uncorrected,” that it was “not perfect or complete.”94 It had been “very roughly compiled” (gar raw zu samen pracht) and “incorrect concepts and ideas” were “at various times gathered and thrown together.”95 Even more candid was the acknowledgment that “although much that is written in the book is truly true (in der warheit wair ist), so I have added much that is made up (gedicht), as poets and chronicle writers in the past are alleged to have done.”96 Thus did Hermann acknowledge the fictitious nature of his family history. In apologizing for the rough state of the Boich Weinsberg, Hermann argued that it was simply “material” from which future housefathers could commission a more “perfect” and fitting family history. To give the book a greater air of authenticity, Hermann urged his heirs to hire a scribe or scholar, “well read in histories and cosmographies,” to clean up the volume, correcting its many “flaws and omissions,” and transferring it to parchment. An illuminator, meanwhile, could transform Hermann’s drawings of chivalric ancestors into something more artful. While Hermann had served as the scribe and historian of his own house, gathering his rough notes on simple paper, he nonetheless hoped that his heirs might be able to afford the luxury of hiring a “learned man” to commemorate the history of the family. (In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this was something that only wealthy merchants and patricians could afford to do.) “You should then have this book expensively bound,” Hermann instructed his successors, “in such a form that it might last for a long time.” The housefather was to see to it that the book was “expensively decorated with silver or brass on all pages” and that it was furnished with a clasp and lock, so that “not everyone can read in it, but only those whom one allows.” The book was to be secured on a chain, so that it would never leave the Haus Weinsberg.97 Indeed, it was to remain “for all eternity” in the house, where it would serve as a source of private consolation and inspiration, reassuring the obscure and middling Weinsbergs that they had a providential destiny.98 For the time being, the book was to remain a private treasure, for the perusal of Weinsbergs only. Someday, when the lineage grew great because of Hermann’s careful planning, the housefather would unveil the Boich Weinsberg as a public confi rmation of the lineage’s ancient pedigree. Until then, however, the housefather was to “keep it secret

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as much as possible.”99 In effect, Hermann had domesticated the elaborate public memoria of the noble family, turning it into a private pleasure and “pastime” (kurzweill). Paper and secrecy allowed him to enact the rituals and appropriate the trappings of noble memory. In turn, the memory of the “house” provided him with two imaginary audiences. The fi rst was the entire family—past, present, and future. Just as Hermann wrote letters to future, unknown descendants, so he also imagined the ancestors watching his work with warmth and affection. The second audience, of course, was the social world—the theater of rank and status. On the one hand, he feared the “mockery” of strangers; he often argued testily against imagined detractors, who suggested that he was “too low and unpropertied,” “too vain,” too inclined to fiction and fantasy.100 On the other hand, Hermann dreamed about how others would marvel at the antiquity, virtue, and memory of his lineage. “Many among the upper nobility,” he proudly wrote, “do not know how to trace their lineages back so high and so far.”101 Thanks to paper, Hermann could bring both of these traditional audiences into his small study. The dense pages of Das Boich Weinsberg betray a deep loneliness— a need for acknowledgment and recognition. In the secret pages of his family archive, Hermann showed signs of a bad conscience whenever he reflected on his grandiose claims. In a candid self-description, he confessed, “I usually spoke the truth, but for the sake of honor and advantage, I often lied and fabricated, in speech and writing.”102 Worried that other burghers might think his Boich Weinsberg vain and unseemly— far too lofty for an obscure burgher family—Hermann urged future housefathers to “instruct the members of the household to act modestly with regards to this book, and not to boast or elevate themselves too highly because of it, as if it were a veritable gospel” (nit so hoich dar uff erhohen, beroemen, und bestain als were es gar eyn Evangelium).103 Not “a veritable gospel”—such nagging doubts linger at the margins of all Hermann’s apologies and justifications for his work. Though he was eager to believe his legends, Hermann knew that he had invented his family’s past. In his Gedenkbuch, the chronicle of his own life and times that he composed after he wrote the Boich Weinsberg, Hermann displayed a sharp concern for accuracy, disparaging those who distorted the truth out of self-interest. Though he could not always fi nd reliable sources, his method nonetheless made him confident that his accounts of contemporary events were as accurate as possible. “Although now and then something that I have brought into

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this book [i.e., the Gedenkbuch] may be lacking,” he wrote, “there are not many errors of which I am conscious.” Thus, “everything truly happened (in der warheit ergangen) as I describe it.”104 Like his intellectual hero Erasmus, Hermann often lamented the “vanity” of contemporary authors; he was skeptical of superstitions and legends. “I write nothing other than what I can most truly fi nd out.”105 Such assertions are strewn throughout Hermann’s Gedenkbuch. And yet in the Boich Weinsberg, Hermann invented a highly implausible descent. Even more, he attempted to pass this fiction off as the truth, claiming that he had assiduously researched his genealogy, interviewing his parents and relatives, examining books and paintings passed down within the family, and scouring “histories, chronicles, public archives, old letters, account books, missives, and other writings,” as well as “stained glass windows, paintings, epitaphs, gravestones, seals, and stamps.” As Hermann explained, he had immediately written down whatever “credible” (gleubichs) information he could obtain about his ancestors, “adding my own thoughts in several places, wherever it seemed in accordance with the necessary assumptions and the truth” (dar es dem noitwendigen vermothen und warheit gemeiß erschein).106 But how could such transparent falsifications coexist with Hermann’s otherwise keen historical awareness? Did Hermann consciously fabricate his past, or had he come to believe in memories of his own making? Historical fabrication was not uncommon in Renaissance Europe— especially when so many wealthy families were willing to pay richly for ancestries that might enhance their status. If anything, the Renaissance valorization of antiquity only made families all the more eager to root their histories in the distant past. The Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519) sought to prove his primacy by tracing his family’s lineage all the way back to Noah; other noble families were content with a Roman ancestry; and late fi fteenth-century scholars sought to trace the history of the Franks back to Troy.107 Thus, even as humanism undermined ancient and medieval legends, there was an upsurge in “historical reconstruction” with mythical overtones.108 As authors became increasingly aware of how legends and myths were made, they gained a certain degree of conscious control over the production of historical memory. Conversely, more sophisticated forgeries challenged scholars to develop better critical tools.109 If such dualities reached a new level of complexity among scholars and philologists, so they could play themselves out somewhat more crudely in the mind of a middling burgher and amateur historian.

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Hermann himself expressed a naïve wonder at the ability of writing to salvage the past from oblivion—not only his own past, but also the history of his ancestors. Thus, the same impulse that led him to record the events of his day accurately for posterity also made him eager to illuminate the darkness of the past—to “renew the old, obscure memories” of his ancestors.110 If writing had the power to “renew, restore, and resurrect that which is forgotten and dead,” then was it also not appropriate to “gather and write down in a book” the history of the Haus Weinsberg, so that it would “not be entirely forgotten, but prove all the more enduring”? Likewise, Hermann asked, “who would be able tell about our ancestors lives and histories only through oral transmission (uis bloissem nachsagen), if they were not secured in writing, especially since they occurred several hundred years before my time and no one living otherwise knows anything about them?” (nemans lebendichs darvon sunst etwas wiste).111 Hermann answered his own question here—no one would be able to tell about them. But this also meant that no one would be able to refute them directly. In compiling his genealogy, Hermann Weinsberg showed a shrewd awareness of the ways in which family legends and origin myths were put together. At the very front of the Boich Weinsberg, Hermann wrote, “All antiquity is riddled with fables” (Alle altheit ist vol und vermengt mit fabeln).112 As an adolescent, he had delighted in drawing coats of arms, genealogies, and chivalric ancestors, and he proved a careful student of other lineages’ histories throughout his life. Hermann was familiar with the histories of many of the surrounding princes; he noted, for instance, that the Duke of Jülich-Cleve was able to trace his lineage back over 1,000 years.113 To make his own legends more credible, Hermann later attributed them to an external source, a two-volume genealogy purportedly written by a great uncle and monk named Patroclus. Though he claimed that these volumes had since been lost, it is more than doubtful that they ever existed in the fi rst place. Hermann fi rst mentioned them in 1586, over thirty years after he compiled his family history. As he then explained, the books had fi rst come to his attention in 1536, when he was eighteen. At the time, he and his cousin Christian Heresbach, both university students, were in the habit of meeting in the house of their grandmother, Maria Keppel. There, in an upstairs room facing the street, they passed the time by practicing their lessons, reading, writing, disputing, drawing, and painting. Their grandmother, seeing that they took an interest in painting and drawing, allegedly brought them

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two parchment books, filled with drawings of couples and their coats of arms. The fi rst volume was still legible, but the other had been “so often in children’s hands that it was worn out, besmirched, and dilapidated,” with many pages torn out, “so that one could get no sense out of it” (das man keinen sin und verstand draus haben mogt). According to Hermann, when the two young men asked their grandmother where she had acquired the books, she allegedly replied that her husband’s brother, a Benedictine monk in Corvey Abbey named Patroclus, had given them to her husband, Gottschalk, requesting that he “preserve them for himself and his children.” These tattered volumes, claimed Hermann in 1586, were the source material for his own Boich Weinsberg; they purportedly told the history of the Weinsberg lineage from its founder, Aramond, down through Hermann’s grandfather Gottschalk van Schwelm. During the 1550s (or so he claimed) Hermann had borrowed the books from his cousin Christian, into whose possession they had come. As Hermann explained, he had simply copied down the fi rst, which was still legible, making only minor changes. It proved far more difficult to extract information from the second, and Hermann supplied plausible information where he saw fit. To all this material he had added several drawings and “all kinds of fantasies” (und hab allerlei phantasien darzu gesetzt), binding the whole mass of papers, however rough, into the Boich Weinsberg in 1560. Since that time the original source material had been “lost.” Hermann professed a desire to see the manuscripts again, so that he might “reconcile” his family history with public records in the Schrein. But after allegedly returning them to his cousin Christian in 1556, he had not seen the books again and “could not fi nd out where the two old books by Herr Patroclus are now, whether they have been preserved or where they have gone to.”114 It is possible that Hermann’s ambitious grandmother—who had once told her grandson “to stand behind a golden wagon” (i.e., to follow opportunity)115 —had indeed shown him some old parchment manuscripts with genealogies and legends. The scholarly consensus, however, is that Hermann created a fictitious Ur-text for his legends, so as to give his work the weight of an external authority.116 Hermann may have been influenced by the example of the scholar Trithemius, who invented a fictitious chronicler Hunibald—a contemporary of King Clovis (d. 511)—as the source for the older, legendary parts of his own history of the Franks and the Germans. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hermann cited Trithemius’s chronicle around the same time that he mentioned Patroclus.117 Trithemius, too, may have furnished Hermann

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with the idea of sources that had been conveniently lost. Maximilian I, who had commissioned the monk’s historical works, asked to see the manuscripts of Hunibald. Trithemius pretended to search for the source—“I looked high and low for it”—but reported to the Emperor that it was nowhere to be found.118 Though many accepted Trithemius’s fabrications, the growing debate about the authenticity of his sources was, in the words of one scholar, “bound to assist with the emergence of modern historicism.”119 So too did Hermann’s fabrications suggest a dawning historical awareness. No sooner had he told the story of his Patroclus books than he tried to bolster his genealogy with archival research—to “reconcile” the Boich Weinsberg with the property registers in the Schrein, to which he had recently gained access by virtue of a civic office. He approached this work with the utmost seriousness, since “contradictory opinions cause doubts and disbelief” (ungliche meinongen machen zweiffel und unglauben). His main goal was to show that the housefathers in his genealogy were the same men who had owned the Haus Weinsberg since the early fourteenth century, when a branch of the lineage had allegedly settled in Cologne and built the family house. Though Hermann found nothing but discrepancies between his family history and the public archives, he did his best to explain the contradictory evidence, claiming, for instance, that one Johann von Langel (mentioned in 1404) was in fact an ancestor, Johann von Weinsberg.120 Variable surnames were hardly uncommon in the civic archives, and the records for each particular house were scattered throughout the registers, often under multiple designations. Here the Patroclus books now provided Hermann with another excuse. Perhaps he had not copied the information correctly from the smudged and tattered volume. If the “housefather” possessed the books, “it would help much towards the verification of the Boich Weinsberg.” But without these original sources, what could be done? “Where are they? Where are the two books by Herr Patroclus?”121 Hermann urged his heirs to continue the work of “reconciliation.” Whenever they “read or discerned something in annals or elsewhere that might serve to confi rm this antiquity,” they were to make note of it, “so that the Boich Weinsberg might be made into a perfect, complete, and well-decorated work, that it might stand the test of truth and scrutiny among learned and unlearned.”122 In analyzing Hermann Weinsberg’s fabrications, Gregor Rohmann has provided a helpful analysis of how family legends and historical awareness could coexist in the early modern mind. While

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sixteenth-century men were becoming more interested in historical accuracy, they nonetheless were willing to lend credence to social myths that corresponded with some actual status. A dynastic or civic legend was “true” not because it could be historically verified, but because it justified or explained some current constellation of power. If the family was great enough, the public was generally willing to give approbation to its legends. Hermann thus had the misfortune of trying to furnish an illustrious past for a family that occupied a modest place in Cologne’s political hierarchies. While he clearly understood how such legends were constructed, his ancestral claims were bound to invite ridicule should they become known, since his social position did not warrant them. In Rohmann’s view, Hermann’s naïveté thus lay less in his fabrication of the past—a pastime in which many of his learned contemporaries also engaged—than in his belief that an obscure burgher family could legitimately lay claim to such legends. Though he “arrived at an astonishingly perceptive understanding of the interaction between family history, kinship, and status legitimation,” Hermann and his family never ascended high enough to make plausible the elaborate history he had composed.123 While Rohmann’s study offers helpful insights into a particular aspect of Hermann Weinsberg’s commemorative project, it focuses too narrowly on the sociological dimensions of the family archive. Hermann’s genealogical writings show too many signs of a sweaty earnestness to be the work solely of a social schemer. For a man so self-conscious about his historical fabrications, Hermann did a poor job of covering his own tracks, revealing how he had conceived of and composed his works. He openly admitted that what he was doing was unusual for a middling burgher; he acknowledged his status as a commoner; he showed exactly where the public records contradicted his writings; and he asked anxious questions as to whether his plan to found an “eternal” household would succeed. At times, Hermann’s elaborate deceptions seemed as much an effort to convince himself as they were an effort to convince others. If Hermann delighted in writing his family history, it was in part because it allowed him to overcome the alienating effects of time and commerce, the visible signs of which he never ceased to enumerate in his writings. In many ways, Hermann’s elaborate myth-making was already a reaction against a sharp historical awareness, an attempt to recover a lost historical and social naïveté. Such motives help to explain why Hermann could both claim a noble and ancient ancestry and yet remain so open about his status as

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a commoner. What Hermann envied above all about the noble lineage was its memoria—its ability to save its individual members from oblivion. Thus, Hermann’s anxieties about “falling from memory” clustered around the symbolism of the male line—extinction, alienation, and changes in the surname. By composing the Boich Weinsberg and securing his own future through his will, Hermann gave himself a timeless identity, immune to change. Not surprisingly, Hermann was immensely fond of the family name, which was the German word for “vineyard.” In the Boich Weinsberg, he exploited the rich imagery of the word, depicting his house as a deeply rooted vine—even more, as part of the “true vine,” which was Christ.124 Against the contingent, open-ended nature of urban life, Hermann asserted the unity and purity of the family, its immunity from the vicissitudes of Fortune. The lineage was a necessary, rather than contingent, identity. There was, however, another nagging uncertainty that Hermann may have been struggling to overcome by writing his genealogy—namely, the loss of a näive faith in pious legends and beliefs. When Hermann was young, both Renaissance and Reformation authors began openly to challenge the cultural memory of Christendom. Though there had previously been skepticism about the lives of the saints and about some of the doctrinal claims of the Catholic Church, the sixteenth century witnessed a full-scale assault on medieval society’s most basic assumptions. Protestants, in particular, contended that all Catholic doctrine and ritual—its elaborate system of salvation—was based on a “human fiction.” Ecclesiastical hierarchies, doctrines of purgatory and penance, the liturgical means of grace—all these, alleged Protestants, had been invented for the sake of papal power and wealth. From Luther’s perspective, they were the work of the Antichrist, which had sought to corrupt the Church and stifle God’s Word. Humanist critiques of medieval religion were somewhat subtler. Erasmus viewed mechanical rites and fabulous legends of the saints less as diabolical inventions than as species of human folly, credulity, and greed.125 They were dangerous only insofar as they diverted Christians from the humility and simplicity of faith. Despite criticizing superstition, humanists such as Erasmus were willing to retain Catholic rituals and legends as aids to faith and piety, especially for the “common folk.”126 According to Peter Bietenholz, Erasmus was one of the fi rst European scholars to argue that the stories of antiquity and the legends of the saints retained their moral force as exempla even if they were fictitious. “If these things are taken for true,” Erasmus wrote, “it serves

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the purpose, if taken for fiction, it does so likewise, because they are invented by wise and excellent writers, whose authority has the force of a precept.”127 In other words, skepticism about fables did not preclude an acknowledgment of their utility. Members of the new, educated elite saw saints less as supernatural figures that actively intervened in daily life than as exemplars of faith and virtue. Here we fi nd a shift from memoria as union with the person or thing remembered to a more modern sense of memory as simple, subjective recollection, the chief effect of which is on the person remembering. As he reflected upon his own fabrications, Hermann engaged in a similar debate with himself about the nature of cultural memory. Often he insisted on the veracity of his genealogical records, protesting that his own Boich Weinsberg was no mere fable. “What my ancestors have recorded, written, and left behind, I cannot and will not alter,” he avowed, adding that some of it could be confi rmed in “established histories, chronicles, books, public archives and instruments, letters, seals, paintings, and windows.” The imagined voices of critics could prompt an irritable reply. Hermann warned his heirs that strangers might “disparage, mock, and attack” his genealogy, paintings, drawings, histories, and insignia, dismissing them as “fabricated and imagined” (erdigt vnd pfanthaseien). The heirs were not to be shaken by such attacks, which were undoubtedly the work of impious folk. In a section titled “Whether my written and painted works concerning the house and lineage of Weinsberg will be criticized when I am gone,” Hermann lashed out at his imagined adversaries: “There are many strange, contrary, and evil-willed people (vil seltzamer, widdersprechende, boißwillige menchen), who reject, overturn, and fi nd fault with everything, who look on little with favorable eyes and hearts, and who do not speak honorably or properly of things.”128 The corrosive effects of impiety were plain for all to see. Men and women owed their ancestors a debt of credulity and veneration. Yet if Hermann claimed that his genealogy was true, he also often hinted that it was “invented” (gedicht) and begged future readers to “accept it out of good will.” Heirs tempted to doubt his accounts should keep the good of the family in mind: “Because the house and lineage depends so much on it, you can lend credence to it kindly and for the sake of piety” (so hat irß humaniter et pietatis caussa gut zugleuben).129 After all, much that was written about antiquity “was somewhat lacking,” including “apocryphal books, poets, and invented things, which one knows to be fictions, such as Aesop and the like.” Even so, such

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pious legends were given public approbation because they produced “good teaching, wisdom, and benefit.”130 In the same way, his genealogy would contribute to the “honor, embellishment, praise, benefit, and advantage” of the house. The usefulness of recollecting the pious examples of forebears was as important as the truth of the stories. In constructing his own family legends, Hermann attempted to establish a moral equivalency between his own efforts and those of ancient Christian and pagan authors. All edifying stories were good, he suggested, because they encouraged and emboldened those who remembered them. For instance, in 1587, Hermann commissioned a painting that depicted a legendary episode in the family’s history— the twelfth-century “exodus” of women and children from the city of Weinsberg, which was under siege. This painting, he explained, was not to be misread as an expression of vainglory or social grasping. After all, monks had many such “histories and legends” in the cloisters. If anyone criticized the Weinsberg “histories,” the housefather would have to endure it patiently, since “now people attack the painted histories from the holy fathers.”131 At the same time, Hermann pointed to examples from antiquity. Was not the Weinsberg household’s own history as worthy of being painted as “other worldly histories out of Livy,” from which “one learns love, fidelity, manners, and morals, as one does from Aesop.”132 Elsewhere, Hermann said that those who would criticize his own family history were similar to those who now criticized the legends of the saints. In the face of such criticism, the family was to be patient, “as those must have patience who esteem the legends of the saints but now hear many people who put no faith in them” (die den keinen glauben zustelln).133 The humanist view of pious legends allowed Hermann to cast his own myth-making in the best light. “For the sake of piety”—this was reason enough for future housefathers to accept his genealogical claims. For Hermann, the issue was not so much the truth or falsehood of the legends, but rather the disrespectful attitude the harshest critics showed towards traditions and the objects of piety. It was good to lend credence to these legends, Hermann suggested, because “piety in the presence of fathers and ancestors is our second nature.”134 Presumably, Hermann had Protestants in mind here, but he lashed out more broadly against all skeptics and naysayers who turned tradition on its head. There were men, he wrote, who would “deny, despise, and mock” all old “histories, chronicles, legends, writings, and books, even if they alone were true and contained all wisdom and knowledge.” Such men

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behaved “as if nothing were true save that which they say and affi rm. Indeed, I believe that several of them would not refrain from denying and reproaching even the Holy Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments” (Jha ich gleub daß etliche auch die hillige schriff t altes und neuweß testamentzs durff ten leugnen oder straffen).135 Once impious individuals refused to accept the traditions and texts handed down to them, where would criticism stop? Hermann Weinsberg’s defense of pious legends, of course, was opportunistic. It was one more product of his ongoing struggle to defend a status that he had no right to claim. But it would be too narrow an interpretation to suggest that his work was merely cynical manipulation of historical tools for the sake of family status. There were deeper, existential concerns at play. As previous chapters have shown, Hermann’s secret plan was as much a defense of commoner status and dignity as it was an act of social ambition. Likewise, his elaborate efforts to forge an ancient heritage was as much a reaction to his fear of alienation and oblivion as it was a bald grasping after pedigree. As was the case with other early modern forgers, Hermann’s efforts to construct a family legacy were bound up with his nascent historical awareness. The same concerns about the silence of the past that prompted Hermann to record his own life in meticulous detail also allowed him to invent alleged sources for genealogical myths. Thus, while Hermann’s sense of history raised doubts about the power of traditional memoria, it also tempted him to compensate for its loss with elaborate historical forgeries. As the next chapters will show, Hermann used source criticism to verify reports of contemporary events; he was intent on recording his life and times “as they truly were.” But he also used these tools to create an illusion of verisimilitude, inventing sources to support his claims and pretending to “reconcile” contravening evidence in the civic archives. Such work displayed a high degree of selfconsciousness. It also expressed his deep fear of alienation, born of his eager reading and his experience of urban mobility. Could he believe that his family dwelling place was not simply a commodity, but rather a cherished patrimony, handed down through the generations? Could he believe that his life had a grand, providential destiny? Could he be confident that future family members would think fondly of him? In Cologne’s traditional memorial culture, there was no clear boundary between historical veracity and the contemporary efficacy of memory—little sense of memory “for its own sake.” To remember the dead

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was to intercede for their souls; to recall the great deeds of ancestors was to cultivate the honor and identity of the clan. As Mary Carruthers has argued, medieval memoria aimed to weave the past into a living present through internalization and reenactment.136 Such memory was pragmatic; it worked to keep the past alive, to animate the relationship between the living and the dead, to remind the living of their responsibilities and callings. The saints of the Church were no mere historical figures; they were living beings who actively intervened in the lives of their devotées. The Mass was no mere remembrance, as some Protestants of the sixteenth century would argue; rather, it was a real sacrifice, in which the body and blood of Christ were truly present in the elements of bread and wine. The work of the scholar was not to set ancient texts in their original context but rather to weave them into one great intellectual fabric. By the time Hermann began to write, this understanding of memory had become problematic. The gap between memory and history— between pious veneration and a critical interpretation—had widened. Renaissance humanists suggested that many medieval historical claims were based on anachronistic interpretations of the sources. Meanwhile, Protestant reformers claimed that most Church teachings were idolatrous historical accretions that had obscured the pure, simple truth of the scriptures. Such polemics highlighted the obscurity of the past. Human memory was faulty, riddled with gaps and distortions. The real presences that medieval men and women perceived all around them were at best “fictions” and at worst a form of satanic deception. The only safeguard against such forgetfulness was a careful, painstaking return “to the sources” (ad fontes). To both humanist and Protestant reformers, such textualism promised a revival of the original vigor of the gospel. But it also had the effect of making the intervening years— the pious traditions that had sustained faith for generations—seem both dead and distant. The most irenic critics, such as Erasmus, tolerated pious legends for their psychological and spiritual effects. But the scope of memory had been reduced. Its task was not to preserve a real communion with the past, but rather to use historical exempla to transform the hearts and minds of the living. Hermann Weinsberg’s ruminations on memory reflected many of these tensions. Like contemporary debates over whether the Eucharist was a simple memorial or a true reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice, or whether the saints were mere moral exemplars or wonder-working beings, his work highlights a transitional moment in European thinking about

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memory. On the one side stood the memorial traditions of the Middle Ages, which presupposed a real connection between memory and the thing remembered. On the other side stood a more modern notion of memorialization as the preservation of particular, unrepeatable, and dead events, stored on paper for future retrieval. In his fondest dreams, Hermann Weinsberg longed to be bound up in a living past—a succession of ancestors and heirs who preserved a mystical unity of house and blood. But his entire writing project betrayed deeper fears that bourgeois life was a drift of unremembered days, destined for oblivion. Though Hermann wanted to believe in the real, transhistorical existence of his name and lineage, his writings betray the defensive posture of a nominalist—that is, of a man who recognized the stubborn particularity of things and events. In more melancholic moments, he resigned himself to a “disenchanted” view of time and memory, in which only fragments of past lives survived on paper. Such disenchantment was nowhere more evident than in Hermann Weinsberg’s efforts to document his own life. The next chapter tells this story.



chapter seven

Spare No Quill, Ink, or Paper

In the late 1550s, having saved his fictitious ancestors from oblivion, Hermann Weinsberg began to consider how best to document his own life and times. It was one thing to tell stories about one’s forebears— to explain the origins of one’s identity. For such writing, a middling lawyer could turn to the precedents established by more illustrious families. Hermann’s family chronicle—Das Boich Weinsberg—thus told how the clan’s “blood” and honor had survived despite numerous setbacks and adversities. It was a providential story, a tale “of the transformations that have miraculously come to pass within our lineage.”1 Drawing on aristocratic and chivalric models, Hermann’s fabricated genealogy highlighted the deeds of noble men. But how was Hermann to tell the story of the family during his own lifetime? How was he to write his own history going forward—to document his own undistinguished life for posterity? What would the descendants need or want to know? Unlike their fictitious noble forebears, Hermann and his kin were simple burghers. Within contemporary literature, there were few models for commemorating the history of common folk. Moreover, urban life was considerably more complex than the stories Hermann had invented for his ancestors, which were drawn from Europe’s agrarian past and its recently revived classical traditions. It was not uncommon for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century housefathers to leave behind genealogies, “housebooks,” and family chronicles for their heirs. To secure a modest fortune, to pass on a good name and reputation, to see that one’s life work had not been in vain—these

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were ends for which any respectable burgher might hope. At a time when honor was embodied in one’s family, townsmen often aimed to turn their fluid, uncertain gains into something more stable. Writing offered a means of consolidating a family identity. Private legacies might include fatherly admonitions, genealogies, moral lessons, family records, contracts, fi nancial accounts, drawings, and autobiographical reminiscences. Transmitted from father to son, these modest legacies were meant not only to set the family’s affairs in order, but also to provide the heirs with a means of orienting themselves in the world. The authors hoped that progeny might remember their origins, as well as their obligation to preserve the family name and reputation. This task was especially urgent in the mobile world of the city.2 The majority of autobiographical texts were didactic or formulaic. Some authors used their lives to testify to God’s providence and to offer moral lessons. Others jotted down simple notices of births, deaths, and marriages for heirs. Meanwhile, ambitious burghers who aimed at a fine posterity could employ a variety of resources: medieval iconography, Renaissance portraiture, genealogical research, church endowments. Not surprisingly, many of the bourgeois chronicles and housebooks that survive from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German cities were written either by ambitious, upwardly mobile townsmen, eager to forge a more distinguished family identity, or by established patricians, who had a family legacy to foster and protect.3 Yet neither the practice of scribbling nor the influence of humanist culture led automatically to more empirical or highly individualized depictions of bourgeois life, as some interpreters of Hermann Weinsberg’s work have seemed to suggest.4 Few contemporary patriarchs saw fit to record mundane or embarrassing details; their primary goal was to offer a pious, idealized narrative of their lives. Hermann Weinsberg’s attempt at self-documentation might have followed a similar path. Yet the more he sought to forge an ancient identity for his family, the more dissatisfied he became with the formulaic nature of traditional commemoration. Just as he sought to bring aristocratic and clerical ideologies in line with his middling values, so Hermann also struggled to adapt traditional memorial forms to the more mundane realities of his everyday life—including the many types of secular record keeping that burghers had pioneered. Where another ambitious townsman might have simply glossed over the less savory aspects of his everyday life, Hermann struggled to reconcile his yearning for fame and reputation with his concern to represent things “as they truly were”

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(wie es in der warheit were).5 Though he may have envied the memory that the great houses possessed, he wanted it in a form that would do justice to his actual, middling life. Here, again, the thrust of Hermann Weinsberg’s project shifted from a simple grasping after nobility to a passionate defense of the commoner’s right to commemoration and written representation. Somewhat by surprise, Hermann came to realize that he could preserve even the most mundane details of his everyday life in writing. He discovered that the practical, ephemeral record keeping of burghers— the quotidian habit of keeping track of income, expenditures, and household events—could also be used to fi x forever on paper “insignificant” (geringen) people and things that would otherwise be forgotten. By the end of his life, he had developed a more modern notion of memory as the preservation of absent, unrepeatable events—insentient, impersonal data trapped on the page. The more he wrote, the more he became aware of all that his writings could not contain. An abundance of writing heightened his awareness of how many things in the world had been forgotten. He applied this insight to the historical record itself, noting that most historians were silent about the lives of commoners. This absence seemed to him a loss—one that he sought to remedy through his own patient, methodical writing.

May No One Blame Me In his struggle to achieve a lasting memory, Hermann Weinsberg participated in a broader historical trend, one that he only vaguely understood. This was the gradual penetration of literacy into ever more areas of secular life—a phenomenon that German scholars have aptly called the “textualization” (Verschriftlichung) of the world.6 During the sixteenth century, more and more of quotidian reality was gaining entry into books; meanwhile, writing was extending its presence in the world, ordering everyday affairs. This transition had begun centuries before, but the spread of printing accelerated it. One consequence was that commoners began to stumble upon new ways of representing their own lives in writing. The emerging infrastructure of paper, print, and publicity gave individuals greater agency in crafting and securing their reputations.7 In the secret pages of Hermann Weinsberg’s chronicle, modern readers can relive the surprise with which one sixteenth-century burgher explored the possibilities of written memory in an age of print, venturing blind into a terrain that would become familiar to later generations.

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In retrospect, it is easy to assume that the emergence of commoner history and self-representation was a simple evolutionary process. As more and more of the world made its way into books, commoners, it would seem, naturally seized upon more realistic, intimate ways of representing their own lives. Did not an expansion of literacy bring with it increasing concern with accurate, empirical documentation? Did not mechanical reproduction stimulate an interest in exact copies? Modern readers tend to think of realism—the desire to commemorate unique historical details as “accurately” and fully as possible—as a natural impulse that was held back during the Middle Ages by religious ideology and technological incapacity. Meanwhile, historians of autobiography have often depicted the emergence of modern self-writing— including its attention to individuality and “inner” psychology—as the progressive unfolding of latent possibilities in Western culture dating back to Augustine. And yet, in the sixteenth century, it was by no means self-evident that candid depictions of everyday life were a good thing. Realistic, empirical representations did not automatically follow from the new historical awareness or the development of urban writing technologies. The development of new cultures of publicity during the early modern period was a long and complex process. It was not until the eighteenth century that modern conventions of self-representation—of “publicizing the private” in autobiographies and novels— became commonplace.8 Within the sixteenth-century city, there were strong prejudices against vainglory—of making too much of the self and its quotidian affairs. During the Renaissance, fame was only for the few. Historians and chroniclers focused largely on the affairs of great men—emperors, princes, prelates. And while artists painted increasingly lifelike images of their subjects, such portraits served primarily to present a significant public persona. The intimate portrait was an elite fashion, displaying the honor and self-possession of the sitter. In private, individuals might preserve clinical records of income and expenses, of diseases and remedies, of secret transgressions and grief. They did so, however, in ephemeral papers, not in public memorials. When intimate stories did make their way into more formal autobiographical texts, it was often to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. It was a rare author in the fi fteenth or sixteenth century who set out systematically to preserve for posterity the mundane affairs of the household, the workshop, the dining room, the bedroom, or the street. Not only could such records compromise the honor of a family, they also

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seemed, in Hermann Weinsberg’s words, “foolish” and “laughable” (narrische und lecherlich).9 Even so, one senses a growing preoccupation with gratuitous selfrepresentation, which the moralists of the age were quick to check. The continued ambivalence towards recording mundane and insignificant matters is perhaps best summed up in Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Glory.” Here, the great French essayist reminded his readers not to pursue the vanity of earthly memory, since “the destinies of half the world stay where they are and, for want of record, do not last but vanish.” To drive this point home, Montaigne introduced a rhetorical question: Do we think that at every volley from harquebuses which concerns us, at every risk that we run, there suddenly appears a clerk to keep a record of it? And, besides, a hundred clerks can jot it down whose accounts will not last three days and will come to nobody’s attention.  .  .  . Nobody writes histories about such trivial events: you have to be the head man in conquering an Empire or a Kingdom.

Montaigne’s sober reminder that oblivion was the vast majority’s fate was based on his own reading of ancient history, which showed that only a handful of great men even had a chance of being remembered. “Whoever will reflect,” he wrote, “on what kind of people and what kind of glory are kept in remembrance through books, will fi nd that very few of the deeds and very few of the men of our century will fi nd a place in them.” Even if one did succeed in memorializing one’s deeds— even if there were a “hundred clerks” to write them down—there was no guarantee that such records would survive, let alone catch the eye of future readers. “To make deeds seen and known,” Montaigne warned, “is purely the work of Fortune.”10 In the end, Hermann Weinsberg became precisely the type of clerk that Montaigne derided. Rather than fostering the resignation that Montaigne urged, an awareness of oblivion only all the more incited Hermann Weinsberg to overcome the blind work of Fortune through planning and record keeping. In this sense, Hermann’s attitude was opposite that of the great seventeenth-century English essayist Sir Thomas Browne, who famously wrote that “oblivion is not to be hired,” that “the greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.” Indeed, the warnings of moralists may very well have been directed against men like Hermann Weinsberg. The social and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to

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have increased anxiety about oblivion, throwing many, according to Browne, into “restlesse inquietude for the diurturnity of our memories.” For Browne, the fact that “grave-stones tell truth scarcely forty years,” that “old families last not three Oaks” was all the more reason not to seek the “folly” of a false immortality, the bare survival of one’s name, which could not compare with true Christian immortality. For Hermann Weinsberg on the other hand, the cruel facts of oblivion were all the more reason to strive after a lasting posterity.11 How such a posterity could be achieved, however, was not entirely clear. Ironically, Montaigne himself delighted in precisely the type of trivial memory he censured in “On Glory.” In a collection of circuitous essays—a book he believed was unlike any other in the world—he laid bare his private habits to contemporary and future readers. Likewise, it was only after a long period of experimentation, with many unexpected discoveries, that Hermann Weinsberg conceived of his project to preserve the stuff of his everyday life on paper. In an ingenious, if opportunistic, reversal of traditional vanitas motifs, Hermann came to argue that it was selfish, even vain, not to record the everyday lives of common folk for future readers, who would otherwise know nothing about them.

Self-Representation: A Period of Experimentation Hermann’s fi rst attempts at writing his own life story did not depart substantially from traditional models. A few accounts of contemporary life were sewn into the pages of his Boich Weinsberg—part of the large family history Hermann handed down to his heirs. Among the earliest were genealogical records he apparently compiled in 1550, not long after he became the eldest male in the Weinsberg family and thus the man responsible for its memoria. These records provided basic information about all the descendants of Hermann’s grandfather Gottschalk—births, marriages, children, dwelling place, occupational history, as well as each one’s status in the year 1550.12 In the mid-1550s, Hermann composed admiring biographical sketches of his grandfather Gottschalk and his father, Christian.13 Whereas the rest of Hermann’s genealogy was fabricated, Hermann’s narratives of the lives of Gottschalk and Christian were based on his own experience and stories he had heard from his grandmother and relatives. In the person of Gottschalk, the housefather of Weinsberg appears not as a proud baron, but as a humble domestic servant, who

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worked his way into security and respectability as a grain merchant and brewer and was so poor as a young man that he had to drink “rainwater” from a stone basin “filled with tadpoles” behind the house where he worked.14 And yet while based largely in fact, these biographies were highly stylized literary accounts, a continuation of the patriline’s story. In composing these accounts, Hermann could draw on classical models, including Plutarch, Cicero, and Herodotus, whose works his father, Christian, possessed in translation.15 He presented his grandfather and father as proud and solicitous housefathers, who did all in their power to preserve and promote the lineage. According to Hermann, his grandfather Gottschalk, who was elected to the City Council late in life, “bore himself well and wisely in all things, as an honorable councilor should do.”16 Of his father, Christian, Hermann wrote that “by nature he was of a sanguine complexion, healthy, gentle, happy, clean, intelligent, modest, eloquent, well liked, sober in eating and drinking; he was loyal and helpful towards his friends and consoling to all persons; he liked to help bring about an agreement in quarrels and arrange marriages.”17 Nestled within these biographies lies an account of Hermann’s father’s death in 1549, which was written not long after the event. The narrative was a standard deathbed account, which described how Christian Weinsberg fell sick, sought medical attention, set his affairs in order, said goodbye to his family, received his last rites, gave up “his last breath gently and peacefully,” and died “in God the Lord” (gaff den lesthen athen soislich uyff, und starff in Gott den Herrn).18 Another account of Christian’s dying moments Hermann wrote in the early 1550s was equally formulaic: “He said ‘I feel that I must die’ and therefore had masses read in the house, confessed, received the Sacraments with his wife Sophia, received the holy oil at the right time, asked his neighbors for forgiveness, and made his last will and testament in the presence of notaries and witnesses.” At the end, he “died in the presence of his children peacefully and with good understanding as a good Christian man” (sanff modich mit guttem verstande wie eyn gut Christmensch).19 Though such accounts were tender, they were highly conventional, reflecting pious prescriptions. Like many contemporary accounts of deathbed scenes, Hermann’s emphasized the consolation that the deceased had borne his fi nal trial well, warding off the temptations of presumption and despair. The sparseness of Hermann’s early descriptions of his father’s death was far removed from the candor of the records he would eventually

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pen. In 1561, after he had become an obsessive autobiographer, Hermann composed a vivid account of his father’s deathbed scene, adding a number of new details that no longer entirely fit the pious formulae of the ars moriendi, the “art of dying.” Though he affirmed that Christian had “gently” given up his last breath and asked forgiveness from his kin, Hermann also divulged his father’s impatience in the face of death and the family’s great distress at his passing. According to the new account, for instance, when a monk arrived to sit at the bedside, Christian, ever the anticlerical burgher, shouted “how the monks in their habits stink!” (wie stinkt der monch in der kappen). Hermann also admitted that Christian often complained on his deathbed: “I am terrified. I must die. I have great fear and pain around my heart. I am a miserable creature, poor worm.” On the morning of his death, Christian said to his wife, Sophia, “Oh, shall we see each other once again today, and never again afterwards?” He rebuffed those who sought to console him with thoughts of recovery. Hermann stayed with him to the end, calling out to him, “Father, do you recognize me?” Half an hour after Christian had “softly given up his last breath,” the family thought that warmth had returned to his feet, “at which we all rejoiced.” But the heat went away, and Christian “could not return to life” (kunt nit widder lebentich werden). Hermann, for his part, grieved for his father deeply. “I could not console myself,” he confessed. This, at least, was how Hermann wrote after he had his breakthrough—his discovery that he could preserve the everyday events of a middling family in writing. 20 But in the 1540s and 1550s, when Hermann was composing the Boich Weinsberg, his personal records were still fairly conventional. Commemorative biographies, genealogical records, deathbed scenes, private memorials—such material was commonly handed down from father to son within respectable burgher families. Indeed, the Boich Weinsberg also contains some of Hermann’s earliest attempts at gathering autobiographical information, which he sewed into his final compilation, along with the letters he had received from his father while a student at Emmerich.21 Composed in the third person during the 1540s, the curriculum vitae provided a basic outline of his school years through the year 1537.22 Each line was less a description than it was a simple memento or marker. About his education, for instance, Hermann wrote that “he was talented in the seven liberal arts and in physics—that is, grammar (to read and write correctly), dialectic (to recognize the truth), rhetoric (to speak decorously).”23 By contrast, in the 1560s, when Hermann composed his Gedenkbuch, he admitted that his education in the seven

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liberal arts had been patchy—that he had never fully mastered Latin, that he was a poor public speaker, that the discipline in the college was poor, that individuals were promoted more for the fees they paid than for their talent. Such insights into adolescent fears and concerns were absent from his earlier third-person autobiographical sketch. There, his transgressions as a student—whoring, betting, fighting, swearing— were briefly mentioned and duly confessed. The terseness of such recollections of youthful excesses gave them an admonitory quality; each was presented as an occasion for the young Hermann to amend his life. The moral, didactic nature of such records was reinforced by Latin sayings from the Distichs of Cato Hermann later appended to the page: “Learn from the examples of many people what to strive for and what to avoid; the life of others is our teacher.”24 The impression this miscellany from the 1540s and 1550s creates is that of a young man experimenting with various forms of conventional representation. The only documents that seem to point towards something more personal and intimate were Hermann’s biographies of his father and grandfather, along with a self-description that Hermann wrote in the third person in 1556. This second attempt at autobiography was more detailed than the first. Again composed in the third person, it furnished a list of physical and personal characteristics—of bodily features, character traits, and clothing. Spanning two pages, this sketch was not unlike his descriptions of his grandfather and father: “He was frugal, also rather tolerant . . . was cheerful . . . spoke gladly (but not too much) . . . was consoling to people and gave them a good hearing and advice.” There were also vices: “He could be secretly angry but gladly let go of hatred and anger, . . . he was secretly ambitious and striving, . . . he desired much, but was not indulgent.”25 But compared with Hermann’s later intimate self-portraits, these early sketches have a mannered, formal quality. In highlighting the deeds and character traits of Weinsberg men, they were reminiscent of ancient biographies of Plutarch and Suetonius. When Hermann wrote about himself and his family in the 1550s, it was to show them as shoots from a deeply rooted patrilineal vine. Indeed, one page from the Boich Weinsberg shows that Hermann made just such an attempt. It is the front page for a work he never wrote, titled Annals of the House and Lineage of Weinsberg, beginning in the year 1550.26 Beneath the title stands a colored drawing of the Weinsberg family insignia as a noble coat of arms, with helmet and plumage. One presumes such a manuscript would have remained fully within the tradition of noble and patrician housebooks.

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But Hermann grew impatient with conventional forms of family memory. By the mid-1550s, there were more questions than answers. Against the centrifugal forces of urban life, Hermann believed that he had discovered the key to unity—a patrilineal “house” that would hold him and his kin within its deepest bosom. Yet the problem of reconciling this idealized form to his own burgher life remained. How was he to narrate the fortunes of the house during his lifetime? What type of memorial would do justice to his life and times? How could he weave the particulars of his own life into this larger, providential history? Though the idealized form of the lineage may have proved comforting to Hermann, its stylized forms of representation were an awkward fit for the lives of middling householders. They hardly allowed him to be remembered as he “actually” (eigentlich) had been. There were, as yet, no clear models for writing the burgher family into history, and the forms of practical writing burghers had pioneered only drew his attention to the fluid processes of urban life. The act of writing revived the very awareness of transience and oblivion that he was trying to overcome. Somewhat paradoxically, Hermann’s drive to consolidate a traditional lineage and memoria led him to explore the possibilities of paper in ways that few other sixteenth-century burghers would do. The possibility of recording everyday life for its own sake was latent in the technology. But the ability to imagine the significance of doing so was largely lacking. Since the late eighteenth century, of course, the situation has been quite different.27 The modern culture of institutionalized record keeping is so dense—its information networks so capacious— that it is easy to imagine the contents of a book or diary floating “out there” somewhere. This was not such an easy thing for sixteenth-century burghers to imagine; their culture was still overwhelmingly local and face-to-face. Hermann, for one, had little concept of a public—of an “imagined community” of anonymous readers. 28 He did, however, have a captive audience: the imagined housefathers of his everlasting lineage. They were the future readers who would preserve his memory. And as men who would inherit his legal person, they would, Hermann believed, be interested in the minutest details of his fi nancial and household life. In addressing them, Hermann was not seeking fame, but rather serving the “common good” of his lineage. The novelty of Hermann Weinsberg’s project was to recast the pedestrian practices of bourgeois accounting and record keeping not merely as pragmatic necessities, but as invaluable historical material for future family members—and, by extension, for posterity.

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Commemorating the Quotidian As one might suspect of a man who secretly filled over 7,000 manuscript pages, Hermann Weinsberg was in love with writing, intoxicated by the power of paper. As a university-trained lawyer and a bookkeeping burgher, he was well aware that writing was key to defending one’s rights in the litigious, uncertain environment of the city. When his illegitimate daughter, Anna, became the mother of the Maria Bethlehem convent, Hermann wrote her a letter, advising her to “spare no quill, ink, or paper” (spart kein papyr, feder, und unck) in keeping her accounts, lest she fall into debt.29 His goal was to “write down whatever I think will be advantageous and good for you and all our house.”30 Writing, after all, had enabled Hermann, a mediocre lawyer, to create a distinguished past for himself. In sixteenth-century Cologne, the primary forms of bourgeois writing were utilitarian. In the money economy of the city, burghers survived by keeping close track of their properties, contracts, and accounts. During the Middle Ages, practices of writing had penetrated increasing areas of everyday life. The relative anonymity of the city both demanded and made possible a sophisticated culture of writing; one could not count on neighbors to remember or respect one’s customary rights. During this period, civic governments developed increasingly sophisticated forms of record keeping, augmenting revenues and enhancing control by monitoring births, deaths, and economic transactions. Yet official record keeping remained spotty; there were few largescale institutions to mitigate risk. The medium of money had a spectral quality; burghers had to rely on paper to pin down the extent of their power and influence. The shrewd burgher thus was vigilant in keeping his papers and accounts, which he could use to defend himself against the complex litigation, contractual disputes, and competing property claims that all but inevitably arose. Such writing was clinical, precise. The urban world demanded a meticulous, empirical approach to reality, which townsmen developed in account books and contracts. Bourgeois papers also had such qualities when dealing with more private, familial matters. The vast majority of sixteenth-century family records were spare and formulaic. They were meant to remind rather than to describe. Hermann’s own father, Christian, for instance, recorded important family dates and genealogical information in an old family Bible.31 When townsmen did narrate a family event, it was usually because they perceived moral or spiritual significance in it.

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Perhaps it was an omen, or perhaps it offered a moral warning to heirs and descendants. Even autobiographical records were written primarily with instruction or inspiration in mind. Much like Hermann’s genealogies, such records showed heirs how God had blessed and guided their ancestors, protecting them from a range of evils. Handed down from father to son, these records were intended less for an abstract posterity than for one’s immediate descendants. During the 1550s, when he was in his thirties, Hermann’s practical record keeping did not substantially diverge from these patterns. As a diligent housefather, he kept track of fi nances and household governance in a variety of personal papers: “debt and account books,” as well as all sorts of “letters, receipts, and other papers lying here and there” (breven zedulen und ander schriff ten hyn und widder ligende). 32 In addition, he jotted down notes on blank pages that he had sewn into almanacs. He began these in 1550, the year after his father died and the year that he became the eldest Weinsberg male. “I always wrote something down, something that happened to myself or my kin, also to several others for the sake of memory.”33 At least initially, these were purely personal notebooks, meant for his own use. By his own admission, he had weak powers of recollection. Thus, the almanacs served as mnemonic aids, helping him keep track of family affairs. There was, as yet, no sign that he intended them as a form of permanent commemoration—unlike his Boich Weinsberg. Beginning in 1555, when he purchased a new house, Hermann decided to consolidate his papers. He began a Gedenkbuch (or “Memory Book”), in which he planned to gather his property and fi nancial records in one place.34 As he explained it, since the future “housefathers” of Weinsberg would inherit his legal person, it would behoove them and the executors of the estate to know about all his circumstances. Thus, the title page of Hermann’s Gedenkbuch (in its early form) read, “All kinds of obligations, contracts, affairs, and occurrences, which I, Hermann Weinsberg, began to write down .  .  . so that they would not fall out of memory, but rather continue to be remembered truly after my death.”35 The fi rst entries in this Gedenkbuch were practical; they had to do with his duties and responsibilities as a patriarch. One detailed the purchase of a house—the terms of sale, the names of witnesses, its entry in the Schrein. Another recorded the contractual agreement reached with two boarders.36 Still another entry noted a banquet he orchestrated as part of his duties as warden of the Town Hall. In matter-of-fact prose, he listed the names of

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the guests, the five courses served at the banquet, and the total cost of the meal (twenty gulden). 37 The renovation of his father’s gravestone, the apprenticing of his stepson, the hiring and fi ring of servants, the commissioning of paintings for his Gaffel house and St. Jacob’s Church—these were some of the household affairs that Hermann initially recorded in his Gedenkbuch. Such records were not unusual among Cologne burghers. In 1559, not long after he had married his second wife, Drutgin Bars, Hermann discovered a small “Memory Book” in her hand. Having not previously known about the manuscript, Hermann was alarmed to fi nd that it listed several debts she had not entered in her main account book, including a note that read, “I gave my husband 404 thaler.” Unable to remember ever receiving this sum, Hermann confronted Drutgin about her little account book (gedenck boichlin) and asked her to change the entry. 38 Hermann was keen to clarify this misunderstanding because he and Drutgin had money from previous marriages, which they managed independently of one another. But the episode also highlighted the pragmatic nature of sixteenth-century paper memory. For Hermann, the word Gedenkbuch did not mean “memoir” in the modern sense. Rather, it could be used to describe any book that served as an aid to memory. The purpose of such papers was almost always to consolidate—that is, to protect one’s resources against the centrifugal forces of the urban economy. Of course, the care and self-consciousness with which a householder strove to consolidate a written legacy could vary greatly. Though only a small sliver of private writing survives from the period, it is safe to assume that most urban men and women left behind at least some accounts, contracts, and letters. Indeed, the vast majority of private records that have come down to us from sixteenth-century Cologne are fi nancial in nature, dealing with property, income, and expenditures. Often stored in some sort of chest or cabinet, such family “memory” could be a source of contention, especially after a death. Possessing these papers might provide a sibling or heir an advantage in an inheritance dispute, since a burgher’s property relations were mediated through his documents. Late in the century, for instance, Hermann and his brother Gottschalk guarded the locked “letter chest” of their recently deceased brother-in-law Johan Deutz. It was moved to an even more secure location in Hermann’s house at the request of two of their nephews, who feared that their siblings might try to “carry it away” before the inheritance was settled and a full inventory of the

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chest had been made.39 A burgher’s papers lived on after death, continuing, for a time, to embody his or her person. Of course, when Hermann Weinsberg began his own Gedenkbuch, he had more reason than most burghers to consolidate his properties and fi nances. It was the means through which he could gather together his various properties and rents and hand them on, intact, to his successors. Not surprisingly, Hermann worked on this document at precisely the same time that he was composing his will and fabricating his genealogy. All these documents were aimed at ensuring the institutional stability and memoria of the Haus Weinsberg. If the genealogy offered the family a deeply rooted identity and the will attempted to preserve that identity long into the future, the original Gedenkbuch was meant to monitor the family estate in the interim. It was the “memory” of Hermann’s work as housefather, of his fi nancial stewardship. “My intention for beginning this book,” Hermann wrote, “is that my heirs and executors might have a reliable report of several affairs after my death.”40 By vigilantly monitoring and recording the changes in his property, Hermann could hand on his legal and fi nancial person to his heirs. This was fully in line with the traditional corporate identity that Hermann was trying to build. As housefather, he was acting on behalf of the “common house,” on behalf of all his ancestors.41 Likewise, he and his successor were “one person.”42 Throughout his writings, Hermann made a distinction between the “immortal office” of the Weinsberg housefather and the mortal persons who occupied it.43 Indeed, if Hermann could expect any worldly immortality, it was through the preservation of the office. His individual actions had significance insofar as they served this corporate identity. Perpetuity was realized “when a man, an animal, a building, or a thing follows in place of another, so that everything is maintained.”44 Everything he wrote was meant to protect, preserve, and consolidate this identity, which stood in stark contrast to the contingent identities of the city.45 Over time, however, the Gedenkbuch became more complex. As with much “bourgeois” writing, it served to highlight the very contingency and particularity it was meant to master. Urban bookkeeping may have been intended to consolidate and preserve fortunes, but it was nonetheless a tool for managing fluid, ongoing processes. As such, it drew attention to the peculiar conditions that produced any particular state of affairs. For a record to be useful, it had to be specific. Hence the diligence with which urban householders noted the date and time

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of a particular event, be it a financial transaction, the birth of a child, or a burial. The ongoing nature of such vigilance was expressed in Hermann’s admonition to “remain henceforth with the practice of writing things down (bei dem gebrauch uffzuschriben) as a fish in water” (wie der fi schs im wasser).46 The metaphor was apt, since a burgher’s record keeping was never done. As a lawyer, Hermann was perhaps even more aware than most of the procedural, indeterminate nature of much urban writing. Between 1555 and 1560, Hermann Weinsberg’s Gedenkbuch gradually expanded to include more of his everyday activities, including noteworthy happenings. He began to record some of the details that he had previously jotted down in brief in his almanacs, but now he had more room to describe events in full. In June of 1556, for instance, Hermann recorded a recipe for cherry jam. He did so at the request of his wife Weisgin, who “asked me to write down the procedure, so she did not forget it.”47 Not long afterwards, Hermann explained how he was asked by the Council to help a Spanish nobleman visiting Cologne for relics. The nobleman had come bearing a letter from the Emperor, requesting that the city help him to obtain relics of Cologne’s 11,000 virgin martyrs. Journeying “here and there” through the city with the gentleman, Hermann fi nally acquired for him two skulls and wrote a letter permitting him to take them out of the city.48 The following year, Hermann wrote of the small “gathering” (krenzgin) he held for his old schoolmates at the university. Enjoying the music of a virginal and flute, the entire group was “merry” (und mir waren frolich).49 Two months later, in May of 1557, Hermann narrated an account of his wife Weisgin’s death.50 Though increasingly thorough and diverse, Hermann Weinsberg’s records between 1555 and 1558 still fit within the normally spare genre of the “housebook.” The reader of these matter-of-fact entries rarely catches sight of the author’s personality. There are few superfluous descriptive details; there was, as yet, no evidence that Hermann sought to preserve anecdotes and personality sketches purely for the sake of posterity. In 1557, for instance, Hermann explained how he and his wife Weisgin took on his illegitimate daughter, Anna—“the natural child” (dat naturlich kint) in the text—as a “stranger” and a servant. Hermann provided a brief summary of his daughter’s life, when she was born and baptized, where she had previously been raised. He also left a blank space, never filled, where he intended to note how much he had spent on her upbringing to that point. There was no mention of what

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effect, if any, Anna’s presence had on either himself or his wife. Rather, the most he saw fit to write down was a formulaic prayer: “May God grant that she becomes a good person.”51 Similar pieties can be found in his account of Weisgin’s death, which, though detailed, did not deviate substantially from deathbed scenes in other contemporary housebooks and diaries. In clinical fashion, Hermann summarized the progression of her illness. He also stressed his wife’s patience and piety in the midst of her suffering—a sign, to contemporaries, that an individual had died in a state of grace. “She was so patient and pious, that it was a miracle,” Hermann wrote. “She died stilly and sweetly, as if falling asleep,” he concluded, “without any gestures, prayers of distress, or distortion of the eyes.”52 These were the manifestations of a good death. From 1558 onward, however, Hermann’s entries in his Gedenkbuch became more detailed and intimate. By that time, he had completed his last will and testament, depositing it with the requisite Schrein after Weisgin’s death.53 And he had fi nished the bulk of his Boich Weinsberg.54 With these major components of his plan now in place, Hermann could now devote himself more diligently to his other writings. Though he had originally intended the Gedenkbuch to serve as a simple housebook, Hermann increasingly came to see it as a means of preserving his and his family’s quotidian memory. The changes were dramatic. Hermann began to expand upon the earlier memories he had jotted down. For instance, he fleshed out the details of his daughter’s arrival in Cologne in 1554. As was customary in cases of illegitimacy, the women of the household handled the matter discretely; Weisgin arranged for Anna to live with Hermann’s illegitimate sister Geirt. When Weisgin fi rst met Anna at one of the city gates, she found the young girl “disheveled in body and clothes; her stomach was swollen out like that of a pig.” It was with a note of tenderness, then, that Hermann recalled how a few days later he had seen his “natural” daughter “for the fi rst time in my life.” Over the years, a growing fondness for Anna would fi nd expression in dozens of entries in his Gedenkbuch, which had become something far more ambitious and capacious than the simple record he had originally envisioned.

A Secret Retreat It was not only theoretical considerations that drove Hermann to record the details of his life. The expansion of his Gedenkbuch also had a great deal to do with his new marriage to a wealthy widow named

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Drutgin Bars in 1558. The marriage began conventionally enough, and Hermann duly recorded in businesslike fashion all the negotiations leading up to the marriage, the order of festivities, and the names of the guests. Within half a year, however, Hermann was beginning to reveal far more intimate details about the quarrels that had erupted with his new wife. Hermann was disturbed by these fights, not least because he had been incited to curse Drutgin, “which never happened with my previous wife, Weisgin,” since it was “not my habit to swear at a woman.”55 Hermann began to confide in his Gedenkbuch, revealing Drutgin’s accusations and defending himself against them.56 As an “honorable” man, Hermann did not want these quarrels to become public, and yet, as a sensitive soul, he seems to have felt compelled to reveal them to someone. The Gedenkbuch, which was intended for an imagined audience of heirs, apparently provided the necessary outlet. Hermann’s records of his marital troubles, which fell mainly between 1558 and 1560, make for exceptionally vivid reading. They are fi lled with concrete, often emotionally charged details, and allow insight into the author’s perceptions. As such, they are quite unlike Hermann’s earlier entries. The fi rst is dated on July 18, 1558, and it speaks of a “great quarrel” that emerged between himself and Drutgin, during which he “screamed and swore at her harshly.” Drutgin had learned that, before their marriage, Hermann had had an affair with “a single woman” (a fact not previously revealed in the Gedenkbuch). According to Hermann, his wife accused him of “still having thoughts for the woman.” She assured him that “everything would be well” if he admitted the affair. Yet according to Hermann, no sooner had he confessed than Drutgin began to scream and accost him. Hermann attributed her reaction to “jealousy.” Later that night, she got up from the bed and threatened to run away. “Fearing scandal and rumor among the neighbors,” Hermann cursed her and forbade her to leave. Drutgin, in turn, dared him to hit her. “Strike me, strike me”—these were the words Hermann remembered. “It was a miracle that I did not do so at the time, so enraged was I,” Hermann confessed in his Gedenkbuch. Though they reconciled that night, more strange events followed. Two days later at dawn, Drutgin came to him while he was still in bed. Carrying a chamber pot, she showed him what looked like a small fetus, saying, “Oh husband, oh, it is a little child.” Because of the dark, Hermann could not make out clearly what the small object was, but he thought it looked like a fetus with “a head, arms, and legs” (es hat gestalt eins kintges mit heuptgin, ermger und beinger). When she

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emptied the pot, the object slipped away as well, preventing Hermann from getting a closer look. Drutgin had said sometime earlier that she had missed her period and thought that she was pregnant. But Hermann doubted whether she had actually miscarried. Sometime after the events above, he discovered paper in her chamber pot. When he pointed this out to her during a quarrel, she claimed that she had put the paper there to muffle the noise during the night, so she would not wake him when she had to relieve herself. She swore that she had truly miscarried; moreover, she thought the child was a boy. Hermann remained skeptical, speculating that she wanted perhaps to convince him that she was still young enough to conceive. Perhaps also she wanted to suggest that his previous swearing and anger had caused the miscarriage.57 More discord followed—all of it revealed in detail in Hermann’s “Memory Book.” Drutgin began to suspect Hermann of numerous affairs. In February of 1559, she confronted Hermann with a drop of blood she had found on one of his shirts, saying that he must have gotten it in an “unclean place” (a brothel). Over the next several days, Drutgin flew into a rage, threatening “to stab herself.”58 In June, she accused her husband of stealing twenty pieces of gold from her. 59 In August, she claimed that he had ogled “pretty women” during a recent trip the two had made to the Netherlands. She brought the accusation before the pastor of St. Laurence, who paid Hermann a visit.60 Later that year, Drutgin temporarily moved all her things out of the couple’s apartment “under the Town Hall” and into her own house. Around the same time, she complained to Hermann’s confessor, the Superior of the Augustinians, of his alleged indiscretions. “She wants to accuse me,” Hermann complained in his Gedenkbuch, “of something that is not true, and I cannot very well tolerate this, although I try to compromise.” For every two days that were good, he said, the third day was bad. Around the same time, Drutgin complained that Hermann had not brought as much money into the marriage as he had originally promised. Hermann was horrified to fi nd that Drutgin was telling her kin how much money he had brought into the marriage—“which I have revealed to no one, not even my mother.” By now, the couple were sleeping in separate rooms, barely speaking to one another and communicating through letters.61 Early in 1560, a major quarrel erupted after one of the couple’s maids ran away. Drutgin found the young woman, who claimed that Hermann had made advances towards her. According to Hermann, the maid “said that I had come after her, kissed her, and revealed

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dishonorable intentions towards her.” When Drutgin heard this, she not only confronted Hermann with the accusations, but also complained of it to his mother, his relatives, the pastor, her own children, and some of the neighbors. In his Gedenkbuch, Hermann dismissed the maid’s claims by raising questions about her character—she was in debt and was rumored to have had an affair with a clergyman. For the fi rst time, Hermann felt compelled to reveal the history of the quarrels to his mother and siblings, who began publicly to complain about Drutgin, resulting in a larger conflict between the two families. To clear his name and seek a peace with Drutgin, Hermann brought the entire affair before the rector of the university, under whose jurisdiction he, as a university member, stood.62 These quarrels were hardly the only subjects in Hermann’s expanding Gedenkbuch. He began to write in more detail about many of his affairs and activities. He threw himself all the more earnestly into his work on behalf of his “father’s house,” completing his massive genealogy late in 1558 and beginning to compose his instructional manual for future housefathers (the Declarationboich). The quarrels with Drutgin seem to have prompted Hermann to take even greater refuge in thoughts of the Haus Weinsberg, his “true” home. Even as his own masculinity— his identity as a housefather—was being threatened, Hermann turned to fantasies of his role as a proud steward of his “father’s house.” In many ways, these quarrels tapped into Hermann’s fears about the alienation of patrilineal goods through women. Trying to defend his own masculinity, Hermann played up gender stereotypes in his narratives of the quarrels with Drutgin—her jealousy, her hysteria, her appeals to priests and confessors. His accounts of the arguments could thus easily become part of the memory of the patrilineal house. As the “housefather” of Weinsberg, he was besieged by the “jealousy” of a woman who was ultimately a “stranger” to his own house. Correctly suspecting Hermann’s true allegiance, Drutgin accused him of siding too much with his mother and siblings. She reminded him of Jesus’s saying that “a man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife.” Her concerns were not amiss. For Hermann, the loyalty a son owed to his “father’s house” was higher than the conjugal bond.63 It was during this period that Hermann had a new revelation about his familial and personal memoria—indeed, he had stumbled upon an unexpected solution to the problem of oblivion that had long haunted him. If marital turmoil led him to take refuge in his books, where he could enact his secret identity as “housefather,” so his detailed accounts

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of the quarrels also made him increasingly aware of the power of paper to capture and enshrine episodes from his life. In the secrecy of his study, Hermann became a passionate, obsessive diarist. He was inspired to transform his Gedenkbuch into an exceptionally detailed chronicle of his life and times. “When I discovered,” he later recalled, “that I had produced many good reports, on many matters and points, during these five or six years, I began to love this record keeping (begunte mir disse anzeigung zu lieben) and often thought to myself that it would have been fi ne, fitting, and useful if I had begun to do so much earlier.” The more he recorded, the more he discovered the power of writing to preserve even the most mundane details of the past. This, in turn, revealed all that would slip into oblivion if it were not written down. Hermann now wanted to write a new Gedenkbuch, one that would encompass his own life from the very beginning.64 In this reconceived project, various forms of memory (both traditional and new) came together to forge an original commemorative form.65 Sometime around 1560, Hermann realized that he could fuse his growing Gedenkbuch with the family chronicle and genealogy that he had already completed. Indeed, he was exhilarated by the thought that he could preserve the particular details of his life within the Haus Weinsberg. The new refuges of intimacy he had discovered in his “Memory Book” now found a new publicity, a new audience. The connection between bourgeois privacy and new forms of publicity is often seen as one of the foundational elements of modern literary culture, which developed slowly during the early modern period. But in Hermann’s own work, this process seems to have been accelerated by his perception that future housefathers—imagined men with whom he could speak “intimately as a friend”—formed a ready audience.66 Hermann could thus not only preserve his own life “immortally” in writing, but also take reassurance in the fact that his memory would forever be bound up in the transhistorical identity of the lineage. Emboldened by these discoveries, Hermann resolved to compile a comprehensive account of the Haus Weinsberg and its fortunes during his own lifetime. In 1561, he returned to his own past, “hurriedly” composing an account of his youth—“as if I were telling it to another in person, with quick words.” In less than eight months he fi lled over 700 folio pages with vivid anecdotes from his early years. “The completion of this work,” he wrote, “astonishes even me, for I have had much else to do in the meantime and cannot write extensively because of my poor eyesight.”67

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In his own earnest fashion, Hermann Weinsberg had found a way of gathering together the history of his family and his own life—reversing the alienating, centrifugal forces of urban life. Through the Gedenkbuch, he was able to graft the particularities of his actual life—the “circumstances” revealed in urban bookkeeping—onto the providential identity of the lineage.68 As he wrote the autobiographical portions of his Gedenkbuch, he was intensely aware of the accidents and contingencies of his own past. Had he obtained a clerical living in young adulthood, for instance, he would have never married, but rather remained a clergyman.69 About a lectureship that was denied him, Hermann wrote, “If I had received it, I would have further been incited to study, which would have been very useful to me.”70 Likewise, he wondered what he might have been if his parents had apprenticed him with a merchant or artisan, rather than enrolling him at the University of Cologne.71 Perhaps nostalgic about his own past, Hermann tried to remember how he had been at each stage of his life—as a child, an adolescent, a young adult. Indeed, his reminiscences of childhood are unusual for the period, insofar as they convey some of the naïveté, exuberance, and wonder of his early experience. After he had completed the retrospective sections of the Gedenkbuch, Hermann Weinsberg continued the work in diary format. His method involved fi rst briefly jotting down notable events each day in his almanac diaries. After a few weeks, he decided which of these events he wanted to commemorate.72 In the Gedenkbuch, he would elaborate upon these events, providing a full description of “all their circumstances, such as who, what, where, when, how, and the like.”73 There were, of course, many fi nancial and familial records, which charted changes within either his estate or his circle of kin. But increasingly, Hermann delighted in recording the stuff of his life—neighborhood rumors, family celebrations, traditional customs, private reflections, household quarrels, his activities as a churchwarden and city-councilor, and so on. This was no ordinary diary, but rather a systematic attempt to keep as comprehensive a record as possible of both his own life and that of his “house and lineage.”74 Indeed, to embellish the memory of his Haus, Hermann included in his Gedenkbuch news of his day— news of “noteworthy great military and religious affairs (heroica und namhaftige groisse kreichs und religionssachen) and great lords, states, countries, and peoples.”75 The result was a history of the sixteenth century from the perspective of a single house. If anything, such record keeping reinforced Hermann’s experience of flux. Writing offered a way to fi x and preserve who he had been at

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various ages. He discovered that he could “portray himself with the quill” at various stages of his life.76 The fi rst of these self-descriptions appeared in the retrospective portion of his Gedenkbuch; it showed his physical and character traits in 1551, when he was thirty-three.77 “Because I have now reached such a year by God’s grace,” Hermann began, “I want to describe my own person and body, that is, how I was fashioned and formed at this time, along with my nature, manners, and habits, both what was good and what was bad.” Inspired by Erasmus, Hermann aimed to show “what is good and bad in me.” “I do not seek praise in this, but rather want to show the truth.”78 In clinical fashion, he proceeded to describe various aspects of himself, including his height, width, eyes, mouth, hair, speech, memory, complexion, digestion, and clothing. Likewise, he composed short paragraphs describing his various personality traits—“Solitary,” “Gentle,” “Ambitious,” “Frugal,” and so on. His sleeping habits, his daily routines, his attitude towards games and parties—these were among the many details that made their way into his self-descriptions. Hermann compiled several more of these self-descriptions—in 1574, 1578, and 1588.79 In the later self-portraits, Hermann stressed many of the changes that had beset him in old age. The physical changes were obvious. But other changes were just as significant. Hermann noted at age sixty, for instance, that “it is unnecessary to praise chastity in old age.”80 This contrasted with his description of himself at age thirty-three: “I was unchaste in thought and deed, and put up little opposition.”81 And slightly different than both of the above was an acknowledgment in 1574, at the age of fi fty-six: “I like to look at shapely, beautiful women,” he wrote, though he noted that there was little danger of following through on his “evil desire.”82 Other changes he noticed in old age included his worsening digestion, his inability to sleep, and his aversion to drinking and banquets. Some historians have considered Hermann Weinsberg’s self-portraits a product of Renaissance individualism.83 Indeed, the modern reader can sense the author’s wonder at his own particularity, his delight in revealing himself to future readers. Everywhere in his Gedenkbuch, Hermann’s records have a strong empirical bent and attention to detail. They presuppose the irreducible particularity, the unrepeatable uniqueness of particular events and things.84 “Past time,” he sighed, “never comes again.”85 Hermann himself lamented that he had failed to record many things in his Gedenkbuch. “Since I have hurried in the writing of this book and could not think of everything .  .  . so many things were not remembered or not fully remembered and have now been

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forgotten.”86 He saw himself as salvaging the history of his own family from oblivion. Since the spoken word “vanishes like the wind,” whatever he did not record would be irretrievably lost.87 “Thus I have been concerned,” he wrote, “that the histories which have taken place during my lifetime, especially within the house and lineage of Weinsberg, should not be forgotten, but rather diligently written down and gathered together in a manuscript for an eternal remembrance.”88 But if Hermann Weinsberg was a Renaissance individualist, he was a somewhat unwilling and tentative one. The main thrust of his Gedenkbuch was not to capture the force of his personality or his life at its peak—not to create a bold self-portrait—but rather to gather together all the details of his life in a single place, so as to realize some semblance of eternity on earth.89 To be sure, such compulsive efforts were themselves an expression of new forms of individual agency, and Hermann’s own grandparents would likely have been puzzled at the initiative he took in matters as fateful as family memory and survival. But the resulting portrait was not that of a proud, decisive patriarch. As he worked on his personal memory, the tone of Hermann Weinsberg’s writings changed. Whereas his earlier genealogical records had been heroic, his personal records were full of pathos. In his Gedenkbuch, he attempted to channel the humble spirit of northern humanism, which condemned a grasping after fame. Vanity was a species of folly: “I will not have myself praised, for self-praise stinks” (eigenlob stinkt).90 One way to read such candid self-revelations is as an attempt to make amends for—and even to justify—his grandiose ambition. By laying bare his foibles, his flaws, his shortcomings, he hoped that future readers would take his secret “plan for the best.” He was “human” after all. The Gedenkbuch took on the quality of an apology. Perhaps not coincidentally, he discovered the possibility of such self-revelation during his marriage to Drutgin, when the gap between his father’s great expectations and his own pathetic persona as a patriarch and stepfather was arguably at its widest. Hermann, moreover, had a great and lonely secret to confess. The modern reader can almost sense his relief as he unburdened his soul, confessing his inability to live up to his father’s great expectations and revealing to future readers the ambitions he kept so carefully hidden. More importantly, the “Memory Book” seemed to provide the opportunity to overcome the alienating effects of time. The unique existential urgency with which Hermann consolidated his identity is evident at the beginning of the second volume of his Gedenkbuch, which he deemed

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his Liber senectutis or “Book of Old Age.” Here, in 1578, Hermann not only composed the most detailed of all his self-descriptions (including a survey of all the houses in his neighborhood), but also “extracted” a summary of his life to date from the previous volumes. Echoing Augustine, he viewed this recollected time as a pale reflection of God’s eternity. By gathering past moments in a single place, he hoped to overcome the nonexistence of the passing moment: “Thus, the past, present, and future of my entire life will come together in one book.”91 So determined was Hermann to have a complete, self-contained account of his life that he often asked the future housefather, his successor, to fill in the records of his fi nal days, death, and burial.92 If the family continued his record keeping, it would possess a memory to rival that of any great house: “Thus will the household members, our blood and kin, be distinguished through an eternally enduring memory before thousands of other houses and lineages.” Not without pride, Hermann compared the archive that he was compiling with the fragmentary memories of most Cologne families, who had not bothered to preserve their histories. Although some memory of them might survive in “the civic archives (schrinen), sealed letters, marriage contracts, and the like,” such documents contained only the “smallest part” of their history and were “not all gathered together in a single place, as here in this Gedenkbuch.” Lamenting that his ancestors had “not all had the custom of writing things down,” Hermann warned his descendants that if he himself had not recorded the stories that his grandmother, father, and other relatives had told him, the descendants would never have learned about them. Thanks to his own writings, however, the Weinsberg family would “remain famous and secure in memory through writing (vernoimt in der memorien und gewisser gedechtenis durch die schrift) in a secure and constant place, namely, with us in the Haus Weinsberg.”93 By this time, however, the relationship between the survival of the lineage and the survival of its memory had become somewhat blurred. Initially, when Hermann began to write, he envisioned the Memoria of his family as something that would promote its survival—the source of its identity, the bond that would unite the ancestors with the heirs. His life was merely the latest chapter in a long and ongoing history; indeed, the belief that he belonged to an illustrious lineage justified his otherwise “laughable” attempt to record the lives of commoners. No matter how far the once noble Weinsbergs had fallen, their distinguished ancestry imbued their current mundane existence with a heightened

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significance, and their future flourishing would one day vindicate Hermann’s lifelong labor as scribe to his family. Towards the end of his life, however, Hermann’s preoccupation with personal memory eclipsed his concern about the lineage. A plaintive plea to “remember me” moved to the center of his work. At times, it may have seemed even to him that the lineage was simply a vehicle for the preservation of his personal memory. He recorded the events of his life compulsively, fearful that he would miss something crucial. In 1578, when he had already written around 1,500 pages of his Gedenkbuch, Hermann lamented, “without doubt many good things (which are very necessary to know) will be forgotten and not sufficiently described with all their circumstances” (mit allen synen umbstenden beschriben).94 Ten years later, he thought that he might be too weak to fi nish his records and that his fi nal days and burial might go unrecorded. Determined that his life—“from the time when I was born into this vale of tears to the time I have died and departed it, together with all that happened to me in between”—should be gathered (samen komen) in a single place, he once again implored his heirs to write down the details of his end. This final task was necessary for “the completion of my person” (complerenß miner person).95 With such desperation came worries that his fragile written memory would not survive. In 1579, he was relieved to discover that a paper edition of Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools had lasted for more than eighty years. Hermann took hope that his Gedenkbuch might remain over a hundred years, provided it was kept free of “water, fi re, dampness, mildew, grease, moths, mice, and worms.”96 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, uncertainty about the durability of paper was not uncommon. In his In Praise of Scribes, Johannes Trithemius stressed the longevity of parchment: “The printed book is made of paper, and, like paper, will quickly disappear. But the scribe working with parchment ensures lasting remembrance for himself and for his text.”97 For similar reasons, Hermann hoped that his heirs would someday hire an experienced copyist to “correct” and “duplicate” his Gedenkbuch on more durable vellum.98 Here, Hermann wanted to take advantage of the best of both manuscript and print technologies. He hoped a parchment copy, adorned with suitable decorations, would prove a suitably rich and lasting resting place for his words, giving them the same aura of authority possessed by the most venerable historical and spiritual texts. At the same time, the heirs were to produce multiple copies (not unlike the way in which mechanical reproduction guaranteed survival through redundancy).99 In the meantime, Hermann provided a set of

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instructions for maintaining his archive—his “little chest”—of papers. Not only were the books to be cleaned yearly, but the executors of his estate were to make sure that his successors did not abuse, misplace, or neglect any of the volumes.100 Family chests, locks and keys, scribes and manuscripts—these were the conventional forms of burgher memory. Yet Hermann placed far more strain on these traditional forms than they could bear, as his anxious efforts to ensure their preservation attest. Indeed, for all his secrecy and privacy, Hermann’s work also pointed towards the new forms of publicity that were being forged by the print culture of early modern Europe. Even though he was writing only for his family, one cannot escape the sense that he was writing for future readers as well. The covers of the three volumes of his Gedenkbuch—and the title pages of his Boich Weinsberg—are not drawn as illuminated manuscripts. Rather, they simulate the title pages of printed books, complete with mock engravings and publication dates (Figure 8). As an avid reader of printed histories and chronicles, Hermann came to see his own Gedenkbuch as a valuable historical source. Though Hermann insisted that the “Memory Book” remain secret, and though he called it “nothing other than a domestic or family book,”101 he nonetheless began to situate his work within a larger arena of publicity opened up by print. To his death, he remained unclear about his ultimate aims. Sometimes his imagined readership was restricted to his kin; at other times it was much wider. Recognizing that others might censure his self-preoccupation, he urged the heirs to keep his work a secret. And yet he also defended his work to unknown future readers, suggesting that future generations would be glad to have a record of quotidian affairs that other historians did not record.

Defending the Memory of Commoners By the time he had compiled several hundred pages, Hermann Weinsberg knew his “Memory Book” was unusual. Though he had originally set out to give his burgher family an illustrious noble memory, he had ended up documenting his own mundane and sometimes embarrassing affairs. His writing is filled with frequent apologies for its “low” subject matter. He was forced to admit that “there may be several people who will read this Gedenkbuch and other things that I have written and wonder what reason I had to engage in so much idle, superfluous work and to write so much about myself and not about more useful

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and important affairs on which the common good and many people depend.” He came back again and again to a single question: “What good is it to know my life and my insignificant circumstances?” (myn geringe gelegenheit).102 Was it vain to think that the humble affairs of a burgher household were worthy of documentation? Hermann defended his record keeping vigorously. He advised those searching for “splendid, stately histories” to consult the chronicle writers. As he put it, “I write about the affairs of relatives, neighbors, and burghers. Because no one writes about them, I am doing it, so that they also might be remembered somewhat. It cannot harm to know humble affairs and things” (Sclechte sachen und dingen zu wissen kan nyt schaden).103 In 1578, when he described the wedding of an acquaintance, Hermann advised future readers that “such things have no significance except to be remembered as old antiquities, relations, and histories among the neighbors. If others write about popes, emperors, kings, great princes, lords, and countries, how does that concern me? I prefer to write about my relatives and neighbors, so that one will know something to say about them as well” (so weis man von inen auch etwas zu sagen). As Hermann saw it, the loftier subject matter already received its fair share of coverage in other books.104 There were many notes of tenderness in Hermann’s apologies. Though he acknowledged that “many effeminate, childish, foolish, and laughable things” (vil weibische, kindigsche, narrische und lecherliche dingen) stood in his Gedenkbuch, he nonetheless insisted that they would not harm anyone. Though they might have had no practical use or benefit, he urged future readers to “interpret them for the best,” taking them as a “joke and entertainment” (swenk und kurzweil).105 Later in life, Hermann wrote, “Now we are all sisters and brothers together, but we are imperfect humans (unvolkomen menschen) and not holy angels.”106 After writing about a family quarrel in 1578, Hermann explained that “I set all this here in the book of my old age so that one might know in the future, when we are no longer here, what we did when we were still in life, so that the children and grandchildren might tell of it and laugh that we were human.” Indeed, Hermann justified his family records by pointing to Scripture itself, where one could find much about how “parents and children, sisters and brothers, young and old, servant and maids acted towards one another.”107 Similarly, Hermann said that he wrote for the future housefather alone, as to his beloved “son.” Though he wished he could speak to the housefather in person, telling him stories and answering his questions, Hermann used

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the “means of quill, ink, and paper, through which memory can be preserved beyond an individual’s life.”108 In defending such intimacy, Hermann drew on the ethos of northern humanism. Far from a display of vanity, his writings were an honest act of self-revelation. By reporting his own traits—both “good and bad”—he was not puffing himself up, but rather displaying his humility. “Self-praise stinks”—this was a message that he had learned from reading authors such as Sebastian Brandt and Erasmus. To make this argument, of course, was to rethink traditional conceptions of vanitas. Under the ascetic regime of the Middle Ages, vanity was not simply unmerited boasting and pride; it was also an undue attention to things that were low, insignificant, and fleeting. Well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the antidote to vanity was a death’s head—a skull reminding the contemplative scholar or monk of the emptiness of worldly life. Hermann’s “Memory Book” was thus problematic not only because it displayed an inordinate preoccupation with individual memory, but also because it dealt with trivial things. Hermann inverted this argument. It would be vain, he insisted, not to record the lives of commoners. Their absence from the historical record was an oversight, a product in part of the “arrogance” of the noble and clerical estates. “Who will do it if I don’t?”—this question was as much condemnation as it was self-defense. In many ways, Hermann anticipated the modern reinterpretation of vanitas as excessive self-esteem alone. In his essay “On Experience,” Hermann’s contemporary Michel de Montaigne made a similar argument, despite his condemnations of glory. It was those who thought themselves too good for this world—those who were perpetually denying their own humanity in pursuit of spiritual ecstasies—who were arguably the most vain. A frank, honest self-assessment was not a species of vanity, but rather an expression of humility. Centuries before Rousseau imagined that the unprecedented sincerity of his Confessions—the revelation of his full humanity—would justify him before the divine throne, Hermann Weinsberg defended (albeit less brazenly) his own honest revelations of all-too-human traits. Hermann’s primary concern, however, was to overcome oblivion. Especially towards the end of his life, Hermann became increasingly preoccupied with the many changes in his local world—changes in clothing, customs, religious practice, writing, laws, coins, and more. Increasingly, more and more of Cologne culture was drawn into his memorial project, as he sought to explain to his heirs how things had been during his own lifetime. When an open part of the stream in

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front of the Haus Weinsberg was plastered over, for instance, Hermann took a moment to explain what the stream had been like in his childhood—how children had played in it, how women had used it for washing clothes, how horses and oxen had fallen through the ice with horrific screams in the wintertime.109 In 1587, he noted how the new, reformed calendar had led to changes in the Easter celebration. Under the old calendar, the weather was often warm on Easter. In many years, “the cherry and pear trees were in blossom.” Then, the family usually ate the “Easter lamb and eggs in the summer rooms.” Now, Hermann wrote, it was usually cold and dry; “little green can be seen.” As a result, the family sang “Christ is risen” and “Alleluia” in the warmer winter quarters.110 There are many such entries in Hermann’s Gedenkbuch. In his later years, Hermann Weinsberg came to see himself as writing a history of burghers and commoners. It would perhaps not be too much of an exaggeration to say that his entire project was an attempt to write a middling burgher family into history. At times, this meant connecting his family with traditional forms of memoria—giving it the same sort of historical significance as a noble lineage. At other times, this meant recording the particular, mundane events of his life for posterity. Ironically, Hermann began to worry that the sheer bulk of his paper records would make it difficult for future generations to keep his memory alive. The more he recorded, the more his dream of a single, consolidated existence seemed to dissipate in a sea of details. “I have not been able to bring together the memory books of my life in a single volume. And no one will easily be able to do it after me.” He recommended that his heirs commission someone to create an index (eyn besonder Register oder extract) of the work. It was “troublesome,” he noted, to “lose time” by thumbing through pages to fi nd a passage, only to forget where it was the next time one sought it. Even Hermann, late in life, was struggling to locate items in his volumes. “Although I can approximately remember the history of my years,” he admitted, “nonetheless I can fi nd it difficult to fi nd what I seek and desire to know.” Recourse to more sophisticated information technologies would be necessary for his heirs to locate even the basic outlines of his story. The bulk of his memory, nonetheless, would remain waiting patiently in the paper pages of his books.111 Here one can see just how much, in Hermann Weinsberg’s mind, the naïve faith in corporate memory had been shaken. Participation in the “eternal gathering” of the lineage was not enough. Rather, the

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particular details of his life had to be preserved in writing, so that future readers might remember each of them in detail. And yet, as Hermann discovered, the cost of such empirical record keeping was a heightened awareness of all that could not be preserved, an inability to combine a mass of details into a living whole. The more information Hermann packed into his Gedenkbuch, the more distant and inaccessible the past he commemorated seemed. If the proliferation of print and paper caused the amount of data available for retrieval to balloon, it also could easily lead to “information overload,” a sense of impotence when confronted with a mountain of evidence.112 Early in his writing career, Hermann had a strong faith in the ability of words to participate in the things they signified, insisting that writing could “renew, restore, and resurrect the past.” He remembered that as a student he believed that in the power of words—of curses and blessings—to bring both “harm” and “benefit.”113 But by the end of his life, after years of writing, Hermann had become painfully aware of the gap between representation and its objects. Late in life, while taking stock of a lifetime of record keeping, he resigned himself to a limited worldly afterlife. To the housefather, he wrote that “when you or others read what is written in my books, perhaps you will be moved at times to remember me for the best, to pray to God for me, to thank me for any way in which I have been helpful, consoling, or useful.”114 To be sure, Hermann inserted here a traditional request for prayers. But this hope for an occasional, fleeting recollection, perhaps inspired by a page or two of his books, was already a long way from the full participation in a transcendent unity that he had so eagerly sought. Not surprisingly, modern historians have expressed profound gratitude for Hermann’s efforts to chronicle his everyday world. It is easy to see this eccentric sixteenth-century lawyer as a kindred spirit. Photo albums, time capsules, newspapers, archives, vast scholarly libraries— the modern urge to document and preserve rages unabated, and we can only wish that men and women in the past had done more of it. Hermann seems to have felt something similar. If he recorded the stuff of his everyday life, it was so that “in the future, when we are no longer living, one will know what we did when we were alive” (daß man kunff tiglich auch wissen mogt wan myr nit synt, was myr angetriben haben do myr in leben gewest syn).115 Though at times clumsy in its execution (at least by modern standards), Hermann Weinsberg’s noble intention to record his local world for posterity seems to anticipate many modern values.

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What can be difficult to remember, however, is that a robust secular memory—the type of memory that lies behind the work of the modern historian—would not be fully developed until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the emergence of a wider reading “public.”116 Many of Hermann’s insights into the power of writing to record the lives of commoners were retrospective arguments, attempts to justify a project that he had stumbled upon almost by accident. In the sixteenth century, the leap from historical awareness to the documentation of everyday life was not immediately obvious. Even though more and more of the world was gaining entry into books, even though writing was penetrating more and more aspects of everyday life, there were no clear examples for writing the burgher family into history. Though town-dwellers commonly used writing to keep track of their familial and fi nancial affairs, there were few fully developed models for representing the middling family as a middling family—with all its unique complexity and particularity. Published autobiographies of elite men were formulaic, based on classical models or pious exempla; meanwhile, burgher private writing remained eclectic, intended mainly for intimate circles of family members. When burghers self-consciously set out to represent themselves in writing, they usually began by mimicking models that had been developed elsewhere. It was only because of his own eccentric experimentation that Hermann Weinsberg came to intuit a deeper historical process. What no sixteenth-century observer could foresee—not even the clear-sighted Montaigne—was that the very foundations of record keeping and secular knowledge were being transformed. New technologies for representing and reproducing reality were opening up something of a new terrain—one that would be systematically explored and colonized during the next several centuries. Over time, modern culture would come to be characterized by an abundance of written material and a relatively stable documentary substratum. Novels, newspapers, diaries, photographs, historical archives, laboratories, universities—the urge to preserve and document reality would become one of the major preoccupations of European culture. With the great modern expansion of cultural memory and communication, the idea of a hundred clerks on the battlefield would not be quite as absurd as Montaigne suggested.



chapter eight

A New World

In the copious writings of his later years, Hermann Weinsberg strove to forge a private order within a shattered Christendom. His bid for fame took on broader historical dimensions as he tried to come to terms with a “new world” of indeterminate, ambiguous change. Sitting in the upstairs study of the Haus Cronenberg, from which he could peer out on his beloved family home, he pondered the “great transformations” of his day. Hermann Weinsberg’s efforts to write his world reflected the new media environment of the sixteenth century. Though he had no access to a regular, predictable supply of news (the fi rst serial news sheets would emerge in the seventeenth century),1 he nonetheless worked assiduously to keep abreast of his age’s developments, acquiring information through a wide range of sources: pamphlets, chronicles, polemical literature, civic records, council discussions, conversations with peers, and neighborhood rumors. In sifting through reports, Hermann adopted a skeptical, tolerant, and irenic attitude. Not unlike many modern readers, he played the role of an impartial observer, attempting to cope with a flood of news and information but also resigning himself to a small place in a large and confusing world. At the same time, Hermann clung all the more desperately to his belief in a secret, providential lineage. As a compensation for the apparent disorder of Christendom, his dream that he belonged to a noble, providential patriline took on immense significance; it provided a “refuge” in the midst of change, a visible sign of God’s work in the

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world. Hermann burdened his modest family with far more meaning and significance than it could bear.

Perceptions of Change A man raised from the dead, granted a glimpse of a strange, new future—that was how Hermann Weinsberg pictured himself in 1588, when he had reached the age of seventy. “Things are now to me much as they would be for the dead if they awoke again and came out of their graves into the world,” Hermann wrote in his secret chronicle, “for as I enter the fi nal stage of my life, I see great changes in all the streets, markets, and squares in Cologne.” Not only had new buildings arisen, but there were also new political and religious elites, new citizens and guild members, and “new customs, laws and ordinances.” He saw “different clothing, different words and ways of speaking, different handwriting, a different manner of preaching and teaching, different taxes and duties, different coins, and still many more changes.” Living during an age when the certainties of the medieval world were quickly crumbling, this unassuming Catholic lawyer used the familiar idea of resurrection to distill his disorienting experience of change. To have survived past seventy, the age allotted to man in the Psalms, was nothing less than “to have been raised from the dead, to have seen a new world (eyn newe welt gesehen) with a living body, to have walked among my descendants and seen what they were doing.”2 It was a metaphor of wonder and alienation, well suited to a man who had witnessed some of the most dramatic religious and cultural changes in European history. Hermann Weinsberg himself was not a weathered traveler; he had spent most of his life in and around the Imperial Free City of Cologne, where he delighted in the privacy of his study. His outlook was conservative, shaped by the medieval traditions of his city. Yet his life had spanned almost the entire century, allowing him ample time to reflect on its many changes. Not only an avid reader of histories, pamphlets, and chronicles, he was also an incorrigible scribbler, who tried to make sense of his changing times on paper. The more uncertain the future appeared, the more feverish were his efforts to put his own world in order—and to secure a place for the burgher family within it. Polemics, rumors, and false reports had made “the world today doubtful and full of errors.” What hope then did descendants have of making sense of the past?3 Hermann’s “new world” was not the vast realm of possibility that moderns would later celebrate; it

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was a strange, confusing terrain, where much that was familiar threatened to melt away. Historians might suspect Hermann Weinsberg of exaggerating both the rate and the extent of his age’s transformations. By modern standards, the pace of social and technological development in sixteenthcentury Cologne was slow—and certainly less radical than Hermann’s comments would suggest. A visitor approaching the city in 1600 would have had much the same view as a traveler in 1500. Throughout an otherwise turbulent century, the population of the city remained stable, hovering around 40,000, a number which included several hundred priests, monks, and nuns. Unlike Protestant cities, which had been purged of their dense ecclesiastical infrastructures and elaborate liturgical systems, Cologne retained visible links with its medieval past. Relics, chapels, side-altars, masses for the dead, monasteries, benefices—such “spiritual capital” continued to distinguish Cologne, with its Roman roots and a rich history of saints and martyrs, as a prominent Catholic city. Although some of Cologne’s churches and monasteries had fallen into disrepair during the sixteenth century, neglected during a time of religious uncertainty, they had not been destroyed; the basic contours of ecclesiastical Cologne remained intact. And while some of city’s wealthiest merchants, academics, and city-councilors had constructed new stone, Renaissance-style mansions, most of the city’s burghers continued to live in the city’s many medieval dwellings—narrow wooden houses designed more for practicality than display. Yet if Cologne’s physical and social environment changed slowly, Hermann Weinsberg’s eerie image of flux perfectly captures the disorientation that a dynamic age could induce in a sensitive, educated townsman. Little in Cologne had changed, and yet, in another sense, everything had changed. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Cologne was a prominent city in Christendom—a microcosm of the universal Christian order. By the century’s close, Cologne was a selfconsciously Catholic city—an island within a fragmented, contested Europe. The burghers of Cologne watched helplessly as larger dynastic and religious conflicts gripped Christendom. Though spared the fate of some of its neighbors, which were besieged and plundered during the age’s religious-dynastic wars, Cologne lived in anxiety during the 1570s and 1580s, when Protestant and Catholic troops repeatedly swept through the region. The secularization of Protestant areas, as well as iconoclasm in the Low Countries, raised troubling questions about the permanence and universality of the Church. It was not difficult to

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imagine that Cologne’s rich ecclesiastical infrastructure might vanish in a day. And there were marked shifts in the tenor of religious life. By the late sixteenth century, religious devotion had revived around new, more austere and intimate forms of piety, brought to the city by the Jesuits and the Catholic Reformation.4 Even as they remained rooted within Cologne’s local, corporate world, educated burghers such as Hermann Weinsberg could not avoid their age’s intellectual and cultural ferment—its psychic mobility, so to speak. Many of the assumptions central to medieval Cologne culture could no longer be taken for granted. Printing brought news from around the world, heightening the historical and political awareness of even modest burghers. At the same time, Europe was groping towards new forms of economic and social interdependence—towards larger, state-based economies and political identities. Though ambitious burghers tried to take advantage of an accelerated flow of goods and information, many German cities would eventually be eclipsed by these developments, entering into a period of relative decline in the seventeenth century. Ironically, the parochial freedoms that had made medieval German cities dynamic centers of commerce and political experimentation hindered their integration into the emerging order. Though the decline of German free cities would not begin in earnest until the mid-seventeenth century, the future of a Catholic city like Cologne had already been cast into great uncertainty by the later 1500s. The 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s—the period of Hermann’s most feverish writing—were tumultuous and anxious years in Cologne and Europe. During the wars between Spain and the Protestant estates of the Netherlands, many families from the Low Countries, both Protestant and Catholic, sought refuge in Cologne, prompting fears of Anabaptism and religious violence in the city. As an avid collector of news (both via broadsides and conversation), Hermann could not avoid rumors of iconoclasm in the neighboring Low Countries. Meanwhile, the city found itself once again forced to defend itself against an Archbishop (Gebhard von Truchsess, r. 1577–1588) who had turned Protestant. During the 1580s, confessional wars erupted in the Rhineland, and though Cologne was spared any direct aggression, it remained on guard, watching helplessly as Protestant and Catholic forces clashed in the surrounding region. Hermann himself participated in several night watches during this tense time. 5 As the fabric of Christendom unraveled, Protestants and Catholic polemicists bitterly denounced each other. The idealistic, reforming

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impulses of the early sixteenth century could easily give way to confusion and weary irony. The more uncertain the world seemed, the more Hermann retreated into his secret archive, taking consolation in a plan that he hoped would carry himself and his kin safely through the ages. With the future of Cologne institutions in doubt, Hermann sought new sources of stability and certainty. He recognized that “the entire world will pass away,” that “many cities and castles have fallen to the ground.” His secret archive became a refuge, from which he could peer out on the upheavals of his world. In the Gedenkbuch, he sorted through rumors and pamphlets with an ironic detachment, lamenting that the public world was governed by passion, hatred, envy, and partiality. And yet he also held out hope for his own family, trusting “that things will not go so badly with the Haus Weinsberg.”6 How much was contained in this deceptively modest hope!

An Erasmian Irenicist By the later sixteenth century, Hermann had become something of an old-fashioned idealist. He clung to values of Christian humanism in an era of bitter polemics. He shared Erasmus’s high hopes for Christendom—his dream of a Christian community bound together by piety, peace, charity, and humility. For a time during the late fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these ideas had been ascendant; many educated Germans had hoped for a revival of Christendom and a new era of peace, justice, and fairness. During the 1510s and 1520s, this vision seemed a remedy for the fragmentation and “selfishness” of the actual Empire, in which the various estates clamored after money, power, privileges, and self-interest. During the second half of the sixteenth century, however, such idealism was difficult to sustain. Protestants and Catholics attacked each other in shrill tones, and Germany seemed more fragmented than ever. The rival confessions became tools of dynastic aggression, as princes and religious leagues fought for influence and power within the Empire. About the “great schism” between Catholics and Protestants, he wrote that “those on both sides who desire peace can do little or nothing and have the smallest following. On both sides, the belligerent are too powerful, too harsh, too intransigent.”7 Popular print culture was filled with pessimistic, apocalyptic warnings. Regarding an astrologer’s forecast that 1588 would be a bad year, Hermann remarked wryly that the prediction “doesn’t scare me in the least.” Since inflation had

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already been rampant for several years, and the Rheinland was ravaged by wars between Protestant and Catholic forces, which prevented many in Cologne from receiving their rents, the astrological prediction was superfluous. “Sadly things are bad enough already,” he sighed.8 In the later sixteenth century, many an erstwhile idealist was forced to become an ironist. Hermann struggled to remain hopeful. The peace and unity of Christians within the traditional Church were more important to him than doctrinal certainty. On the one hand, Hermann acknowledged the rampant corruption in the Church. The Lutheran movement, in his view, had accomplished some good, “partly abolishing the great abuses in the church, producing many learned men, and making the Holy Scriptures clearer.” But from the Reformation, “much evil” had also flowed, including the ruin and plunder of churches and cloisters, the persecution and burning of clergy and laity, and “all such murder, sorrow, and misery.” Whether the “benefits” were worth the great “harm” that had arisen, “God only knows.” Such matters were best entrusted to the “pious scholars.” What Hermann wished for was simply an end to Christian divisions—“a common unity in the true faith among all dear Christians.” All his ancestors had lived and died in the Catholic Church. “Therefore, I intend to remain with the Holy Church, as my ancestors have done, until the Holy Church teaches me otherwise.”9 While he criticized the “superstitions” of the Cologne laity, he nonetheless believed that many Catholic customs were “Christian and humane” and should be preserved for the sake of peace and unity.10 As a layman, Hermann professed a certain agnosticism in matters of doctrine, deferring to those more learned than himself whenever he encountered a thorny theological question. For the sake of peace, he remained undecided on many of his day’s most pressing polemical questions, never determining to his own satisfaction, for instance, whether “all the saved are saints, or whether the saints are better and more blessed than the saved.” Nor had he been able to discern whether some of the saints had spent time in purgatory before ascending to heaven. Hermann’s emphasis on the fundamental equality of all Christians— his belief that all humans possess both good and bad traits—no doubt contributed to his confusion in these matters. For Hermann, however, solving abstruse theological puzzles was less important than affirming a few key essentials—that Christ was the “true intermediary, advocate, and redeemer” and that God was “merciful and just and would not eternally damn a pious person for a little evil.” Though Hermann had

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not made up his mind on the question of the saints’ wonder-working power, he was not about to prohibit their veneration, since it was possible that the “saints may also intercede for us.”11 The prudent course was to continue in the faith of one’s ancestors, suspending disbelief for the sake of charity. In Hermann’s eyes, both sides of contemporary religious conflicts were to blame for violence. While admitting that Catholic abuses had sparked the religious conflagration sweeping through Christendom, Hermann condemned the destructive zeal with which Protestants fanned its flames. In particular, he was shocked by iconoclasm in the Netherlands, which could suddenly destroy the ecclesiastical infrastructure of entire cities.12 He was equally disturbed, however, by Catholic attempts to impose religious unity “by the sword.” “O Lord,” he prayed, “look down, may both sides avoid persecution, murder, burning, looting, and not permit so much oppression of the just and innocent.” Though Hermann longed for all men and women to live in Catholic unity—“it is to be wished and prayed that the good shepherd would bring us all into one stall, into one faith”—Hermann did not believe it could be accomplished by force. He lamented that religious affairs had been hijacked by powers beyond the control of common men. “One must believe what the strongest wills” (man mois doch gleuben, was der starckste wil), Hermann complained, “and many must believe against their will and good conscience in accordance with their ruler.”13 To coerce Protestants to become Catholic—as the Spanish crown attempted in the Netherlands—would set a dangerous precedent, in which “the most powerful would always have the right faith” (dan sult der gewaltigster allezit den rechten glauben haben). Had not the Turks brought Constantinople and the Eastern Empire under their power? The same thing, he feared, could easily happen to Cologne.14 As a timid, retiring man, Hermann was drawn by temperament to a more irenic stance. Wary of taking bold positions in public for fear of displeasing others, he preferred “peace” to conflict.15 As if offering a counterbalance to the age’s bitter disputes, Hermann became increasingly self-deprecating as he grew older. In his view, no individual was free from the general foolishness of the human spectacle. “Just as no man is so bad that he does not have some good in him,” Hermann averred, “likewise none is so good that he does not have several vices.”16 His family members, himself included, were “not formed as angels, and did not always practice the works of love.”17 During Carnival, he joked that “I now know of no better foolishness to pursue than to praise

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myself, for that is a true masquerade and work of folly.”18 Each selfdescription grew more clinical and less flattering. He was frail; he was vain; his memory was weak; his judgment was flawed. But such was the condition of sinful humanity. Few examples of Hermann’s relative tolerance are more striking than his skepticism towards accusations of witchcraft—an unusual stance in the later sixteenth century. Towards the end of his life, at the beginning of the great witch craze in Germany, Hermann expressed a certain weariness regarding the whole matter. “I have heard so much about it during my lifetime,” he wrote, “that it annoys me.” On the one hand, he declared himself an agnostic, insisting that “magic is above my understanding” (mit der zaubereien ist uber min verstant). As was his custom when confronting matters beyond his ken, Hermann laid out the two opposing viewpoints: that magic and witchcraft were real or that they were “fantasies, dreams, madness, inventions.” The answer, he suggested, was impossible to know with certainty. “God alone knows it truly,” he wrote. For this reason, in 1589, he found it strange that the Prince-Elector of Trier had recently burned and drowned several witches, whereas the city of Cologne had never, even after long interrogations of several suspects, found enough evidence to burn anyone. “Does this mean that people in Cologne are not able to investigate the truth as well as people in other places?” The implication was that interrogators found what they had set out to fi nd.19 What Hermann could say with certainty was that individuals in Cologne frivolously accused others of witchcraft—indeed, that any accusation was “evil” and frivolous, given human ignorance. He somewhat sardonically suggested the real reason for such accusations. “There is no easier way,” he wrote, “to get rid of old women and despised people” (Man kan der alter weiber und verhaster leut nit balder quidt werden). It was a grave business to start rumors of witchcraft, and those who did so were “very bad people,” who had no way of knowing whether those they accused were actually guilty. Those who pointed the fi nger frivolously, or out of hatred or envy, would “have difficulty answering for it before God.”20 But the most important reason to avoid such accusations had to do with neighborliness—with the tolerance and charity required of those who lived in close proximity and mutual dependence. Whenever told that someone was a witch, Hermann’s standard reply was “How do you know that?” If his interlocutor responded that “people are saying so” or that “the rumor is going around,” Hermann tried to encourage some sympathetic imagination.

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“If such a thing were said of you, how would you feel? Would you be happy about it?”21 This was a simple extension of the Golden Rule. Unlike many contemporary chroniclers and pamphleteers, Hermann refrained from proclaiming the significance of contemporary events or divining a secret meaning behind them. “God only knows.”22 “Let God judge it!”23 “Time will tell.”24 These were some of the phrases Hermann used to suggest the weakness of human judgment. The truth was too obscure, the world too uncertain, to permit summary judgments, especially when lives were at stake. But Hermann’s sighs should not be read as an expression of a simple fatalism. Even as he suspended judgment about the spiritual meaning of current events, Hermann developed a sophisticated system for testing the accuracy of incoming news. The uncertainty of contemporary affairs—their inability to be integrated into a providential historical narrative—made it all the more important to record them accurately for future generations.

As It Truly Was Hermann Weinsberg’s skepticism was rooted in his experience of sixteenth-century print culture. Compared with their ancestors, the men and women of sixteenth-century Cologne had access to a wide range of news and information. But there were, as yet, few regular, systematic sources of news. An abundance of information could make contemporary observers feel that they knew less, not more. 25 To reformers, print allowed for the dissemination of standard editions. But it also loosed upon Christendom a flood of polemics and misinformation. The institutions that would contain and channel this surge—newspapers, scientific societies, peer review, copyright, encyclopedias, libraries—had yet to emerge. One of the fi rst great effects of print was to flood oral culture with new stories and ideas. Printing accelerated the circulation of rumors, stimulating discussion of events, gossip, and ideas that had originated far afield. Rumors or prognostications circulating in one city might be printed in a pamphlet and read halfway across the Empire, thus generating a new set of rumors far removed from their original context. The same was true of religious polemics and propaganda. During the fierce religious disputes of the sixteenth century, polemicists fought to sway popular opinion. Meanwhile, printers gladly responded to the public demand for sensational literature—for almanacs, prognostications, and accounts of monstrous births or ominous events.

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In the pages of his diary, Hermann greeted this riot of news with a mixture of suspicion and resignation. As a justification for his own retreat into private writing, he cited the “vanity” of contemporary polemics, especially among lawyers and theologians. “Those who trouble themselves by writing about the Holy Scriptures and theology in these contentious, hateful times are great fools,” Hermann wrote, explaining that it was coercive power, not persuasion, that determined people’s beliefs. “I am astonished at all this useless work, since each party bans and forbids the other’s books. It is all in vain.” It was not an impartial concern for truth and justice but rather “self-interest” that dominated public affairs—and especially Hermann’s own field of law. The only authors with whom Hermann sympathized were the “chroniclers and historians.” And yet even they “are hated, for the truth is hated.” It was for this reason, wrote Hermann, that he had decided to serve his father’s house “privately and secretly” (privatim ins geheim) where there was “not so much hatred and envy.”26 Such a retreat, however, did not mean disengagement from the world. Rather, Hermann argued that he could judge the news of his day objectively precisely because of his status as a “private” (privatim) burgher. Hermann may not have achieved a bold legal career, but for this very reason he had no personal stake in public affairs. “Why should I be partial? I know of no benefit or advantage from being so?” In public, which included the common spaces of the household, Hermann had to remain guarded. In the dangerous religious environment of the later sixteenth century, even the confessional—a protected space of privacy—required caution. In 1588, for instance, a young priest startled Hermann by asking him “tough questions” out of a manual, including whether he had ever committed murder or “whether he had ever been present when someone acted against the Catholic religion.” Hermann attributed this interrogation to the priest’s inexperience. The event prompted him to reflect on the many “strange” stories he had heard about the confessional (some, presumably, from Protestant criticisms of the practice). Yet it was dangerous to speak disparagingly about the confessional, Hermann noted, lest one be viewed as “uncatholic.”27 True privacy Hermann found only in the pages of his “Memory Book.” Writing in secret, he did not have to fear arousing suspicion or hatred. “I do not want to write something different because I like this or that party, but rather only what I hold to be the truth.”28 He refused to gloss over the transgressions of his co-religionists—their violence and intransigence. As a private man,

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his service to his heirs would be to offer them a dispassionate account of his lifetime. To gather accurate news (zeitungen) was no small task. To Hermann, the world seemed inundated with false and partial opinions. “It troubles me that so many biased, libellous writings and rumors are going around,” Hermann wrote. He noted not only that there were often multiple versions of the same story, but also that each retelling was influenced by the interests of the narrator—“as each one is inclined, so he spreads the news” (als jeder geniegt ist, so breidt ers aus).29 As a city-councilor, Hermann knew all too well how difficult it was to obtain reliable information. Given their precarious military and political situation, city councils in Germany grew adept at deciphering cryptic rumors and missives. The contagion of rumor was hard to contain: “The lies spread from one door to another,” he wrote.30 As previous chapters have shown, Hermann believed that oral transmission was particularly unreliable, a source of error and forgetfulness. Though writing offered remedies for such collective amnesia, it was not necessarily more trustworthy than rumor. A wide and eclectic reading had made Hermann highly sensitive to biases in sources. Protestant and Catholic chroniclers, he noted, often told different accounts of the same events. Even stories that seemed trustworthy were often suspect. Sorting out the truth required “great care” (groisse sorg), since interpretations varied (dan man nit alles eins gesinnet). Chroniclers who gathered and published material from civic archives and chanceries might protest that “they want as historians to write the truth, but one can quickly tell which party they favor the most.”31 Hermann could be quite cynical about the chronicles he read: “If the authors of chronicles are partial, or if they are flatterers, friends, or enemies, so go their pens.”32 There were many reasons that historians erred: “when the events happened far away or are obscure or were reported to them partially or when the author himself takes sides.”33 In addition, historians committed many unintentional errors. Despite his concern to report things as accurately (am eigentligsten) as possible, he admitted that he may have “erred here or there without my knowledge.”34 In the Gedenkbuch, Hermann attempted to remedy his age’s lack of a system of regular, reliable news. He felt an even greater urgency to do so during the Cologne War of the 1580s, when armies and devastation swept through the region. Serving as the chief scribe of his own private chancery, he developed a relatively sophisticated system for managing the age’s chaotic flow of information. Ideally, Hermann noted, he would

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have witnessed fi rsthand all that he reported. This was true of many events in his neighborhood that he described. However, he lacked such intimate knowledge of affairs of “great monarchs, potentates, princes, and lords, their territories, states, wars, and histories.” In recounting such news, he had to rely on the reports of others, determining which were most reliable. His fi rst step was to obtain information from several sources: from peers, from rumors circulating through the neighborhood, from Council meetings, from pamphlets. Rather than writing a piece of news down immediately (nit eilens ins rein geschriben), he jotted a note and waited several weeks or even months “until the general clamor and rumor was confirmed.” When he wrote a formal account in his “Memory Book,” he based it on the “constant rumor” (bestendich gerucht)—that is, the common consensus that emerged after the initial excitement had subsided. His sources included whatever printed accounts he could obtain, though he scrutinized these for biases. In all things he gave preference to eyewitnesses—to “those who wrote as if they had personally seen an event or who showed very strong indications and good evidence of having seen it.”35 Hermann often gave more detailed insights into his method. In May of 1585, for instance, the city of Neuss was unexpectedly overwhelmed and sacked by the forces of Archbishop and Protestant convert Gebhard von Truchsess. In typical fashion, Hermann recounted the “general opinion” about what had happened: In the middle of the night a group of soldiers had secretly used ladders to climb the city walls (something they were able to do because the watchmen were either drunk or asleep), after which they broke open the city gates from the inside. The entire army poured into the city, which they plundered; in the confusion that followed the initial alarm (mordgeschrei), many desperate burghers jumped from the city walls and swam across the moats. Such, at least, was the best Hermann was able to conclude from the consensus that emerged about the event. But in its immediate aftermath, there was a great deal of confusion in Cologne. Hermann fi rst heard the news from his stepson, whom he met in the street. Later that day, Hermann spoke with a Cologne baker who had been in Neuss when it was sacked and had injured his hand while trying to flee. Others told their own stories about the calamity. “We did not know what actually (eigentlich) happened,” recalled Hermann in his Gedenkbuch. “The reports came one after another.” The City Council, meanwhile, sent “messenger after messenger,” trying to find out what happened, but they were prevented from approaching the city and merely brought back the reports of those who had fled.36

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In the absence of fi rm information, accounts of how the soldiers had managed to break into the city proliferated. “The conversations and rumors were not in agreement,” wrote Hermann. By his count, there were no fewer than twelve different stories of how the Archbishop’s soldiers had broken in. According to one rumor, the soldiers had entered disguised as farmers; in another account, seditious burghers within Neuss had plotted to let the soldiers in; in still another retelling, the sacking army knew that the City Council had recently discontinued the night watch; in yet another story, the Protestant commander Martin Scheck had allegedly been in the city beforehand and had orchestrated the event. If Hermann recounted these multiple interpretations, it was to show how difficult it was to determine the facts of an affair that few had witnessed but many reported. “Each person,” he wrote, “cannot truly say and know more than what he had seen or heard at the place where he was at that hour. But if he heard about it from others, the story may be faulty; he cannot truly know it.” Only those who had climbed the walls and taken the city knew what had happened, but even their accounts were not to be trusted, since they might “not tell it correctly” or might lie about the event. Here, as elsewhere, Hermann acknowledged his own inability to arrive at the truth of the matter. Instead of choosing the story he preferred, Hermann simply enumerated the explanations he had heard and concluded, “God only knows.” Even when unable to determine the most plausible account of an event, Hermann did seek to explain how biases shaped people’s reactions to rumors. In 1588, a story circulated that Spanish troops were preparing to besiege Bensberg, a town west of Cologne in the Protestant territory of Berg. According to Hermann, “many sided with the foreigners (Welschen) against their neighbors, saying that the neighbors were heretics (Geussen) . . . and deserved to suffer a bit.” In his words, these were the “Catholics” who allied themselves with the “Pope, clergy, and Spanish.” Here, Hermann used the term “Catholic” to refer to the more robust and partisan confessional identities that emerged in the wake of the Catholic Reformation. But there were other Cologne residents who supported their Protestant neighbors for “defending the fatherland” (das fatterlant beschirmen) against “foreign, robbing peoples.” Though they considered themselves good “Catholics,” these individuals did “not agree with the Pope and the clergy in all things,” which won them accusations of being “Lutherans and heretics.” Hermann’s conclusion was a sad one: Each party was unperturbed (nit betrubt), if not glad, when their opponents suffered harm. As a result, each side

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had “burdens and unrest.” Those who yearned for peace, lamented Hermann, were in the minority.37 Partial or incorrect memory had practical consequences that went beyond religious violence. As a good Erasmian, Hermann had a subtle understanding of the ways in which self-interest and power shaped the written record. His attempt to lay claim to an enduring legacy made him aware that writing could be used to legitimize the status of exclusive castes. For this reason, Hermann yearned for more open, transparent record keeping in his own hometown of Cologne. Secret and incomplete civic records, he believed, could be abused by corrupt and oligarchic magistrates. For instance, he lamented the chaotic state of Cologne’s official records of property ownership, the Schreinsbücher, which were often used to settle disputes. There was a great deal of “abuse, inconsistency, and partisanship” in the keeping of these records. Private persons had little chance of changing inaccurate entries, even when they were used to settle property disputes in which they had a stake. Official decisions about rents on properties were thus often made “behind closed doors,” without consulting the parties involved. Arnold von Brauweiler, the powerful mayor of Cologne, had himself admitted that not everything in the Schrein records was “gospel truth.” To Hermann, a “reformation” would require a more systematic approach to record keeping—“good, correct, proper, constant customs and practices.” Only then could justice be done.38 More often than not, however, Hermann was forced to recognize the inadequacies of the writings available to him. Even pious sources were not exempt from his rigorous criticism. At the death of Laurentius Surius (1522–1578)—a Cologne Carthusian who had written “all kinds of histories,” including lives of the saints—Hermann expressed some skepticism about the late monk’s works. Though others had claimed they were exceptionally reliable, Hermann wondered whether a monk who had “spent so many years imprisoned and cloistered in a monastery and who was not in the world during his manly years” could write accurately about things he had not seen. Of course, Surius gathered his work from oral and written sources, just as Hermann himself did. But the thought made Hermann worry that many authors recorded “what they are most partial towards” (darzu sie am meisten affectioneirt sin). Whether authors wrote the truth, Hermann could not always know.39 Such reflections lent greater urgency to Hermann’s own documentary project. As a chronicler, Hermann did not subordinate contemporary events to some larger providential narrative. Instead, he became

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something akin to a journalist, seeking to record the events of his day impartially and accurately. Even if the public world was full of error, he could set the record straight in private, where he did not feel pressure to please those he wrote about. This task, he believed, was important in its own right, lest future generations lose access to the past. It was also, in Hermann’s estimation, an immensely difficult task: “It is very troublesome to write chronicles and histories, for the reports are so contradictory, that one cannot always establish the truth, and if this happens to me, so it can also happen to others. For who will travel all over to get news at his own expense or obtain reports from all the chanceries.”40 As the sheer abundance of news and data became increasingly difficult to fit within traditional categories, individuals were forced to improvise methods to classify, sort, and make sense of it. For Hermann, interpreting contemporary events was less a matter of discerning providential meaning than of managing an ongoing flow of indeterminate information.

A Providential Household Historians have found Hermann Weinsberg’s skepticism sympathetic. Like his famous contemporary Michel de Montaigne, Hermann exhibited an exemplary intellectual modesty in an otherwise polemical age. His careful source criticism and tolerant, irenic attitude seem to anticipate some of the fundamental values of modernity. But this is only part of Hermann Weinsberg’s story. In the end, Hermann did not easily resign himself to the increasing opacity of larger, providential orders. Rather, he compensated for this powerfully within his private writings. The more his world seemed to slip into disorder, the more fervently he clung to his private calling—his belief that God had specially blessed his lineage. During the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Hermann Weinsberg’s secret project to secure a great legacy took on additional, more urgent dimensions. In many ways, it became an anxious work of cultural salvage, an attempt to preserve an idealized Christian community. Increasingly, he saw his family as a point of stability and peace within a tumultuous world. Hermann’s own understanding of his calling became even more grandiose. Comparing himself to Christ and the Apostles, he believed that he had been “sent” by God to secure and preserve his family.41 Even if German lands were torn apart by religious and dynastic violence, his house would remain a haven of peace and

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Christian unity. His family became a surrogate for the larger communion of saints; his descendants would remember him and his parents and pray for their souls.42 Hermann often depicted the Haus Weinsberg as a refuge from historical change. He wrote often about the “great transformations” of his day, which he discussed in gatherings with fellow councilors and lawyers. Chief among these transformations, of course, was the Reformation, which had burst upon Germany just months after his own birth. At that time, “the great schism (die groisse spaltung) in religion, sadly, had begun.”43 In Hermann’s retelling, an Augustinian monk in Wittenberg named Martin Luther fi rst wrote and preached against an indulgence proclaimed by Pope Leo X. From this preaching, “a great fi re erupted, which still burns unextinguished throughout all of Christendom.”44 “It pains me,” he wrote elsewhere, “that this quarrel took place during my lifetime.”45 Though he prayed for Christian unity, Hermann had little hope that the “great fire” would be put out during his lifetime. A robust confidence in Christian institutions had given way to a meek fideism: Hermann would hold to the faith of his ancestors until the Church “teaches me otherwise.” Yet he did not stand idly by as the world of youth changed beyond recognition. Through writings and careful planning, he sought to preserve Christendom as he had once known it. No matter what else happened, his house would stand fi rm, a bulwark against the future.46 In more sanguine moments, Hermann presented his household as a place where the high ideals of Christian and classical ethics could be realized. Hermann envisioned the “entire body and members” of the Haus Weinsberg dwelling together in piety and unity and praying for the living and the dead.47 The household would be a providential community, protected by God so long as its members feared him.48 Hermann tried to transfer the full weight of biblical promises to his own house. At the same time, he contrasted the “common good” of the Haus Weinsberg with the self-interest sought in other houses, where families lightly alienated their properties and identities. Speaking to future Weinsbergs, he wrote, “because the common housefather of Weinsberg represents you and all household members and preserves your eternal community, so also should all of you seek the common good of your common house.”49 Hermann’s visions of blessedness were concentrated on the house. He urged future family members to live “eternally in the bond of peace and unity and all virtue.”50 He dreamt of the “hearts of all household members” united in one, blossoming

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like the petals of a beautiful rose. “May God grant grace for unity and peace among all members of the Haus Weinsberg.”51 Hermann’s depictions of his house were overloaded with providential symbolism and imagery. He prayed, for instance, that the Holy Spirit would dwell “in every corner” of the Haus Weinsberg, just as he had once spread to every corner of the world through the Apostles’ preaching.52 Likening his calling as a “housefather” to that of both the patriarchs and the Apostles, he believed that he had been “sent by the will of God” to serve his “father’s house and lineage,” both to the praise and glory of God and the “salvation, consolation, and welfare” of both the housefather and future family members.53 In the name Weinsberg was united the sacred and secular; the word pointed not only to the flourishing and blossoming of a deeply rooted lineage, but also to the vineyard of the Lord. This imagery was often grandiose, as in Figure 9, in which Hermann depicted himself beneath the “true vine,” which was sprouting from the Haus Weinsberg, while Christ tended to the house’s garden.54 Though Hermann’s language was somewhat hyperbolic, such symbolism was not altogether uncommon in the sixteenth century. It was the stuff of genealogies, family trees, and religious paintings. All institutions in the sixteenth century were invested with providential significance. House, council, church, city—in the ideologies of the day all of these were meaningful entities, established and vouchsafed by God. In the traditional view, the world consisted of a series of interlocking, providential orders. Similarly, Hermann saw houses and housefathers everywhere he looked. Clergy belonged to households just as much as the laity. Reliquaries housed the remains of saints, and graves were “houses of the dead.”55 The world itself could be considered a house, with Adam’s descendants as its members.56 Even the heavenly realms could be compared to the more familiar realities of domestic governance. Later in life, Hermann spoke of God as the “richest housefather,” who generously forgave the debts of the penitent: “O almighty, eternal, merciful God, creator, redeemer, and comforter, please pass over my previous account, . . . demand neither my old nor my new balance. . . . You alone are the richest housefather; you will not seek payment of my debts and my balance, as great as they are.”57 For a man such as Hermann, the belief that God was a just patriarch—that the laws of the macrocosm were not fundamentally different from those of the microcosm—was a source of comfort. The housefather was both a reassuring paternal

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presence and a bulwark of order, discipline, and justice. When viewed through the prism of the house, the world appeared bounded, hierarchical, and comprehensible. And yet the very anxiousness with which Hermann insisted on the providential order of his household suggests that this global balance had been disturbed. Indeed, Hermann used language to describe his household that he rarely, if ever, used to describe the wider world. In his work as a chronicler, Hermann adopted a neutral, ironic tone, well suited to factual recounting. In meditations on his lineage, by contrast, he used a loftier, often bombastic language of prayer and pronouncement. Within his archive emerged a sharp contrast between a changing, uncertain external world and the “eternal” security of his house, which would be a perpetual refuge (zuflucht) for family members.58 Even while admitting that everything changed—that “cities, lands, churches, cloisters, religions, and governments are overturned and destroyed”—he nonetheless excepted the Haus Weinsberg from this common, inevitable fate. 59 Hermann’s work thus contained a rupture between macrocosm and microcosm—an inability to situate the smaller orders of his own family and city within larger structures of historical, political, and religious meaning. One might say that Hermann’s irenicism was sustained by his secret belief in a providential lineage. His private plan was invested with all the significance that traditionally adhered to the larger spiritual and providential orders of the Church and Christendom. His imagined household increasingly became his sole source of stability and permanence. This reassuring belief enabled him to cope with an unsettling historical awareness. He clung to this fantasy at all costs. Hermann’s retreat from the world was thus a strange mix of the traditional and the new. He drew a great deal of inspiration from Stoic authors, presenting himself as a man who had withdrawn from the cares and worries of a vain and rancorous world. And yet, unlike ancient Stoics, who merely aimed to place themselves in line with the cosmos, Hermann worked actively in his study to bring order to a confusing and chaotic external world. Paper allowed him to play the role of a detached observer, but it also allowed him to remain secretly engaged with contemporary events. In his critical engagement with the news of his day, Hermann arguably anticipated a distinctively modern stance—that of a “private citizen” exercising his critical reason, independently of his official functions. According to several historians, early modern Europe saw the gradual emergence of a distinct “private

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sphere,” in which the individual detached from his or her social identities and reflected on the world not as a particular burgher or aristocrat, but as a “human being.” Such, for instance, was the self-conception of Michel de Montaigne, who often retreated to his library and appealed to the common humanity of his readers.60 A century and a half later, such individuals would come to be seen collectively as a “public”—one that could exert pressure on governments. Whether reading privately at home or discussing the news in coffeehouses, individuals came to believe that they had a say in contemporary affairs not as shopkeepers or aristocrats but as equal citizens and human beings.61 In the sixteenth century, however, voices such as Hermann Weinsberg’s remained singular and isolated. His sense of privacy was the product of an exceptionally unique set of circumstances, including his own good fortune as a rentier and the careful secrecy with which he guarded his unusual plan. And while Hermann suspended judgment on the major matters of his day, he compensated for uncertainty with the private consolations of a providential fantasy. With Christendom falling apart around him, Hermann Weinsberg invested the Haus Weinsberg with all the symbolism of traditional orders. The house became a microcosm of an idealized public space. The real public world, meanwhile, seemed to him an arena of historical contingencies and partisan politics—of rumors, errors, information, and news that needed to be monitored constantly and scrutinized regularly. In his own peculiar way, this Catholic lawyer discovered the individual agency that would henceforth be required to order a confusing and fragmented world.

My Poverty In 1575, at the age of fifty-seven, Hermann Weinsberg fi nally had an opportunity to set in motion his secret plan to entail his family’s estate. His mother, Sophia, died that year, leaving vacant the Haus Weinsberg, where she had lived as a widow for the past twenty-five years. It now fell to the children to determine the best way to share or divide the property. Hermann had already begun to entrench himself in the neighborhood. In 1573, after the death of his second wife, Hermann himself had moved into his own house, zur Cronenberg, whose back door opened onto the courtyard of the Haus Weinsberg. 62 As he settled into a semiretirement, Hermann planned to devote himself entirely to his “father’s house.” He intended not to remarry, claiming that his mother, with

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whom he took meals, was now “woman enough for me.”63 Hermann set up his study, running a cord from an upstairs window to a bell in the Haus Weinsberg, in case he needed to call any of the servants.64 His mother’s death, however, cut short this happy domestic interlude. Indeed, the transmission of property threatened his entire plan, since several of his sisters were interested in selling the Haus Weinsberg and splitting the proceeds. Hermann himself stood to inherit only a sixth of the house, as did his siblings and their children. The Licentiate immediately sought some way to prevent the sale of his beloved patrimony. He approached his younger brother Gottschalk, asking him if he and his wife, Elizabeth, would like to rent the house from all the heirs, so that it might remain in the male line. When all the heirs gathered to discuss the inheritance, Hermann was happy to discover that one of his sisters, Sibilla, proposed a similar solution. Though not all parties were content, the heirs eventually agreed not to sell the family house, but rather rent it to Gottschalk for twelve years.65 This arrangement suited Hermann’s secret purposes. “It will serve towards the execution of my will,” he wrote.66 Here was a chance to realize during his own lifetime the fraternal unity he hoped his plan would ensure. Years before, Hermann had already imagined what such an arrangement might look like in a fabricated story about the origins of the lineage. Allegedly, after the death of the family’s founder, Aramond, the sons joined to form a united family community. Full of “brotherly love” (broderliche leibde), they supported each other in their time of mourning. “If one was troubled,” Hermann wrote, “the others consoled him and sorrowed with him, and whatever each one had, he lent it willingly to the others.” After a year, the brothers came together and decided that for the sake of “good governance,” so that “the praiseworthy house might remain in honor,” they would keep the inheritance intact. Instead of selfishly claiming their individual shares, they peacefully elected one brother as the “head” of the family, drew up “house ordinances and laws” (haußregel und ordnung), and swore to stand by one another for the protection of the family patrimony—in short, they enacted the provisions of Hermann’s own will.67 Now Hermann had a chance to shepherd his family in a similar fashion. After years as a stepfather, he was fi nally able to act as father to his own “blood,” the nephews of his late brother Christian, who had previously lived with his mother. Hermann took these two teenagers, Hermann (1560–1604) and Gottschalk (b. 1561), into the house zur Cronenberg. At the same time, he looked after his younger sister

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Sibilla, who was estranged from her husband and had lived for several years with Sophia. This small group, meanwhile, took meals with the elder Gottschalk and his wife in the Haus Weinsberg. All the expenses of this common “board” were tallied annually and divided between the two brothers. Such an arrangement spared Hermann the trouble of keeping his own house.68 Seeking to cultivate family traditions by stealth, Hermann began to celebrate his nephew Hermann’s birthday on May 3, the birth date of his alleged ancestor Aramond. Without revealing the reason for this change, the elder Hermann nonetheless hoped to provide his heirs with a model of the future “house celebration” (Hausfest) he envisioned in his will.69 The year 1575 was a Golden (i.e., Jubilee) Year, and Hermann hoped that this would be a good omen for the future; he spoke of the “golden light of the house.”70 In memorializing his mother’s death, he noted that the Haus Weinsberg had fi nally become “common”—that is, a fraternal community. And yet, during the next two decades, the joint household Hermann had formed with his brother frequently threatened to split apart. There were frequent quarrels between Gottschalk’s wife, Elizabeth (the main mistress of the house), and Hermann’s sister Sibilla, who, despite a lack of income, chafed at her subordination to another woman’s housekeeping and threatened to establish a household of her own.71 Hermann, meanwhile, was disconcerted by the rigorous spirituality of his brother’s wife, Elizabeth, and her daughter, who were devoted to the Jesuits. He spoke somewhat disparagingly of their desire to be “perfect.”72 On another occasion, when Elizabeth’s daughter fell ill from a fever, he blamed it on excessive fasts and hours spent in cold churches.73 The presence of “good Jesuits” in the household not only reminded Hermann of clerical influence and power, but also brought confessional polemics into the household. Hermann did his best to avoid disputations at the dinner table, but nonetheless was criticized by his in-laws for his idiosyncratic religious views. Meanwhile, Hermann’s nephew and namesake, the second in succession to the house, proved a surly, secretive, and unresponsive young man. The elder Hermann wanted him to become a Licentiate like himself; the nephew, however, was a poor student, who made little academic progress and would have preferred to become a merchant, despite his lack of capital.74 Hermann’s greatest challenge, however, was to keep his secrets from the sisters, whom his will effectively disinherited. His sister Catherine correctly surmised that Hermann was scheming to deprive

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the “daughters” of their rightful inheritance. Pressed for money, she accused Hermann of trying to keep the patrimony “with the sons,” which “would not be just.” Hermann replied somewhat testily, “No one should worry about what is mine. Please banish that thought from your mind.”75 Fearing discovery, Hermann kept his papers carefully locked away. And yet, to his great consternation, his vigilance sometimes slackened. In 1580, when Hermann left for a meeting of the City Council, he accidentally left the keys to his study sticking in the door. When he returned home, his sister Sibilla, who also lived in the house, handed him the keys. He worried that she had discovered his “secrets” while cleaning.76 He also made provisions for his death. If any of his sisters should contest his will, the executors were gently to explain that “it is customary and proper for the family house (Stamhauß) to remain with the sons.”77 And yet Hermann could not bring himself to reveal his plans in person. In the end, Hermann shared his secrets only with his brother Gottschalk and his nephew Hermann—the fi rst two intended heirs.78 They appear to have kept his confidence. The elder Hermann continued to hope for an amendment in his nephew’s life. He frequently encouraged his namesake to overcome his apparent laziness, quietness, and lack of motivation. The admonitions, however, had little effect. The elder patriarch was especially concerned about the younger Hermann’s antisocial behavior—his “extreme quietness” (vil stilswigen). His nephew had few companions and showed little interest in others.79 Once, the elder Hermann discovered that his nephew had sneaked out in the middle of the night. When confronted with this fact, his namesake remained silent and impassive. For the fi rst time in his life, Hermann struck his nephew, causing his nose to bleed.80 Family quarrels, demands to divide the family property, an antisocial heir—these were discouraging signs. Moreover, Hermann’s financial situation deteriorated somewhat, not only because inflation devalued his income from rents, but also because regional wars prevented him from receiving payments from the countryside. And yet by this point, Hermann was too attached to his secret plan to abandon it.

Disaster When Hermann Weinsberg died on May 3, 1597, his friends and relatives were shocked to discover his plans. There was talk he had “not settled his affairs well” (er seine dingen nitt richtig gemacht). 81 His

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goals were out of all proportion to his actual social position; moreover, they contradicted Cologne traditions of partible inheritance. For the next ten years, the City Council was inundated with supplications demanding that his last will and testament be declared null and void.82 To make matters worse, the Weinsberg family was plunged into a sordid, murderous scandal. Apparently humiliated by public mockery and the complaints of kin, Hermann’s brother Gottschalk renounced the inheritance in favor of the next heir, his nephew Hermann. Not long afterwards, Gottschalk attempted suicide. A family maid discovered him upstairs next to a bloody dagger.83 According to the chaplain who ministered to him, Gottschalk lingered on for six weeks after the deed, often muttering to himself, “Oh, poor man, what have I done?”84 The younger Hermann now ruled the estate, somewhat tyrannically, according to the accounts of kin and neighbors. The body of his aunt Sibilla, who lived with him, was soon discovered in the well behind the Haus Weinsberg. In 1598, this strange death came to the attention of the civic authorities, and the young man became the chief suspect in a murder investigation conducted by the city’s officers of the peace, the Gewaltrichter. It eventually came to light that Sibilla had wanted to write the younger Hermann out of her will, since he had already inherited the bulk of the family property. Hermann, in turn, had tried forcibly to prevent this step, terrorizing her within the house. A day before she died, Hermann had threatened her in front of visitors, which prompted her to plead with relatives, “Please stay with me! I am so scared that I could crawl into a mousehole.”85 Though Hermann was never formally convicted of his aunt’s murder, his property was confiscated by the city. The house was locked up until the dispute could be resolved. Hermann Weinsberg the Younger, in turn, sued the city, both for his estate and for the bodily harm that he had suffered under torture. He began a long and tedious process of appeal, eventually bringing his case before the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht). He died in prison in 1603, signing his letters with the appellation “the poor man.” Finally, in 1608, the City Council put an end to the whole squabble, selling the Weinsberg estate and dividing the proceeds equally among the heirs.86 During all these annoyances, the City Council confiscated the writings of the late Licentiate. Whether they had ever been read by his heirs, for whom they were most heartily intended, is not clear. In 1600, the City Council entrusted them to Hermann Weinsberg’s grandnephew, the Licentiate Gottschalk Ordenbach, to be reviewed for any

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information pertaining to the case. He had nothing but scorn for his great uncle’s attempt to impose on his heirs the “dangerous rule of the housefather.” The writings were filed away in a civic archive, where they hid for over 250 years. Ironically, they remained safe and untouched in civic custody because of the failure of Hermann’s plan. Had they been handed down within the family, they would likely have been lost. The cataclysm that Hermann Weinsberg’s will triggered only confi rms the strangeness of his project. And yet it is also a fitting end to the story of a man who inhabited many of the tensions and contradictions of sixteenth-century bourgeois identity, without ever resolving them.

Conclusion

Centuries after he wrote, Cologne Licentiate Hermann Weinsberg has achieved his dream of being remembered more fully than his contemporaries. His unflattering self-descriptions are now crawled by Internet spiders and bots, becoming part of the gargantuan, global memory book that is the World Wide Web. One can only wonder what Hermann would have made of today’s surfeit of information, of a time when men and women compulsively publish the details of their lives for public consumption or compile statistics about their daily habits.1 Would Hermann have celebrated the tremendous expansion of humanity’s technologies for recording and preserving data? Would he have delighted in the myriad opportunities common folk now have to represent themselves? Would he have found the opportunities for instant publicity as addictive as they seem to be in the twenty-fi rst century? Or would Hermann have recoiled from such a massive externalization of human memory? Would he have found its immensity alienating? Would it have confi rmed his worst fears about rumor and intolerance? Fame remains as elusive as ever—perhaps even more so as distinctive voices are drowned in a sea of trivial data and formulaic Facebook pages. The problem many individuals face today is not how to be remembered, but rather how to be obscured—how to erase the traces of their past lives from a vast digital network that never forgets, how to escape the relentless publicity of data accessible to anyone. As employers scour the Internet for revelations about job candidates, as marketers compile massive amounts of data about users, and as governments scan the chatter of

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their citizens, some European politicians have begun to speak of “a right to be forgotten.”2 For Hermann Weinsberg, the fundamental problem was how to be remembered—how to avoid the dumb, nameless posterity that awaited the greater part of humankind. Hermann felt that he and fellow burghers were emerging from an age of information scarcity. The past seemed shrouded in darkness and obscurity; the lives of most Cologne burghers passed by unrecorded. Determined to avoid the same fate, Hermann began to work on his own paper memory; he strove to secure a lasting legacy. The expansion of lay reading and writing during his lifetime opened up new ways to represent the bourgeois family and the quotidian self. Indeed, it was the proliferation of printed information that made Hermann so aware of gaps in the written record—of the silence in which the lives of most burghers were enveloped. Yet even as he sought to overcome a perceived lack of records, he struggled with an abundance of information. Reports of religious violence and destruction stimulated in him a discomfiting historical awareness—a sense of the contingency and fragility of things that had once seemed timeless. A chaotic rush of news made the customs of Cologne seem less central, more parochial. Print was no cure for fears of oblivion. Knowledge of the wider world could bring with it a nagging awareness of one’s own insignificance. How then was a sixteenth-century burgher to secure remembrance— how could he convince himself that he was “not in this world in vain”? Initially, Hermann Weinsberg employed conventional forms of writing in pursuit of this end—genealogies, testaments, and account books. He aimed at achieving the type of corporate longevity that noble and clerical houses enjoyed. A site of divine blessing where the Weinsberg name and blood survived down through the generations—such was his vision of his patrimonial inheritance. It was a thoroughly parochial vision in which the Haus Weinsberg would remain forever nestled within the cozy corporate world of Cologne, a microcosm of Christendom. Just as late medieval iconography showed solicitous saints watching over the walls of the Christian city, so Hermann imagined his house as a vineyard (weinberg) of the Lord. Such a vision, however, was already a form of nostalgia, a reaction to a gnawing sense of alienation. As Hermann worked to forge a legacy, his conception of commoner identity and memory became somewhat more abstract; it was something he worked out on paper while arguing with an imagined audience. As such, it reflected the new relationships between book and reader, between

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author and public that print had begun to forge. It also reflected the arguments of humanists and reformers, who promoted more uniform values and lifestyles, demanding that all men and women, regardless of caste, abide by the same norms of civility, industry, and modesty. Hermann began to justify his plan by appealing to more general claims about the inherent dignity of commoners; and he began to see his life against a much wider background of news, rumors, wars, and worldly politics. In his Gedenkbuch, he took on the urgent task of writing himself and his family into this broader history. Yet the more urgently he pursued this end, the more he worried about his own insignificance. Many sixteenth-century individuals, of course, sought to order their worlds in writing. With social and religious dislocation came the need to make sense of new and often problematic identities.3 The blurring of traditional boundaries called forth anxious efforts to fi x, to codify, to secure. Burghers such as Weinsberg sought not only to keep track of credits and debits, but also to consolidate family legacies, to fi nd deep roots for themselves. What distinguished Hermann Weinsberg’s project from many contemporary sources, however, was the unusual self-consciousness and existential urgency with which he crafted his legacy. In the very practice of writing, Hermann discovered new possibilities for documenting the self and describing his world. He explicitly reflected not only on his own reasons for writing, but also on the very nature of writing itself. Was it right for a burgher to record his life for posterity? Did commoners deserve to be remembered? What future audiences were there for such records? The value of Hermann Weinsberg’s secret project lies not in a simple tally of medieval or modern traits, but rather in the work’s potent, unresolved tensions. Hermann simultaneously sought to escape his commoner status and to embrace it. He both praised the clergy and questioned the logic of medieval asceticism. The same author who forged an elaborate genealogy rigorously sifted through contemporary sources in an attempt to discover what “actually” happened. The Catholic layman who was committed to the customs of the parish and the faith of his ancestors nonetheless sympathized with Protestants and questioned whether the Catholic Church would survive in Cologne. A “Memory Book” meant to sustain a robust and flourishing corporate memory became a lonely man’s attempt to preserve the scraps of his life on paper. Such tensions reflected the anxieties of a sensitive Erasmian struggling to fi nd a way forward through the religious and political uncertainty of the post-Reformation age. To be sure, the

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“great transformations” Hermann perceived in the world around him can seem relatively small to modern readers, for whom, as Karl Marx famously put it, “all that is solid melts into air.”4 But one must also keep in mind that a conservative Cologne lawyer in the sixteenth century was not as habituated to change as are many modern men and women. Even if Cologne changed slowly, Hermann perceived the ground shifting under his feet. One hesitates to attribute an unusual project to something as vague as a sense of flux. A phrase such as “an age of transition” can easily become historical fi ller, a means of gesturing at changes instead of explaining them. Even so, Hermann Weinsberg’s sprawling writing project offers the modern reader unique insights into the particular historical anxieties confronting an early modern Catholic lawyer. The sixteenth century may not have been any more anxious than previous ages, and it was certainly not more dynamic than subsequent centuries. But it did see the confluence of several disorienting developments, including the rise of humanist criticism, the shattering of Christendom, the spread of printing and lay literacy, and the discovery of the New World. Sixteenth-century men and women had no sense of a coming modern age, little concept of history as secular progress. Rather, for Hermann, there was only uncertainty about the future. The Protestant Reformation had cast into doubt deep continuities with the past that Cologne burghers had once taken for granted. Already in the later Middle Ages, anxieties about salvation had found expression in vastly inflated reckonings of purgatorial years, with some accounts stretching into the millions. Preoccupied with fame, Hermann saw worldly history itself fi lling huge expanses of time. His keen interest in both the distant past and contemporary events made heaven seem remote; in his imagination, the future stretched on, obscure and indeterminate. In the midst of this uncertainty, Hermann Weinsberg attempted to solve problems for which there was no obvious answer. In an age of pervasive risk, he developed legal measures to protect the Haus Weinsberg from death, accident, and ruin. During a period of growing burgher confidence, he claimed the rights of the nobility and clergy for commoners. At a time when the Catholic tradition seemed to teeter, he worked to domesticate the Church, transferring its memory and its sanctity to the bourgeois household. In a world suddenly awash in information, he sought to order the news he received. His own peculiar solutions were different from those that would eventually emerge. Yet Hermann was nonetheless groping his way towards realities that

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individuals in later centuries would take for granted. One can only imagine the marvel he might feel were he to “wake from the dead” and see a “new world” of insurance policies, newspapers, libraries, mass politics, privatized religion, and instant publicity. In one particular aspect did Hermann Weinsberg’s paper memory seem to anticipate the logic of modernity. This was his unrelenting drive to record his own life in writing. If medieval men and women trusted that they were inscribed in the Book of Life, modern Europeans would become increasingly preoccupied with survival in human books. Indeed, print has proved to be an unrivaled technology for preserving written material, since it widely disperses multiple copies of a text. We moderns take it for granted that knowledge and information exist “out there”—in books, archives, libraries, museums, government records, and now, increasingly, on the Internet. We are shocked when the infrastructure that supports our efforts at preservation proves inadequate—as was the case when the Cologne City Archive collapsed in 2009. But the massive resources available to modern memory come at a cost. Even as we assiduously work to fi x and preserve historical data, we are confronted by a human record far too massive to synthesize, let alone incorporate as part of a living tradition. Documentation becomes an end in itself; the world is not real until it is recorded. “Everything,” wrote Stephan Mallarmé, “exists in order to end up in a book.”5 Behind this faith in the written word, however, lurks a fear that Hermann Weinsberg knew all too well: What if the book never fi nds a reader?

Notes

Abbreviations Boich W. BW

Decl. HAStK Lib. decr. Lib. iuv. Lib. sen. StadtAN

Hermann Weinsberg, Das Boich Weinsberg [Materialen zu den Denkwürdigkeiten], Chron. u. Darst. 52, HAStK Konstantin Höhlbaum, Friedrich Lau, and Josef Stein, eds., Das Buch Weinsberg: Kölner Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Alphonse Durr, 1886–1887; Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1897–1926) Hermann Weinsberg, Declarationboich [Erläuterung zum Testament], Chron. u. Darst. 60, HAStK Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln Hermann Weinsberg, Liber decrepitudinus, Chron. u. Darst. 51, HAStK Hermann Weinsberg, Liber iuventutis, Chron. u. Darst. 49, HAStK Hermann Weinsberg, Liber senectutis, Chron. u. Darst. 50, HAStK Stadtarchiv Nürnberg

Introduction 1. Roger Boyes, “The city without a memory: treasures lost under collapsed Cologne archives,” The Times, March 5, 2009. http://www.timesonline.co .uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5846343.ece (accessed August 26, 2011). 2. David Crossland, “German history buried under the rubble,” The National (United Arab Emirates), March 6, 2009. http://www.thenational.ae/news/ world/europe/german-history-buried-under-rubble (accessed April 6, 2012). 3. Boyes, “The city without a memory.”

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4. Kate Connolly, “Acclaimed German writer’s archive lost in building collapse,” The Guardian, March 6, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2009/mar/06/heinrich-boll-archive-cologne (accessed April 6, 2012). 5. BW, 3:337: “Wie es in der warheit were.” 6. BW, 5:178. This is one of the most quoted passages from Hermann Weinsberg’s great Gedenkbuch. It was written in 1582, after Hermann had already compiled over 2,000 pages of records about his life and family. The passage was titled “Apology on behalf of this book” (“Unschuldung des boichs halber”): “Nemans will mir verargern, das ich van geringen leuten, suster, brodern, frunden, nachparn, burgern, bauren, gesellen, van huslichen, schlichten, kindischen dingen und von mir selbst vil schribe, dan wer wult es doin, wan mir es nit deden. In der bibel, in der romischn historien und croniken, in der hilliger schrift, im herbario, in den siben frien und andern kunsten und philosophien und poeten wirt man werlich van uns nit fi nden, darumb wa min boich und anzeignong verwart und nachgeschriben wirt, werden unse nachkomen van uns auch etwas zu sagen wissen; sunst weren wir, als weren wir nehe gewesen. . . . [V]ox audita perit, litera scripta manet.” 7. BW, 1:13: “das auch mehe copien, abscriften gemacht und dupliceirt worde.” 8. BW, 1:221. 9. “Sie stellen damit das großartigste Dokument einer Chronik des bürgerlichen Lebens dar, das es im deutschen Sprachraum gibt.” Wolfgang Herborn, “‘Straßen wie diese’: Zum Alltagsleben einer Kölner Straße im 16. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte in Köln: Studentische Zeitschrift am historischen Seminar 15 (1984): 12. 10. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 11. Londoner Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) wrote a massive diary between 1660 and 1669. Composed in shorthand and prized for its literary qualities, the exuberant work contains a wealth of intimate details about urban and household life. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970–1983). 12. See Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed. (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1992), 97–119. For the most famous example of early modern microhistory, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin, 1982). 13. For a classic account of the ways in which late seventeenth-century institutions reduced individual risk and thereby transformed European mentalities, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Scribner, 1971).

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14. For the classic statement of this view, see Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 15. For more on the downfall of the house, see BW, 5:xxxv–xxxviii. See also Gerd Schwerhoff, “Verklärung und Untergang des Hauses Weinsberg— eine gescheiterte Geltungsgeschichte, oder: Vom glücklichen Überlieferungs-Zufall eines Ego-Dokuments aus dem 16. Jahrhundert,” in Kloster, Stadt, Region: Festschrift für Heinrich Rüthing, ed. Johannes Altenberend (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2002), 65–86. 16. Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen Hermann Weinsbergs. Digitale Gesamtausgabe. Abteilung für Rheinische Landesgeschichte des Instituts für Geschichtswissenschaft der Universität Bonn. http://www.weinsberg .uni-bonn.de (accessed April 6, 2012). 17. BW, 1:12.

1. A Secret Legacy 1. Manfred Groten, ed., Hermann Weinsberg (1518–1597), Kölner Bürger und Ratsherr: Studien zu Leben und Werk, Geschichte in Köln, Beiheft 1 (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2005). 2. BW, 2:375 (Lib. sen., 36v). Many of passages cited in this book can be found both in BW and in the original manuscripts. In such instances, the pages in the edited volume will be provided fi rst, followed by the archival citation in parentheses. 3. BW, 2:381 (Lib. sen., 39r). 4. Lib. decr., 6r. 5. BW, 5:7–8 (Lib. iuv., 245r). 6. Lib. decr., 4r: “Derhalb byn ich stetich mit der feddern in der werre.” 7. Almost all of Hermann Weinsberg’s extant writings are housed in the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. Verf. und Verw. 49–60, HAStK. See the bibliography for a list of manuscripts; see below for descriptions of individual sources. 8. BW, 5:178 (Lib. sen., 240r). 9. Lib. sen., 174r; Decl., 13v. 10. BW, 5:331 (Lib. decr., 136v). 11. Boich W., 154r. 12. Boich W., Cr: “Jha das nitz durhaff tich und ewich in der welt ist, Stedt, landt, kirchen, klausen, religion und regiment were verendert und uberhauff geworffen.” 13. Lib. sen., 6r. 14. BW, 5:xv. 15. Lib. sen., 571v. 16. The following summary of Hermann Weinsberg’s books is drawn from BW, 5:xvi–xviii. 17. Handbuch des Herm. von Weinsberg, Chron. und Darst. 53, HAStK.

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18. For more on Witzel, see John M. Frymire, The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 107–119. 19. A “business-book” of Hermann’s wine-trade survives from the years 1553–1557; he mentioned many other records in his private writings. See Weinhandlungs-Geschäftsbuch, Chron. u. Darst. 55, HAStK. During his marriage to his fi rst wife, Weisgin, Hermann tracked the progress of her lucrative textile holdings. BW, 1:315–316 (Lib. iuv., 221r–222r). 20. See Robert Jütte, “Household and Family Life in Late Sixteenth-Century Cologne: The Weinsberg Family,” Sixteenth Century Journal 17 (1986): 165–182. 21. Rechnungsbuch der Elisabeth Horns, Chron. u. Darst. 60a, HAStK; Account Books (Hermann Weinsberg the Younger), Rechnungen 1396, 1402, HAStK. See also Wolfgang Herborn and Klaus J. Mattheier, “Sozialhistorische und sprachgeschichtliche Aspekte eines frühneuzeitlichen Rechnungsbuches der Kölner Kronenburse,” Rheinisch-wesfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 24 (1978): 140–182. 22. Memorialbuch, Bestand Pfarrei St. Jakob B II 8, Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln. See Theodor Pass, “Ein neues Buch Weinsberg,” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 15 (1933): 161–167; Joachim Oepen, “Die Aufzeichnungen von Hermann Weinsberg im Memorialbuch der Pfarrkirche St. Jakob in Köln als historische Quelle,” in Groten, Hermann Weinsberg, 59–77. 23. Memorialbuch, 2r, 13r. 24. Test. W196, HAStK. Hermann transcribed a copy of his will into his Declarationboich, 5r–15v. 25. Declarationboich [Erläuterungen zum Testament], Chron. u. Darst. 60, HAStK. Cited as Decl. 26. Das Boich Weinsberg [Materialien zu den Denkwürdigkeiten], Chron. u. Darst. 52, HAStK. Cited as Boich W. 27. Boich W., Hr–v. 28. Liber iuventutis, Chron. u. Darst. 49, HAStK. Cited as Lib. iuv. 29. Liber senectutis, Chron. u. Darst. 50, HAStK. Cited as Lib. sen. 30. Liber decrepitudinus, Chron. u. Darst. 51, HAStK. Cited as Lib. decr. 31. Verf. u. Verw., Turmbücher G231, HAStK, 203v: “wie das die auswendige uber den Ohmen sehr geclagt, das ehr seine dingen nitt richtig gemacht, sonder sie ihn solchen großen Irthumb gepracht.” These complaints came out in civic investigations into the strange death of Hermann’s sister Sibilla. See also BW, 5:xxxiv. 32. Gottschalk Ordenbach, quoted in BW, 5:xxxix. The full letter—titled “Underthenige Supplication” and written March 3, 1608—can be found in Aktenstücke zu Buch Weinsberg, Chron. u. Darst. 60b, HAStK, 103r–105v. 33. “Das Buch Weinsberg,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 5 (1859): 124. 34. Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 153–161; Gérald Chaix,

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“De la piété à la dévotion: Le conseiller de Cologne Hermann Weinsberg entre mère et belle-soeur (1518–1597),” in La religion de ma mère: Les femmes et la transmission de la foi, ed. Jean Delumeau (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1992), 157–172; Wolfgang Herborn, “Die Reisen und Fahrten des Hermann von Weinsberg: Zur Mobilität eines Kölner Bürgers im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Köln als Kommunikationszentrum: Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgeschichte, ed. George Mölich and Gerd Schwerhoff (Köln: Dumont, 1999), 141–166; Robert Jütte, “Aging and Body Image in the Sixteenth Century: Hermann Weinsberg’s (1518–1597) Perception of the Aging Body,” European History Quarterly 18 (1988): 258–290; Jütte, “Household and Family Life in Late Sixteenth-Century Cologne”; Winfried Hofmann, “Hermann Weinsberg und die kölnische Fastnacht im 16. Jahrhundert,” Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 10 (1963): 82–98; Wolfgang Schmid, Kölner Renaissancekultur im Spiegel der Aufzeichnungen des Hermann Weinsberg (1518–1597) (Cologne: Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, 1991); Gunter Hirschfelder, “Zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Privatsphäre: Bemerkungen zum Kölner Gastgewerbe in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Mölich and Schwerhoff, Köln als Kommunikationszentrum, 321–336; Wolfgang Herborn, “Das Lachen im 16. Jahrhundert: Die Chronik des Hermann von Weinsberg als Quelle für eine Gemütsaußerung,” Rheinische-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 40 (1995): 8–30; Karl Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob in Köln,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 158 (1956): 5–86; Herborn, “‘Straßen wie diese.’” 35. A. Unkel, “Review of Das Buch Weinsberg: Kölner Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem 16. Jahrhundert, vols. 1–2 (1886–87), ed. Konstantin Höhlbaum,” Historisches Jahrbuch 11 (1890): 531–549. 36. Wolfgang Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg (1518–1597),” in Rheinische Lebensbilder, ed. Wilhelm Janssen, vol. 11 (Cologne: RheinlandVerlag, 1988), 59–76. 37. Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen Hermann Weinsbergs. Digitale Gesamtausgabe. http://www.weinsberg.uni-bonn.de (accessed April 6, 2012). The digital edition, despite its massive scope, represents only part of Hermann Weinsberg’s total output. At the moment it contains only the three volumes of the Gedenkbuch: Liber iuventutis, Liber senectutis, and Liber decrepitudinus. 38. BW, 2:10 (Lib. iuv., 263v–264r). The entry was titled “Ein groisser irtum tuschen mim broder Christian und mir.” 39. Lib. sen., 32r. 40. Hermann depicted himself at the ages of thirty-three, fifty-six, sixty, and seventy. These lengthy self-portraits are found respectively in Lib. iuv., 243r–245v (BW, 1:354–355 and BW, 5:3–9); Lib. iuv., 666r–667v (BW, 2:269–272); Lib. sen., 30r–40r (BW, 2:367–383 and BW, 5:116–122); and Lib. decr., 5r–6v. 41. BW, 5:117 (Lib. sen., 33v–34r). 42. Lib. sen., 35r–v. 43. Lib. sen., 480r.

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44. Lib. sen., 30r–40r. 45. BW, 1:50–51 (Lib. iuv., 27v–29r); BW, 1:257–258 (Lib. iuv., 181r–v). 46. Lib. sen., 312r–v. 47. BW, 5:364 (Lib. decr., 267v). 48. BW, 5:182 (Lib. sen., 255v). 49. BW, 5:190 (Lib. sen., 288v). 50. BW, 4:1 (Lib. decr., 4r). 51. BW, 3:20–21 (Lib. sen., 90v–91r). 52. BW, 3:232–233 (Lib. sen., 446v): “Ja, die wort, so man spricht, lauten nit, wie vormails. Itz ist in Coln ein andere pronunciation und manier zu reden, dan vor sesszich jaren, die littern werden versatzst, das e in a verwandelt, oberlendische oder nederlendische wort instat der alter colnischer sprachen, latinische wort instat der deutzen gebraucht.” 53. BW, 5:304 (Lib. decr., 58v). 54. BW, 5:369 (Lib. decr., 282r–v). 55. BW, 1:x. 56. BW, 2:xi. Friedrich Lau was even more emphatic: “Those who believe that the task of cultural history is to observe the smallest minutiae (die kleinsten Kleinigkeiten) will fi nd more hidden in Weinsberg’s book. I must publicly confess that such an approach to the Buch Weinsberg does not seem permissible. The arbitrary excavation of antiquarian trivialities has given cultural history the reputation . . . of a dilettantish game. Only what is of general interest will one fi nd in the edition.” BW, 4:xix. 57. Josef Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 4 (1917): 134–136. 58. Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 69. 59. Josef Stein proclaimed that Hermann Weinsberg perfectly represented the “petit bourgeois of his time.” “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 109. 60. BW, 2:381 (Lib. sen., 39r); Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 67. 61. BW, 2:373 (Lib. sen., 36r): “tragt aber eiz allet nach der rast und rauwen, das ich ein fridsam und gemechlich leben fortan in minem alter mog haben.” 62. Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 67. See also Wolfgang Herborn, “Die Familie von Schwelm / von Weinsberg: Entwicklungsstufen einer bäuerlichen Familie im großstädtischen Milieu an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit,” Beiträge zur Heimatkunde der Stadt Schwelm und ihrer Umgebung 32 (1982): 67, 49–50. 63. BW, 3:337 (Lib. sen., 589v). For the influence of Johannes Sleidan on Hermann Weinsberg, see Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 144–146; see also BW, 1:xii. According to A. G. Dickens and John Tonkin, Sleidan strove to “achieve impartiality by refusing to follow personal affection” and to relate “events barely, simply, in good faith, just as each thing took place—prout quaeque res acta fuit, an almost exact anticipation of Ranke’s famous phrase, als es eigentlich gewesen.” The

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Reformation in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 13. 64. BW, 1:3 (Lib. iuv., Ar). 65. For more on Hermann’s historical method, see Chapter 8 and Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 142–155. 66. BW, 1:12 (Lib. iuv., Gv). 67. The most balanced of these studies is Stephan Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen in deutschsprachigen Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Psychologie (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993). 68. Hans-Jürgen Bachorski, “L’élement biographique dans les Chroniques: L’ébauche de l’individualité dans la prose de non-fiction,” in Chroniques Nationales et Chroniques Universelles: Actes du Colloque d’Amiens 16–17 janvier 1988 (Göppingen: Kummerle Verlag, 1990), 14; Clemens Lugowski, Form, Individuality, and the Novel: An Analysis of Narrative Structure in Early German Prose, trans. John Dixon Halliday (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 69. The patriarchal and familial aspects of Hermann Weinsberg’s work have been highlighted in recent historical studies. See Gregor Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit: Verwandtschaft, Status und historisches Wissen bei Hermann Weinsberg,” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 71 (2000): 43–76; Birgit Studt, “Der Hausvater, Haus und Gedächtnis bei Hermann von Weinsberg,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Neue Folge 7, no. 2 (1998): 135–160. 70. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 46. 71. Robert Jütte, “Household and Family Life,” 182. 72. Winfried Schulze, ed., Ego-Dokumenten: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996). 73. As James Amelang has put it, “autobiography was a practice before it was a project.” The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14. 74. BW, 1:3 (Lib. iuv., Ar). 75. Boich W., 177v. 76. Lib. sen., 335v. 77. See Hans-Rudolf Velten, Das selbst geschriebene Leben: Eine Studie zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995), 34. 78. Ann M. Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11–28; Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 79. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 80. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For an introduction

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to private writing in all its forms, see Roger Chartier, ed., The Passions of the Renaissance, vol. 3 of The History of Private Life, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989). 81. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 149. 82. Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Alfred Hartmann and Walter Muschg (Basel: Schwabe, 1944). See also Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997). 83. Felix Platter, Tagebuch: Lebensbeschreibung, 1536–1567, ed. Valentin Lötscher (Basel: Schwabe, 1976). 84. Bartholomaus Sastrow, Bartholomai Sastrowen Herkommen, Geburt und Lauff seines gantzen Lebens, ed. G. C. F. Mohnike (Greifswald, 1823), 1:1, 4. 85. Hannah S. M. Amburger, “Die Familiengeschichte der Koeler: Ein Beitrag zur Autobiographie des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 30 (1931): 214. 86. Gabriele Mentges, “Fashion, Time and the Consumption of a Renaissance Man in Germany: The Costume Book of Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg, 1492–1564,” Gender and History 14, no. 3 (2002): 382–402. 87. Johann Kamann, “Der Nürnberger Patrizier Christoph Fürer der Ältere und seine Denkwürdigkeiten, 1479–1537,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 28 (1928): 230. 88. Amburger, “Die Familiengeschichte der Koeler,” 205. 89. Geschlechtsbüchlein des Michael Behaim des Älteren. E11/II, FA Behaim 507, StadtAN. 90. “Memorial in allerlei sachen,” E11/II, FA Behaim 511, StadtAN. 91. Geschlechtsbüchlein des Michael Behaim des Älteren, 41r. 92. Gedenkbüchlein der Katharina Tucher, E11/II, FA Behaim 642, StadtAN, 5v–6r. 93. Amburger, “Die Familiengeschichte der Koeler,” 264–266. 94. For more on the 1396 guild revolution, see Chapter 2. 95. Wolfgang Herborn, “Bürgerliches Selbstverständnis im spätmittelalterlichen Köln: Bemerkungen zu zwei Hausbüchern aus der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Stadt in der europäischen Geschichte: Festschrift Edith Ennen, ed. Werner Besch, et al. (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid Verlag, 1972), 502–504, 508. 96. Stephan Pastenaci has nicely summed up Hermann’s project as “compensation for a thwarted social ascent.” Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 96. 97. BW, 1:220–221 (Lib. iuv., 158v–159v). 98. Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 103; Andrew Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 95.

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99. Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs, 316, n. 64. 100. Hermann Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns im 16. und beginnenden 17. Jahrhundert,” in Zwei Jahrtausende Kölner Wirtschaft, vol. 1, Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Kellenbenz (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1975), 332–333; Lib. sen., 111r. 101. BW, 2:260–261 (Lib. iuv., 642v). 102. Lib. sen., 111r. 103. John van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6. 104. BW, 1:14.

2. My Father’s House 1. Gerald Strauss, ed. and trans., Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). 2. Robert Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation in Cologne?” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 218–219; Martha Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100–107. 3. For descriptions of the topography of “old” Cologne, see Leonard Ennen, Bilder vom alten Köln: Stadtansichten des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts und Beschreibung der Zustände vom Mittelalter bis nach der Franzosenzeit, ed. Willy Leson (Cologne: J.  P. Bachem, 1977), 35–42; Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 329–334. 4. Die cronica van der hilliger stat van Coellen [Koelhoffsche Chronik] (1499), in Die Chroniken der niederrheinische Städte, vol. 2, edited by Karl Hegel, et al., 211–638 [Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte 13] (Leipzig: G. Hirzel, 1876), 288. 5. For overviews of the city’s dense ecclesiastical infrastructure, see Gérald Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique: Vie religieuse et conscience civique à Cologne au XVIe siècle” (Thèse pour le Doctorat d’État, University of Strasbourg, 1994), 28–218 and Joseph Klersch, Volkstum und Volksleben in Köln: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Soziologie der Stadt, 3 vols. (Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1965–1968), 3:9–75. 6. Brigitte Klosterberg, Zur Ehre Gottes und zum Wohl der Familie: Kölner Testamente von Laien und Klerikern im Spätmittelalter, Kölner Schriften zu Geschichte und Kultur 22 (Cologne: Janus, 1995), 21. There are varying estimates of the numbers of religious institutions in Cologne. Leonard Ennen, for instance, counts two abbeys, thirty-eight cloisters, and thirty chapels. Bilder vom alten Köln, 39. For the late sixteenth century, Rudolf Banck estimates fourteen monasteries (Männerklöster), twenty-four convents, thirty small churches and chapels with altars, two hostels for pilgrims, a hospital for lepers (Melatenhaus), eight “hospitals” for old men,

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one orphanage, and at least fi fty-five convents for women, including eight beguinages. “Die Bevölkerungszahl der Stadt Köln in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte vornemlich Kölns und der Rheinlande, Messivenfestschrift (Cologne: DuMont, 1895), 328–329. 7. Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 32–40, 48–59; Klersch, Volkstum und Volksleben in Köln 3:17–22; Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 112. 8. BW, 3:365 (Lib. sen., 637r). 9. For a succinct narrative of these developments, see Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 95–123. See also Wolfgang Herborn, Die politische Führungsschicht der Stadt Köln im Spätmittelalter (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1977). 10. Wolfgang Herborn, “Verfassungsideal und Verfassungswirklichkeit in Köln während der ersten zwei Jahrhundert nach Inkrafttreten des Verbundbreifes von 1396, dargestellte am Beispiel des Bürgermeisteramtes,” in Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde in der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Wilfried Ehbrecht (Cologne: Böhlau, 1980), 25–52; Clemens von Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert,” in Ehbrecht, Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde, 60–63. 11. Robert Giel, Politische Öffentlichkeit im spätmittelalterlich-frühneuzeitlichen Köln (1450–1550) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998). 12. Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln,” 77–79. 13. Edith Ennen, Die europäische Stadt des Mittelalters, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 217. 14. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 95–123; Franz Irsigler, “Kölner Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter,” in Kellenbenz, Zwei Jahrtausende Kölner Wirtschaft, vol. 1, 218–225. 15. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 108–123. 16. BW, 3:14 (Lib. sen., 81v). 17. Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 335; Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln,” 59. 18. Joachim Deeters, “Das Bürgerrecht der Reichsstadt Köln seit 1396,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistiche Abteilung 104 (1987): 1–33. 19. BW, 4:31 (Lib. decr., 49v): “Es ist auch ein grois underscheit der raitzherrn, dan etliche gar rich, edel, befrundt, geschickt und mechtich sin, etliche mittelmeissich, etliche unvermogen(d) an guttern und narong, unbefrundt, sclecht und ungeschickt.” 20. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 111. See also Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 370. 21. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 137–152. 22. BW, 5:454–455 (Boich W., 134r). For more on Gottschalk’s dramatic ascent, see Herborn, “Die Familie von Schwelm / von Weinsberg,” 36–44. 23. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 112. 24. Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 39.

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25. Hermann Keussen, “Siegen, Arnold von,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 34 (1892), 195–196; Hermann Keussen, “Brauweiler, Arnold von,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 47 (1903), 213–214. 26. Wolfgang Schmid, “Nicasius Hackeney (d. 1518),” in Rheinische Lebensbilder, ed. Wilhelm Janssen, vol. 11 (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 1988), 45–46. 27. BW, 1:70–71 (Lib. iuv., 43v–44v). 28. Gérald Chaix, “Von der Christlichkeit zur Katholizität: Köln zwischen Traditionen und Modernität (1500–1648),” in Frühe Neuzeit—Frühe Moderne?: Forschungen zur Vielschichtigkeit von Übergangsprozessen, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus, Veröffentlichung des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 104 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 233–235. 29. Ulf Heppekausen, Die Kölner Statuten von 1437: Ursachen, Ausgestaltung, Wirkungen, Rechtsgeschichtliche Schriften 12 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 9–10; Maria Clementine Beemelmans, “Die Stellung des Hohen Kurfürstlichen Gerichts zum Rat der Stadt Köln (1475–1794),” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 17 (1935): 1–43. 30. Irsigler, “Kölner Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter,” 223–224; Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln,” 57–58. 31. Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln,” 53–89. 32. An excerpted English translation of the 1513 grievances can be found in Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent, 138–143. For the full text of the 1525 grievances see Clemens von Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525: Hintergründe und Verlauf des Aufruhrs von 1525 in Köln,” in Kirche und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in deutschen und niederländischen Städten der Werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne: Böhlau, 1980), 65–153. 33. Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 85–91. “Dat unse heren vortan straiffen willen alle verbruychere und verbruychersse, den reichen als den armen” (133). 34. Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent, 140–142. 35. Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent, 128; Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 128, 73–74; Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln,” 74. 36. BW, 1:42 (Lib. iuv., 21r–v). 37. Looz-Corswarem, “Unruhen und Stadtverfassung in Köln,” 75. 38. BW, 1:43 (Lib. iuv., 22r). 39. Irsigler, “Kölner Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter,” 234; Wolfgang Rosen, “Rat, Bürger und geistliche Institutionen: Zur Amortisationsgesetzgebung im frühneuzeitlichen Köln,” in Mölich and Schwerhoff, Köln als Kommunikationszentrum, 287–288. 40. Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent, 142. 41. Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 74–76. 42. Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent, 141; Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 97.

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43. Gérald Chaix, “Humanism et élites urbaines à Cologne au XVIe siècle,” in Humanismus und höfi sche-städtische Eliten im 16. Jahrhundert: Humanisme et élites des cours et des villes au XVIe siècle, ed. Klaus Malettke and Jürgen Voss (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989), 195–210. 44. Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation,” 223–235. 45. Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation,” 221–225. 46. Chaix, “Humanism et élites urbaines à Cologne,” 195–210. 47. 500 Jahre Buch und Zeitung in Köln: Ausstellungen, vor allem aus dem Beständen der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek (Cologne: Greven & Bechtold, 1965). 48. BW, 1:69 (Lib. iuv., 43r). See also BW, 5:466 (Boich W., 142r). 49. For more on religious and social life in the parish of St. Jacob, see Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 5–87. 50. BW, 1:18 (Lib. iuv., 1v); BW, 1:39 (Lib. iuv., 19r). See also BW, 5:462 (Boich W., 139v). Starting a new business was a joint decision, according to Hermann, who noted that “my father and mother discussed among themselves and decided that they would become wine merchants.” Any full citizen enjoyed the privilege of the “wine tap” (Weinzapf)—the right to sell wine from home. Deeters, “Das Bürgerrecht der Reichsstadt Köln,” 9–10. Meanwhile, the dyeing industry in Cologne suffered from a sharp downturn in the 1520s. Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 358. 51. BW, 1:33 (Lib. iuv., 14v). 52. BW, 1:56–57 (Lib. iuv., 32r–33r). 53. BW, 4:119 (Lib. decr., 221r–v). 54. Ennen, Bilder vom alten Köln, 51; BW, 1:24–25 (Lib. iuv., 5v–6r); BW, 1:144 (Lib. iuv., 98r–v). 55. BW, 1:30–31 (Lib. iuv., 12r–13r); BW, 5:463–462 (Lib. iuv., 140v). 56. Christian chose the Gaffel to which his father Gottschalk had belonged. Thanks to his father’s reputation, Christian was elected to the Council in 1517, 1520, 1523, 1526, 1529, 1532, 1535, 1538, and 1541. See Herborn, “Die Familie von Schwelm,” 59, n. 58. Once a powerful society of dyers and woad merchants, the Gaffel Schwarzenhaus suffered from declining membership in the sixteenth century. However, its thinning ranks may have offered the Weinsberg men greater opportunities to secure civic offices, since their competiton within the Gaffel was relatively weak. Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 358. 57. BW, 5:454 (Boich W., 134r). 58. BW, 1:19–21 (Lib. iuv., 2r–3v). 59. Hermann narrated his father’s discovery of books in an entry titled “My father begins to read and study as an adult.” BW, 1:69 (Lib. iuv., 43r). 60. BW, 5:458 (Boich W., 137r). 61. BW, 1:69 (Lib. iuv., 43r): “Und dieweil er ein lei war . . . , noch dannest, do er disse boichr lass, kreich er sulchen smach darin, das er steitich lass, und was er gelesen hatt, verzalt er uns uber tisch.”

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62. BW, 1:303 (Lib. iuv., 211v): “So plach min fater gern uber disch und mit dem essen und keuen zu reden, so schalt min moder innen duck, das er nit reden sulte, er hette den mont eirst ledich.” 63. BW, 1:69 (Lib. iuv., 43r). 64. Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 332–333. 65. Chaix, “Humanism et élites urbaines à Cologne,” 204–205; Edith Ennen, “Die Lateinschule in Emmerich: Niederrheinisches Beispiel einer bedeutenden Schule in einer kleinen Stadt,” in Studien zum städtischen Bildungswesen des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit: Bericht über Kolloquien der Kommission zur Erforschung der Kultur des Spätmittelalters, 1978 bis 1981, ed. Bernd Moeller, Hans Patze, and Karl Stackmann, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse 3, Folge 137 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 235–242. 66. BW, 5:466 (Boich W., 142r). 67. BW, 1:84 (Lib. iuv., 54r). It is not clear which edition of this book Christian read, but the Cologne publisher Koelhoff was publishing a Formulare und deutsch rhetorica as early as the late fi fteenth century. 68. BW, 5:466 (Boich W., 142r). 69. BW, 5:464 (Boich W., 140v–141r). 70. BW, 1:84 (Lib. iuv., 54r). 71. BW, 1:72 (Lib. iuv., 44v). 72. BW, 5:465–466 (Boich W., 142r–v). 73. BW, 5:467 (Boich W., 142r–v). 74. BW, 5:459 (Boich W., 138r). 75. Lib. sen., 335r: “Ich hab nyt gern daß myn kynder zu groisser arbeit geneigt syn.” 76. Boich W., 212v. 77. BW, 4:178 (Lib. decr., 327v). 78. These conceptions of honor, of course, were strongly gendered. According to Karin Hanika, “Lucretias Geschichte lehrt, daß die Tugendhaftigkeit von Frauen vor allem für das Ansehen ihrer Ehemänner von Bedeutung ist.” Hanika notes how many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images of Lucretia depicted her diligently spinning with the women of her household. “Lucretia als ‘Damenopfer’ patriarchaler Tugendkonzeptionen: Die vier Kupferstiche des Hendrik Goltzius,” in Eros, Macht, Askese: Geschlechterspannungen als Dialogstruktur in Kunst und Literatur, ed. Helga Sciurie and Hans-Jürgen Bachorski (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996), 396–422. 79. BW, 1:86–87 (Lib. iuv., 55v–56r). Christian expressed his regret in a letter he wrote to Hermann in 1533—a letter that Hermann later transcribed in his Gedenkbuch. 80. BW, 1:62–63 (Lib. iuv., 37r–v). 81. BW, 1:52–53 (Lib. iuv., 29v). 82. BW 1:87 (Lib. iuv., 56v–57r). 83. Quoted in Franz Irsigler, “Konrad Heresbach (1496–1576),” in Rheinische Lebensbilder, ed. Bernhard Poll, vol. 8 (Düsseldorf: Rheinland-Verlag, 1980), 83.

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84. Irsigler, “Konrad Heresbach,” 82–87; Heinz Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise: Deutschland, 1517–1648 (Berlin: Siedler, 1994), 263. 85. BW, 1:26 (Lib. iuv., 7r). 86. BW, 1:72 (Lib. iuv., 45r). 87. BW, 1:71 (Lib. iuv., 44r–v). 88. BW, 1:101 (Lib. iuv., 66v–67r). 89. BW, 1:72 (Lib. iuv., 45r). The Cologne brethren lived in the house zu Weidenbach, up the street from the Haus Weinsberg. They advised Christian to send Hermann to Emmerich because of its proximity and the quality of its schoolmasters. 90. BW, 1:97 (Lib. iuv., 63v). 91. BW, 1:90–91 (Lib. iuv., 58v–59v): “dieweil er wenich, ja gar wenich latinischer wort verstunde.” 92. Lib. sen., 11v; Boich W., 49v; Lib. sen., 216r–v. 93. BW, 1:46 (Lib. iuv., 23v). See Heide Wunder, “Wie wird man ein Mann: Befunde am Beginn der Frühen Neuzeit (15.–17. Jahrhundert),” in Was sind Frauen? Was sind Männer?: Geschlechterkonstruktionen im historischen Wandel, ed. Christiane Eifert (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 130–138. 94. BW, 1:53 (Lib. iuv., 29v–30r): “War wat neuwes, nit gebruchlich, dan ich war noch zur zit sin einicher son, darumb hat er mich sonderlich leif.” 95. BW, 1:88–89 (Lib. iuv., 57v–58r). 96. BW, 1:87–88 (Lib. iuv., 56v-57r). 97. BW, 1:86–87 (Lib. iuv., 56v). 98. BW, 1:89–90 (Lib. iuv., 58v). 99. BW, 1:91 (Lib. iuv., 59r–v). According to Stephan Pastenaci, Hermann’s invocation of the biblical story of Jacob highlighted his own arbitrary choice of a single heir, the “housefather,” to receive the family’s birthright. If Jacob obtained the blessing through craft and guile, excluding his brother Esau from the birthright, so too had Hermann secured his birthright through secret stratagems. Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 97–98. 100. Decl., 16v. 101. BW, 1:117 (Lib. iuv., 78r–v). 102. BW, 1:37 (Lib. iuv., 17v). 103. BW, 1:95–96 (Lib. iuv., 63r). 104. BW, 1:32 (Lib. iuv., 14r). 105. Lib. sen., 103r. 106. BW, 1:34, 33, 36, 34, 46, 49–50. 107. BW, 1:33, 34 (Lib. iuv., 14v, 15v). All these events were recorded in tender detail in the fi rst portion of Hermann’s great Gedenkbuch. BW, 1:18–65 (Lib. iuv., 1–40). See also Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 154–161. 108. BW, 1:81 (Lib. iuv., 51v–52r). 109. BW, 1:104 (Lib. iuv., 69r). 110. Lib. sen., 337v–338r.

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111. BW, 1:182 (Lib. iuv., 134r). 112. BW, 5:467 (Boich W., 142r). 113. Gérald Chaix, “De la piété à la dévotion,” 157–172. 114. BW, 5:460 (Boich W., 138r): “fonden sie nitz mehe dan ein Merien biltgin.” 115. BW, 1:114 (Lib. iuv., 76r). 116. Gottschalk had bought the house with money acquired during his fi rst marriage to an older, wealthy widow. At the time, the house was in some disrepair, having previously served as an inn. BW, 5:454 (Boich W., 132v). Christian, meanwhile, inherited the house after buying out his two sisters’ shares. BW, 1:29 (Lib. iuv., 11r–v). 117. BW, 1:23 (Lib. iuv., 4v). 118. BW, 1:117–118 (Lib. iuv., 78v). 119. BW, 1:87 (Lib. iuv., 56v): “doch so wirt min ansclach mit dir all vergeffs sein, wa du selver nit fleis in allen dingen, wie ich dir geschreven han, vur en keirs.” 120. An interesting example of this phenomenon is the relationship between Albrecht Dürer and his student Hans Baldung Grien, as illuminated in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

3. The Patriarch 1. In the words of Stephan Pastenaci, Hermann felt “tremendous pressure” to complete his family’s social ascent. Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 92–94. 2. Julius Hoff mann, Die “Hausväterliteratur” und die “Predigen über den christlichen Hausstand”: Lehre vom Hause und Bildung für das häusliche Leben im 16., 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Weinheim: Julius Beltz, 1959). 3. BW, 1:5 (Lib. iuv., Bv). 4. Lib. sen., 337v–338r. 5. BW, 1:36 (Lib. iuv., 16v–17r). 6. BW, 1:66 (Lib. iuv., 39v–40r). 7. Lib. sen., 33v. 8. BW, 1:50–51 (Lib. iuv., 27r–28r). 9. Lib. sen., 33v. 10. BW, 5:9 (Lib. iuv., 257r). 11. BW, 5:7 (Lib. iuv., 244v). 12. BW, 5:7 (Lib. iuv., 245r). 13. BW, 1:87 (Lib. iuv., 56v). 14. Lib. sen., 337v. 15. According to Gerald Strauss, the foundation for mastery of the law was “knowledge by heart through repeated reading.” A successful law student was able to consider multiple opinions and authorities relevant to the matter at hand. More generally, “a good memory was taken as the surest measure of intellectual ability.” Law, Resistance, and the State: The Opposition to

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Roman Law in Reformation Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 172, 175. 16. Lib. sen., 19v: “dan er hat in grammatica nehe gut fundament gelacht.” 17. Lib. sen., 32r. 18. For more on the Cronenburse, see Hermann Keussen, “Die Kölner Juristenschule und die Kronenburse: Die Stiftungen Dwerg und Vorburg,” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 14 (1932): 55–91; Herborn and Mattheier, “Sozialhistorische und sprachgeschichtliche Aspekte.” 19. BW, 1:114–115 (Lib. iuv., 76v–77r). 20. BW, 1:130 (Lib. iuv., 87v). 21. BW, 1:128–130 (Lib. iuv., 86v–88r). 22. BW, 1:152 (Lib. iuv., 106r–v). 23. BW, 1:102–103 (Lib. iuv., 67r–68r). 24. BW, 1:119 (Lib. iuv., 79r–v). 25. Lyndal Roper, “Will and Honor: Sex, Words and Power in Augsburg Criminal Trials,” Radical History Review 43 (1989): 45–71. 26. BW, 5:1–2 (Lib. iuv., 89v–90r). 27. These three works fi lled thirteen volumes, which Christian purchased for fourteen thaler, a substantial sum. According to Hermann, the volumes of “civil” (Roman) law were “very old.” BW, 1:115–116 (Lib. iuv., 77v). 28. BW, 1:131–132 (Lib. iuv., 88v–89r). 29. BW, 1:117 (Lib. iuv., 78v). 30. BW, 1:141 (Lib. iuv., 96r). 31. BW, 1:108 (Lib. iuv., 71r–v). 32. BW, 1:134–138 (Lib. iuv., 91r–92v). 33. BW, 1:141–143 (Lib. iuv., 96r–97v). 34. Keussen, “Die Kölner Juristenschule und die Kronenburse,” 65–68; Herborn and Mattheier, “Sozialhistorische und sprachgeschichtliche Aspekte,” 163–164. 35. Keussen, “Die Kölner Juristenschule und die Kronenburse,” 65–68. 36. BW, 1:142 (Lib. iuv., 97r). 37. BW, 1:143 (Lib. iuv., 97v). 38. BW, 1:160–161 (Lib. iuv., 117r–v). 39. BW, 1:181 (Lib. iuv., 132v–133r). 40. Keussen, “Die Kölner Juristenschule und die Kronenburse,” 65–66. 41. BW, 1:183–184 (Lib. iuv., 134v–135r). 42. BW, 1:184–186 (Lib. iuv., 135r–136v). 43. BW, 1:190–191 (Lib. iuv., 139r–140r). 44. BW, 1:162–165 (Lib. iuv., 118r–121r). 45. BW, 1:221–223 (Lib. iuv., 159v–161r). 46. BW, 1:180 (Lib. iuv., 132v). 47. BW, 1:176–178 (Lib. iuv., 128v–130r). Among other things, the Warden was responsible for overseeing the Town Hall watchmen, opening and locking the doors of the council chambers, and presenting wine to visiting dignitaries on behalf of the council. Burggraf Oath, Verf. u. Verw., Nachträge 1005, HAStK.

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48. BW, 1:159 (Lib. iuv., 116r). 49. Lib. sen., 337v. 50. BW, 1:213–214 (Lib. iuv., 153v–154r). 51. BW, 1:191 (Lib. iuv., 140r–v). 52. BW, 1:221–223 (Lib. iuv., 159v–161r). 53. BW, 1:194–195 (Lib. iuv., 142r–v). 54. BW, 1:198 (Lib. iuv., 144v). 55. BW, 1:199 (Lib. iuv., 145r). 56. Wolfgang Herborn, “Der graduierte Ratsherr: Zur Entwicklung einer neuen Elite im Kölner Rat der frühen Neuzeit,” in Bürgerliche Eliten in den Niederlanden und in Nordwestdeutschland: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte des europäischen Bürgertums im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, ed. Heinz Schilling and Herman Diederiks, Städteforschung, Reihe A, Darstellungen 23 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1985), 338–342. See also Erich Meuthen, Kölner Universitätsgeschichte, vol. 1, Die Alte Unviersität (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), 73–74. 57. Meuthen, Kölner Universitätsgeschichte, 62–64; Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation,” 225–226. 58. BW, 1:208 (Lib. iuv., 150v–151r). 59. BW, 1:209 (Lib. iuv., 151r–v). 60. See the introduction to Manfred Groten, ed., Beschlüsse des Rates der Stadt Köln, 1320–1550, vol. 2, 1513–1520, Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde, 65 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1989). 61. BW, 1:247–249 (Lib. iuv., 175r–176r). 62. BW, 1:255 (Lib. iuv., 179v–180r). 63. BW, 1:255–256 (Lib. iuv., 179v). 64. The affair began in 1545. BW, 1:231 (Lib. iuv., 166r–v). The baby, named Anna, was born on November 6, 1546. BW, 1:257–258 (Lib. iuv., 181r–v). 65. BW, 2:49 (Lib. iuv., 296r–v). 66. BW, 1:322 (Lib. iuv., 225v). 67. BW, 1:192–194 (Lib. iuv., 141r–142r); BW, 1:201–202 (Lib. iuv., 146v– 147r). Leonard Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Köln, vol. 4 (Cologne: L. Schwann, 1875), 432–444. 68. Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation,” 222–223. 69. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 521–535. Also see Chapter 5. 70. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r): “Und wan das gemeils nit uberich, so weren sei gar uis der gedechtnis komen, als weren sei uff erdrich nehe gewesen.” 71. Boich W., 351v: “Ich sein der untraw al so vil / daß ich heir uis neit en wil.” 72. BW, 1:220–221 (Lib. iuv., 159r–v). 73. Hermann explained his reasons in a section titled “Why I did not want to become a doctor.” BW, 1:302 (Lib. iuv., 211r). 74. BW, 1:281–285 (Lib. iuv., 196v–199v). 75. BW, 1:315–316 (Lib. iuv., 221r–222r): “und ich hilt boich darvan, was ider wech gemacht und verkauft wart, wie manich wullen und haren scharz, wie manch stuck garns gesponnen, gekratzt und geschlagen wart.”

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76. Lib. sen., 584r. 77. BW, 1:315–316 (Lib. iuv., 221v–222r). For more on the couple’s business, see Gerhard Fouquet, “Ein privates Milieu im 16. Jahrhundert. Familie und Haushalt des Kölners Hermann Weinsberg (1518–1597),” in “Vom rechten Mass der Dinge”: Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, ed. Rainer Elkar (St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae, 1996), 370–371. 78. BW, 1:327–330 (Lib. iuv., 229r–230v). 79. BW, 5:7–8 (Lib. iuv., 245v). 80. BW, 1:16 (Lib. iuv., Kr). 81. BW, 1:12 (Lib. iuv., Gv). 82. Decl., 231r, inside back cover: “Mit mein Haushertzs / Treib nemantz schertzs / Das macht mir smertzs.” 83. Lib. sen., 295r. 84. BW, 1:342–343 (Lib. iuv., 237r–v); Decl., 11v–12r. 85. In his autobiographical Gedenkbuch, written in 1561, Hermann spoke elliptically about the meaning of the apparition. BW, 1:343 (Lib. iuv., 237v). However, in the Declarationboich, written in 1559, Hermann interpreted the vision as meaning “that it would be pleasing to God if I drew up my will and established a perpetual heir . . . that God might be praised and my family honored thereby.” Decl., 12r. 86. Decl., 68r. “Sehet ir nuhe wie deß hauß Ehr in der tugent der hausfatters meistheilß gelegen ist.” 87. Test. 3/W197, HAStK. Hermann transcribed a copy of his will into his Declarationboich. Vr–XVv. 88. Heppekausen, Die Kölner Statuten von 1437, 43–44. 89. Herbert Meyer, “Die Anfänge des Familienfideikommisses in Deutschland,” in Festgabe für Rudolph Sohm (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1914), 248. For a succinct overview see “Familienfideikommiß” in Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann, eds., Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 1 (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1971). 90. Boich W., Cr. 91. Lib. sen., 604r–605r. 92. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 93. Lib. sen., 166v. 94. Decl., 7v–8r. 95. Decl., 9v–10v. 96. BW, 1:5 (Lib. iuv., Bv). 97. Boich W., Fv. 98. Lib. sen., 174r. 99. Boich W., 10r. 100. For a detailed account of these fights, see Chapter 7; see also Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 75–80. 101. BW, 2:103 (Lib. iuv., 383v–384r); BW, 2:139 (Lib. iuv., 490r). 102. BW, 2:146 (Lib. iuv., 509v). 103. BW, 2:169–170 (Lib. iuv., 540r–540v).

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104. Heppekausen, Die Kölner Statuten von 1437, 58–61. 105. Lib. iuv., 393r. 106. Lib. iuv., 399r. 107. Lib. iuv., 668r–669r. Numerous episodes in this quarrel can be found in Lib. iuv., 630r–680r. 108. Decl. The title page reads “Declarationboich. Hermanni von Weinsberch uber sin Testament, sampt etliches allegationen, ansclegen, und anhengen, in der formen eines Diologi verfast.” 109. Decl., IIIv. 110. Erler and Kaufman, “Familienfideikommiß.” 111. At the beginning of his Declarationboich, Hermann wrote down notes and words for a hymn based on Psalm 126, adding the name Weinsberg: “Wo Got Weinsbergh nyt bawt das hauß, So wirt doch nichts gerichtet auß / Der bauleudt arbeit ist verloren.” Decl., XVv. 112. Decl., 74r–75v. 113. Lib. sen., 194v. 114. For an excellent summary of this transformation, see Heidi Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 115. Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence: A Translation of I Libri Della Famiglia, trans. with introduction by Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 1–2. 116. Boich W., Cr: “Ich bit Gott durch syn ewige weisheit, er wil mineß testamentz beschirmer und myneß fatters hauß ewiger bawmeister syn.” 117. Lib. sen., 57r. 118. BW, 2:373 (Lib. sen., 36r): “Im haus gain ich vil uff und ab, denk, practisier, imagineir, singe vur kurzweil, sol zu zeiten im haus wol ein meil wechs den tag ab und zu spacern, ist gut zu der verdeuwung.” 119. Rohmann, “Lügner durchshaut die Wahrheit,” 43–76. 120. Boich W., Dr. 121. Decl., XVv. 122. Decl., 9v. 123. Though common in ancient Rome, adoption was all but unheard of in late medieval Cologne, which restricted the testator’s freedom in favor of blood relations. For Hermann, adoption was always a last resort—a means of preserving the “blood” through other means. For more on the “essentially voluntary parental bond” that Roman adoption implied, see Yan Thomas, “Fathers as Citizens of Rome: Rome as a City of Fathers (Second Century BC–Second Century AD),” in A History of the Family, vol. 1, Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds, ed. André Burgière et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 230–231. 124. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 116–119. 125. Giel, Politische Öffentlichkeit, 1. 126. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, Chapter 6; Heppekausen, Die Kölner Statuten von 1437, 63–64.

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127. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 133. 128. BW, 5:470 (Boich W., 349). 129. See Chapter 8. 130. Lib. sen., 193v–194r. 131. Lib. sen., 137v. 132. The sixteenth century saw a proliferation of books and manuals for the housefather. Hoff man, Die “Hausväterliteratur” und die “Predigen über den christlichen Hausstand.” 133. Decl., 58v. 134. BW, 1:13 (Lib. iuv., Hv). 135. Trewe die ist doit, Untrewe ist groit (BW, 5:493; Boich W., 71r); Gelt, gelt, schreit al die welt (BW, 5:495; Boich W., 91r); Wan das P[enninck] geit vor dem G[elt] / Und das V[ntrewe] vor dem T[rewe], So hat V und P sulche macht, / Das man noch T[rewe] noch G[elt] en acht (BW, 5:494–495; Boich W., 91r). 136. Robert James Bast, Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 137. Joel Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans. David McClintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Bast, Honor Your Fathers. 138. For a helpful overview of this narrative, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 90–145. 139. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Paula Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Chapter 1. 140. Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, Chapter 1. 141. Lib. sen., 423v. 142. BW, 5:178 (Lib. sen., 240r); BW, 5:330 (Lib. decr., 136v); Lib. sen., 77v; Lib. sen., 315v; Lib. sen., 337v; BW, 5:145 (Lib. sen., 134r).

4. The Middle Is Best 1. BW, 5:128–129 (Lib. sen., 79v). 2. This legend dated back at least to the thirteenth century; it served an important role in legitimizing Cologne’s patrician families, which ruled the city until 1396. See Wolfgang Herborn, “Bürgerliches Selbstverständnis im spätmittelalterlichen Köln,” 228. 3. BW, 5:129 (Lib. sen., 79v). 4. BW, 1:220–221 (Lib. iuv., 159r–v). 5. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 218–220; Steven Ozment, The Reformation in

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the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 22–32, 49–56. 6. Christopher R. Friedrichs, “German Social Structure, 1300–1600,” in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, 1450–1630, ed. Bob Scribner, vol. 1 (London: Arnold, 1996), 242–243. 7. The literature on the Reformation in Germany is too extensive to cite. The seminal study is Bernd Moeller’s Reichstadt und Reformation, which notes the affinities between Reformation ideas and the communal ethos of the “free cities.” Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark Edwards (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). 8. See Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, 89. 9. See Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise, 166; Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 3–9; Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, 84–89. For a more critical reading of this new moral and sexual order and its effects on women, see Roper, Holy Household. 10. James Hankins, “Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125–127. 11. Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 93–94. 12. Steven Ozment, Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Ozment, Reformation in the Cities. 13. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 14. Lib. sen., 134r. 15. Lib. decr., 299r: “durch erbung und nachfolgung wirt ewigkeit, wan eyn mensch, eyn their, eyn gebewe, eyn dingk in deß andern statt folgt so wirdts erhalten, so ist es durhafftich und ewigh und uff diese weise ist nichtzs vergencklich.” 16. I borrow the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” (somewhat anachronistically) from Paul Ricoeur, who used it to describe the methods of “seeing through” ideologies developed by Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Although sixteenth-century discourses of suspicion were not nearly as comprehensive as those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they nonetheless succeeded in recasting traditional spiritual and noble ideas as cynical expressions of self-interest. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). 17. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 214–215, 217–218. 18. One of the famous earlier pupils of the school was the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), who reported reading letters of Pliny and Cicero and poems by Virgil, Horace, and Baptista Mantuanus. Ennen, “Die Lateinschule in Emmerich,” 241. 19. Hermann mentioned Latin grammars by Johann Despauterius (ca. 1460– 1520), Petrus Mosellanus (1493–1524), Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), and Ambrosius Calepinus (ca. 1493–1519). BW, 5:xv. 20. Johannes Murmellius, Tabulae in artis componendorum versuum rudimenta. See BW, 5:xvi. 21. BW, 1:96–97 (Lib. iuv., 63v).

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22. BW, 1:103–104 (Lib. iuv., 68v–69r). 23. Lib. decr., 4r–v. 24. BW, 5:xxv–xxviii. See Chapter 1 for more on Hermann’s reading. 25. For more on the connections between humanism and elites, see Malettke and Voss, Humanismus und höfi sche-städtische Eliten, 121–122, 188– 189; Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 26. Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33–36. 27. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 67. 28. Erasmus, “The Complaint of Peace,” in Praise of Folly, 97–98. 29. Irsigler, “Konrad Heresbach,” 100–101. 30. Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise, 263. 31. Irsigler, “Konrad Heresbach,” 87. 32. Irsigler, “Konrad Heresbach,” 89–103. 33. For a succinct summary of “Stadtrepublikanismus,” see Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise, 162–165. 34. Erasmus, “The Complaint of Peace,” in Praise of Folly, 102 (emphasis mine). 35. Boich W., 262r–322v. The title of the work was “Artificialis introductio per modum Epitomatis in decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis.” Hermann Weinsberg estimated that the publication date was 1512. Birgit Studt has confi rmed a date of 1506 from the letters of Beatus Rheanus. Studt, “Hausvater, Haus und Gedächtnis,” 150, n. 66. 36. BW, 5:499–500 (Boich W., 281v–282r): “Wa war der edelman, Do Adam groif und Eva span.” “Respondit Maximilianus primus Romanus Caesar: Ich bin ein man wie ein ander man, / Wiewol mir got der ehren gan.” “Ist dir ein ampt ein zit lank gegeben, / Daruff saltu dich nit zu hoich erheben.” 37. BW, 5:500 (Boich W., 291r): “Grandibus exigui sunt pisces piscibus esca. Groisse, ungeregte, gewaltdedige, eigennutzige herrn, amptlude, keuflude, wochner fressen den armen man ins leib.” One is reminded here of an engraving by Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569), “The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish,” which shows a massive fish being cut open, revealing smaller fish inside, many of them with smaller fish in their mouths. See Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 42, Figure 2.3. 38. BW, 5:500 (Boich W., 290v): “Wer hat recht und darzu macht, / Des recht wirt groiss geacht. / Wer der macht aber nit enhat, / Moiss liden, das er wirt geiagt.” 39. BW, 5:493 (Boich W., 71r): “Were einer van Judas art, / Der argste, der ehe gewart, / Sin moder ein hoer, sin vader ein deiff, / Ich gleub, het er geld, so wer er leiff.”

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40. For the myriad images of “gorging” and “fleecing” in contemporary pamphlets, see Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 41. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 62. 42. Lib. sen., 148r. 43. BW, 1:355 (Lib. iuv., 245v): “Ich will auch mich selbst nit gelobt haben, dan eigenlob stinkt.” See Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 122–125. 44. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 44. 45. BW, 5:150 (Lib. sen., 147v). 46. Lib. sen., 583v. 47. BW, 2:374 (Lib. sen., 36r). 48. BW, 2:375 (Lib. sen., 36v). 49. BW, 2:380 (Lib. sen., 39r): “Min symbolum, dieterium oder sprichwort, das ich sag, schreib oder mäle ist: ‘medium tenuere beati,’ die seligen habens mittel gehalten, daran ich oft gedenk, das mich oft troistet . . . also halt ich in allen sachen und dingen gern das mittel. ‘Optima mediocritas,’ ‘in medio consistit virtus,’ ‘omnibus in rebus modus est pulcherrima virtus,’ ‘inter utrunque vola, medio tutissimus ibis.’” According to Konstantin Höhlbaum, these Latin lines may have been drawn directly from Cicero and Ovid, or they may have been taken from a compendium of sayings. It is not difficult to discern Cicero’s influence on Hermann’s ideas of sobriety, prudence, and thrift. According to Cicero, “if we wish to reflect on the excellence and worthiness of our nature, we shall realize how dishonourable it is to sink into luxury and to live a soft and effeminate lifestyle and how honorable to live thriftily, strictly, with self-restraint, and soberly.” De Officiis I.106. The translation quoted here is Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41–42. 50. Erich Maschke, “Mittelschichten in deutschen Städten des Mittelalters,” in Städte und Menschen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt, der Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1959–1977 (Weisbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980), 274–305; Richard van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 2:74–84. 51. BW, 4:31 (Lib. decr., 49v). 52. BW, 2:378–379 (Lib. sen., 38r–v). 53. BW, 2:381 (Lib. sen., 39r). 54. Gerhard Fouquet, “Ein privates Milieu im 16. Jahrhundert, 370–371; BW, 1:315–316 (Lib. iuv., 221r–222r). 55. Lib. sen., 22r–v. 56. BW, 5:270–271 (Lib. sen., 583v–584r). 57. Lib. sen., 583v. 58. BW, 5:270–271 (Lib. sen., 583v–584r). 59. Lib. sen., 584r.

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60. Lib. sen., 337v–338r. 61. BW, 4:27–31 (Lib. decr., 48v–49v). See also Herborn, “Verfassungsideal,” 25–26. 62. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 63. BW, 3:14 (Lib. sen., 81v). 64. Lib. sen., 83r. 65. Lib. decr., 78r. 66. BW, 5:162 (Lib. sen., 201r–v). In a section titled “My sisters’ income declines” (“Narong miner sustern nimt ab”). 67. Lib. sen., 201r. 68. BW, 5:151–152 (Lib. sen., 153v–154r). 69. Lib. sen., 34v. 70. Decl., 100r. 71. Lib. sen., 149r. 72. Lib. sen., 237v. 73. Lib. sen., 377r. 74. BW, 5:6–7 (Lib. iuv., 244v). 75. BW, 5:7 (Lib. iuv., 244v). 76. BW, 5:197 (Lib. sen., 334v): “Man were deß broidtzs ohn fleissige arbeit nit werdt.” “Arbeit ist arbeit, aber es moiß sulche fleissige arbeit syn daß sie noitturff t bei moge bringen.” “Borgen macht sorgen.” 77. BW, 5:499 (Boich W., 235v): “Gewin und min / Verwar und spar.” 78. BW, 5:498 (Boich W., 200v): “Ein weisser hab mit fleiss in hut / Sin seel, sin leib, sin ehr, sin gut.” 79. Decl., 73r. 80. Lib. sen., 335v. 81. Cicero, On Duties, 58–59 (De Offi ciis I.150–151). 82. Decl., 73r. 83. Charles Taylor has nicely summed up this idea with a seventeenth-century Puritan quote, “God loveth adverbs.” Taylor, Sources of the Self, 211–233. 84. BW, 2:183 (Lib. iuv., 557r): “Doch aller handel ist wol gut, wan man mit fleis zusuit.” 85. BW, 5:197 (Lib. sen., 334r): “Jha frei ist die arbeit heilich und gibtt noitturff t, Es arbeit mit verstande oder syne mit den henden und leibe.” 86. Decl., 73r. 87. Decl., 71v–72r. 88. BW, 5:187 (Lib. sen., 271v). 89. BW, 5:187–188 (Lib. sen., 271v–273r): “Eyn jeden ist nit jedes beschert sonder war zu er beroiffen und syn vermogen und geschicklicheit ist.” 90. Decl., 73v. 91. Decl., inside cover: “Gut lierung, und wol regierung / Gewynnung, sparung, und merung / Sein deß hauß Weinsberghs handtierung / Bringen im Ehr, Nutz, und Zierung.” 92. Lib. decr., 265r: “Wo Gott der her neit bawt das hauß / So wirt doch nichtzs gerichtett auß / Der bawleudt arbeit ist verloren .  .  . Wurdt auch der

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Weinsbergh nit regeirt / Gemein haußnutzs bleib unvermeirt / Unkruyt und schaedt sult in verwoisten.” 93. Lib. sen., 81v. 94. BW, 5:125–126 (Lib. sen., 65r–v). 95. BW, 5:397 (Lib. decr., 389r). 96. Lib. sen., 186v–187r: “daß sie zu eym gutten Ehestande sich eirst selbst qualificern und geschickt machen, dan geschicklicheit hilff mehe dan gelt und gutt.” 97. Decl., 31v–32r. 98. Lib. sen., 80v–82r. 99. Boich W., Dr. 100. See BW, 1:343–344 (Lib. iuv., 237r–v) and Decl., 11v–12r. 101. Lib. sen., 201v. 102. For the popularity of entails among the European nobility, see J. P. Cooper, “Patterns of Inheritance and Settlement by Great Landowners from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 192–327. 103. BW, 5:444–447 (Boich W., 36r–43v). 104. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 61. 105. Erich Maschke, Die Familie in der deutschen Stadt des späten Mittelalters, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1980, Abh. 4 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980), 23–24. 106. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit.” 107. Lib. sen., 134r. 108. Boich W., Gv. 109. Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 71; Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 76. 110. Lib. decr., 39r. 111. Lib. sen., 137r. 112. Lib. sen., 82v. 113. Lib. sen., 83r. 114. According to Stephan Pastenaci, Hermann challenged “an important basis for legitimizing a society of estates.” Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 102–103. 115. Dewald, European Nobility, 33–36. 116. Desiderius Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. N. Bailey (London: Reeves & Turner, 1878), 181–191. 117. Lib. sen., 413v–414r. 118. Lib. sen., 414r: “Hie redt ich allein vom adel der geburt. Sunst macht tugent jeden edel.” 119. Boich W., 156v: “Wer on tugent wil edel syn, / Ist glich eynem gekrointen swyn, / Im mist, und dreck ist syn beger, / Die Croin brengt im spot, und kein ehr.”

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120. Boich W., Cv. 121. Lib. sen., 137v. 122. BW, 5:497 (Boich W., 119v): “Fursten, herren, ritter und knecht / Wie sie es krigen, es dunkt sie sin recht.” 123. Lib. sen., 137v: “und kan sie dan Gott wol fynden und von den stoelen setzen wie sie verdienet.” 124. Boich W., Dr. 125. Lib. sen., 295r–v. 126. Lib. sen., 137r. 127. BW, 5:500 (Boich W., 282r): “Wan wir all weren megtich rich, / Auch einer dem andern gelich, / Dan an einem dischs gesessen, / Wer sult uff tragen das essen?” 128. BW, 1:42 (Lib. iuv., 21r). 129. Boich W., 208r–v. 130. Lib. sen., 81r. 131. Lib. sen., 81v. 132. Lib. sen., 137v. 133. Boich W., Dr. 134. Lib. sen., 134v.

5. A Holy Household 1. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Pfaffenhass und gross Geschrei: Die reformatorischen Bewegungen in Deutschland 1517–1529 (Munich: C.  H. Beck, 1987). For the prominence of clerical anticlericalism in the early Reformation, see Euan Cameron, The European Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 56–61. 2. Ozment, Protestants, 11–31; Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 94–95. 3. In Robert Scribner’s memorable formulation, the city’s vulnerable position “did not allow the social space for a Reformation movement to appear.” Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation,” 241. 4. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique.” For a critique of Scribner’s argument that political contingencies largely explain Cologne’s “lack” of a viable Protestant movement, see Manfred Groten, “Die nächste Generation: Scribners Thesen aus heutiger Sicht,” in Mölich and Schwerhoff, Köln als Kommunikationszentrum, 110–113. 5. Lib. sen., 66 IIIr; BW, 2:371 (Lib. sen., 32r); BW, 4:2 (Lib. decr., 5v). For a summary of Hermann Weinsberg’s traditionalism, as well as his attitudes towards Protestants, see Wolfgang Herborn, “Die Protestanten in Schilderung und Urteil des Kölner Chronisten Hermann von Weinsberg (1518–1598),” in Niederlande und Nordwestdeutschland: Studien zur Regional- und Stadtgeschichte Nordwestkontinentaleuropas im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, ed. Wilfried Ehbrecht and Heinz Schilling (Cologne: Böhlau, 1983), 137–153.

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6. BW, 4:2 (Lib. decr., 5v). 7. BW, 5:407 (Lib. decr., 424r). 8. Before 1525, Cologne publishers produced fewer than twenty editions of Erasmus’s books, while Augsburg, Strasbourg, and Basel churned out hundreds. But between 1525 and 1575, Cologne became one of the major centers of Erasmus publishing; meanwhile, the number of his works published in Protestant cities such as Strasbourg and Augsburg sharply declined. Chaix, “Humanism et élites urbaines à Cologne,” 201–203. 9. For a vivid summary of Hermann Weinsberg’s anticlerical sentiments, see Ozment, Protestants, 181–192. 10. BW, 1:220–221 (Lib. iuv., 159r–v). 11. Lib. sen., 214v: “O here Gott, mogt daß recht der geistlichen und lehnleuthen die non aliendo seu dividendo bei dem hauß Weinsberch stat haben.” 12. Lib. sen., 77v–84r. 13. For an exceptionally thorough overview of Cologne’s religious institutions, see Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 28–218. 14. BW, 5:153–154 (Lib. sen., 155r–v). 15. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 104–106. 16. BW, 5:153 (Lib. sen., 155r). 17. BW, 5:153–154 (Lib. sen., 155r–v). 18. Banck, “Die Bevölkerungszahl der Stadt Köln,” 331. 19. BW, 5:154 (Lib. sen., 155r–v). 20. BW, 1:104–105 (Lib. iuv., 69r–v). See Herborn and Mattheier, “Sozialhistorische und sprachgeschichtliche Aspekte.” 21. BW, 5:153 (Lib. sen., 155r). 22. Lib. sen., 155v. 23. BW, 5:153 (Lib. sen., 155r). 24. Irsigler, “Kölner Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter,” 234; Rosen, “Rat, Bürger und geistliche Institutionen,” 287–288. 25. Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 92. 26. Quoted in Gerd Schwerhoff, Köln im Kreuzverhör: Kriminalität, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in einer früneuzeitlicher Stadt (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1991), 37; also quoted in Rosen, “Rat, Bürger und geistliche Institutionen,” 287. 27. Irsigler, “Kölner Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter,” 234; Kellenbenz, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns,” 351. 28. Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 73–76, 91–97. For the text of the concordat, see pp. 103–113. See also Scribner, “Why Was There No Reformation,” 232. 29. For a recent summary of the scholarship on late medieval religion, see Rittgers, Reformation of the Keys, 23–25. 30. In a sampling of wills from the years 1498–1502, those containing pious bequests rose to 100 percent (73 out of 73). Klosterberg, Zur Ehre Gottes, 269–270. “In no other city of the German Empire did testators have such a ‘wide range’ of churches and cloisters at their disposal for pious bequests” (98–99).

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Notes to Pages 137–142

31. Lib. sen., 152r. 32. For a comprehensive, if somewhat partial enumeration of clerical abuses in Cologne, see Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Köln, 39–53. For the situation throughout Europe, see Cameron, European Reformations, 20–37. 33. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 110–126; Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 9–11, 36–40. 34. Hans Vogts, “Kölner Hauskapellen,” in Köln: 85 Jahre Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpfl ege, vol. 1, Texte von 1912–1976, ed. Hanna Adenauer and Bernd Dreher (Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1997), 54–65. 35. Gérald Chaix examines several of these phenomena as part of a “‘domestication’ of religion” (“la ‘domestication’ de religion”). He reminds us that these trends were not identical with privatization; the iconography of private chapels linked them to the larger communities of church and city. “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 205–209. Euan Cameron suggests that there was a certain “democratization” of the Church’s liturgy, visible most clearly in the popularity of masses for the dead. European Reformations, 14–17. 36. Klaus Militzer, “Laienbruderschaften in Köln im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Mölich and Schwerhoff, Köln als Kommunikationszentrum, 254–270; Klersch, Volkstum und Volksleben in Stadt Köln 3:29–35. 37. For the defi nitive study of the Devotia Moderna, see Engen, Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life. 38. Ozment, “The Original Protestant Message,” in Reformation in the Cities, 47–120. 39. Lindberg, European Reformations, 114–118, 128–131. 40. For a vivid contrast between the pre- and post-Reformation urban world, see Ozment, Protestants, 24–28. 41. In 1525, when the Council extracted concessions from the clergy, it excepted the city’s four noble chapters (Stifte)—the Domkapital, St. Gereon, St. Ursula, and Maria im Kapitol. Looz-Corswarem, “Die Kölner Artikelserie von 1525,” 92. 42. BW, 2:382–383 (Lib. sen., 39v). 43. Walter Lipgens, “Johannes Gropper, designierter Kardinal (1503–1559),” in Rheinische Lebensbilder, ed. Bernhard Poll, vol. 2 (Düsseldorf: RheinlandVerlag, 1966); Janis Marie Gibbs, “Catholicism and Civic Identity in Cologne, 1475–1570” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1996), 180–184. 44. BW, 1:192–194 (Lib. iuv., 141r–142r). 45. Herborn, “Protestanten in Schilderung und Urteil,” 151–153. See also Gibbs, “Catholicism and Civic Identity in Cologne,” 154–173. 46. BW, 1:193 (Lib. iuv., 141v). According to Wolfgang Herborn, a “wide segment of the Cologne population was inclined towards Protestantism, but the leading members of the City Council remained fi rmly Catholic.” “Protestanten in Schilderung und Urteil,” 150–151. 47. BW, 2:68 (Lib. iuv., 317v–318r).

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48. BW, 2:69 (Lib. iuv., 318r). 49. BW, 3:134–135 (Lib. sen., 347v–348r). 50. Gibbs, “Catholicism and Civic Identity in Cologne,” 232–246; Herborn, “Protestanten in Schilderung und Urteil,” 152. 51. Between 1576 and 1595, ten of the city’s twenty-two Gaffeln elected Protestant councillors. Herborn, “Protestanten in Schilderung und Urteil,” 147. 52. BW, 3:54 (Lib. sen., 174v). 53. BW, 3:45 (Lib. sen., 133r–v). Also quoted in Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 63. 54. BW, 3:45 (Lib. sen., 133v). 55. BW, 3:79–80 (Lib. sen., 260v). 56. BW, 3:84 (Lib. sen., 275r). 57. BW, 3:79 (Lib. sen., 260v). 58. BW, 3:87 (Lib. sen., 278r). 59. Rosen, “Rat, Bürger und geistliche Institutionen,” 291. 60. Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 62. 61. BW, 3:216 (Lib. sen., 427v–428r). 62. BW, 3:173 (Lib. sen., 393v). 63. BW, 3:180–181 (Lib. sen., 400v). 64. BW, 3:195 (Lib. sen., 414r). 65. BW, 5:406–407 (Lib. decr., 423v–424r). 66. Boich W., Dv. 67. BW, 5:151 (Lib. sen., 152r). 68. BW, 2:270 (Lib. iuv., 667r): “Ich gain wol zu kirchn, hoir gern predich, aber bitte nit so fleissich noch vil, bekommeren mich wenich in der hillger schrift, dan mehe in weltlichen zitlichen dingen.” This quote has often been cited as evidence of the author’s sober, nondogmatic temperament. Taken out of context, however, it can easily obscure the extent to which Hermann’s project itself was deeply religious, if heterodox. Hermann quite sincerely saw his house as a spiritual institution, rooted in Christ, the “true vine.” See Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 101–102. 69. Lib. sen., 449v. 70. Lib. sen., 154r. 71. Boich W., Dv. 72. Lib. sen., 152r–v. 73. Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, 111–115. 74. BW, 5:154 (Lib. sen., 155v). 75. BW, 3:87 (Lib. sen., 278r). 76. BW, 5:356–357 (Lib. decr., 219v–221r). 77. Lib. sen., 296v. In the Gedenkbuch, this saying followed a lament that men and women gave ample bequests to “strangers”—canons, monks, and beguines—before they had endowed foundations for their own “blood.” 78. BW, 5:129 (Lib. sen., 79r–80v).

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Notes to Pages 149–157

79. BW, 5:407 (Lib. decr., 424r). 80. BW, 3:10–11 (Lib. sen., 76r–v). 81. BW, 5:151 (Lib. sen., 152v). 82. BW, 5:153 (Lib. sen., 155r). 83. Lib. sen., 154v. 84. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 66, 61. 85. BW, 5:357 (Lib. decr., 220r). 86. BW, 5:128–129 (Lib. sen., 79v–80r). 87. BW, 5:406 (Lib. decr., 424r). 88. BW, 5:151 (Lib. sen., 152v). 89. BW, 5:129 (Lib. sen., 80r). 90. Lib. sen., 316v–317r. 91. BW, 3:11 (Lib. sen., 76v). 92. Lib. sen., 316v–317r: “da gleube ich fast es moist nach deß menschen absterben waß im leben vor daß wenich boisses nit gelitten het dasselbich dan liden und boissen, derhalb wirt es recht purgatorium daß fegefuyr genant.” 93. Decl., 90r: “so halt ich es doch mit dem Christlichen menschlichen gebrauch der alten und myner eltern die mich geleirt haben daß gebet helff e den doden, und pleibenn da bei, biß ich gleubwirdich anders bericht werde.” 94. BW, 5:466–467 (Boich W., 142r). 95. BW, 2:270–271 (Lib. iuv., 667r). 96. Corsten, “Studien zur Pfarrgeschichte von St. Jakob,” 19–20. 97. BW, 3:55 (Lib. sen., 181v). 98. BW, 5:126 (Lib. sen., 66 IIIv). 99. BW, 5:143 (Lib. sen., 122v). 100. Lib. decr., 78r. 101. Lib. decr., 6r. Hermann referred here to the famous sisters who were followers of Jesus, Mary and Martha of Bethany. In Luke 10:38–41, Martha busies herself with household chores (representing the worldly life) while Mary sits at Jesus’s feet and listens to his teachings (representing the spiritual life). In Catholic tradition, Mary of Bethany was merged with the figure of Mary Magdalene. 102. Lib. decr., 78r. 103. Lib. sen., 154r–v. 104. BW, 5:152–153 (Lib. sen., 154r–v). 105. BW, 5:152 (Lib. sen., 154r). 106. Lib. sen., 315v. 107. Lib. sen., 152r. 108. BW, 5:151 (Lib. sen., 152v). 109. BW, 5:145 (Lib. sen., 133v). 110. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 521–535. Chaix points to similar fi ndings made by historians in Münster, Lyon, Aix-enProvence, and Venice.

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111. Chaix, “Von der Christlichkeit zur Katholizität,” 243. 112. Lib. sen., 152v. 113. Decl., 15r. 114. Decl., 15r. His entail was a donation “ad pias causas.” 115. Boich W., Dv: “Im hauß weinsberch kan Gotz lob so wol gesoigt, die armen gespeist, die jugendt in leer und zucht befordert werden als anders.” 116. Hermann developed this argument in a section titled “On the blood and dwelling of Weinsberg” (“Vom geblode und wonung Weinsberch”). Hermann’s reflections were prompted by the feast of the Dispersion of the Apostles on July 15. If the Apostles were called to spread the gospel throughout the world, was it possible that he, too, might be called to the more modest task of “founding” the Haus Weinsberg? Lib. sen., 294v–297r. 117. Lib. sen., 295r–v: “Wie nuhe Godt ewich ist, so ist er auch gut, Jha daß hoigste gut, so lang dan der mensch gut, from, und gerecht ist, und pleibt, so ist vereinigt mit dem hoigsten gut daß ewiglich pleibt, und wirt daß auch mynem geblode nit faelen wan es gut, from und gerecht pleibt und sich mit dem ewige Godte und hoigsten gut vereinigt. . . . So zweifflen ich nit dar an wan in myn geblode und haußgnosen zu Weinsbergh forchten und syn gebotter halten so wirt er sie und daß hauß von hondert zu hondert und tusent jarn widder durch syn barmhertzigkeit erhalten.” 118. Lib. sen., 295r–296v. 119. Lib. sen., 83v; Boich W., Cr. 120. BW, 5:152 (Lib. sen., 154r).

6. As If We Had Never Been 1. BW, 1:12 (Lib. iuv., Gv). 2. BW, 5:xvii–xviii. The dates after each title are the original dates of publication, not necessarily the dates of the editions Hermann owned. 3. Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 143–148; see also BW, 1:xi–xiii. 4. BW, 5:3 (Lib. iuv., Ar). 5. Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, De Laude Scriptorum, ed. Klaus Arnold, trans. Roland Behrendt (Lawrence, KS: Coronodo Press, 1974), 96–99. 6. For more on the Koelhoffsche chronicle and late medieval Cologne historiography, see Gérald Chaix, “Coellen eyn kroyn boven allen steden schoyn: L’historiographie colonaise à la fi n du Moyen Age,” in Villes, bonnes villes, cités et capitales: Études d’histoire urbain (XIIe–XVIIe siècle) offertes à Bernard Chevalier, ed. Monique Bourin (Caen: Paradigme, 1993), 315–322. 7. Die cronica van der hilliger stat van Coellen [Chroniken der deutschen Städte 13], 255. 8. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 9. The literature on the late medieval “cult of the dead” is immense. For an analysis of Memoria in connection with the late medieval city, see Jacques

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Notes to Pages 165–171

Chiffoleau, La compatabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fi n du Moyen Age (vers 1320–vers 1480) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1980). See also Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 10. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 11. Decl., 89v. 12. Lib. sen., 316v. 13. Chaix, “De la cité chrétienne à la métropole catholique,” 170–193. 14. Decl., 7r: “Memorien zu machen ist teglich im brauch bei den Christen.” 15. Miri Ruben, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 16. BW, 2:277 (Lib. iuv., 673v). In a list of funeral expenses for his late wife Drutgin in 1574, Hermann wrote, “3. maji in 6 kirchn zu bitten.” 17. Klosterberg, Zur Ehre Gottes, 94–98. 18. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 218–233. 19. Lib. sen., 475v. Each year on All Saints’ Day, Hermann noted his observance of his parents’ memorial. The entry for 1584, however, is particularly detailed, perhaps because his sister Catherine had recently died. 20. See BW, 5:237–238 (Lib. sen., 454v, 458v–459v). 21. Lib. sen., 100r. The detail concerning the “holy water” comes from an account of an All Saints’ Day in 1574: “und mit dem weiwasser umbgangen.” 22. Lib. sen., 405r. 23. Lib. sen., 475v. 24. Lib. sen., 100r. 25. Klersch, Volkstum und Volksleben in Köln, 2:163–164. 26. BW, 2:277–279 (Lib. iuv., 673v–674v). 27. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 178–181. 28. Lib. sen., 154r. 29. BW, 1:144 (Lib. iuv., 98r). 30. BW, 5:224 (Lib. sen., 402r). 31. BW, 5:348 (Lib. decr., 198r). 32. Lib. sen., 405r. 33. Boich W., Hv. 34. Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 35. BW, 1:144 (Lib. iuv., 98r–v). 36. BW, 5:179 (Lib. sen., 240r). 37. BW, 5:263 (Lib. sen., 546v): “Aus dodenkoppen, ist ein schreck, / Ich hab gekant denselben geck.” Hermann also said he had seen men drink out of chamber pots and other “foul” receptacles. 38. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 39. BW, 1:352–353 (Lib. iuv., 242r). The gravestone and inscription cost twelve gulden.

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40. Decl., 7r. 41. Decl., Vv–VIr. 42. Testament of Hermann Weinsberg and Weisgin Ripgin (Oct. 31, 1554). Test. 3/W195, HAStK. 43. BW, 2:87 (Lib. iuv., 355v–356r). For more on this altarpiece and the Weinsberg family’s activities as patrons of religious art, see Schmid, Kölner Renaissancekultur, 19–46. 44. Decl., 6r–7v, 89r–v. 45. For an excellent discussion of the contradictions and anxieties that lay at the heart of perpetual masses (albeit in a different cultural context), see Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 200–209. 46. Decl., 90r. 47. Schmid, Kölner Renaissancekultur, 25–35. 48. BW, 5:178 (Lib. sen., 240r). 49. Lib. decr., 253r. 50. Lib. decr., 4v: “die dhoeten leist man sich mit den doeten in jhener welt im himmel bei unsser aller fatter und schepffer frolich machen, die lebentigen bekommeren sich mit den lebentigen.” 51. Lib. decr., 253r. 52. For an encyclopedic overview of these attitudes towards sin, see Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 53. Lib. sen., 83r. 54. Lib. decr., 3r. 55. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, 73. 56. Lib. decr., 4v. 57. BW, 1:16 (Lib. iuv., Kr). 58. BW, 1:221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 59. Lib. sen., 215v. 60. Decl., XVv: “Eß irth mich das vil ist bestiff t / Wilche nit bei siner ordnongh bliff t / Versteuret off vergencklich wirt / Lester will und renth ubel fi rth.” 61. Lib. sen., 152r–v. 62. Pass, “Ein neues Buch Weinsberg,” 161–167. 63. Peter Dinzelbacher, “Die ‘Realpräsenz’ der Heiligen in Ihren Reliquaren und Gräbern nach mittelalterlichen Quellen,” in Heiligenverehrung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Ostfi ldern: Schwabenverlag, 1990), 115–174. 64. Decl., 13v. 65. For more on the more robust, “ontic” view of memory in premodern societies in the West, see Gerhard Otto Oexle, ed., Memoria als Kultur, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Plancks-Instituts für Geschichte 121

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(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 30–42. To this older view of memory, Oexle juxtaposes the more modern idea of recollection as something subjective—as “bare recollection” (55–57). 66. BW, 1:220–221 (Lib. iuv., 159r). 67. Lib. sen., 80r. 68. Decl., XVv: “Was nit zur stiff tung wirt gewandt / Pleibt ohn selden lang im eirsten standt / Dan balt zertheilt, verkauff t, verbeudt / Kumbt durch vil wegh an fremde leudt.” 69. See BW, 5:203–209 (Lib. sen., 351r–352v). 70. Lib. decr., 4v. 71. BW, 2:274 (Lib. iuv., 670v). 72. See Hermann Keussen, “Verzeichnis der Schreinskarten und Schreinsbücher,” Mitteilungen aus der Stadtarchiv von Köln 32 (1904): 4–5, 16–17. 73. Lib. sen., 79v. 74. BW, 5:110–116 (Lib. sen., 13r–16r); see also Herborn, “‘Straßen wie diese,’” 7–36. 75. Lib. sen., 296r–v. 76. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 183–185. 77. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, 200–219. 78. BW, 2:369 (Lib. sen., 30r). 79. Lib. sen., 295r. 80. See Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 111–118. 81. Lib. sen., 137r. 82. Lib. decr., 4r. 83. Boich W., Tr. 84. BW, 5:433–447. 85. BW, 5:447 (Boich W., 1r–43v). 86. Boich W., Fv–Hv. 87. Boich W., Fv–Gv. 88. Boich W., Gr. 89. Decl., 77r. 90. Boich W., Gr–v. 91. Studt, “Hausvater, Haus und Gedächtnis,” 148–149. 92. Boich W., Gv. 93. Boich W., Hr–v. 94. Lib. iuv., 379r–v. 95. Boich W., Gv. 96. Lib. iuv., 379r. 97. Boich W., Hr–v: “Daß boich soll auch im hauß uff eynem bequemen gemach an einer ketten hangen uff daß es bei handen verbleibe und nit verlenet ader verleußlich werde, und soll nymmer uiß dem hauß komen.” 98. Lib. iuv., 379r. 99. Boich W., Hv: “dan halt es bei uch in geheim so vil moglich.” 100. Boich W., Dr–v; Lib. decr., 38v–39r. 101. Boich W., Cv.

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102. BW, 5:8 (Lib. iuv., 245r–v): “Ich redt gemeinlich die wairheit, aber umb der ehren und nütz willen hab ich duck lügen und gedicht geredt und geschriben.” 103. Boich W., Hv. 104. BW, 3:194 (Lib. sen., 413r). 105. BW, 3:310 (Lib. sen., 561r). 106. Boich W., Gr. 107. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 50–51; Peter Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 189–194; Tanner, Last Descendant of Aeneas, 67–118. 108. “Solche historischen Rekonstruktionen waren keine bloßen Fälschungen, sonder vielfach Produkte gelehrter Forschung auf der Höhe der zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung.” Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 51. 109. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula, 193–195. 110. Boich W., Fv–Gr. 111. BW, 1:3–4 (Lib. iuv., Ar–v). 112. Boich W., Er. 113. BW, 5:xxv–xxvi. 114. BW, 5:277–280 (Lib. sen., 615r–616r). 115. BW, 5:197 (Lib. sen., 334v). 116. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 67–68. 117. Lib. sen., 305v, 519r. For more on Hermann’s invention of the figure of Patroclus—which Josef Stein rightly calls an “attempt at mystification”— see BW, 5:xxiii–xxv, xxvi. 118. Noel L. Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 96–97. 119. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula, 194–195. 120. BW, 5:280–281 (Lib. sen., 617r–620v). 121. BW, 5:280–281 (Lib. sen., 617r). 122. BW, 5:281 (Lib. sen., 618r). 123. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 50–52, 76. 124. Boich W., Qv, Rr, 201v. 125. For a succinct summary of Erasmus’s critique of late medieval piety and its difference from that of Protestants, see Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28–53. 126. Eire, War against the Idols, 48–49. 127. Quoted in Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula, 155. 128. Lib. decr., 38v. 129. Lib. decr., 39r. 130. Lib. decr., 38v. 131. Lib. sen., 635r.

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132. Lib. sen., 635r. 133. BW, 5:281 (Lib. sen., 617v–618r). 134. BW, 5:281 (Lib. sen., 618r): “pie credendum est, cum pietas etiam sit circa patres et maiores nostros secundum naturam.” 135. Lib. decr., 38v. 136. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8.

7. Spare No Quill, Ink, or Paper 1. Boich W., Gv. 2. Velten, Das selbst geschriebene Leben, 34. 3. The city with the richest cache of genealogies and family books, not surprisingly, was the city with the most stable and venerable patrician class— namely, Nuremberg. Maschke, Die Familie in der deutschen Stadt des späten Mittelalters, 22–30. 4. Though scholars have rightly noted the “individualism,” “rationalism,” and “humanist body of thought” evident in Hermann’s work, they have tended to read his work as a simple reflection of wider cultural trends. See Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 134–136; Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 70–72. 5. BW, 3:337 (Lib. sen., 589v). 6. Horst Wenzel, Wilfried Seipel, and Gotthard Wunberg, eds., Die Verschriftlichung der Welt: Bild, Text und Zahl in der Kultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum/Skira, 2000). 7. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 251–300. 8. See James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapter 3. 9. BW, 1:14 (Lib. iuv., Ir). 10. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 713–714, 706. 11. Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 308–310. 12. Boich W., 152r–153v, 192r–v. 13. BW, 5:447–470 (Boich W., 128r–145r). 14. BW, 5:447–449 (Boich W., 128v). 15. BW, 5:xv. 16. BW, 5:455 (Boich W., 134r). 17. BW, 5:466 (Boich W., 141v–142r). 18. Boich W., 147r–148r. 19. Boich W., 144r–v. 20. BW, 1:320–323 (Lib. iuv., 224v–226v). 21. Boich W., 170r–177v. 22. Though the narrative breaks off in 1537, Hermann mentions that a lawsuit was “still pending in 1546,” suggesting that he wrote this brief autobiography around that time.

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23. Boich W., 177r. 24. Boich W., 177v: “Multorum disce exemplis, quae facta sequaris, / Quae fugias; vita est nobis aliena magistra.” 25. Boich W., 186r–v. 26. Boich W., 188r: “Jargeschichten deß haus und gesclechtz Weinsberch, angainde vam jar M.D.L. 1550.” 27. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 27–56. 28. For the relationship between print and the expansion of imagined social spaces, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new ed. (London: Verso, 2006), Chapters 2–3. 29. Lib. sen., 237v. 30. Lib. decr., 4r. 31. Lib. sen., 11v. 32. Lib. iuv., 341r. 33. BW, 1:331 (Lib. iuv., 231v). 34. This original Gedenkbuch, which ran from 1555 through 1561, is now embedded in the more detailed and wide-ranging Gedenkbuch that eventually supplanted it. See Lib. iuv., 332v–333v, 341r; see also BW, 2:79. 35. Lib. iuv., 341r. 36. Lib. iuv., 342v. 37. BW, 2:85 (Lib. iuv., 354r). 38. Lib. iuv., 393r. 39. Lib. decr., 52v. 40. Lib. iuv., 341r. 41. Decl., 13v. 42. BW, 1:11 (Lib. iuv., Fv). 43. Decl., 17r: “Person quidem est mortalis, sed dignitas sui officii est immortalis.” 44. Decl., 299r. 45. “In der Funktion des Hausvaters vereinigen sich beide Individuen zu einer Person. Das Amt als überzeitliche Institution überwindet die Sterblichkeit des Individuums.” Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 55. See also Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 94. 46. BW, 1:12 (Lib. iuv., Hr). 47. BW, 2:84 (Lib. iuv., 352v). 48. BW, 2:86–87 (Lib. iuv., 354v–355r). 49. BW, 2:90–91 (Lib. iuv., 361r). 50. BW, 2:91–93 (Lib. iuv., 363r–364r). 51. BW, 5:18–19 (Lib. iuv., 362v). 52. BW, 2:91–93 (Lib. iuv., 363r–364r). 53. BW, 5:19–20 (Lib. iuv., 366v). 54. BW, 2:101–102 (Lib. iuv., 378v–379v). Hermann had worked secretly on both his will and the Boich Weinsberg while married to Weisgin.

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Notes to Pages 216–221

55. BW, 5:20–21 (Lib. iuv., 373v). 56. Accounts of the quarrels can be found in BW, 2:104, 107, 109; BW, 5:20– 22, 24, 26–28, 30–31. 57. BW, 5:20–22 (Lib. iuv., 373v–374r). 58. BW, 5:24 (Lib. iuv., 385r). 59. BW, 5:25. 60. BW, 2:107 (Lib. sen., 391r–v): “hat mir verwissen, ich het hubsche frauleut tuschen wegen angesehen.” 61. BW, 5:26 (Lib. iuv., 395r). 62. BW, 5:26–28 (Lib. iuv., 397r–398v). 63. Lib. iuv., 399r. 64. BW, 1:4 (Lib. iuv., Br). 65. Gregor Rohmann interprets Hermann’s record keeping as a simple extension of his duties as a housefather. “In den personalen Synthesen der Hausväter wird all dies unterschiedslos zum erinnerden Wissen des Hauses.” “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 58–59. Such a reading is too restrictive. Though the house provided the audience and justification for the writings, Hermann began to use more abstract arguments about history and posterity to justify his project. 66. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Bourgeois Family and the Institutionalization of a Privateness Oriented to an Audience,” in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 43–50. See also Jean Marie Goulemot, “Literary Practices: Publicizing the Private,” in Chartier, The Passions of the Renaissance, 207–264, 327–362, 363–398. 67. BW, 1:5 (Lib. iuv., Bv). 68. Rohmann, “Der Lügner durchschaut die Wahrheit,” 58; Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 94. 69. BW, 1:208 (Lib. iuv., 151r). 70. BW, 1:275 (Lib. iuv., 192v–193r). 71. BW, 1:104 (Lib. iuv., 69r); see also Lib. sen., 338r. 72. BW, 1:231 (Lib. iuv., 231r). For more on Hermann Weinsberg’s methods as a chronicler and historian, see Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 148–169. 73. BW, 1:12 (Lib. iuv., Gv). 74. See Herborn, “‘Straßen wie diese,’” 11–13; Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 74. Stephan Pastenaci argues that Hermann was able to see his own times from an “alien” perspective and thus record things that many of his contemporaries took for granted. Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 111. 75. BW, 1:9 (Lib. iuv., Er–v). 76. Lib. sen., 32r: “mich selbst mit der federen abcontrafeiten.” For a general discussion of Hermann’s self-descriptions, see Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 118–122. For a more detailed discussion of Hermann’s bodily descriptions, see Jütte, “Aging and Body Image in the Sixteenth Century,” 259–289.

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77. Lib. iuv. 243r–245v (BW, 1:354–355 and BW, 5:3–9). This sketch seems to have been based on notes Hermann himself had made at an earlier date, when he was compiling his genealogy and family history. But it was only in 1561 that he decided to enshrine these notes within the context of his family chronicle. 78. BW, 5:3–4 (Lib. iuv., 243v). 79. In other words, Hermann depicted himself at the ages of fi fty-six, sixty, and seventy. These are found respectively in Lib. iuv., 243r–245v (BW, 1:354–355 and BW, 5:3–9); Lib. iuv., 666r–667v (BW, 2:269–272); Lib. sen., 30r–40r (BW, 2:367–383 and BW, 5:116–122); and Lib. decr., 5r–6v. 80. Lib. sen., 33v. 81. BW, 5:8 (Lib. iuv., 245r). 82. BW, 2:269 (Lib. iuv., 270). Here, Hermann confi rmed at least some of his late wife Drutgin’s earlier suspicions. 83. Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 134; Herborn, “Hermann von Weinsberg,” 72. 84. Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 106–111. 85. BW, 2:369 (Lib. sen., 30r): “aber dieselbe verlaufene zit [komt] nimmer widder.” 86. BW, 1:8 (Lib. iuv., Er). 87. BW, 1:13 (Lib. iuv., Hr–v). 88. BW, 1:4 (Lib. iuv., Av). 89. Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellungen, 111–118. 90. BW, 1:355 (Lib. iuv., 245v). 91. Lib. sen., 6r: “so kompt dan daß preteritum, presens, et futuram in eyn boich zusammen myn ganß leben.” 92. Lib. sen., 29v. 93. BW, 1:12–13 (Lib. iuv., Gv–Hv). 94. Lib. sen., 2r. 95. Lib. decr., 4v. 96. Lib. sen., 147v. 97. Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, 35. 98. BW, 1:13 (Lib. iuv., Hv). 99. Elisabeth Eisenstein has argued that print was an unrivaled technology of preservation, since it dispersed multiple identical copies of a text across wide geographical distances. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 78–88. 100. Kistenbüchlein, 6r–8r; Lib. sen., 310v. 101. BW, 1:5 (Lib. iuv., Bv): “Und wanne das man recht ansehen und erwegen will, was ist es dan vil anders dan liber domesticus seu familiaris, dan ein hauslich, broderlich und fruntlich gedenkboich.” 102. Lib. sen., 6r. 103. Lib. decr., inside cover. 104. BW, 3:2 (Lib. sen., 60r). 105. BW, 1:14 (Lib. iuv., Ir).

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106. Lib. sen., 422v. 107. Lib. sen., 103r. 108. Lib. sen., 6r. 109. BW, 4:119 (Lib. decr., 221r–v). 110. BW, 3:367–368 (Lib. sen., 640r). 111. Lib. decr., 4v. 112. Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload”; Blair, Too Much to Know. 113. Boich W., 177v. This quote comes from the third person autobiography Hermann wrote in the 1540s. 114. Lib. decr., 4v. 115. Lib. sen., 103r. 116. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 14–26.

8. A New World 1. Johannes Weber, “The Early German Newspaper—A Medium of Contemporaneity,” in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 69. 2. Lib. decr., 3r–v. 3. BW, 4:1 (Lib. decr., 4r). 4. During the Enlightenment, Cologne came to be seen as a bastion of conservatism and obscurantism, a place fi lled with musty relics and idle monks. Such perceptions had a great deal to do with Protestant and anticlerical biases. Recently, historians have provided a more balanced view of Cologne’s changes during the sixteenth century, arguing the city only came to seem “backward” in the later seventeenth century, after its Catholic Reformation culture went out of style. See Chaix, “Von der Christlichkeit zur Katholizität”; Schwerhoff, Köln im Kreuzverhör, 36–37. 5. See, for instance, BW, 3:22 (Lib. sen., 104v). 6. Lib. sen., 83v. 7. BW, 4:16 (Decl., 29v). 8. Lib. decr., 10r. Hermann believed that the stars influenced, but did not determine, human actions. 9. BW, 1:21 (Lib. iuv., 3v). 10. Decl., 89v. 11. Lib. sen., 316v. 12. Lib. sen., 151v–152r. In 1579, at a dinner with friends, the discussion turned to iconoclasm: “wie die kirchen und cloister in Hollandt, Selandt, Flandern, Brabant, und eitz auch zu Utricht und das Gellerlandt durch verstorett unnd vill alte herliche fundationes und stiff tungen zu neit gemacht worden.” This caused Hermann many “strange thoughts and questions” (seltzame gedancken und questiones dubiose). 13. BW, 5:331 (Lib. decr., 136v). 14. Lib. decr., 10v.

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15. Stein, “Hermann Weinsberg als Mensch und Historiker,” 125. 16. Lib. sen., 33v. 17. Lib. sen., 94v. 18. Lib. sen., 64r. 19. BW, 4:68–70 (Lib. decr., 129r). 20. BW, 4:69 (Lib. decr., 129r). 21. BW, 4:70 (Lib. decr., 129r). 22. BW, 1:50 (Lib. iuv., 27r): “Got weis es.” 23. BW, 4:70 (Lib. decr., 129r): “Lass es gott richten.” 24. BW, 3:143 (Lib. sen., 359r): “Die zit wil erleren.” 25. Ann Blair has cautioned against attributing the phenomenon of “information overload” to print alone. Complaints about an overabundance of information—along with reference works designed to manage it—were already common in the Middle Ages. Too Much to Know, Chapter 1. Print did not create information overload so much as it increased the number of people who experienced it. 26. BW, 5:331 (Lib. decr., 136v). 27. Lib. decr., 45r. 28. BW, 3:310 (Lib. sen., 561r). 29. BW, 4:1 (Lib. decr., 4r). 30. BW, 3:193 (Lib. sen., 413r). 31. BW, 3:310 (Lib. sen., 561r). 32. BW, 4:12–13 (Lib. decr., 27r). 33. BW, 3:193 (Lib. sen., 413v). 34. BW, 3:310 (Lib. sen., 561r). 35. BW, 4:1 (Lib. decr., 4r). 36. BW, 3:267–269 (Lib. sen., 502r–v). 37. BW, 4:15–16 (Lib. decr., 29r). 38. BW, 5:329–330 (Lib. decr., 136r–v). 39. BW, 3:8 (Lib. sen., 71r). 40. BW, 4:12 (Lib. decr., 27r). 41. Lib. decr., 3v–4r; Lib. sen., 297v. 42. Decl., 15r. 43. BW, 1:21 (Lib. iuv., 3v). 44. Lib. sen., 9r. 45. BW, 1:28 (Lib. iuv., 11r). 46. BW, 1:21 (Lib. iuv., 3v). 47. Decl., 15r. 48. Lib. sen., 295r–v; Decl., 53v. 49. Lib. sen., 469v. 50. Lib. sen., 297v. 51. Lib. sen., 627v–628r. 52. Lib. sen., 297v. 53. Lib. sen., 294v–295r: “Und derhalb weiterß bei mir gedacht, Ob ich auch wol durch den willen Gotzs zu dem hauß und gesclecht myneß fatters Weinsbergh geschickt mog syn, daß durch Gottes ingeben dermaissn durch

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myn testament zu fundern und darin vorsehung zu thoin das der Allemechtiger darin gelobt und geprise mogt werden zu deß hausfatters daselbst und hausgnosen selen heill und troist und irer aller wolfart.” 54. Boich W., Qv, Rr. 55. Decl., 6r. 56. Lib. sen., 295v–296r. 57. Lib. sen., 449v. 58. BW, 1:7 (Lib. iuv., Cv). 59. Lib. sen., 83v. 60. See, in particular, the essay “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse,” in Montaigne, Essays, 922–934. 61. For the classic statement of this argument, see Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; See also Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. 62. BW, 2:258 (Lib. iuv., 637v–638r). 63. BW, 2:261 (Lib. iuv., 642v). 64. BW, 2:273–274 (Lib. iuv., 670v). 65. BW, 2:303–305 (Lib. iuv., 699r–700r). 66. BW, 2:305 (Lib. iuv., 700r). 67. Boich W., 10r–14v. 68. BW, 5:100–102 (Lib. iuv., 705v–706r, 707r). For a detailed study of the consumption habits of this household, see Jütte, “Household and Family Life.” 69. Lib. sen., 645v. 70. BW, 2:300 (Lib. iuv., 698v). 71. See especially Lib. sen., 94v–99v. 72. Lib. sen., 95v: “dieweil sie Jhesuiters und volkomener syn wil.” 73. BW, 5:126 (Lib. sen., 66 IIIr). 74. BW, 5:180–181 (Lib. sen., 253v–254r); Lib. sen., 286r. 75. Lib. sen., 101v. 76. Lib. sen., 262r. 77. Decl., 183r. 78. BW, 5:320–321 (Lib. decr., 96r–v). 79. Lib. sen., 312r–v. 80. Lib. sen., 267v–268r. 81. Verf. u. Verw, Turmbücher G231, HAStK, 203v. 82. BW, 5:xxxviii. 83. Verf. u. Verw., Turmbücher G232, HAStK, 45v–46r. 84. Verf. u. Verw., Turmbücher G232, HAStK, 46v: “Ihn welcher zeitt ehr ime noch ein mall funff oder 6 gebeichtet und große raw und Leidtwesen gehat und diese wortt ach ich armer man was hab ich gethan duckmaln repetiert.” 85. Verf. u. Verw., Turmbücher G231, HAStK, 203v–204r: “soll Sybilla gesagt habe Ach gefattersche pleibt bei mir, mir ist so bangh, ich wolte woll ihn ein mauß loich kruffenn.”

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86. For a complete narrative of these events, see Josef Stein’s introduction in BW, 5:xxxv–xxxviii.

Conclusion 1. Gary Wolf, “The data-driven life,” New York Times, April 28, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html (accessed August 28, 2011). 2. Suzanne Daley, “On its own, Europe backs web privacy rights,” New York Times, August 9, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/ europe/10spain.html (accessed August 28, 2011); Jeffrey Rosen, “The Right to Be Forgotten,” Stanford Law Review Online, February 3, 2012. http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/right-to-beforgotten (accessed April 19, 2012). See also Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 3. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 7–8. 4. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 58. 5. Stephan Mallarmé wrote “tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre.” “Le Livre, instrument spirituel,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), 80–83.

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Acknowledgments

This book is about a sixteenth-century man who was preoccupied with paper memory, with the power of writing to save the details of his life from oblivion. It is only appropriate, then, that I happily remember all those who helped me to complete this project. Like the subject of this book, I am all too aware of my own inability to do justice on paper to the myriad influences that shaped this work. I am grateful for the generous fi nancial assistance I received while working on this project. Two fellowships—from the the Pew Scholars Program and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program—funded much of the research. Generous grants from the Harvard University History Department helped to defray the costs of archival research in Germany. While in Cologne, I was kindly and ably assisted by the staff at the Historisches Archiv. Needless to say, it was with a heavy heart that I read news of the civic archive’s sudden collapse in 2009. Special thanks go to Dr. Joachim Deeters, who provided me with a comprehensive overview of Hermann Weinsberg’s manuscripts, pointed me toward relevant sources in the archives, and suggested further avenues of research. I am also grateful for the time Dr. Joachim Oepen of the Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln spent discussing parish records compiled by Hermann Weinsberg, as well as for the written advice I received from Dr. Robert Jütte and Dr. Wolfgang Herborn, both experts on Hermann Weinsberg’s writings. Likewise, the staff at the Stadtarchiv in Nuremberg graciously assisted me in locating private writings to compare with the Gedenkbuch. Unlike the protagonist of this book, who wrote entirely in secret, I have enjoyed the support of a wide community of friends, colleagues, and family from the moment I began this project. I would like to thank Mark Noll for his many words of encouragement, including his comments on an early draft of this work. At Harvard University, I benefited not only from the riches of the Widener

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Library, but also from the careful and critical readings of participants in the Early Modern History Workshop. I owe particular thanks to Steven Ozment, James Hankins, and Ann Blair for responding to early drafts with incisive comments and suggestions for improvement. I am most grateful for the kind encouragement and astute advice Ann Blair offered at various stages of the project. I would especially like to thank Steven Ozment for alerting me to the existence of Hermann Weinsberg’s work, awakening my own fascination with sixteenthcentury burgher culture, and encouraging me to see the project through to completion. Warm thanks go to Mark Schwehn, Ron Rittgers, and members of the history department at Valparaiso University for their thoughtful readings of drafts. I would also like to thank Jared Highlen for checking many of the book’s citations. The editorial staff at Harvard University Press played an indispensable role in shepherding this task through to completion. I would like to thank Kathleen McDermott for her assistance in getting the project off the ground and Andrew Kinney for his editorial advice and expertise. I am grateful for the many helpful edits the book received. While completing this book project, I have gained a new appreciation for Hermann Weinsberg’s many apologies to future readers. Wherever Paper Memory succeeds, it owes a great deal to those who have helped me. Wherever there are errors or flaws, the fault is all mine. To my family I owe an immense debt of gratitude. My parents, Roger and Sue, offered me unflagging support and encouragement throughout as I saw this project to completion. I thank them not only for the interest they took in this particular work, but also for their untiring efforts to foster a love of learning in their children. My siblings and siblings-in-law were always quick to encourage me when I emerged, bleary-eyed, from deep immersion in Hermann Weinsberg’s manuscripts; conversations with them helped to put this work in perspective. My parents-in-law, who live in Germany, not only showed an eager interest in my research, but also provided a familiar house to retreat to after research in the archives. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Cherith, and my children, Theo and Phoebe, who were miraculously patient during the research and writing of this book and whose love is worth more than any paper memory.

Index

Abraham, 121, 128, 172 account books, 12, 30, 116, 210–211 ad fontes, 198 Adam and Eve, 108, 129, 158, 247 Aesop, 195–196 Alberti, Leon Battista: I Libri della Famiglia, 89 alienation: and urban mobility, 135, 162, 177–179, 193, 197; of family property, 15, 135, 177–178, 180, 218 All Saints’ Day, 167–168 All Souls’ Day, 167 almanacs, 235, 239; as notebooks, 211, 214 altarpieces: and threat of iconoclasm, 156; as traces of past lives, 131, 161, 173, 175; commissioned by Hermann Weinsberg, 171–172; prominence of donors in, 138 ancestry, 184–185, 193, 223; abuse of, 126; and social status, 122, 124; as “thing indifferent,” 128; common to all human beings, 110, 124; noble, 100; of Christ, 129; patrician, 99; pride in, 62 anticlericalism, 143–145; among clergymen, 130; arguments about clerical hypocrisy, 148–150; clergy as “fat swine,” 108, 153; critique of clerical power, 151–152; fear of clerical violence, 145; humanist, 109, 139; in Cologne, 44–46, 61, 132; violence against clergy, 45, 136–137, 142

antiquity: legitimizing effects of, 34, 122; “riddled with fables,” 190, 195 Apostles, 128, 245, 247; as “coarse folk and fishermen,” 114 Aramond (fictitious Weinsberg ancestor), 86–87, 183, 191, 250–251 Archbishop of Cologne, 132, 141; as former overlord of Cologne, 40; as Prince-Elector, 47; jurisdiction in city, 43–44; suppression of Protestantism, 22. See also Truchsess, Gebhard von; Wied, Hermann von Archbishop of Trier, 238 Aristotle, 24, 95; Nicomachean Ethics, 32, 107–108 art of dying (ars moriendi), 206–207, 215 asceticism, 96, 101–102, 132, 139, 146, 148, 153–154 astrology, 74, 235–236 Augustine, 181, 203, 223 autobiography: history of, 25–29, 201–203; of Maximilian I, 34; pious purposes of, 30; signs of divine blessing in, 29–30; sixteenth-century German, 29–31 bankruptcy, 21, 119, 178 Bars, Drutgin: children of, 87–88; death, 88; funeral, 168; Hermann Weinsberg’s memories of, 169; marriage to Hermann Weinsberg, 87–88, 215–216, 222; “Memory Book” of, 212; quarrels with

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Bars, Drutgin (continued) Hermann Weinsberg, 90, 216–218 Bartolus, 11, 70 begging, 119, 155; among mendicant orders, 149 beguines, 134, 168; burgher suspicion of, 44, 149; hired to pray at graves, 168 Behaim, Friedrich, 31 Behaim, Katharina, 31 Behaim, Magdalena, 31 Behaim, Michael the Elder, 31 Behaim, Paul, 31 Bensberg, 243 bias in sources, 163, 241–244 Bible, 2, 20; affi rmations of hard work, 117; criticism of, 197; domestic stories in, 226; genealogies in, 128–129; patrilineal promises in, 90; praise of the humble, 121; use in households, 57 Bietenholz, Peter, 194–195 Black Death, 180 blessings, 27, 58, 229 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 105 Böll, Heinrich, 2 bourgeois values, 103, 116–118, 127–128 Brandt, Sebastian: critique of vainglory, 227; Narrenschiff, 109, 224 Brauweiler, Arnold von, 34, 42, 114, 244 Brethren of the Common Life, 35–36, 139, 154–155; as educators, 56, 139; influence on sixteenth-century reformers, 35; practices of writing, 35 Browne, Sir Thomas, 204–205 Bruyn, Bartel, the Younger, 171 burghers: ambiguous place in social order, 5–6; and upward mobility, 42–43; as members of the “third estate,” 100–101, 124; attraction to Reformation and humanism, 101; dependence on writing, 28, 200–201, 210–212; envy of noble titles, 109; lack of ancestry, 178, 181–182; lack of corporate memory, 177–178; optimism in early sixteenthcentury, 38–39, 48, 63; piety of, 2, 137–139; relation to time, 181; rights of, 44–45; social stratification of, 42–43, 111–113, 115 calendar reform, Gregorian, 228 Calvinists, 153 Carion, Johann: Chronica, 12, 162 Carmelite monastery, 57, 83, 167

Carruthers, Mary, 198 Catholic reform: and transformation of Cologne Catholicism, 157, 234; early attempts at, 141; initial obstacles to, 132, 141; Tridentine, 142, 146, 153 Cato, 24, 208 cemeteries, 12, 170 chanceries, 245 charity, 148, 155–158 Charles of Burgundy, 44 Charles V, 34–35, 43, 47 childhood: clothing, 57; games, 59; illness, 60; mortality, 49, 57, 60 Christ, 128–129; as the “true vine,” 194 Christendom: dual-authority structure of, 131; hopes for reform of, 235; shattering of, 246, 248, 258 chronicles, 12, 161–164, 183, 191, 241 churchwardens, 71; accused of injustice, 42; administration of memorials by, 171, 176–177; responsibilities of, 12, 42, 131; tensions with clergy, 61, 144 Cicero, 11, 24, 51, 83, 95, 206; denigration of manual labor, 117; On Duties, 54; On the Orator, 49 cities, 63; appeal of humanism in, 101, 106; appeal of Protestantism in, 101–102; as centers of printing, 39; as models of good government, 107; differentiated economies of, 117–118; prosperity of, 38–39. See also Imperial Free Cities civility, 96, 105, 257 clergy, 44–47, 96, 130–131, 134, 148; as “housefathers,” 134, 147–148; as professional memorializers, 180; denigration of lay life, 101; effects of Protestant Reformation on, 23, 140; enduring institutions of, 133, 135, 147, 155; institutional power of, 140; “part spiritual and part secular,” 77, 154; privileges of, 101–102, 132, 135–137, 139, 141, 144–145, 149; wealth of, 132, 137, 149; worldliness of, 69, 138–139 clerical celibacy, 138, 141 clerical fees, 45 clerical livings, 71, 75–76, 134; and absenteeism, 138; effects on pastoral care, 143–144 clothing, 57, 110–111 college life, 68–73 collegiate churches, 76, 133–135, 143–144

Index Cologne: absence of Protestant Reformation in, 140–141; as holy city, 40, 133, 141, 145, 233, 256; as Roman city, 145, 178; burgher rights in, 41, 44; burning of Luther’s books in, 47; Cathedral chapter, 40, 78, 133–134, 140; Catholic identity of, 47, 140–141, 145; challenges facing, 43–44, 77, 141–142; citizenship, 42; civic records, 244; clergy, 44–46, 143–145; constitution (see Verbundbrief); crisis of confidence in traditional institutions, 145–146, 156–157; description of, 39–40, 233; ecclesiastical courts, 77; economic prosperity of, 42; elite families, 51–52; government, 40–42, 44–47; guild revolution (1396), 32, 40, 99; guilds, 45–46; housebooks, 31–32; lack of hereditary patriciate, 51, 92–93, 122; measures against immigrants, 143; merchants, 32; mobility in, 21, 42–43; occupations, 118; old patrician families, 31–32, 99; parishes, 40, 42–43, 157; relics, 40, 183, 214; religious conservatism, 130–131; religious culture, 93; religious infrastructure, 40, 133–134; revolts, 44–46, 101–102, 136; ruling class, 113; saints, 40, 131; sixteenthcentury changes in, 233–234; social life, 21, 42; social structure, 111, 115; threat of Protestantism in, 22, 142–143 Cologne, Historical Archive: collapse in 2009, 1–2, 259; Hermann Weinsberg’s writings in, 7, 16; holdings, 1–2 Cologne City Council, 78, 206, 242; checks on power of, 40–41; confiscates Hermann Weinsberg’s writings, 6, 254; confl icts with Archbishop, 47, 75, 141; diverse membership of, 42, 51; dominated by a few men, 41–42, 44; involvement in Weinsberg inheritance dispute, 253; measures against Protestants, 142–143; measures against the “dead hand,” 46, 136; pragmatism of, 140; responds to revolts, 44–46; sells Weinsberg estate, 15, 253 Cologne War, 144–145, 234, 236, 241 commemoration, rites of, 165–168, 171–172. See also memory common good, 225–226; as religious ideal, 93; interwoven with Catholic tradition in Cologne, 145; modeled by cities, 107; of the Haus Weinsberg, 118,

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155, 185–186, 246; perceived threats to, 44, 95; responsibility of rulers to protect, 105, 107, 126; threatened by nobility and clergy, 108; threatened by oligarchy, 113 common man. See commoners commoner history, 2, 200, 202, 223–228, 256–257 commoners: absence from historical record, 4–5; abused by powerful lords, 108, 128; anticlericalism of, 142–143; honor of, 26, 110, 124; humanity of, 124–125; neglect of ancestry, 124; obscure origins of, 124, 183; Protestant appeals to, 28; responsibility of rulers to serve, 126 confession (Sacrament of Penance), 101, 147, 240, 247 confessional coexistence, 55, 106 confessional disputes, 233–237, 240–244, 251 confraternities, 138–139, 166, 180 conjugal household, 64, 88–89, 93, 95–97 Constantinople, 237 convents, 21, 116, 131, 168, 170 corpses, 170, 180 Corpus canonicum, 11, 70 Corpus juris civilis, 11, 70 critical reason, 248–249 Cronenburse, 56, 68–73, 134 cult of the dead, 165–168, 170, 180 curses, 27, 216, 229 customs: changes in, 22–23, 232; “Christian and humane,” 165, 236; of the parish, 131, 140, 147; undermined by self-interest, 108 damnation, 152, 236 Dance of the Dead, 170 Das Buch Weinsberg (edition), 16–17, 23–24 David, 128–129 “dead hand,” 46, 135–136 death, 174–175, 180. See also art of dying (ars moriendi); cult of the dead; oblivion; vanitas Deutz, Johan van, 212 Devotio Moderna. See Brethren of the Common Life Dewald, Jonathan, 125 diet, 19, 116 Don Quixote (character), 6, 10

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Dormagen (village), 50, 74–75 drinking, 19, 21, 69, 116, 170 Duke of Jülich-Cleve, 55–56, 106, 190 Dürer, Albrecht, 34 Dwerg, Hermann, 134 early modern period: as age of uncertainty, 245–246; historiography of, 5–6; transformations during, 6, 129, 258 Easter, 21, 228 education, 207–208; and social advancement, 61–62; benefits of, 54, 58; of princes, 106; primary, 51; secularization of, 38, 75–76, 139. See also schools ego-documents, 27. See also autobiography Emmerich, 56, 60, 104, 139 Ennen, Leonard: activity as Cologne archivist, 7; discovery of Hermann Weinsberg’s writings, 7, 16 entails: reasons for, 10. See also fi deicommissum equality: before the law, 44, 102; in work, 117–118; modern ideals of, 104; of origins, 108, 124–125, 127, 129; spiritual, 129, 236 Erasmianism: anticlericalism, 146; challenges facing, 145; critique of self-interest, 244; idealism, 235–236; intellectual modesty, 109, 236; irenicism, 108–109, 237; reforms influenced by, 55–56, 106, 141 Erasmus, Desiderius, 235; anticlericalism, 108–109, 130, 139, 150; connections with Brethren of the Common life, 35, 139; critique of vainglory, 109, 227; defense of pious legends as exempla, 194–195; influence on Christian Weinsberg, 11; influence on Hermann Weinsberg, 10, 24, 56, 104, 189, 221, 227, 235–237, 239, 244; on civility, 96; on responsible governance, 105–106; on the nobility of virtue, 125; popularity in Cologne, 46–47, 52; praises cities, 107; praises Conrad Heresbach, 55 estates (traditional orders), 100–103 eternity: participation in God’s, 158–159, 223; through inheritance, 102 Eucharist, real presence of Christ in, 27, 166, 177, 198 exempla, 194–197

fabrications, 189, 191–195, 197 fame, 79, 203; and new forms of publicity, 63; and spiritual remembrance, 164; as product of Fortune, 204; limited to the few, 203 fatherland, 81, 243 Ferdinand II, 43 fi deicommissum, 13–14, 80, 92, 122; history of, 84 fighting, 68–69, 87 Fortune: as cause of fame, 204; blind workings of, 21; fickleness of, 186; goddess, 54; inconstancy of, 119; wheel of, 127–128 Frank, Sebastian: Cronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel, 12, 162 Frankfurt Messe, 11 Frederick II, in Das Boich Weinsberg, 122, 183 French Revolution, 130 friendship, 56, 71–72 frugality, 116–119, 128 funerals. See commemoration, rites of Fürer, Christoph, 30 Gaffel Schwarzenhaus, 50, 75, 143 Gaffeln, 41–46, 75, 143 gender: and conceptions of household honor, 54; and household governance, 94; and inheritance, 14, 94, 251–252; role in accusations of witchcraft, 238; stereotypes, 70, 77, 218. See also masculinity; patriarchy genealogy: as expression of fi lial piety, 184–185; as goad to virtue, 185–186, 211; as pastime, 184, 188; benefits of, 184–186, 195–196, 213; biblical, 129; idealized nature of, 200; ideological functions of, 124; Imperial, 34, 64, 189; in family bible, 210; neglect of, 181–182; proper use of, 186; role in legitimizing status, 122, 192–193. See also ancestry; fabrications; lineage Gennep, Jaspar: Epitome, 12, 162 God: as “eternal architect,” 10, 90; as the “highest good,” 158; as the “richest housefather,” 147, 247; gives the gift of writing, 163; infl icts suffering as punishment, 60; mercy of, 236–237; power to elevate and humble, 124, 186; power to unseat bad rulers, 126; promises to

Index bless the humble, 121, 159; remembers the blessed, 79 Goethe, 27 graves, 167, 170–171, 176–177; as houses of the dead, 171 gravestones, 172–174 Gropper, Johannes, 141 Hamlet (character), 6, 170 Haus Weinsberg, 74–75, 167; as “bourgeois” house, 114; as “eternal gathering,” 9, 177; as “everlasting” refuge for kin, 89; as “immortal bride” of the housefather, 90; as patrimonial inheritance, 62, 85; as spiritual institution, 155, 157–158, 246–247, 256; description of, 49–50; domestic life in, 50, 59; during Hermann Weinsberg’s childhood, 49; fraternal household in, 250–251; God as “eternal architect” of, 90; Hermann Weinsberg’s plan to entail, 33, 80; ivy on, 169; murals in, 54; renovation of, 54–55; sale of (1608), 15 Hausvaterliteratur, 65, 89 heaven, 174, 236, 258 hell, 150, 152 Herborn, Wolfgang, 24 Heresbach, Christian, 56, 62, 69, 71, 190–191 Heresbach, Conrad, 55–56, 65, 106 Heresbach, Peter, 55 Herodotus, 11, 51, 206 historical awareness, 234; and burgher pride, 65; and fear of oblivion, 175; and longing for historical naïveté, 193–194; as impetus to fabrication, 189–190; stimulated by histories and chronicles, 61, 162–164; stimulated by religious uncertainty, 36, 256, 258 Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln. See Cologne, Historical Archive history writing: early modern, 241–242; late medieval, 164. See also chronicles; historical awareness Höhlbaum, Konstantin, 23–24 holy household, 132–133, 154–155, 157– 159; Protestant vision of, 95, 140, 157 Holy Roman Empire: fragmentation of, 38; late medieval unrest, 38; religious divisions in, 235 Holy Spirit, 247

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honor, 67, 104, 147, 181–182; ability of house to adorn, 54; among students, 69; degrees of, 111; embodied in family, 201; eroded by money and power, 108; from lineage, 122–123, 184, 196; from virtue, 186; less important than sustenance, 81; of both clerical and lay estates, 147–148; of humble ancestries, 124–125; of middling folk, 116–118; patriarchal, 54, 83; preoccupation with deemed sinful, 149, 166 Horn, Elizabeth, 12, 250; as a “good Jesuit,” 153, 251; quarrels with Sibilla Weinsberg, 251 house: as foundational social institution, 89–90; as symbol of order, 247–248. See also Haus Weinsberg; lineage housebooks and family chronicles, 25–26, 31–32, 122, 200–201, 208 “housefather”: as “immortal office,” 85; as audience for Hermann Weinsberg’s writings, 219; as surrogate son, 9, 65, 84, 86, 226–227; clergyman as, 154; letters to, 86, 187; marriage to Haus Weinsberg, 90; “one person” with Hermann Weinsberg, 211, 213; represents all Weinsbergs, 246; responsibile for family records, 187, 223; responsible for family identity, 92; rules for succession, 85–86. See also patriarch; patriarchy household: fragility of, 97; separation of work and living space, 21, 81. See also conjugal household; household workshop household governance: and full adulthood, 72, 75; and public reputation, 73; and social order, 94–97; as prerequisite for civic governance, 75. See also patriarch; patriarchy household workshop, 21, 49–50, 53, 81, 89. See also conjugal household Howell, Martha, 93 humanism, 105; and genealogical “research,” 33–34; and the common good, 105–107; civic, 52, 64, 101; critique of superstition, 194–196; critique of vanity, 227; critique of warrior nobility, 105, 110, 125; in Cologne, 51–52; praise of moderation, 105–108; understanding of pious exempla, 196–198.

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humanism (continued) See also Erasmianism; northern humanism humility, 121, 222, 227 iconoclasm, in the Netherlands, 142, 156, 176, 233, 237 Ignatius of Loyola, 6, 35, 163 illegitimacy, 77, 214–215 illness, 49, 57, 60 immortality: of office, 89; through succession, 102; through writing, 163, 219; true vs. false, 205 Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht), 253 Imperial Free Cities, 38, 234 inequality, functional understanding of, 127. See also equality information overload, 255–256 inheritance, as a means of immortality, 102; folly of relying on, 119–120; partible, 34, 84, 93, 253. See also alienation; fi deicommissum inheritance disputes, 88, 212–213; after Hermann Weinsberg’s death, 14–15, 252–254; between Hermann Weinsberg and his stepchildren, 88 Internet, 7, 255 Jesuits, 142, 153–154, 157, 234 jokes, 45, 59, 67 Justin, 11, 51 Keppel, Maria, 50, 190–191; ambitions, 191; as single mother, 53; death, 168 Koeler, Hieronymous, 30–31 Koelhoff, Johann (publisher): Die cronica van der hilliger stat van Coellen, 12, 164 Korth, Hermann, 50 Korth, Sophia, 18, 207, 249–250; death, 249; family background, 50; fear of bewitchment, 61; work, 49 laity, 96, 130; dependence on clerical intercession, 137; gifts to the Church, 137–138, 149; lack of foresight, 135; neglect of kin, 149–150; not fundamentally different than clergy, 139, 148; outwitted by clergy, 149–151; “part spiritual and part secular,” 77, 154; piety of, 138; unjustly accused of worldliness, 132, 148

lawsuits, 71, 73–75 lawyers, 70–71, 74, 105, 240 legends, utility of, 195–196. See also exempla Lenten fast, 153 liberal arts, 68, 70, 207–208 lineage, 65, 252; advice for survival of, 127–128; agnatic vs. cognatic, 97, 185; and social status, 122–123; as antidote to alienation and oblivion, 82, 97, 115, 178, 183, 194; as refuge in an uncertain world, 248; as source of identity, 62, 85, 123–125, 185; in Roman law, 64, 93; providential nature of, 26, 158–159, 186, 200; reasons for extinction of, 120–121, 133; relation to individual memory, 223–224; transhistorical unity of, 177, 219. See also ancestry; patrlineage literacy, 28–29, 33, 51–53, 76, 139, 202, 210, 256 Livy, 11, 51, 196 Lucretia, 54, 84 Luther, Martin, 6, 35, 130, 194; books burned in Cologne, 47; conservatism of, 5; responsible for “great fi re” in Christendom, 246 Lyth, Gerhard, 153 maids, 20, 226, 253; affairs with, 77; in Cronenburse, 70, 73; influence of Jesuits on, 153; sexual advances toward, 217–218; spinning, 49; washing, 49 Mallarmé, Stephan, 259 manual labor, denigration of, 101, 117 Maria Bethlehem convent, 170, 210 marriage: and family strategies, 128; as economic partnership, 49, 97, 120; community of goods in, 88; economic rights of women in, 93–94; idealized vision of, 90; property rights in, 93; quarrels within, 216–218. See also conjugal household; household workshop Marx, Karl, 258 Mary, 128; apparition of, 83; in Weinsberg altarpiece, 172; invoked in wills, 171; Magnifi cat, 121 masculinity, 57, 218, 222; student bravado, 68–69 Maximilian I, 34, 108, 164, 189; autobiography, 34 memoria. See memory

Index memorial masses, 138, 166, 168, 172, 176, 180 memory: as bare recollection, 195, 199; bourgeois, 225; corporate, 100, 133, 160, 168, 176–177, 181–182; ecclesiastical, 175–177, 180; familial, 167, 169, 210–211; fundamental to human identity, 181–182; importance to lawyers, 67–68; medieval, 197–198; medieval vs. modern, 198–199, 228–229; modern, 209, 229–230, 255, 259; of commoners, 26, 209, 226–227; of the ancestors, 184–185; preserved through writing, 163–164, 226–228; problematization of, 198; real presence in, 166, 177, 198– 199; salvific effects of, 165–166; stored in civic records, 179, 223; undermined by urban mobility, 177–178; weakness of, 163. See also oblivion “memory books,” 31, 212 mendicant orders, 157; begging, 149; preaching of, 46, 150; wealth of, 45, 136–137 microhistory, 4 middling: as honorable status, 113, 117; as moderation, 107–108, 116; as modesty, 110; Hermann Weinsberg’s selfdescription as, 6, 8, 24; independent householders, 41, 114; place within social hierarchies, 111–112, 115; talent, 112–113; virtues, 127 miscarriage, 216–217 monasteries. See religious houses Montaigne, Michel de, 6, 230; Essays, 29; “On Experience,” 227; “On Glory,” 204; skepticism, 245 Moses, 172 Münster, Sebastian: Cosmographia, 12, 162 Murmellius, Johannes, 104 music, 22, 59, 214 neighbors, 179 Neuenhausen, Johann, 153 Neuss, 242–243 news, 22, 220, 231, 239, 241–243, 257 news sheets, 231 nobility: changing conceptions of, 105–106, 125; entails among, 84, 88; ranks of, 125 nobility of virtue, 105, 110, 125–126, 128

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northern humanism, 104, 164; compared with civic humanism, 52; critique of vainglory, 222. See also Erasmianism nuns, 170, 233; as “brides of Christ,” 131; economic activity of, 136 Nuremberg, patrician family books, 31, 34, 122 oblivion, 79, 174–178, 204–205; thoughts of, prompted by religious uncertainy, 36. See also alienation; vanitas officers of the peace (Gewaltrichter), 18, 142, 253 oligarchy, 76, 113, 244 oral culture, 28; effects of printing on, 239 oral transmission: and oblivion, 163–165, 190; unreliability of, 241 Ordenbach, Gottschalk, 253–254; criticizes Hermann Weinsberg’s plan, 15; writes supplication to Cologne City Council, 15 origin myths, 183, 250 origins, 123 Overstolz, Werner, 31–32 Ovid, 11, 104 pamphlets: as source of news, 231, 242; in praise of the independent householder, 64; Protestant, 28, 148 papacy, humble origins of, 114, 128 paper, 89; and opportunities for self-representation, 202; as extension of one’s person, 27, 211, 213; as foundation of bourgeois identity, 28, 210; as information technology, 228–229; as means of rationalizing household governance, 89; compared with parchment, 224; diverse uses of, 27; durability of, 3, 224; experiments with, 27, 209; fi nancial uses of, 210, 212; in inheritance disputes, 212; means of preserving, 187; power to preserve the past, 26, 224; use among lawyers, 12; use in chamber pots, 217 pastoral care, 141, 143–145, 153 pastors: as citizens in Protestant towns, 140, 154; praise of, 153; right of parishes to elect, 42, 138, 147; salaries of, 45, 143–144 patriarch: as “prince” within household, 92; God as, 247–248; responsible for family honor, 54, 83–84; responsible

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patriarch (continued) for keeping family papers, 26, 211–212; self-image of, 53–54 patriarchs (biblical), 58, 83, 90, 132, 247 patriarchy: and civic order, 94–95; history of, 95–96; ideal vs. reality of, 92–93, 97; influence of Roman law on, 92–93; revival of classical forms of, 64 patricians: Cologne, 31–32, 92–93, 99, 122; entails among, 84; family books of, 182, 201, 208; family legends of, 99; Nuremberg, 31–32, 34, 122; traditional privileges of, 63 patrilineage: arbitrariness of, 185; vs. Cologne traditions of partible inheritance, 93, 250; vs. conjugal household, 218. See also lineage Patroclus, 190–192 Peasants’ War, 127, 129 Peter, 114, 121 Petrarch, Francis, 105 piety: late medieval, 137–139, 180; penitential, 147 pilgrimage, 40, 61 pious bequests, 134–135; and penitential piety, 137–138, 146; as means of remembrance, 165–166, 168–169; clergy as beneficiaries of, 149–151; compared with leaving money to Haus Weinsberg, 155–156; popularity of, 136; problems with, 175–176. See also “dead hand” Pirckheimer, Willibald, 34 Platter, Felix, 29–30 Platter, Thomas, 29 Plutarch, 51, 206, 208 poverty, 21, 116, 155, 205–206; as a result of pious bequests, 151; as spur to industry, 109, 121; feigned by mendicants, 149 power, abuse of, 108–109, 113, 126, 150–151, 244 prayers for the dead, 152, 167, 180; efficacy of, 165; Hermann Weinsberg’s requests for, 169, 171–172; in confraternities, 138–139 preaching, 142; and power of the clergy, 150–151; calls for reform of, 46; Protestant, 142–143 printing: and information explosion, 231, 239; and publicity, 225; as technology of preservation, 259; disorienting effects of, 65; effects on oral culture, 239; effects on private writing, 28–29;

Johannes Trithemius’ criticisms of, 224; parallels with digital revolution, 33; stimulation of historical awareness, 256; stimulation of lay literacy, 28–29, 32, 52, 63, 139, 202 privacy, 219, 225, 240 pronunciation, changes in, 22 prostitutes, 44, 69–70 Protestant Reformation, 30, 128, 139–140, 143, 151; appeal to “common man,” 28; as failure, 5; consequences of in Cologne, 78; critique of Church tradition, 194, 198; critique of clerical prerogatives, 132; dismantling of clerical estate, 140; effects of, 22–23, 28–29, 233–234, 236, 246; in the cities, 101; theology of vocation, 117, 157 Protestants, 243; in Cologne, 12, 22, 143 providential orders, 247–248; collapse of, 249 Psalms, 117 public sphere, 219, 248–249 publicity, 203, 209, 225 purgatory, 137, 166–167, 236; as humane doctrine, 152; made terrifying by preachers, 150; suffering as, 67, 147; uncertainty about time spent in, 180, 258 recipes, 214 relics, 40, 166, 177, 214 religious habits, 23, 207; burial in, 138; danger of wearing in Protestant territories, 23 religious houses, 40, 134, 244; economic activities of, 136; family members in, 120, 131; graves in, 147, 167; paintings in, 57; permanence of, 102–103, 133; plundered, 45; robust institutional memories of, 35; wealth of, 149 religious refugees, from the Netherlands, 142–143 religious vows, as alternative to marriage, 131 Renaissance individualism, 24, 221–222 Rheanus, Beatus, 107 rhetoric, 52–53, 67–68 “right to be forgotten,” 255 Ripgin, Weisgin, 214; as successful businesswoman, 80, 112; death, 84, 215; funeral, 167; property, 81 Rittmeister, 76–77

Index Rohmann, Gregor, 192–193 Roman law, 39, 65–66, 92–93 Ross, Ailetgin: poverty, 21 Ross, Heinrich: poverty, 21; quarrels with Hermann Weinsberg, 87 Ross, Wilhelm, 21 Rousseau, 27, 227 rumors: confusion generated by, 242–243; effects of printing on, 239; make the world “full of errors,” 232; of Protestantism in Cologne, 22; of violence against clergy, 45, 145; of witchcraft, 238; partiality of, 241 saints: communion of, 141, 166; criticism of, 68, 194–196; lives of, 244; power of, 177, 198, 237; questions about, 236 Sastrow, Bartholomew: autobiography, 30 sayings, 8, 24, 79, 95, 116–118, 126–127, 149, 191 schools, 51–52, 55–56, 59 Schrein (civic property records), 88, 179, 192, 215, 223, 244 Schwarz, Matthäus, 30 Schwelm, Gottschalk van, 191; bones transferred to chest, 170; grave of, 49; origin of surname, 62; social ascent of, 42, 205–206 secularization of church property, 151–152 self-representation, prejudices against, 203–205, 226 servants, 19–20, 59, 72, 212, 250; memory of, 226; place in Cologne social hierarchies, 115; unrest during Peasants’ War, 127 Seutonius, 208 sex, 69–70, 77, 169, 216, 221 Sichen, Paul von, 168 Siegen, Arnold von, 34, 43, 76, 114 skepticism, 195–197 skulls, 170, 214, 227 Sleidan, Johannes, 12, 162; “as it truly was,” 25 Sloesgin, Johann, 32 social discipline, 96 social mobility, 21, 43, 111–112, 119, 125, 127, 180, 205–206 source criticism, 241–244 Spanish troops, 237, 243 spiritual economy, 137–138, 146, 166 St. George (collegiate church), 50

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St. Jacob (church): “belongs to the people,” 61; destruction of in nineteenth century, 173; graves in, 49, 168, 170–171; memorials, 134, 176 St. Jacob (parish): as “middling” neighborhood, 49, 179; churchwardens of, 53 (see also churchwardens); inequality in, 42; records of, 12, 176 St. Laurence (church), 142, 168, 217 St. Peter in Chains, 22–23 Stein, Josef, 24 Stoics, 248 Strabo: Geographia, 12 streets: activities in, 49; anonymity of, 179; noise in, 19 study, 55, 252 sumptuary laws, 15 Surius, Laurentius, 11, 162–163, 244 surnames, 62, 185, 192, 194 swearing, 19, 72, 208, 216–217 Taylor, Charles, 104 Teresa of Avila, 6 testaments: drawn up on deathbed, 206; inviolability of, 88; pious bequests in, 137, 157, 166; pious language in, 171, 174–175 three esates, the. See estates (traditional orders) time, 199; alienating effects of, 222–223; in purgatory, 180, 258; nonexistence of the present moment, 181, 223; towndweller’s relationship to, 181 tonsure, 71 Trithemius, Johannes: fabrications, 191– 192; Frankish chronicle, 12, 164, 183, 191–192; In Praise of Scribes, 163–164, 224; on the longevity of paper, 224 Truchsess, Gebhard von, 145, 234, 242–243 Turks, 144, 237 Ulenberg, Kaspar, 11 University of Cologne, 55–56, 59–60, 68, 85. See also Cronenburse vainglory, 94, 109, 146, 166, 172–173, 203–205, 226–227 Vaitzbel, Hermann, 119 vanitas, 174–175, 205, 227 Verbundbrief, 40–41, 113 vernacular, 104–105

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Index

Virgil, 11 vocation, 117–118, 132; Protestant theology of, 117, 157; religious, 139, 141; secular, 101; traditional understanding of, 117 Warden of the Town Hall (Cologne), 74, 81, 112 Weinsberg, Agnes, 170 Weinsberg, Anna, 214–215; birth, 77; fi rst seen by father, 215; mother of Maria Bethlehem convent, 116, 210 Weinsberg, Catherine, 115, 167; suspects brother’s plan, 251–252 Weinsberg, Christian, 64, 104, 205, 210; ambitions, 53–54, 57–58, 61–62; anticlericalism, 61; approval of son’s plans, 80; as autodidact, 51–52; as churchwarden, 53, 71; children’s memory of, 169; civic activities, 43, 50, 52–53; clothing, 53; death, 206–207; discovery of classical literature, 49, 51, 63; early career, 50; early education, 51; fatalism, 74; historical awareness, 61; interest in genealogy, 57, 62; lawsuits, 73–74; letter to Hermann, 57–58; linen-dyeing, 49; on redirecting the Rhine, 52, 88–89; passion for architecture, 52–54; promotion of family legends, 62; rhetorical skills, 52–53, 67–68; self-image as patriarch, 54; skepticism, 61; support of son’s education, 11, 54–56, 58 Weinsberg, Christian, the Younger, 17–18, 172, 250 Weinsberg, Drutgin, 55 Weinsberg, Feigin, 170 Weinsberg, Gottschalk, 21, 90, 167, 172, 212; bad manners of, 96; Hermann Weinsberg’s fi rst successor, 14; joint household with brother, 115, 153, 250–251; knowledge of brother’s plans, 13; suicide, 6, 253 Weinsberg, Gottschalk, the Younger, 119, 250 Weinsberg, Hermann, 215–216; affairs (extramarital), 77, 216–218; ambitions, 8–10, 81; as churchwarden, 12, 81, 134, 176–177; as cleric, 71, 75–77; as eldest son, 57; as landowner, 81; as lawyer, 71, 74–75, 77; as patriarch, 18, 87–88, 96–97; as rector of the Cronenburse, 71–73; becomes interested in genealogy,

57, 71; challenges to his authority, 73, 87–88; clothing, 8, 57, 110–111, 116; daily activities, 90–91; death, 252; decision not to become a doctor of law, 74; desire for peace, 154; diet, 116; early interest in family legends, 62; education, 55–58, 104, 112; excuses for lackluster career, 66–68, 74, 112, 208; frugality, 119; hernia, 20, 67, 147; illegitimate daughter, 8, 77, 214–215; illness, 57, 60; introduced to works of Erasmus, 56, 104; joint household with brother, 250–251; library of, 11–13; marriage to Drutgin Bars, 87; marriage to Weisgin Ripgin, 80–81; mercantile activities, 80–81, 112; old age, 221; patronage, 156, 173, 196; personality traits, 81; quarrels with Drutgin Bars, 90, 216–218; reading, 11–12, 36, 61, 91; recollections of youth, 66–67, 220; record keeping, 12, 80, 220; regrets about career, 60–61, 74, 220; request to play instrument, 59; response to paternal pressure, 58–63, 65–66; secretiveness, 70; sexual experiences, 69–70, 208; siblings, 17–18, 21, 59, 94, 250–252; sleeping habits, 19; stepchildren, 87–88; straddling of sacredsecular divide, 75–77, 79; student life, 68–71; timidity, 58, 66–67; vision of the Virgin Mary, 83 Weinsberg, Hermann, ideas and attitudes: anticlericalism, 103–104, 108, 143–145, 148–151, 159–160; attitudes towards Protestants, 151–152; attitudes towards witchcraft, 237–239; “both spiritual and worldly,” 148, 154, 157; civility, 96–97; concerns about alienation, 193, 246 (see also alienation); critique of nobility, 103–104, 108, 159–160; critique of religious violence, 235, 237; defense of commoner history, 2, 226–228 (see also commoner history); defense of middling status, 100, 103, 112–114, 124, 257; fear of oblivion, 14, 79, 91, 99–100, 102, 161, 165, 173–176, 178, 190, 194, 199, 219, 222, 256 (see also oblivion); fears that the Church might prove transient, 36, 143, 156; influenced by northern humanism, 104–105, 107, 222, 227 (see also Erasmus, Desiderius); irenicism, 154,

Index 235–237; lack of spiritual anxiety, 35–36, 146–147; love of histories and chronicles, 61, 162–163, 240; middling values, 8, 24, 107–108, 110–113, 116, 118, 121, 127; on his “house-heart,” 82; on the “great schism” in religion, 36, 235–236; on the vanity of confessional polemics, 240; patriarchal fantasies, 65–66, 87, 97 (see also “housefather”; patriarchy); perceptions of change, 5, 10, 36–37, 227–228, 231–233, 235, 246, 248, 257 (see also historical awareness); preoccupation with lineage, 5, 65, 79–80, 82, 102, 123–124, 177–178, 186, 194 (see also lineage); preoccupation with posterity, 2–3, 9–10, 25–26, 162, 223, 226; religious beliefs, 152, 236–237; religious conservatism, 131, 236; skepticism, 61, 238–239, 243, 245; social ambition, 123, 186–187; theological arguments, 158–159; views of human nature, 237–238; views of the afterlife, 174; work ethic, 116–119, 127–128 Weinsberg, Hermann, secret plan, 8–9, 13, 121, 171; attempt to implement, 250; common good of the house, 115; disinheritance of sisters, 94, 251–252; “immortal son,” 9, 84, 86; inheritance dispute, 6, 14–16, 252–253; instructions for memorial, 171; last will and testament, 84–85, 88; origins of, 80, 82–85; plan to establish a scriveners’ office, 89; plans for memorial service, 172–173 Weinsberg, Hermann, writings, 2, 9, 12–14, 26, 83–86; apologies to readers, 91–92, 97–98, 188, 226–227; as “housebook,” 25–26; as act of cultural salvage, 245–246, 248–249, 256; as historical source, 3; as solution to contemporary problems, 4, 36; autobiographical nature of, 39, 48–49; biographies of grandfather and father, 205–207; Boich Weinsberg, 86, 121, 182–187, 190–191, 193–194, 200, 205, 207, 213; chest, 252; composed in vernacular, 104–105; concern for accuracy, 24–25, 188–189, 201–202, 209,

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329

213–214, 220–221, 240–245, 257; Declarationboich, 13, 88–90, 94; defense of, 195–196; descriptions of body, 20; desire for index, 228; development of, 33–37; digital edition, 7; discovery of, 7, 16; documentation of the everyday, 2, 202; fabrication of genealogy, 189–193, 195, 197; Gedenkbuch, 2, 13–14, 17–23, 86, 211–215, 217–220, 223–225, 227, 240; genealogy, 122–123, 182–183; instructions regarding, 3, 187–188, 224–225; Memorialbuch, 12; modern reception of, 3, 16–17, 23–26; news gathering, 220, 241–243; preservation of the everyday, 218–219, 223–228; religious symbolism in, 245– 247; rhymes in, 10, 108, 118, 126–127; self-portraits, 18–20, 207–209, 219, 221–222; source criticism, 25 (see also source criticism) Weinsberg, Hermann, the Younger, 12, 14–15, 19, 250–252; antisocial behavior, 20; as “housefather,” 253; suspected of murder, 6, 253 Weinsberg, Maria, 59, 115 Weinsberg, Sibilla, 115, 250–251; body discovered in well, 253; death, 14; quarrels with Elizabeth Horn, 251 Wied, Hermann von, 47, 141; attempt at Protestant reform, 78 witchcraft, 238–239; suspicion of, 61 Witzel, George, 11 women, 69–70, 115, 214–217, 221, 238; and “alienation” of patrilineal property, 218; in Cologne economy, 42, 93; in religious houses, 155; status in Cologne, 93–94 Word of God, 46; Lutheran doctrine of, 27 word, spoken: fleeting nature of, 163, 222; power of, 27–28, 229 work, 116–120 work ethic, 117 writing, 122; bourgeois, 28–29, 210–212; in religious orders, 35; limitations of, 228–229, 241, 244; partiality of, 241, 244; power of, 27–28, 161, 163, 190 Xenophon, 95