Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives (Studies in Central European Histories)

Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany

Studies in Central European Histories Edited by

Thomas A. Brady, Jr., University of California, Berkeley Roger Chickering, Georgetown University Editorial Board

Steven Beller, Washington, D.C. Atina Grossmann, Columbia University Peter Hayes, Northwestern University Susan Karant-Nunn, University of Arizona Mary Lindemann, University of Miami David M. Luebke, University of Oregon H. C. Erik Midelfort, University of Virginia David Sabean, University of California, Los Angeles Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri Jan de Vries, University of California, Berkeley

VOLUME L

Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany Cross Disciplinary Perspectives

Edited by

Lynne Tatlock

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: Sophia Eleonora von Hesse-Darmstadt, an allegory of history and mourning, from Unverweslicher Ceder-Baum . . . , [n.p.] 1661–1666, Herzog August Bibliothek (Gm gr. 2o7) This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enduring loss in early modern Germany : cross disciplinary perspectives / edited by Lynne Tatlock. p. cm. — (Studies in Central European histories, ISSN 1547–1217 ; v. 50) Essays from papers presented at fifth triennial conference of Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar (FNI), held at Duke University, March 27–29, 2008. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18454-1 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Germany—History—1517–1648— Congresses. 2. Germany—History—1648–1740—Congresses. 3. Germany—Social life and customs—Congresses. 4. Germany—Religious life and customs—Congresses. 5. Loss (Psychology)—Social aspects—Germany—History—Congresses. 6. Loss (Psychology)—Religious aspects—Christianity—Congresses. 7. Death—Social aspects—Germany—History—Congresses. 8. Identity (Psychology)—Germany— History—Congresses. 9. Creative ability—Germany—History—Congresses. 10. Community life—Germany—History—Congresses. I. Tatlock, Lynne, 1950– II. Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar (Group) III. Title. IV. Series. DD176.8.E54 2010 943’.04—dc22 2010010985

ISSN 1547-1217 ISBN 978 90 04 18454 1 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

In memory of Hugh Powell (4 September 1912–31 December 2009)

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................... xi List of Illustrations ............................................................................. xv List of Tables ....................................................................................... xxi List of Musical Examples ................................................................... xxiii Contributors ........................................................................................ xxv Introduction ......................................................................................... Lynne Tatlock Chapter One The Thirty Years’ War as Experience and Memory: Contemporary Perceptions of a Macro-Historical Event ................................................................. Hans Medick Chapter Two Vanitas, vanitatum, et omnia vanitas: The Baroque Transience Topos and its Structural Relation to Trauma ........................................................................................ Claudia Benthien Chapter Three Dürer’s Losses and the Dilemmas of Being ..... Jeffrey Chipps Smith

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Chapter Four Memento Mori, Memento Mei: Albrecht Dürer and the Art of Dying ..................................................................... 103 Helmut Puff Chapter Five Enduring Loss and Memorializing Women: The Cultural Role of Dynastic Widows in Early Modern Germany .......................................................................................... 133 Jill Bepler Chapter Six Paper Monuments and the Creation of Memory: The Personal and Dynastic Mourning of Princess Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony ............................................................................. 161 Mara R. Wade

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Chapter Seven Loss and Emotion in Funeral Works on Children in Seventeenth-Century Germany .............................. 187 Claudia Jarzebowski Chapter Eight Enduring Death in Pietism: Regulating Mourning and the New Intimacy ................................................ 215 Ulrike Gleixner Chapter Nine Between the Old Faith and the New: Spiritual Loss in Reformation Germany ..................................................... 231 Christopher Ocker Chapter Ten Loss and Gain in a Salzburg Convent: Tridentine Reform, Princely Absolutism, and the Nuns of Nonnberg (1620 to 1696) ......................................................... 259 Barbara Lawatsch Melton Chapter Eleven Themes of Exile and (Re-)Enclosure in Music for the Franciscan Convents of Counter-Reformation Munich During the Thirty Years’ War ....................................... 281 Alexander J. Fisher Chapter Twelve Locating the Sacred in Biconfessional Augsburg .......................................................................................... 307 Lee Palmer Wandel Chapter Thirteen Losing One’s Place: Memory, History, and Space in Post-Reformation Germany ......................................... 327 Duane J. Corpis Chapter Fourteen Migration and the Loss of Spiritual Community: The Case of Daniel Falckner and Anna Maria Schuchart ......................................................................................... 369 Rosalind J. Beiler Chapter Fifteen Forecasting Loss: Christoph Saur’s Pennsylvania German Calender (1751 to 1757) ....................... 397 Bethany Wiggin

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Chapter Sixteen After the Fall: The Dynamics of Social Death and Rebirth in the Wake of the Höchstetter Bankruptcy, 1529 to 1586 .................................................................................... 415 Thomas Max Safley Bibliography of Secondary Sources ................................................. 435 Index ..................................................................................................... 463

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The sixteen essays included in this volume grew out of papers presented at the fifth triennial conference of Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär (FNI) held at Duke University, March 27–29, 2008. As the president of FNI (2006–2008), I was charged with the task of conceiving and organizing an international, interdisciplinary conference on early modern Germany. I sought the advice of many colleagues; in particular, I would like to thank Thomas Robisheaux, Erik C. Midelfort, Thomas Max Safley, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Jill Bepler, and the founder of FNI, Max Reinhardt, who worked with me early in the process to expand and shape the germ of an idea that I had for a conference on loss. I am especially indebted to Thomas Max Safley and Gerhild Scholz Williams who recruited participants to the conference, some of whose work appears in this volume. FNI-Treasurer Thomas Robisheaux, assisted by James Stutler and Angelique Droessaert, secured local support and tended to on-site arrangements for the conference and therefore deserves special thanks. Former FNI-president Randolph C. Head likewise proved a reliable and responsive source of wisdom, and Hans Medick as well responded generously to my request for advice. The limitations of print and paper dictated that I make a selection for the present volume. I am grateful, however, to all of the conference participants who assembled in Durham for two days and generously presented their work. Their willingness to reframe their research in a consideration of the ways in which it is illuminating to recast the early modern period in terms of loss and gain made this collection of essays possible. I extend my warmest thanks to the sixteen contributors to the volume for their work and their responsiveness during the editorial process. The conference and this volume of essays were generously supported by the Max Kade Foundation, the Josiah Trent Foundation, Duke University, Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and the American Friends of the Herzog August Bibliothek. The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, has long supported the endeavors of FNI and its members and, moreover, supplied a number of the images included in this anthology. I especially

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thank Provost Edward S. Macias at Washington University for early and generous support of the project. I received editorial assistance from Emma Cohen and Shelby Carpenter, two students earning B.A. degrees in the International Disciplinary Project in the Humanities (IPH) at Washington University. I thank IPH for funding their work. Emma Cohen, in particular, stepped in at a frantic moment in the preparation and proofreading of the manuscript. Likewise Shane Peterson, PhD candidate in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University, proved infinitely helpful and patient in creating, assembling, and proofreading the bibliography of secondary literature. Randy Petilos especially deserves thank for his advice and discerning eye during the proofreading stage of this project prior to typesetting. I am grateful to series editors Thomas A. Brady Jr. and Roger Chickering for including this volume in Studies in Central European History. I thank as well the editors at Brill who shepherded this pro-ject, especially Hylke Faber, acquisitions editor; Boris van Gool, assistant editor for history; and Birgitta Poelmans, desk editor. I am grateful to the anonymous reader at Brill for a generous review of the manuscript and for useful suggestions for shaping it into its final form. I thank Jill Bepler for assistance with the identification and procurement of the engraving of Sophia Eleonora of Hesse-Darmstadt as mourning widow that appears on the cover of this volume. I first became aware of Sophia Eleonora’s funeral book in1996 when I heard an interdisciplinary presentation on it by Jill Bepler, Birgit Kümmel, and Helga Meise at Geschlechterperspektiven in der Frühen Neuzeit/ Gender in Perspective, a conference on gender held in Frankfurt am Main. I am beholden to Michael Sherberg for reading and responding to two drafts of the introduction, and I thank Joseph F. Loewenstein for, as always, encouraging and supporting my scholarly endeavors. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the following institutions, organizations, and persons for permission to reproduce images in this volume: for the cover illustration and figures 19–21, the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; for figure 1, Sigrid Kohlmann and the Graphische Sammlung der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; for figure 2, Ingrid Kastel and the Albertina, Vienna; for figures 3 and 4, Jörg P. Anders and the Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin / Art Resource, New York; for figure 5, Olga Kotková and Jana Řepová and the Národní galerie v Praze; for figure 8, Anne Röver-Kann and the

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Kunsthalle, Bremen; for figure 9, Karl Schütz and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; for figures 10 and 23, Gabriele Prager and the direction of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; for figures 17 and 18, Jörg P. Anders and the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; for figure 16, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Austin, Texas; for figures 23–26, the Forschungsbibliothek, Gotha; for figure 27, the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv, Altenburg; for figure 28, the Salzburger Barockmuseum; for figure 30, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; for figures 31–33, the Stadtarchiv, Augsburg; for figure 34, Angelika Prem; for figures 35, 38, 42, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York; for figures 36 and 40, the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna; for figures 37 and 41, the Staatsund Stadtbibliothek, Augsburg; for figures 39 and 43, the Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley; and for figures 44 and 45, The Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv is also gratefully acknowledged for providing access to the song texts that are extensively quoted and translated by Alexander J. Fisher in chapter 11.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1491–92, pen and ink drawing, Erlangen, Graphische Sammlung der Universität (Photo: museum) ............................................................................ Figure 2. Albrecht Dürer the Elder (attributed), Self-Portrait, 1486, silverpoint drawing, Vienna, Albertina Museum. (Photo: museum) ............................................................................ Figure 3. Albrecht Dürer, Barbara Holper (Dürer’s Mother), 1514, charcoal drawing, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY) ................................................ Figure 4. Albrecht Dürer (copy after), Death of Crescentia Pirckheimer, original dated 1504, pen and ink drawing, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY) ..... Figure 5. Albrecht Dürer, The Feast of the Rose Garlands, 1506, oil on panel, Prague, Národní galerie. (Photo: National Gallery in Prague 2008) ................................................................. Figure 6. Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1503, woodcut from the Life of the Virgin series ................................ Figure 7. Marcantonio Raimondi, Adoration of the Magi (after Dürer), c. 1506, engraving ................................................. Figure 8. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows, 1522, metalpoint drawing, Bremen, Kunsthalle (Photo: museum) ............................................................................ Figure 9. Albrecht Dürer, The Dream, 1525, watercolor, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Photo: museum) ........... Figure 10. Albrecht Dürer, Four Apostles, 1526, oil on panel, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek (Photo: museum) ...................................................... Figure 11. Albrecht Dürer, Back View of a Man Eight-Head Lengths Tall, woodcut illustration in Albrecht Dürer, Four Books on Human Proportions (Nuremberg, 1528), folio C2 recto .................................................................................. Figure 12. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500, oil on panel, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek (Photo: museum) ......................................................

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Figure 13. Albrecht Dürer, Christ Expelling the Money Changers, c. 1508–09, woodcut from the Small Passion ............................ Figure 14. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, 1526, engraving ............................................................................... Figure 15. Erhard Schön, Portrait of Albrecht Dürer at Age 56, c. 1528, woodcut ............................................................................. Figure 16. Christian Daniel Rauch, Albrecht Dürer Monument, 1828–40, bronze statue cast by Jacob Daniel Burgschmiet, Nuremberg, Albrecht-Dürer-Platz (Photo: Jeffrey Chipps Smith) ...................................................... Figure 17. Albrecht Dürer, Gedenkbuch (Memorial Book), recto, bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders ......... Figure 18. Albrecht Dürer, Gedenkbuch (Memorial Book), verso, bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders ........ Figure 19. Prayer book for Dorothea of Prussia, velvet and silver binding, HAB: Cod. Guelf. 68.12 Aug. 8°. Reproduced with the permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel .................................................................................... Figure 20. Entry by Sophia of Brandenburg-Ansbach in a volume with seven sermons, mainly from Saxony, HAB: 471.7 Theol. Reproduced with the permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel ................................................. Figure 21. Dorothea of Saxony-Eisenach, née Saxe-Altenburg (1601–75). Reproduced with the permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel ................................................. Figure 22. Detail from the epitaph for Margräfin Sophia of Brandenburg-Ansbach in the Lorenzkirche, Nuremberg. Reproduced from Günther Schuhmann, “Markgraf Georg Friedrichs d. Ä. zweite Gemahlin Sophia (†1639) und ihre Beziehungen zu Nürnberg,” in Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978), 257 .......................... Figure 23. Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter, the funeral lament by Magdalena Sibylle of Saxe-Altenburg for her deceased son, Prince Christian (1663). Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol-4°-p-939-12-Rara) .......... Figure 24. The inscriptions on the coffin of Prince Christian of Altenburg from one of the Gotha copies of the funeral sermon, Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw

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list of illustrations Mutter. Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (LP-F-8°-25_26_001) .................. Figure 25. Prince Christian on his lit parade, color portrait in oil from the Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter. Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol-4°-p-939-13-Rara) .......... Figure 26. An engraving of Prince Christian as in life with his coffin below. Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol-2°-347-1_17k_003) ........ Figure 27. The “Weisslinienschnitt,” or white on black image of Magdalena Sibylle’s funeral cortege, 1668. Reproduced by permission of the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Altenburg (Bildersammlung, No. 1872a) ...................................................... Figure 28. Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg. Ceiling fresco of the nuns’ choir by Matthäus Ostendorfer, 1625. Photo by Ulrich Gezzi (Oberalm). Reprinted with permission of the Salzburger Barockmuseum ........................................................... Figure 29. Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg. Head reliquary of St. Erentrudis (1316) with crown commissioned by Abbess Johanna von Wolkenstein in 1652. Photo by Hans Tietze or Hans Makart, from Hans Tietze and Regintrudis von Reichlin-Meldegg, Österreichische Kunsttopographie, Vol. 7, Die Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1911), 87 ............................................................... Figure 30. Melodies for Johannes Khuen, Convivium Marianum (1637). Photo courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Res/ P.o.germ. 314#Beibd. 2) ........................ Figure 31. Augsburg Cathedral Floorplan (1926), Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5: Mappe 1, Nr. 3 ................................................................................ Figure 32. Georg Seld, Map of Augsburg, 1521, Stadtarchiv Augsburg .......................................................................................... Figure 33. Floorplan, St. Anna’s Church (1769), Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5: Mappe 1, Nr. 13 .............................................................................. Figure 34. St. Ulrichskirche, also known as the Predigthaus, after the completion of the 2002–2007 restoration with the larger Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra. Photograph reproduced with the permission of Angelika Prem .................

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Figure 35. Close-up of Predigthaus (F) as depicted in Daniel Manasser’s “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627). Reproduced courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (BX 2618.S32 H57+) ...................................................................... Figure 36. Façade of Predigthaus depicted in a watercolor from 1710. Reproduced with the permission of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna (HHStA RHR Decisa Kart. 176) ............ Figure 37. Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” (1626). Reproduced with the permission of the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, Augsburg (Graph 28–78) ..... Figure 38. Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627). Reproduced courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (BX 2618.S32 H57+) .................................... Figure 39. “Basilica St. Ulrich u[nd] Afrae mit dem Kloster,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder, Basilica. daß ist Herrliche Kirchen des Freÿ-Reichs Klosters St. Ulrich und Afra in Augspurg (1712). Reproduced with the permission of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Bancroft fNA5586.A84.H35 1712) ............................................. Figure 40. Lutheran design for the Predigthaus renovations c. 1710. Reproduced with the permission of the Haus-, Hofund Staatsarchiv, Vienna (HHStA RHR Decisa Kart. 176) .... Figure 41. Close-up of Predigthaus (F) and St. Jacob’s Chapel (G). Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” (1626). Reproduced with the permission of Staatsund Stadtbibliothek, Augsburg (Graph 28–78) ......................... Figure 42. Close-up of Predigthaus (F) and St. Jacob’s Chapel (G). Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627). Reproduced courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (BX 2618.S32 H57+) ....................................

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Figure 43. Close-up of Predigthaus (F) and St. Jacob’s Chapel (G). “Basilica St. Ulrich u[nd] Afrae mit dem Kloster,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder, Basilica. daß ist Herrliche Kirchen des Freÿ-Reichs Klosters St. Ulrich und Afra in Augspurg (1712). Reproduced with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Bancroft fNA5586.A84.H35 1712) ............................................................... 358 Figure 44. Lewis Evans, “A general map of the middle British Colonies, in America,” 1755. Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ........... 375 Figure 45. Title page, Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht von Pennsylvania in Norden-America . . ., 1702. Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania .................................................................................... 382

LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Some Key Dates in the History of Munich’s Franciscan Tertiary Convents: the Pütrich House of St. Christophorus, the Ridler House of St. Johannes auf der Stiege, and the Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger ............................................. 283 Table 2. Five Songbooks by Johannes Khuen (1606–75) with Connections to Munich’s Houses of Franciscan Tertiary Nuns .................................................................................. 298

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES Example 1. “Wo kompt es here, das eytel Ehre,” from Wilhelm Bäumker, Das katholische deutsche Kirchenlied in seinen Singweisen von den frühesten Zeiten bis gegen Ende des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Freiburg im Breisgau, St. Louis, MO: Herder, 1883–1911), 2:289 .................................................. 291 Example 2. “Ihr Zungen manigfalt,” no. 3 from Johannes Khuen, Convivium Marianum. Freudenfest Deß Him[m]lischen Frawenzimmers, mit zwölff newwen Gesänglein geziert, vnd in truck verfertigt (Munich: Nikolaus Heinrich, 1637) ................. 300

CONTRIBUTORS Rosalind J. Beiler (Department of History, University of Central Florida, Orlando) is Associate Professor of History. She has published Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 and articles on early modern German-speaking immigration to the British colonies. She has been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Free University, Berlin. Claudia Benthien (University of Hamburg), Professor of Germanic Literatures, Gender and Cultural Studies, conducts research on imagology, the cultural history of the body and the senses, psychoanalysis and literature, post-colonial theory, gender, history of emotions, new media, early modern culture, drama, performance theory and theatricality, rhetoric, narratology, and the history of science. She has published widely on Germanic and American literatures of the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the cultural history of the body, performance art, and the relationship of visual arts and medicine. Her main books are Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (2002; German 1999) and Barockes Schweigen. Rhetorik und Performativität des Sprachlosen im 17. Jahrhundert (2006). Jill Bepler (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel) is head of the Wolfenbüttel Library’s fellowship program. She has published on travel literature, the history of collections, and on ceremonial and funeral publications for the high aristocracy from the early modern period. Recent publications have concentrated on the political, confessional, and cultural roles of dynastic women at the courts of the Empire. Recently, she co-edited the conference volume Triumphs of the Defeated. Early Modern Festivals and Messages of Legitimacy (2007) and contributed the chapter “Early Modern Libraries and Collections” to volume 4 of the Camden House History of German Literature (2007). Duane J. Corpis (Department of History, Cornell University, Ithaca), Assistant Professor of History, is currently completing a book manuscript on the social, cultural, and political consequences of religious

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conversion in early modern Germany. His general research interests combine the themes of historical geography, religion, and early modern perceptions of cultural difference. He recently co-edited a special thematic issue of Radical History Review titled Critical Approaches to Religion and Politics (Fall 2007). Alexander J. Fisher (School of Music, University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Associate Professor of Music, specializes in music, confessional culture, and religious identity in early modern Germany. His publications include Music and Religious Identity in CounterReformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Ashgate, 2004), articles on song and confession in the Journal of Musicology (2001) and on Orlando di Lasso in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2007), and editions of the music of Rudolph di Lasso (2001) and Anton Holzner (2009). Ulrike Gleixner (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel), head of the research department at the HAB and Professor of History at the Technische Universität in Berlin, has published on popular culture and on religion and culture from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. Her publications in early modern German history include articles and books on cultural practices in peasant societies, midwifery, cultural practises in Pietism, (auto-)biographical writings, the impact of gender on religious culture, and Enlightenment discourse and practice. Among her recent publications available in English is Ulrike Gleixner and Marion Gray, eds., Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practise in German-Speaking Europe 1750–1830 (2006). Claudia Jarzebowski (Department of History, Free University of Berlin), Assistant Professor of Modern History, publishes on early modern history. Her publications include articles on the history of emotions, the history of violence and power, kinship, and sexuality. Her recent book treats incest, kinship and sexuality in the eighteenth century (2006), and she is currently studying the history of childhood from a historical-anthropological perspective. She co-edited both Historische Inzestdiskurse (2003) and Blutige Worte: Gewalt und Sprache in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (2008) with Jutta Eming and Gewalt in der Frühen Neuzeit (2005) with Claudia Ulbrich and Michaela Hohkamp.

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Hans Medick (member of the research group on Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective, Free University of Berlin; Professor Emeritus, Modern History and Historical Anthropology, University of Erfurt) lives and works in Göttingen. He has published widely on the cultural, social, and economic history of Early Modern Germany and Europe and is the founding co-editor of Historische Anthropologie (1993–). He is also editor with Norbert Winnige of a new digital resource with personal accounts of the Thirty Years’ War (www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de). He is preparing, with Benjamin Marschke, The Thirty Years War from Up Close. A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History and Culture [2011]). Barbara Lawatsch Melton (Department of Classics, Emory University, Atlanta) has published on late-Roman literature, the classical tradition, seventeenth-century confessional history, and transatlantic topics. Her publications on early modern confessional and transatlantic history include the edition/translation Voyage to Maryland (1633). Relatio itineris in Marilandiam (1995). Christopher Ocker (San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley), Professor of History, works on the history of religion in late medieval and early modern Europe. His publications include articles on anti-Jewish polemic, friars, the persecution of beguines, biblical interpretation, and theology, and also the monographs Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life (c. 1300–1374) (1993), Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (2002), and Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547 (2006). He is currently working on conflicts between friars, towns, and parish priests in the late Middle Ages and early Reformation. Helmut Puff (Department of Germanic Languages and Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Associate Professor of German and History, teaches and publishes on the history, culture, and literature of German-speaking Europe with a particular focus on the period of the Reformation. He is the author of “Von dem schlüssel aller Künsten / nemblich der Grammatica”: Deutsch im lateinischen Grammatikunterricht, 1480–1560 (1995) and Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (2003). With Christopher Wild, he also is the co-editor of Zwischen den Disziplinen? Perspektiven der

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Frühneuzeitforschung (2003). He has published widely on the history of sexuality, gender history, humanism, and visual history. Thomas Max Safley (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Professor of History, is a specialist in the economic and social history of early modern Europe. He has published extensively on the history of marriage and the family, poverty and charity, and labor and business. Forthcoming books include Bankruptcy: Economics and Ethics in a Capitalistic Age and Debito et Obligatio: Debt and Indebtedness in Early Modern Society. His two-volume history of poverty and charity is currently being translated for publication in Germany to appear in 2009 and 2010 as Kinder, Caritas und Kapital. Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin) holds the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art. He has published extensively on German and Netherlandish art from about 1400 to 1700. His recent books include Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, 2002), The Northern Renaissance (Phaidon, 2004), The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (Yale, 2006), Dürer (Phaidon, forthcoming), and an introduction to Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton Classic Edition, 2005). He co-edited The Essential Dürer (University of Pennsylvania, 2009) with Larry Silver. Lynne Tatlock (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis), Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanites, has published on German literature and culture from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Her publications in early modern German studies include many articles on the seventeenth-century novel, midwifery, constructions of gender, and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, and the editions/ translations The Graph of Sex and the German Text: Gendered Culture in Early Modern Germany 1500–1700 (1994; co-edited with Christiane Bohnert), The Court Midwife, by Justine Siegemund (2005), and Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ, by Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (2009).

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Mara Wade (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois, Urbana) is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She has published on early modern German and Scandinavian women writers, court festivals, and emblematics. She has been a guest professor at the University of Göttingen and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hannover—at the latter as the Maria Goeppert Mayer named professor of women and gender studies. She is the chair of the International Society for Emblem Studies and serves on the editorial board of the journal Emblematica and of Spektrum, the monograph series of the German Studies Association. Lee Palmer Wandel (Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison), is Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Visual Culture. In 2006, she published The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge University Press). Currently, she is working on catechisms and the ways in which they constructed our modern understanding of “religion.” Bethany Wiggin (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Assistant Professor of German, has published articles on the emergence of consumer culture in Europe, the invention of fashion, German coffee consumption, and Andreas Gryphius. She has authored a transnational cultural history of the early German novel, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730. At present she is charting the global circulation of slave narratives, part of a project exploring early modern globalism and the vagaries of cultural translation titled “Writing Home: Germans and America, 1492 to 1775.”

INTRODUCTION Lynne Tatlock In October 1675, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, the premiere woman poet of seventeenth-century Germany, wrote of her mother’s death to Sigmund von Birken, her confidant and mentor: “Oh! She is dead! She, next to God, gave me life. . . . I cannot paint my sorrow either with tears or ink, for the humors of my heart and brain are desiccated and curdled. My deathly pallor is the liveliest color illustrating it. Oh!”1 Despite lamentation between carefully positioned emotional ejaculations—oh!—of lacking the words to express her grief, Greiffenberg goes on to describe at great length and in stylized language this pain and her mother’s final hours. She tried to read to her mother, she reports, but could not because she was so overcome with grief. Her face and eyes were swollen with weeping, yet she stayed beside her mother’s bed observing the signs of death. Members of her household told her that she needed to take care of herself so as not to put herself in the same danger as her mother. About two hours before her mother’s “end,” she continues, her mother was in agony yet showed no impatience, no struggle, fear, or terror in the face of death, but instead expressed yearning for God. In order not to make those present sad, her mother did not make a fuss of saying goodbye or sad things. Yet she was fully alert until her end, finally closing her eyes gently and “going to sleep,” softly and sweetly, indicating with the last blinking of her eyes that she understood and appreciated the prayers said in her presence.2 If, as we shall see in Helmut Puff’s examination of the death of Barbara Dürer, death had presented itself as terrifying in 1514 even to a virtuous woman who had then “died hard,” 1 “Ach! Sie ist Todt! Die mir nächst Gott das Leben gegeben. . . . Ich kann Mein Leid weder mit Trähnen noch Dinte abmahlen, denn es ist aller Herz- und Hirne Safft in Mir vertroknet und erstarret! Meine Todenbleicheit ist die lebhaffste Farb, die es abbildet? [sic] Ach!” Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg to Sigmund von Birken, 15 October 1675, in Heimo Cerny, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg geb. Freiherrin von Seisenegg (1633–1694): Herkunft, Leben und Werk der größten deutschen Barockdichterin, Amstettner Beiträge 1983 (Amstett: Stadtgemeinde, 1983), 81. All translations in this introduction are mine. 2 Ibid., 81–82.

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Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg insisted by contrast in 1675 on her mother’s gentle passing—or at least she made it so with her virtuosity of language and the power of her imagination. As a poet, Greiffenberg found in language an arsenal that she could muster in her experiences of the death of loved ones and in repeated disastrous turns of fortune. She, furthermore, had in her circle of friends—fellow nobility and the learned bourgeois elite of Nuremberg—and in the readers of her religious literary oeuvre a ready and willing audience for rehearsing her sorrows in letters, poetry, and prose meditations and airing her attempts to find solace and certainty in the power of language and religious belief. In her writing, she could bewail the crucifixion but rejoice in its purpose, could memorialize Jesus Christ and undertake her mission to save others, and finally could even turn a zealous eye to converting the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor to the Lutheran faith. According to her stylization of her own story, Greiffenberg herself was nearly lost before she saw the light of day, before she had a mouth to speak, nearly deprived of her life mission to glorify God on earth and in all eternity.3 When her mother almost miscarried, Greiffenberg recounts in the Leiden und Sterben Jesu Christi (1672; Suffering and Dying of Jesus Christ), she promised her unborn child to the service of God, a service that Catharina took up with zeal. As a mature writer, the poet would pay special attention to the meaning of Jesus’ lying in Mary’s womb as the true sign, she thought, that no child would be lost to God.4 Greiffenberg’s father died when she was young, bringing the family’s precarious financial standing into full view.5 The death of her

3 On the stylization of her mother’s promise as anchoring her writing in female spirituality, see Lynne Tatlock, “Empathic Suffering: The Inscription and Transmutation of Gender in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s Leiden und Sterben Jesu Christi,” 34.1 (2007) Wolfenbüttler Barock-Nachrichten: 41. 4 See her annotation of Lk 1:41 in her third meditation in Des Allerheiligtst- und Allerheilsamsten Leidens Jesu Christi (1672). This passage on the significance of Christ’s lying in the womb like every human child is included in my translation, Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 202–4. 5 Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s biography has been recounted by a number of scholars. I myself have done so twice relying on previous scholarship, most recently in the introduction to my translation (Meditations, 12–22). Kathleen Foley-Beining also includes a biographical sketch in The Body and Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s “Meditations” (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997). For

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younger sister, Anna Regina, in 1651 led Greiffenberg to an experience akin to a Pietistic awakening when she first beheld what she termed the “light of God’s glory” (Deoglori-Licht).6 As outlined above, her mother’s death became an occasion for lamentation, self-styling, and praising God. When she lost her ability to realize her intention to remain single and to live chastely after being coerced into a marriage with her half uncle, Hans Rudolf von Greiffenberg, she accepted this loss of autonomy. Nevertheless, she would later see to it that she praised chastity and solitude in her second set of meditations, Der Allerheiligsten Menschwerdung, Geburt und Jugend Jesu Christi (1678; Holiest Incarnation, Birth, and Youth of Jesus Christ). Upon Hans Rudolf ’s death in 1677 after thirteen years of marriage, she again wrote Birken of her grief, declaring that her heart had been torn into a million pieces.7 Thereupon she had the devastating experience, as had her mother, of what it meant in the late-seventeenth century to be the widowed mistress of a heavily encumbered estate.8 She forfeited her father’s property in Lower Austria to the family’s nemesis, Franz von Riesenfels, but in fact Lower Austria, as she had known it, was melting out from under her altogether. As a result of the Habsburgs’ efforts at re-Catholicizing the hereditary lands, policies relentlessly pursued even after 1648 and even after the Protestant nobility had obtained concessions, Greiffenberg’s friends, who could not practice their religion, were unable to take communion or to employ clergy to instruct their children in their religion, and, furthermore, were effectively inhibited even from employing Protestant servants, had left Habsburg territory.9 Greiffenberg left as well to rejoin some of them in Nuremberg, thus renewing a community of the like-minded.

pertinent literature on the author and her works, see my bibliography in Meditations, 41–45. 6 Horst-Joachim Frank, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg: Leben und Welt der barocken Dichterin, Schriften zur Literatur, 8 (Göttingen: Sachse and Pohl, 1967), 20. See also Sigmund von Birken, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Sigmund von Birken und Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, ed. Hartmut Laufhütte, with Dietrich Jöns and Ralf Schuster. 2 vols. Vol. 12.1–2 of Sigmund von Birken, Werke und Korrespondenz (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2005), pt. 1, xvii. 7 Greiffenberg to Sigmund von Birken, 3 May 1677, in Cerny, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, 90–91. 8 Ibid., 56. 9 Martin Bircher, Johann Wilhelm von Stubenberg (1619–1663) und sein Freundeskreis: Studien zur österreichischen Barockliteratur protestantischer Edelleute (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968), 3–4.

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Catharina, who was childless, was the last of the Greiffenbergs. With her death in 1694, the family that had risen to nobility on the enterprise of a sixteenth-century lawyer was extinguished in the third generation. Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg did not complete her final project to write of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, yet she turned out a voluminous life’s work of poetry and prose. Her thirty-six meditations on Jesus’ birth, life, miracles, and death supply ample evidence of life experience of multiple personal losses that has been reworked, stylized, and re-signified for the purpose of glorifying and commemorating the Christian redeemer and saving the world at the End of Days. Frequently relying on the practice of occasional meditation whereby one describes objects or occurrences from the everyday world and interprets them in a spiritual vein, she refashioned and re-signified the mundane. In 1668, Greiffenberg wrote to Birken of the difficulty of finding time for religious devotion in a life fraught with social obligations, household responsibilities, and many personal difficulties. Her way of preventing herself from becoming mired in mere earthly things was to transform these very things into “locations of spiritual mindfulness” (Geistlichen Gedächtnus Öhrteren).10 This life marked by losses and these writings as a re-creative response to them can serve here as a prelude to the present volume on loss in early modern Germany. In them echo and circulate the multifarious and ubiquitous privations of the period resulting from war, politics, religious conflict, and human error—loss of community, material deprivation, economic ruin, spiritual loss, and diminished social status—and bereavement experienced at the death of parents, siblings, children, colleagues, neighbors, heroes, as well as the consciousness of one’s own mortality and certain death, that is, awareness of the imminent loss of an embodied self. Greiffenberg responded to these painful events and conditions with self-discipline and the wordsmith’s powerful will to form; in her writings she commemorates, comforts, and empathizes, seeking to overcome even death in performative language that imitates resurrection.11 With faith in the “happy 10 Peter M. Daly, Dichtung und Emblematik bei Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparatistik 36 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1976), 130–32. 11 On the performative force of Greiffenberg’s language, see Burkhard Dohm, “Die Auferstehen des Leibes in der Poesie. Zu einem Passionsgedicht Catharina Regina von Greiffenbergs,” Daphnis 21 (1992): 673–94.

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fall”—the connection between Eve’s sin and Mary’s purity, between the entry of sin and death into the world and Jesus’ voluntary submission of his divinity to the lowliness of human bodily suffering to save humankind—Greiffenberg refashioned and sublimated her personal sorrow in religious poetry and prose. She thereby translated her losses to make them—in her understanding—the gain of others. Beginning her meditations in 1672 with special attention to the woman with nard oil as she ministers to Christ, preparing him for burial, she from the start imagines her oeuvre as a monument for her spiritual bridegroom and herself as a funeral urn in which, via Communion, Christ’s body is mourned, preserved, and commemorated. In the conceit of her body as funeral urn, she recalls Sophia Eleonora Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt’s elaborate representation of her mourning in her funeral book, Mausoleum (see Bepler in this volume), one of the many examples investigated in the present anthology in which loss gives rise to agency and creativity. * * * The sixteen essays that follow explore perceptions of and responses to loss during the approximately 250 years that comprise early modern Germany. These contributions grew out of papers originally presented on March 27–29, 2008, at “Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany,” the fifth triennial interdisciplinary and international conference held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and sponsored by Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär (FNI), an organization of North American and European scholars devoted to interdisciplinary study of the culture and history of German-speaking Central Europe. In keeping with FNI’s mission to bridge disciplinary divides that can confound broader understandings of the character and trajectories of early modern Germany, this collection of essays assembles and juxtaposes scholarship across disciplines as well as research that spans disciplines—literary studies; gender studies; cultural, social, and economic history; art history; history of emotions; architectural history; musicology; history of religion and theology; women’s history; studies in place and space; and historical anthropology—with the express intention of making that diverse work mutually resonate. The sweeping political, economic, religious, and intellectual paradigm shifts and conflicts, indeed catastrophes, that took place in Central Europe during the years 1500–1750 left in their wake enormous wreckage in the German territories (in some views wreckage of

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unprecedented proportion; see Medick in this volume). The perception and experience of and re-creative responses to this wreckage stand at the heart of the sixteen essays in this anthology as they examine challenges confronted as a result of death, reconfiguration of space, proscriptions on movement, war, the threat of dynastic extinction, forced emigration, the loss of spiritual community, the destruction and confiscation of property, bankruptcy, and the loss of social status. New technologies of printing and improving communication over the course of two-and-a-half centuries spread the news of threat, crisis, devastation, and bereavement more rapidly; an emergent public sphere facilitated, furthermore, debate and dissent over the meanings of these events. Print culture and increasing literacy, however, fostered not merely sharing of knowledge and contesting of opinion but also an unprecedented textualization of human experience in Europe.12 Even private, ordinary individuals kept diaries and thus chronicled the vicissitudes of their short lives. Moreover, individual subjects living in the German territories increasingly had a sense of themselves as selves whose losses were defined not only by the authorities and institutions with whom they tangled, the material disasters with which they struggled, and the violence to which they and their neighbors were subjected, but also by their own writings and their feelings, perceptions, and beliefs about the meanings of these losses and, not least, by their grief over their own finitude as, for example, in the case of the aging Albrecht Dürer (see Smith in this volume). The contributions to this anthology examine individual emotional reactions to loss, while also treating the perception of and response to loss as emergent from interpersonal, communal, and institutional dynamics, that is, from negotiations and contestations within social,

12 On the revolution in media and communication, see Wolfgang Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur. Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Neuzeit, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 189 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003). The recently published collection of essays “Consuming News: Newspapers and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800),” ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams and William Layher, special issue, Daphnis 37, nos. 1–2 (2008), provides pertinent examples of the mediation of events and the spread of news. Of immediate interest in this anthology to the present volume is Hans Medick’s “Wallensteins Tod: Auf den Schlachtfeldern des Dreißigjährigen Krieges” (111–30). For the broad impact of printing on early modern Europe, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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religious, and economic systems. They investigate such affective and symbolic responses as public dynastic mourning, mourning within circles of academic elites, and artistic expressions of individual and cultural melancholy as well as such strategic and reconstructive responses to privation as migrating, remodeling churches and convents, writing poetry, telling stories, making art, singing communally, collecting books, and erecting monuments of metal, stone, and paper. In their materiality, graphic responses to loss became, as the contributors repeatedly demonstrate, lasting tributes and testimonies not merely to perceived loss but to the fears, pain, piety, creativity, spontaneity, persistence, will, drive, flexibility, synthetic intelligence, and ingenuity of early modern people—men and women, nobles, clerics, nuns, poets, merchants, academics, burghers, and peasants. The essays in this volume approach the investigation of loss with an understanding that loss was not always experienced as irreversible or tragic in early modern Germany. Some early modern persons proved extraordinarily resilient, and as the contributions to this anthology demonstrate—and this is perhaps the central and shared finding of the essays in this volume—some losses were in the end perceived as gains by those who experienced, responded to, and recorded them or, at the very least, by later generations. Reactions to change and inevitable loss, moreover, testify repeatedly in the pages of this anthology to dynamism and unpredictability in human affairs. In losing and being lost, these people and these communities were thus sometimes found. * * * Hans Medick opens the inquiry into early modern loss with a consideration of the concept and designation “Thirty Years’ War” and the suffering, ruin, and setbacks associated with this extended period of armed conflict as they were recorded and solidified for posterity in personal accounts from the time period. He argues from an historical anthropological perspective that these accounts reflect responses to real historical circumstances and ways of knowing and seeing in that period. As personal accounts from all social groups make clear, contemporaries had a strong sense of having experienced a unique and unified historical event that had disrupted communal and economic life to a degree hitherto inconceivable in the early modern European context. The very fact of the historical mooring of the concept of a “thirty years’ war” in experience and self-expression, Medick furthermore maintains, secured the long-term historical understanding of

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this series of armed conflicts as a Thirty Years’ War and a catastrophe of unprecedented size and suffering. The proof of the enduring viability of an historical understanding gained from contemporaries’ understanding of their situation can, moreover, be sought, Medick argues, in twentieth-century attempts to appropriate the term “thirty years’ war” for a changed context, namely to think about the period of German history bookended by two world wars, 1914–45. The failure of this new label—the Second Thirty Years’ War—to gain traction arises from the very circumstance that the concept is not rooted in the experience and self-expression of those who endured privation and suffering in this period. In short, in attempting to record and make sense of their personal histories, the denizens of the Thirty Years’ War helped to create History. Claudia Benthien turns our attention from personal accounts of the violence of the Thirty Years’ War and their significance for historiography to the stylized poetry of the high culture of the Baroque as it “performs” trauma. The Baroque topos of transience, she posits, can be seen as emerging from a collective traumatic disposition in this cultural moment, one resulting from the violent upheavals of the seventeenth century, in particular widespread and protracted warfare. In the vanitas poems that she examines, she identifies “a loss of differentiation between psychic temporality and linear chronological time,” a loss that poststructuralist theorists view as characteristic of trauma (in this volume, p. 59). These poems, Benthien demonstrates, reproduce structures analogous to those of trauma in, for example, the manic repetition of the elements of decay that the mind cannot fully comprehend, because the threat of oblivion has been perceived only belatedly (and not in the time of actual experience). Most especially, strategies of distancing in these poems tellingly reveal a concern with survival symptomatic of a traumatic disposition: the lyrical subject and his or her experience are absent, replaced by a more general address to the human condition per se, even as the poems evoke, through linguistic virtuosity, the intense presence of decay and imminent extinction. According to trauma theory, Benthien points out, the exclusion or elimination of the “I” is proof of the “survival” of that very “I.” The (usually male) speaker distances himself from the decay and destruction that he describes in the poem in order to feel alive and therefore “enigmatically survives.” Even in poems where the author’s real historical experience is made visible, a strategy of distancing can be

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detected as the poem moves from the speaker’s specific experience of, for example, his own corporal debility, to the human condition in general. In a final turn in her argument, Benthien identifies a gendered address in strategies of distancing in vanitas poems in which female figures appear or are addressed: in depicting the decay of an explicitly female body, the speaker mysteriously excludes his own male body from being eliminated and thus, as it were, survives. With their investigations of Albrecht Dürer’s perceptions of loss, Jeffrey Chipps Smith and Helmut Puff take up a highly self-conscious male artist from an earlier moment of early modern crisis and new beginnings. In Smith’s consideration of Dürer and loss, the creative artist becomes visible in his very recording of and reflection on privation; the marking of loss is part and parcel of his self-fashioning, selfaccounting, and self-preservation. Unique with regard to the thickness and richness of his visual and textual documentations of loss, Dürer provides multiple proofs of differentiated and subtle understandings of human finitude. Surveying loss in Dürer’s oeuvre under four general rubrics—loss of people, everyday losses, loss of self, and the loss of art and artists— Smith examines Dürer’s recording of the deaths of siblings, friends, colleagues, and parents. In this very act of recording and ordering, Smith maintains, Dürer found consolation. Dürer’s tender yet unflinching charcoal portrait of his dying mother, dated March 19, 1514, on the other hand, displays minute attention to the ravaging of mortal flesh. Dürer’s passionate lamentation in 1521 upon hearing a report of Luther’s abduction and possible assassination demonstrates, moreover, how imminent privation makes visible present significance, and specifically Luther’s role as spiritual leader. Dürer’s recording of his financial fortunes and his concern with his present and future status and reputation testify, furthermore, to a perception of vulnerability and to a self-conscious wish to endure. The notation of such “everyday losses” also provides proof of Dürer’s own sense of himself as an artist. As Smith further notes, Dürer left ample evidence that he perceived and grieved over his own mortality and physical limitations—a gray hair, diminished eyesight, an unsteady hand gave rise to reflection and regret. A watercolor from 1525 depicting a dream shows that Dürer was likewise highly aware of certain artistic media as useful hedges against the ephemerality of memory. Awareness of and mourning over lost art circulate in his writing as well. Smith proposes that the lost

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art of antiquity amplified Dürer’s concerns about his own legacy and the possibility of obliteration through the passage of time, a concern expressed in the positive in the assertive self-portrait of 1500 where Dürer unmistakably lends himself the appearance of Christ. Fear of loss or personal oblivion, Smith concludes, helped to fuel Dürer’s creativity. As both Smith and Puff demonstrate, contemporaries keenly felt a sense of bereavement when Dürer died and immediately responded to his death with elaborate attempts to preserve his memory as symbol and ideal. But even if preserving an ideal, these attempts also reasserted the importance to commemoration and memory of real physical presence in the form of locks of hair, a cast of his right hand, a wax impression of his hand, and a (then rare in Germany) commemorative death mask. Yet memorializing, Puff notes, is paradoxically always predicated on distance and difference. This idea of distance and difference informs Puff’s analysis of Dürer’s perceptions of death and dying, especially in his Memory Book [Gedenkbuch]. Functioning “as ledger and archive,” this multilayered memorial folio records the artist’s reflections over time in response to social circumstances and human bonds (in this volume, p. 104). Dürer’s account of his mother’s death in this folio is especially rich. According to Puff, Barbara Dürer’s death in Nuremberg in 1514, as recorded here, marks an “extraordinary moment in the history of death” in a context of imminent change. Puff characterizes both the new (Protestant) and old (Catholic) scenarios of dying as predicated on divergent configurations of proximity and distance; neither, however, banished the paradox that memorializing—the commemoration of loss—is founded on difference and distance. In 1514, Barbara Dürer could in both Dürer’s portrait of her and in his written account of her death still serve as an example of a (good) Christian life and death and thus the basis for community. Upon recording his mother’s death, Dürer notes “me too,” taking in her dying the lesson that as a mortal he must also learn how properly to die; death prompted the artist to meticulous observation and to “learning through seeing” (in this volume, p. 115). In her deathbed suffering, that is, in “dying hard,” Barbara enacted an imitatio Christi that knit together the generations and the community that attended her death. As Puff outlines, human suffering in Christ similarly recurs in Dürer’s art as an invitation to enter with the artist into community.

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Puff argues that within Protestantism and the theology of the cross, this idea of community in death would be undercut. The ties that had previously connected the living to the dead in Catholic Europe would be severed in Protestant cities and territories, and death would gain a new finality. Purgatory would vanish, and the community of the living and the dead would disintegrate, rendering the living incapable of alleviating the suffering of the dead through prayer or intercession. “Protestantism disconnected the community of the living from that of the dead,” Puff asserts, Christian mercy thus coming to an end upon death (in this volume, p. 128). Reformers, moreover, encouraged engagement with the suffering, crucified Christ only from a distance and admonished believers to bear their cross—alone and individually. As the engraving from the deluxe funeral book Mausoleum (1665), published by Sophia Eleonora Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt, that appears on the cover of this volume illustrates, loss provided some early modern women, too, with opportunities for elaborate self-expression and reflection. In this engraving, Sophia Eleonora herself, dressed in widows’ weeds and holding a lighted lamp, stirs the ashes in a fireplace while overhead winged geniuses hover, referring both to story and history and to everlasting love. As Birgit Kümmel has explained, the stirring of the ashes as well as the genius holding the open book labeled “Historia” indicate the landgravine’s cultural activity on behalf of the dearly beloved dead, that is, the family dynasty. Sophia Eleonora thus gives voice not merely to the grief that she experienced at her husband’s death; in responding to loss through the creation of this funeral book, she also vividly establishes her role as a dynastic woman by commemorating not only her deceased husband but also her entire family line. This moment of bereavement thus becomes an opportunity for reasserting the importance of that family.13 Jill Bepler and Mara Wade refocus the inquiry into responses to loss on just such dynastic women. They investigate reconstructive and preservationist cultural practices undertaken by dynastic women

13 Jill Bepler, Birgit Kümmel, and Helga Meise, “Weibliche Selbstdarstellung im 17. Jahrhundert. Das Funeralwerk der Landgräfin Sophia Eleonora von HessenDarmstadt,” Geschlechter Perspektiven: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Heide Wunder and Gisela Engel (Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 1998), 441–68. For Kümmel’s explication of the engraving, see 460–61.

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in the seventeenth century upon the death of family members as modes of self-fashioning and methods of guaranteeing personal and familial survival. In her examination of dynastic women with long widowhoods, from mainly Lutheran dynasties, for whom the CryptoCalvinism of the 1590s and the experiences of the Thirty Years’ War were critical, Bepler asserts that the identity of the dynastic widow was predicated on multiple deprivations, not the least of which in most cases were the immediate diminution of status and authority at court. Widowhood brought with it, moreover, the necessity to negotiate the terms of these losses and thus, as Bepler demonstrates, also the possibility of constructing an identity of sorts while securing a place for oneself in dynastic memory. Some, like Eleanore of Anhalt, even experienced a degree of personal freedom as widows, sovereign in their dowager castles. Instructed to withdraw into seclusion while doing good works and preserving the memory of her husband, the dynastic widow, upon the death of her husband, so contemporaries believed, joined an order founded by God whose rules dictated solitude, faith, and prayer. As a “pillar of prayer,” the embodiment of piety, the dynastic widow undergirded the state. At the same time, this representational role also legitimated her reading, writing, publishing, and book collecting, activities that in turn shaped her self-understanding, her self-fashioned public persona, and ultimately her legacy. In their materiality, books could reflect back to the widow and her dowager’s court her place within a dynasty, as in the case of the book collection of Sophia of Brandenburg-Ansbach, marked as it was by her spousal fidelity, by her personal values as reflected in her motto, and by its record of her reading. As Bepler outlines in her essay, as “keepers of dynastic memory and guardians of the faith,” widows found meaning in their bereavement and purposefully re-inscribed themselves in dynastic memory (in this volume, p. 148). Wade likewise interrogates the responses of a conservative, dynastic woman to loss for their personal and political meanings. Upon the death in 1653 of her nine-year-old son, the heir to the duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony turned to the genre of the funeral volume to record her personal, maternal sorrow as well as to register dynastic loss and to attempt to solidify the now endangered family’s position among the courts of Saxony and Thuringia. Having found in her widowhood upon the death of her first husband, Prince-Elect Christian of Denmark, the possibility of cultural activity

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and personal expression in writing and publishing, Magdalena Sibylle returned in 1653 to these activities in a strategic re-creative gesture. As Wade demonstrates, Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter (Lamentation of a Very Sorrowful Princely Mother) allowed Magdalena Sibylle to speak for herself of her grief and to shape the family’s legacy through the culture of memory. A carefully crafted and well-integrated compilation, the funeral volume contains Magdalena Sibylle’s own prose and poetry as well as funeral sermons, Bible passages, a description of the funeral, biographical accounts of the deceased, and a funeral portrait of the dead child. Even as her young son perished, she as his chief mourner and the shaper of his legacy survived as it were in the funeral book, living to influence practices of mourning at neighboring courts and thus, for a time, to secure the cultural capital of the court of Saxe-Altenburg in Middle Germany. As Wade maintains, Magdalena Sibylle made “paper monuments” for her son, thereby affirming her status as princess and mother and “creating dynastic memory in the face of dynastic extinction” (in this volume, p. 169). Claudia Jarzebowski, too, takes up the death of children in the seventeenth century—in this case as reflected not in ruling families but in funeral sermons for Protestant children from the elite academic middle class—to investigate how parents in such circles were attached to their offspring and what the demise of those children meant to them: that is, to research the “feeling” of mourning in this historical period. The narrative qualities of funeral sermons render them a rich source for the investigation of the history of emotions and the attachment of parents to children. Embedded in a dense social context, that is, a field constituted by the interaction of text, author, addressee, and structural and accidental conditions, these funeral sermons offer, Jarzebowski argues, paths into the thicket of “real” historical emotion. Jarzebowski points out that funeral sermons for adults devote considerable space to sketching the deceased’s childhood as the phase when the future adult’s good qualities first become visible, as a “laboratory-like phase” that in the account of a life carries meaning equal to that of family heritage (in this volume, p. 191). Funeral sermons for children therefore present a special problem and thus also an opportunity for the historian, since dead children will never grow up to fulfill the promise of their childhood and since this unfulfilled promise, the fragmentary life, marks the occasion for perceiving and

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mourning loss. As Jarzebowski’s examples illustrate, funeral sermons tend to insist on the death of a child as a sign of God’s grace and to remonstrate parents—in particular fathers—who mourn excessively, for forgetting their duty to love God above all else. In the normative view of these funeral sermons, dying young spares children from the world and its trials and temptations and secures for them a place in heaven. In this respect, early death is seen as a gain for the child, but also for the parents who have faith in God’s love and who should be happy that their child is saved. Funeral sermons thus make visible a bond of love between parents and their children that reproduces other kinds of Christian love and is therefore founded in the love of God. This love, Jarzebowski points out in closing, is fundamentally different from modern forms of parental love of children, love that is less concerned with pleasing God and more with the entry of the child into civil society. The mourning of the deaths of children and other loved ones provides the focus for Ulrike Gleixner’s study of a new spiritual intimacy among eighteenth-century inner-churchly Pietists as evident in autobiographical accounts. Like Jarzebowski, Gleixner considers the thick social context in which these texts were generated. Inasmuch as the purpose of these autobiographies was to record one’s efforts to perfect oneself in keeping with religious tenets, they provide particularly good examples of emotional self-censorship within Pietism. Even as the authors constitute themselves through writing, they seek not to narrate an account of an individual self but rather, in dialogue with communal norms, they render an account that conforms and is infused with Pietistic meaning. Like Jarzebowski, Gleixner demonstrates that religious norms dictated the appropriate reaction to death. Thus in the context of Pietism, the death of someone who had been awakened in keeping with Pietistic tenets was understood as a gain for the deceased. It was supposed to constitute a moment of rejoicing that the departed one was saved and in heaven. The emotional pain experienced upon the death of a loved one was, furthermore, in Pietistic belief and practice, not to be expressed explicitly as it had been in highly affective writings in Lutheran circles. In Pietists’ autobiographies, by contrast, it remains ineffable, implicit in what Gleixner calls “empty spaces.” Whereas Pietists were not entirely denied the right to mourn, Pietistic devotional literature insisted that mourning was more a matter of egotistical sorrow about one’s own experience of bereavement than of sorrow about the deceased. As

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does Jarzebowski in seventeenth-century funeral sermons, Gleixner finds examples in Pietistic writings that view the death of children as a corrective punishment for the parents’ insufficient devotion to God. Whereas Jarzebowski’s examples point to the grieving of fathers whose excessive love for their children needed correction in the view of contemporary theologians, Gleixner notes that, in Pietist circles, husbands who assumed the authority for interpreting the spiritual meaning of all earthly events could view the death of children as their wives’ punishment for, among other things, disobedience. The prohibition on the expression of sorrow in any case led Pietist authors to point to the lessons that death teaches rather than to speak of their sorrow. In refraining from communicating their grief with others, Pietists instead turned to God, thus finding a new wordless emotional intimacy with their God. God alone knew their pain. With his essay on spiritual loss in Reformation Germany, Christopher Ocker opens a set of five essays that interrogate changes in spiritual community and the accompanying losses and gains felt in the wake of the Reformation and ensuing centuries of religious strife. Ocker takes the position that for the years immediately following the Reformation in the German territories one cannot yet easily pinpoint the generalized sense of spiritual loss that we might reasonably expect, given the long-term significance of the Reformation. While the Reformation did in fact lead to deprivation of many kinds, Ocker maintains, the boundaries between the old and the new remained porous for a time. Contemporaries therefore did not experience religious controversy as heralding conclusive religious change; indeed, the differences between the two faiths had not yet become sufficiently clarified for many contemporaries so as to be irretrievably separate and thus to be registered as loss. While many staked out a neutral position for reasons of expediency, which generally meant simply remaining Catholic, still others did not fully understand what precisely was changing. Ocker thus directs our attention away from the notorious examples of zealous Protestants and resistant Catholics to examples of those who were affected by religious controversy but not committed to its extremes and who thus found themselves on middle ground that they configured in various ways. In contrast to those who fervently took up the orthodoxies of the new faith or those who zealously defended the old ones, that is, those who, in their hardened positions, likely saw their lives largely in terms of spiritual gain, those who tried to occupy a middle position experienced its increasing untenability as

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the extreme positions in the religious controversy solidified and the middle ground was lost. These “middle Germans,” Ocker argues, “may offer the best evidence for an experience of loss in Luther’s Germany” (in this volume, p. 239). Ocker traces the post-Reformation career of the Austrian nobleman Ruprecht von Mosheim, Counselor of Archduke Ferdinand, as offering a case in point. A humanist and sometime canon and dean of the cathedral of Passau who in the 1630s had direct experience of religious negotiation at the highest level and who enjoyed access to the imperial court, Mosheim came to feel the spiritual brokenness of schism and thus set out to chart a healing middle course, as he said, with a “middle and mediating doctrine” that was to enable the “spiritual middle ground to coalesce as its own movement and overwhelm the poles of religious debate” (in this volume, p. 249). As Mosheim’s example and those of others illustrate, in the end those who tried to live on a spiritual middle ground in a time of religious polarization ultimately lost. In her study of the impact of Tridentine reform on the convent of Nonnberg in Salzburg in the early seventeenth century, Barbara Lawatsch Melton directs our attention to some long-term ramifications of the Reformation that can be understood in terms of loss and gain. She demonstrates that enclosure and other Tridentine reforms, while certainly resulting in the curtailment of personal freedom for the nuns of Nonnberg and a reduction in autonomy for the convent itself, also benefited at least some of the members of the convent and in some respects even proved to be a boon for the convent in general. Initially resistant to reform, Nonnberg was compelled beginning around 1620 to conform more strictly to the dictates of reform. Having once accepted the need to comply, the nuns of Nonnberg undertook to pursue spiritual reform in the Tridentine vein in creative ways that also compensated for loss of autonomy and freedom of movement. These proved beneficial, ultimately ensuring the long-term survival of the convent. Having been denied domestics as part of enclosure, the choir nuns who came from aristocratic and patrician families were forced after 1620 to rely instead on lay sisters recruited from the lower social strata to perform menial tasks. These lay sisters as a result acquired a new status in the convent; some of them were even sought after for their special skills, for example, their knowledge of medicine and their musical talent. As the convent placed more emphasis on the skills of

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these lay sisters, noble birth became less important. Music especially became a priority for the convent in the seventeenth century, providing a creative outlet for the women housed there, even as the recruitment of skilled musicians significantly changed the population of the convent. Architectural alterations meant to enforce enclosure in the convent also provided new opportunities for the nuns. While these renovations were undertaken for the purpose of separating the nuns from the world, they also brought the convent a new kitchen and dining hall, the latter promoting communal life, as well as expanded sleeping quarters that allowed the convent to admit members in greater numbers. The need to redesign the nuns’ choir enabled the nuns to decorate it according to their own lights and, for example, to paint the ceiling to reflect the convent’s flourishing musical culture. A new high altar, furthermore, provided them with the opportunity to promote the veneration of their first abbess, St. Erentrudis. In venerating St. Erentrudis in this and other ways, they acted wholly in the spirit of Tridentine reform while also reaffirming the convent’s importance within the archbishopric. Alexander Fisher likewise turns his attention to the situation of post-Tridentine cloistered nuns with particular emphasis on music.14 In examining songs as records of and responses to the experiences of Munich nuns during the Thirty Years’ War, Fisher also offers yet another look at contemporary responses to upheaval, violence, and deprivation that complement the personal accounts investigated by Medick and the poetry analyzed by Benthien. These songs provide insight, in particular, to the ways in which the Thirty Years’ War impinged on claustration, which itself resulted from the impulse to restoration in the wake of the Reformation. As Fisher points out, war returned these nuns to the world after twelve years of enclosure; upon

14 Both Fisher and Melton have written essays that begin to fill lacunae on the musical culture of early modern German convents. The musical culture of convents has to date been more richly studied and documented for Italy in such works as Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Craig A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and his forthcoming Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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their return to Munich and the cloister after a brief period of exilic wandering, these same nuns found themselves isolated anew. In 1632, the Swedish invasion of Bavaria drove cloistered Munich nuns into the world and into several months of exile, during which time they journeyed from Munich to Hall in Tyrol and back again. A pair of manuscript songs, possibly written by one of the nuns, attempts to make sense of that event. The first of these songs narrates the hardships and the opportunities presented by that journey and ends with the nuns’ happy return to their convent; the second views the nuns’ plight in a larger political context in which foreign aggression threatens the inviolability of virgin nuns, the nuns standing in for the polity that must be protected in this time of war. Upon their safe return to Munich, the nuns who had been driven out into the world were re-enclosed. Five songbooks by Johannes Khuen, private chaplain to Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg, that were published 1636–40 appear to form part of a larger literary program designed to promote the virtues of claustration with nuns who had, as a result of Tridentine reform, been involuntarily enclosed. Comprised of devotional vernacular songs with simple instrumental accompaniment that are easy to memorize, Khuen’s five books overtly appeal to female audiences by presenting strong female role models, evoking exclusive female space, and calling those who hear the songs to spiritual marriage. Khuen’s songs not only defend claustration per se but also support a spiritual economy in harmony with it, one invested in the virginal state, the cult of relics, and prayers for souls in purgatory. If the Munich nuns were his intended audience, then they could find in his songs reason to believe that their repeated loss of personal freedom and autonomy had ultimately led to renewed spiritual life. The political and religious landscape of Augsburg in the wake of the Reformation provides the possibility for a consideration of loss and gain as registered in terms of space and place in essays by Lee Palmer Wandel and Duane Corpis. Taking her impetus from geographers Robert David Sack and Yi-Fu Tuan, Wandel considers the configuration of religious space and place after 1520, positing a general loss to European Christendom of the sense of a shared map of the sacred.15 If 15

On the structure and dynamics of place and social behavior, see, for example, Robert David Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; and Yi-Fu Tuan,

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the Catholic Church had once covered the map of Europe with hierarchies of administration and with sacrality, after 1520 each religion was spatially fragmented. Yet even in this shared spatial fragmentation, Catholics and Protestants experienced religious space differently, she argues. Wandel characterizes Catholic space as hierarchically defined in accordance with Church governance and jurisdiction as well as in terms of degrees of sacrality. Interiors of churches, placement of relics, and proximity to the altar mattered deeply. Endowed masses, for example, had to be said at specific places within a given church. To Catholics, the iconoclasm of the early years of the Reformation therefore signified loss less in the destruction of beautiful artifacts per se than in the obliteration of differentiated space articulated by the arrangement of these objects within a sacred place. For Protestants, on the other hand, no space was more sacred than another, that is, no human action was capable of making one place more sacred than another. In this sense, churches were interchangeable. Thus asserting a fundamental difference between the ways Catholics and evangelicals conceptualized space, Wandel offers a preliminary “geography of religion” in the city of Augsburg during the sixteenth century. In Augsburg, the map of religious jurisdiction changed three times over the course of the sixteenth century: in the years 1534–37, 1547–48, and in 1555. Upon each alteration, structures that functioned as a place of worship were assigned to one church or another and thereby allocated to one confession or another. The final change in 1555, the institution of biconfessionality, meant that urban space was divided between Catholic and Lutheran jurisdiction, with no one church coterminous with the jurisdiction of the city council. To sketch out this geography of Augsburg, Wandel examines the interiors of churches—the seating therein, the placement of altars, the presence or absence of relics—as well as cemeteries as fundamentally differently experienced spaces. By examining the changing fortunes of the Lutheran Church of St. Ulrich in Augsburg over approximately two-hundred years, Duane Corpis provides a case study of the ways space and place mattered in the subdivided religious geography of Augsburg. Indeed, St. Ulrich’s, which in 1526 became the place of worship for an early Protestant

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

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parish, constitutes a particularly telling example of the tense history of biconfessionality in this city. This church is not merely proximate to the much larger Catholic Basilica and Benedictine Abbey of SS. Ulrich and Afra to which it once belonged; it also shares a wall with its Catholic neighbor. In retelling the history of this disputed space, Corpis is interested, on the one hand, in how Protestants laid claim to what had been a Catholic sacred space and, in the process, attempted to erase the pre-Reformation past of that space; on the other hand, he scrutinizes the ways in which Catholics responded to the loss of St. Ulrich’s, seeking to preserve the memory of the church’s Catholic past. He therefore traces how both parties used this built space to construct their distinct and competing civic identities. In part, this competitive remembering and forgetting took place in the form of histories written about the adjoining buildings. But, as Corpis demonstrates, the very materiality of this space, where confessional memories inhered in wood, stone, and mortar, itself played a critical role; it could both reinforce and confound efforts on either side to assert jurisdictional rights over St. Ulrich’s. Assertion of Catholic access to a chapel through St. Ulrich’s (and in the Protestant view, Catholic abuse of that access), quarrels over the bells of St. Ulrich’s that had once called Catholics to worship, squabbles over renovations, and even disputes over who was to cut the grass in the adjoining churchyard (and could thereby lay claim to that space) supported assertions of rights on both sides. These conflicts, even when they may seem trivial, mattered; they potentially established precedents for future jurisdictional claims. The dates 1648/1624—respectively the year of the Peace of Westphalia and the date used by the Peace to resolve confessional disputes—became especially important—indeed, “enshrined”— points of reference in the competing histories that Protestants and Catholics created about St. Ulrich’s. Even after the establishment of parity, Catholics continued to struggle against the Lutheran occupation of formerly Catholic space with, for example, jurisdictional claims to St. Ulrich’s based on the cult of the dead who had been buried on this site. Moreover, Catholics argued, St. Ulrich’s bore on its façade overt signs of its Catholic origin: paintings and monastic insignia. Lutherans in turn eventually obliterated these outward signs of the church’s Catholic past, giving rise to still further tense disputes. Corpis concludes that the fraught history of Catholic and Protestant quarreling over St. Ulrich’s demonstrates that parity in Augsburg did not mean tolerance, since parity in and of itself presumed enduring

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confessional competition and thus conflict. Parity in Augsburg signified instead the right to exercise public authority to define one’s own religious community. Essays by Rosalind Beiler and Bethany Wiggin turn from the reconfiguring, contestation, and reclaiming of sacred space in the Old World to the search for regeneration and reconstruction in the New. Voluntary migration, exile, and colonization stand at the center of Beiler’s tracing of the lives of a dissenting Pietist couple from Erfurt who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1694 hoping to found a new spiritual community in the “wilderness.” Anna Maria Schuchart, an illiterate servant, and Daniel Falckner, a student of August Hermann Francke, belonged to the ecstatic fringe of Pietism in Erfurt. When Pietist leaders Francke and Philipp Spener distanced themselves from those experiencing visions and prophesying, Schuchart and Falckner, among others, lost what limited spiritual community they had as religious minorities. Their response was to seek to reconnect themselves to a unified Pietist community through emigration to North America where they hoped to reestablish the remnants of what they saw as the historical Christian church. As Beiler outlines, the couple failed repeatedly to realize their goals and upon each failure turned again to migration as a regenerative strategy. The first migration to the New World began badly. The couple was excommunicated during the journey across the Atlantic and then lived apart from the group. But the Pietist migrants as a whole quickly became embroiled in religious schism and struggled in religiously tolerant Pennsylvania to find a solid footing among so many competing religions. Falckner and Schuchart determined to separate themselves permanently from the group. A journey back to Europe and a second migration in search of community led to a promising new start that again failed for multiple reasons, not the least of which were Falckner’s own moral failings. Nearly thirty years after they had been marginalized in Erfurt for their kind of Pietism, Falckner and Schuchart made yet a third try in New Jersey. Beiler concedes that Falckner may have led a successful religious community there for around ten years; nevertheless, by 1731, the congregation was riven with conflict, Falckner himself had fallen into discredit, and Schuchart was suspected of consorting with the devil. Although the couple again considered migration, they remained in New Jersey, marginalized once more. Despite their failure over the long term to find the unified spiritual community that they sought, Falckner and Schuchart may be understood as exemplifying

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strategies of migration typically pursued by religious minorities in this period as they negotiated the loss of spiritual community that repeatedly resulted from their dissenting beliefs and practices. Bethany Wiggin likewise examines the situation of German settlers in Pennsylvania in her study of Christoph Saur’s advice column published in Der Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Calender (1751–58; The High German American Almanac), the most successful Germanlanguage almanac published in eighteenth-century North America. In this advice column, the nonconformist Saur offered his readers strategies for coping with the immigrant experience and the feelings of loss that this resettlement entailed; he included information about the New World as well as recycled information from the Old World. He also recorded his own feelings of loss and predictions of disaster as he saw Pennsylvania changing with the arrival of new waves of immigrants. Prophesying radical and irreclaimable losses for the Germans who had first settled the area in pursuit of freedom of conscience, Saur repeatedly points in the almanac to recently arrived “men of the cloth” who endanger the peace and harmony of the older settlement. Organized religion in particular, he asserts, poses a threat to the colony’s freedoms, and he insists at length on the importance of freedom of religion as guaranteed in William Penn’s original charter. Saur frequently invokes Penn himself as the founder of a colony dedicated to peaceful relations with its neighbors, be they Native Americans or European immigrants. As Wiggin notes, Saur’s worst fears would soon become a reality with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, a war that in the context of the American colonies led to armed conflict between settlers and Native Americans along the frontier. When taking account in 1757 of these new hostilities, Saur does not pull punches, offering an example of a German who claims to be prepared to force an Indian to eat his own flesh. Thus Saur marks the ruination of the paradise that the colony had, in his view, once been: German settlers have become savage and bellicose and in the process a new world, once the home to the new religion that promoted peace and harmony, has been lost forever. These sixteen cross-disciplinary explorations of early modern understandings of and responses to loss conclude with a sixteenth-century instance of material loss, a spectacular bankruptcy: the collapse in 1529 of the powerful, aggressive, and well-connected Höchstetter firm. Thomas Max Safley takes up this case to interrogate the usefulness

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of the concept of social death, since even after suffering bankruptcy and the dramatic and ostensibly irreversible loss in social status that accompanied it, the Höchstetter family surprisingly reemerged. As Safley points out, death indicates stasis, yet the history of the family testifies by contrast to resilience and dynamism in human affairs. The Höchstetters’ aggressive speculation on the mercury market led to the precipitous collapse of the firm and subsequent bankruptcy; however, the attempts of Ambrosius the Elder, the head of the firm, to conceal assets in anticipation of that bankruptcy guaranteed the family’s loss of social status. This fraud flew in the face of the ordinances governing bankruptcy that specified that creditors were to be given a full account of the bankrupt’s assets. Fraud thus placed the Höchstetters squarely in the category of “bad bankrupts,” those who could not hope for future recovery. In resorting to deception to preserve the family’s economic status, the head of the firm could have sealed its loss of social status. Safley, however, finds to the contrary that social death in the end does not describe the ensuing history of the Höchstetters. Tracing the fortunes in the following years of the various lines of the Höchstetter family, he uncovers evidence that at least some of its male members were later able to achieve material success by means of a number of different strategies. Social death thus accurately characterizes only the situation of Ambrosius the Elder, the fraudulent defaulter, and his immediate associates. Migration, for example, proved to be one effective strategy for circumventing social death insofar as the migrant was able to remove himself from the ostracizing community to start anew. Safley points out, however, that in other cases patronage and simple persistence played a critical role in the newly rising fortunes of some family members. In Safley’s view, social death is therefore not a particularly useful category for understanding early modern economic and social life, for it fails to take account of mobility, spontaneity, and agency. Safley reminds us again of what the denizens of early modern Germany understood only too well: things change, fortunes turn, loss becomes gain, and gain becomes loss. Indeed, as the essays in this volume indicate, early modern Germans—men and women whatever their station—adapted and coped with these blows. And in the Christian context, the pious among them believed that beyond the inconstant and treacherous ephemeral world were God’s love and the promise of redemption. While temporal misfortune might have been the story, in the larger scheme of things, it could never be that story’s end.

CHAPTER ONE

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR AS EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY: CONTEMPORARY PERCEPTIONS OF A MACRO-HISTORICAL EVENT1 Hans Medick On Monday July 22, 1650, Hieronymus Kromayer, Professor of Rhetoric in Leipzig, gave a speech in the presence of the ruler of his country, Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony: “Oratio Panegyrica de Bello Tricennali Germanico” (Speech on the Thirty Years’ War).2 The occasion for this speech was the festival of thanksgiving, praise, and prayer [Dank-, Lob- und Betfest] that the Elector had proclaimed for this day.3 Its purpose was to celebrate the restoration of peace in Saxony and in the Holy Roman Empire, a peace that had finally arrived with the Nuremberg Accords for the Implementation of Peace of June 16/26 and the departure of the last Swedish troops from Leipzig, that is, two full years after the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück had been signed and proclaimed.4

1

I would like to thank Lynne Tatlock for her insightful and illuminating translation of this text as well as Bernd Warlich (Volkach) who, with his profound and detailed knowledge of the Great War, provided me with advice on the writing of this essay. I am likewise grateful to Herbert Schmidt (Mannheim) and Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville) for valuable references. 2 Hieronymus Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica De Bello Tricennali Germanico et Partibus tam togatis, quam sagatis Serenissimi Saxoniae Electoris in isto spectatis habita in Templo Academico, XXII. Julii, Soteriorum die publice indicto (Speech on the Thirty Years’ War as well as on the Peaceful and Likewise Wise Part Played by His Majesty the Elector of Saxony, Held Publicly Before this Audience in the Academic Hall on the Announced day of Congratulations) (Leipzig: Henning, 1650). 3 Johann Jakob Vogel, Leipzigisches Geschicht-Buch oder Annales, das ist: Jahr- und Tagebücher der weltberühmten Königlich und Churfürstlichen Sächsischen Kauff- und Handels-Stadt Leipzig. . . . (Leipzig: Lanckisch Erben, 1714), 650–52: Transcription of the Electoral Order. 4 See Katrin Keller, “Das ‘eigentliche wahre und große Friedensfest . . . im ganzen Sachsenlande’: Kursachsen 1648 bis 1650,” in Der Westfälische Friede: Diplomatie— politische Zäsur—kulturelles Umfeld—Rezeptionsgeschichte, ed. Heinz Duchhardt, Historische Zeitschrift Beihefte 26 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 661–77. The double date of the agreement cited here refers to the Gregorian calendar (June 16), adopted

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The celebration began in Leipzig in the morning with protracted ringing of bells and services of thanksgiving in all the churches. At noon, it was continued with a special academic ceremony in the “Auditorium Philosophicum” of the university. Framed by “stately music” (stattlicher Musik) at the beginning and conclusion of his speech, Kromayer commemorated the return of peace and the preceding years of war.5 He spoke of the “bellum tricennale” (thirty years’ war), even though he must have known, like his fellow Leipzigers, that the war and its violent consequences had continued in Leipzig, as in other places, for two years after 1648; indeed, the war had not concluded for Saxony until after the peace accords of the summer of 1650 and the departure of the last Swedish troops from Leipzig on June 30, 1650.6 Like other documents from Middle Germany from the same time period, the electoral ceremonial address thus spoke of a thirtytwo years’ war, “in which form our righteous God sent the horseman on the red horse into our Fatherland on account of our copious sins until the thirty-second year.”7 Notably, in the very act of recalling the past war, Kromayer reaches for an academic, rhetorically distanced formula; that is, right at the beginning of his panegyric he speaks of the “bellum tricennale,” the “thirty years’ war,” thereby placing it in the series of “great historical events” (res magnas) and simultaneously characterizing it as a catastrophe that has to be evaluated in a particular way: “it is known that great things are not to be measured as events, but according to their conclusion, and this applies all the more to the happy catastrophe of the thirty years’ war.”8

after 1582 in Catholic countries, and the old Julian calendar (June 26), retained by many Protestant countries until the end of the seventeenth century. 5 Vogel, Leipzigisches Geschicht-Buch, 653. 6 Keller, “Das ‘eigentliche wahre und große Friedensfest,’ ” 662–67. 7 “welcher Gestalt der gerechte Gott wegen unserer überhäuften Sünden biß anhero nunmehr in das zwey und dreissigste Jahr den Reuter auf dem roten Roß in unserem Vaterland deutscher Nation gesendet.” Quoted in Vogel, Leipzigisches Geschicht-Buch, 652. The “christliche Anordnung” (Christian order) by the city council for a celebration of peace for Erfurt for September 8, 1630 (August 30 of the same year), was also predicated on a “thirty-two-years” war. On this subject, see Marcus Ventzke, “Das Ende des Dreißigjährigen Krieges in einer verhinderten Reichsstadt: Erfurt zwischen Diplomatie und Friedensfest,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde von Erfurt, New Series 8 (2000): 52; see also Keller, “Das ‘eigentlich wahre und große Friedensfest,’ ” 667. 8 “non eventu, sed exitu res magnas ponderari . . ., tritum est, et laeta belli hujus tricennalis catastrophe magnis comprobatum.” Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, A1r.

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When Kromayer labeled the Thirty Years’ War a “catastrophe” and simultaneously modified this concept with the adjective “happy,” he did not do this as a twenty-first-century historian of catastrophes.9 He was not interested in recalling the war merely in light of its “catastrophic” character as event, not merely in the sense in which catastrophe is understood today, that is, as an unfortunate event that becomes meaningful above all on account of its disastrous side effects and consequences.10 Instead, he understood it in the sense of classical antiquity, as this sense had been derived from the poetics of drama and as it—as a foreign word from Greek and Latin—gradually gained currency in the German language, first in singular usages in the sixteenth century and then in ever more frequent usage since the early seventeenth century, namely as an indication of a critical turning point in a nexus of occurrences, a point from which things either took a turn toward a deadly conclusion or took a turn for the better.11 Kromayer too appears to

9 See the introduction to Martin Voss, Symbolische Formen: Grundlagen und Elemente einer Soziologie der Katastrophe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), 9–37. 10 Cf. Duden: Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 3rd. ed. (Mannheim: Duden, 1999), s.v. “Katastrophe.” Here catastrophe is defined as a “schweres Unglück” (grave misfortune) or an occurrence in nature, economy, or politics “mit verheerenden Folgen” (with devastating consequences). It is notable with regard to the expansion of the meaning in the twentieth century that there are fifteen different and separately listed compounds here including “Katastrophentourismus” and “Katastrophenmedizin.” 11 Cf. Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch, vol. 1, ed. Hans Schulz (Strasburg: Trübner, 1913), s.v. “Katastrophe.” In this entry there is evidence of the use of the concept in the sense of “Wendung, Umschwung” (turn, vicissitude) for the period around 1600, but this usage does not become truly current until the eighteenth century. One of the documentations of its use cited from an astrological tractate by Helisaeus Röslin, Iudicium, oder Bedencken von Newen Stern, welcher den zweiten Octobris erschinen . . . (Strasburg: Bertram, 1605), 5, is of course striking in its extensive prognostic and thoroughly modern-sounding perspective: “And as I wrote, around this time there would be a catastrophe with respect to all things that were plotted in Christendom many years ago: all this has thus already come to pass in England and now in the Netherlands. And the other things will soon reveal how they are going to go.” (Und wie ich geschriben hab, daß umb dise Zeit ein Catastrophe sein werde aller Sachen, die in der Christenheit sich vor vil Jaren her angezettelt: also ist es schon zum theil erfüllet in Engelland und jetzund in Niderland. Und werden sich die ubrigen Sachen auch bald erzeygen, wo hinauß sie gehen werden.) According to a helpful communication from Herbert Schmidt at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, who is part of the editorial team for the new edition of the “Deutschen Fremdwörterbuchs,” which is in the process of being published, it is expected that the findings of Schulz’s older article will be confirmed in the entry “Katastrophe,” which is currently being revised (2009). These findings indicate that there was not a widespread German meaning for this word until the second half of the eighteenth century. At the same time, Schmidt supplies some new examples that indicate a relatively early German use of the word (e.g., the syntagma “eine schendliche Katastrophe” from 1538, meaning a deplorable

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have taken this extant though rather rare use of the term catastrophe from contemporary poetics. Indeed, he speaks of the theater of the Thirty Years’ War as a “tragico-comoedia” (tragi-comedy) in five acts.12 He identifies a turning point at the beginning of the war—the retreat of the army of the Bohemian Estates and their commander, Count Heinrich Matthias von Thurm, outside of Vienna in the year 1619—a “tragica, tamen catastrophe fabula” (a tragic story, a catastrophe as it were).13 Of course the Thirty Years’ War was for Kromayer not a catastrophe that ended with a disaster after the customary dramatic climax, but instead one that in the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück and its implementation had reached a happy conclusion as a result of the constructive policies of the Electorate of Saxony and with the blessing of God. The Thirty Years’ War was thus for Kromayer to a certain degree a “catastrophe” with a “happy ending.” Kromayer was both an educated humanist and an orthodox Lutheran theologian. In his speech, however, the contemporary Lutheran view of the war as divine punishment is in the end not much in evidence. He left this view to the court preachers at the seat of the Saxon court, Dresden.14 Rather—and as was appropriate to his celebratory speech—he emphasized the beneficent divine intervention that had

catastrophe) in Anton Lauterbach, Tagebuch auf das Jahr 1538, die Hauptquelle der Tischreden Luthers (Dresden: J. Naumann, 1872), 112, and additional references that, above all, point to the use of the word in polemical contexts in the Reformation as it was derived from the Greek and Latin through philology and translation, as for example with Zwingli. See Huldreich Zwingli, Schriften betreffend die Disputation zu Baden, in Werke vol. 2, pt. 2 (Zurich: Schultheß 1832), 519: “ Catastrophe means turning around. . . . It is used in this way in tragedies and in comedies and thus commonly used by rhetoricians for the outcome of a project, game, war, or story. Faber, that old drunkard, didn’t know that and then added disloyalty to ignorance and made of the meaning outcome or turning—as it’s usually intended—the [perverted meaning] turn the wrong way.” (Catastrophe heißt Umkeerung. . . . Es wirt ouch in den Tragödien und in Comödien also genommen, und demnach gemeinlich by allen Redkünstleren gebrucht für ‘den Usgang’ eins ieden Fürnemens, Spils, Kriegs oder Geschicht. Das hat Faber, der alt Bacchant, nit gewüßt, und hat erst die Untrüw zu der Unwüssenheit gknüpft, und jm us dem Usgang oder us Umkeeren, so vil es zum türesten heissen möchte, verkeeren gemacht.) The frequent use of the word to indicate the turning point in drama can be found, for example, in Martin Hayneccius, Almansor (Leipzig 1582), 13, or in Martin Hammer, Weihnachtgesang (Leipzig 1608), 5. 12 Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, A2v. 13 Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, B1r. 14 On this subject, see Wolfgang Sommer, Die lutherischen Hofprediger in Dresden: Grundzüge ihrer Geschichte und Verkündigung im Kurfürstentum Sachsen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006).

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brought about the end of the war. At the same time, he also situated the war within the horizon of exempla and rhetorical patterns from antiquity and thereby pursued a thoroughly secular representation of history: Just as Mars the god of war can go astray in the case of dubious armed conflicts, the individual results of wars usually vary so greatly that we cannot judge with certainty from these [results] either the goal of the players or the nature of the reason for them. If, however, the entire enterprise of the war is concluded with a happy ending and with having reached the goal of the players, there is no longer any reason to say that the war was undertaken blindly.15

In keeping with this secular point of view and the aims of his panegyric, which, after all, was delivered in the presence of his ruler, Kromayer offered a sober presentation of the war in five acts.16 In doing so, he attributed a key role to the policies of the Electorate of Saxony and the religious conduct of the Protestant cause from the Leipzig Convention through the Peace of Prague up to the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück.17 These policies constituted, as it were, an “axis of good” that led to peace.18 Kromayer even incorporated the glorious landing of Gustavus Adolphus on the Island of Rügen on June 26, 1630, in an historical account shaped by his Saxon-Protestant bias. To be sure, having slightly altered the date, he had this event taking place on June 25, 1630, that is, one day before the actual occurrence, but exactly on the day on which people began celebrating the onehundred-year anniversary of the Augsburg Confession in Saxony.19 In the title of his speech and repeatedly in the text itself, Kromayer speaks of the various events and turning points in the recent war as a nexus of 15 “Wie nämlich der Kriegsgott Mars bei zweifelhaften Waffengängen irren kann, so sind die einzelnen Ergebnisse der Kriege gewöhnlich so verschieden, das aus denselben [Ergebnissen] weder über das Ziel des Handelnden noch über die Beschaffenheit des Grundes sicher ein Urteil abgegeben werden darf. Wenn aber die gesamte Kriegshandlung mit einem glücklichen Ausgang und passenden Ziel des Handelnden beendet wird, gibt es keinen Grund mehr zu sagen, dass der Krieg blindlings unternommen wurde.” Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, Ar. 16 Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, A3v-Er. 17 For a later view of the key role, see Johannes Burkhardt, “Der Dreißigjährige Krieg—Einfluß der sächsischen Politik auf die deutsche Geschichte,” Dresdner Hefte 16 (1998): 3–12. 18 “Axis of good” is an allusion, if somewhat historically incorrect, to Henryk M. Broder’s formulation. See, e.g., Henrik M. Broder et al., Die Achse des Guten, http:// www.achgut.com/dadgdx/. 19 Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, Dr.

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events that has lasted three decades, the “German Thirty Years’ War” (bellum tricennale Germanicum), as if this nexus were obvious. This war may well have acquired its far-reaching meaning for him—as it may have for the learned men in his audience—at the very least on account of the fact that as a “bellum tricennale” it had lasted three years longer than the then longest-known war, the longest and most important war of antiquity, the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War. Thus the term, concept, and idea of the “Thirty Years’ War” as a nexus of events of armed conflict and politics with a “catastrophic” climax are by no means a mythmaking “invention” after the fact of later intellectuals and academic historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The American historian Robert Ergang and the GermanEnglish historian Sigfrid Henry Steinberg have advanced this view, thus declaring the idea of the Thirty Years’ War an unhistorical fiction lacking in historical foundation.20 In the meantime, however, Ergang as well as Steinberg must themselves be seen as writing fiction. Indeed, it has been shown that the idea and concept of the Thirty Years’ War arose already from the experiences and perceptions of contemporaries and their situatedness in the discourses of the age itself. Within this contemporary context, the term, concept, and idea of the Thirty Years’ War acquired their characteristic meanings. Precisely this contemporary assignment of meaning to the war led to the long-lasting effects of the memory of the Thirty Years’ War, effects that endured in the terms in which the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries portrayed it. Hieronymus Kromayer was in any case by no means alone either in his formulation “bellum tricennale” or in his view of this war as a catastrophe. Konrad Repgen (1988) and indeed before him the American scholar Guenther Mueller in an essay (1978) and in his dissertation (1974) demonstrated that the term Thirty Years’ War and the sense it which it expresses a far-reaching nexus of armed conflicts with catastrophic effects were marked by contemporaries already in political print culture and chronicles around the year 1648.21 In this way, 20 Robert Ergang, The Myth of the All-Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years’ War (Pocono Pines: The Craftsmen, 1956); Sigfrid Henry Steinberg, The “Thirty Years’ War” and the Conflict for European Hegemony 1600–1660 (London: Arnold, 1966). 21 Konrad Repgen, “Über die Geschichtsschreibung des Dreißigjährigen Krieges: Begriff und Konzeption” (1988), in Konrad Repgen, Dreißigjähriger Krieg und Westfälischer Friede: Studien und Quellen, ed. Franz Bosbach and Christoph Kampmann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), 21–111. Mueller’s essay is difficult to get

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it became a constituent part of the political language of the time— and by no means only in the German-speaking world, but also in the Netherlands, England, France, Sweden, and Italy. Still more important than the proof of the use of the term is of course the identification of a characteristic connection between the term and a corresponding contemporary idea and interpretation, a picture that had been formed before 1648 and that came to be as an act of “interpreting the present through the contemporary understanding of antiquity” (Gegenwartsinterpretation durch Rezeption der Antike).22 Soon after 1618, an idea of the coherence and continuity of the wars of the present day constituted itself in the media and in chronicles, beginning usually, but by no means always, with the Bohemian Uprising of 1618.23 This idea was connected to the notion that these “German wars” (teutschen Kriege) or this “German war” (Teutsche Krieg), in its length and suffering, surpassed what was seen in Old Europe as “normal.” This idea of the singularity, continuity, and contemporary historical unity of the present war found expression in a numerical technology of denotation. Thus the length of the war was continued by means of the changing numbers that marked its duration: from the five, six, ten, fourteen, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, twenty-seven, and twenty-nine years’ war, and finally to the thirty years’ war. The method employed here makes use of the “humanist topoi of topping” (humanistischen Überbietungstopoi), as Repgen calls it, borrowing a concept from Ernst Robert Curtius.24 Counting, counting up and counting down, connected to an emphasis on extraordinary amounts of suffering and cruelty, was in Curtius’s formulation a “means of mental orientation” (Mittel gedanklicher Orientierung).25 The extraordinary aspect and hold of. It appeared in the table of contents for the 1978 volume of the Journal of Modern History, yet it could only be obtained as a supplement upon demand and thus it is not bound in with most of the copies found in libraries. Guenther H. Mueller, “The Thirty Years’ War or Fifty Years of War,” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), Supplement: D 1053–D 1066; Guenther H. Mueller, “Georg Greflinger ‘Der Deutschen Dreyszig-Jaehriger Krieg’: Ausgabe und Kommentar” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1974; Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms, 1984; Georg Greflinger, Der Deutschen Dreyszig-Jaehriger Krieg (1657) rpt. ed. Peter Michael Ehrle (Munich: Fink, 1983). 22 Repgen, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 52. 23 Kromayer too dates the events of 1619, starting with the charter (Majestätsbrief ) of Emperor Rudolf II for the Bohemian estates of 1609; see Kromayer, Oratio Panegyrica, A3v. 24 Repgen, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 35. 25 Quoted in Repgen, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 39.

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newness of the present war was to be thereby emphasized, above all, in comparison with the wars of classical antiquity (but also in comparison with those of both the Middle Ages and the early modern period). Thucydides had already designated the measure for the significance of a war in the extent of the suffering it caused and its length in his account of the Peloponnesian War. He had given the three-times-nine years of the Peloponnesian War a special aura by noting that the war’s length had been predicted already at the beginning of the war by oracles.26 As Repgen demonstrates, moreover, the recourse to the topos of the “bellum decennale” from antiquity gained particular importance in contemporary representations of the war. Likewise, the triplication of the ten years’ war made apparent the far-reaching significance of the Thirty Years’ War.27 The idea of the Thirty Years’ War as a unified nexus of politics and armed conflicts with catastrophic effects was also created by political authorities and the learned men of the age with recourse to models from antiquity and to the rhetorical tradition of the same. Repgen proves this convincingly, yet the question remains open in his work as to the extent to which this idea of the war gained currency outside of elite academic and humanistic circles and, in particular, whether and how this idea was modified and elaborated there and whether and how it became operative. Numerous contemporary testimonies from the era of the Thirty Years’ War provide an answer to these questions. Two-hundred-thirty-two of these were discovered by my Göttingen colleague Benigna von Krusenstjern in an excellent annotated cata-

26 Repgen, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 48–49. In Thucydides’s work, five phases of the Peloponnesian War can be distinguished. I thank Bernd Warlich for pointing out that Thucydides’s description of the war bears a remarkable similarity to the five acts in which Kromayer saw the Thirty Years’ War unfolding. In Thucydides, one can distinguish the following phases: 1. Introduction (prehistory, methodological excursus, causes of the war); 2. Archidamian War (431–21 BCE); 3. The shaky peace (Peace of Nicias, 421–16 BCE); 4. Sicilian Expedition (415–13 BCE); 5. The Decelean War (414/13–11 BCE, end of the work; the war itself continued until 404 BCE). Kromayer distinguishes the following acts of the Thirty Years’ War, in each case with special attention to the role of Saxony: 1. Prehistory of the Bohemian Uprising and the Bohemian War; 2. The Dutch-Danish War and the Edict of Restitution (1629); 3. Sweden’s entry into the War (1630) and the Leipzig Convention (1631); 4. The Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) and the Saxon Alliance with Sweden (1631); 5. The Prague Peace (1635) and the Further Peace Negotiations During the “Swedish War.” 27 Repgen, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 50–52.

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logue of these texts.28 I, myself, together with Andreas Bähr, Holger Berg, and Bernd Warlich, and with the assistance of the informatics expert Norbert Winnige, have researched, edited, and published four of these previously unpublished testimonies in a model digital edition on the internet. This site offers all interested users long-term, free access to an electronic laboratory for the study of the history of the Thirty Years’ War.29 Examination of these documents, as well as numerous other personal accounts, shows that soon after 1648 the idea of a Thirty Years’ War gained currency with many people outside of academic circles, yet it was thereby re-signified and filled with specific contents. Accounts exist from nearly all social groups—artisans and academics as well as peasants, nobility, clerics, military men, and a few women—and were often written in and after life-threatening situations. They are without exception acts of commemoration meant to preserve an extraordinary experience for posterity, often for the family or the local community. Thus Joachim Rese, the mayor of the small Middle German town Jeßnitz (near Bitterfeld), wrote the following in his diary soon after the end of the war: “In this year 1618 the most horrific comet appeared . . . , it remained for thirty days in the sky, just as the war in Germany too lasted thirty years, and thus each day means a year, as the experience of it has unfortunately and sufficiently proven.”30 Similarly in his chronicle, the Westphalian town councilor Andreas Kothe from Wiedenbrück connects the idea of the Thirty Years’ War not with its ending, but with the disastrous portent of the comet at its

28 Benigna von Krusenstjern, Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges: Beschreibendes Verzeichnis (Berlin: Akademie, 1997). I organized an international conference together with von Krusenstjern for discussing the possibility of new contents and methodologies in the study of the Thirty Years’ War, not the least of which were to draw on personal accounts. On the results, see Hans Medick and Benigna von Krusenstjern, eds., Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe, 2nd. ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). 29 See the digital edition that I created together with Norbert Winnige, Andreas Bähr, Holger Berg and Bernd Warlich—“Mitteldeutsche Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges”—that became accessible as of November 2008 to the general public as a digital archive: http://www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de/sz/index.php. 30 “In diesem Jahr 1618 erschien der schreckliche Cometstern . . ., derselbe stunde 30 Tage am Himmel, wie dann der Krieg in Deutschland auch 30 Jahre gewähret, und also jeder Tag ein Jahr, wie der Erfahrung solches leider genugsam bezeugte, bedeutet.” Tagebuch des Bürgermeisters Joachim Rese vom Jahre 1618–1637 (Stadtarchiv Jesnitz, typed transcription). Cf. Benigna von Krusenstjern, Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, No. 174, 195–96.

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beginning and with the course of events that were thereby presaged if not indeed predicted: In the year 1618, sometime in November, a large comet was seen in the sky . . . [It] . . . appeared thirty nights in a row. Thus one can easily infer [what it meant], since the German war in the [Holy] Roman Empire lasted for thirty years and ended in the year 1648 in November by the grace of God. . . . If [I] had known that it was supposed to indicate a thirty-year-long war, I would have conducted my affairs differently.31

Both the specific timeframes and the particular contexts that are referenced in these testimonies by the concept of the “thirty years’ war” are striking. From them we can conclude that the authors of these testimonies became familiar with this concept soon after the end of the war—be it through reading newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, or orally through daily communication. But they used the concept in an individual way to gain perspective on the war years and to connect these years to their own present. Thus the Erfurt master blue-dyer and woad-trader Hans Krafft does not see the “protracted thirty-year-long German war” (langwierigen dreißigjährigen teutschen Krieg), as he calls it, as having come to an end until the year 1652, when after a twenty-eight year hiatus, woad from the area surrounding Erfurt is placed once again on the town scales for sale and he can once again resume the routines of a woad-trader and blue-dyer. He notes in his chronicle: “In the year 1652 they began putting woad up for sale again on St. Walpurgis’s Day. And they hadn’t gone out [to harvest it] since 1624, for twenty-eight years; they couldn’t do this because of the protracted thirty-year-long German war.”32 Striking here is of course the

31 “Anno 1618 ungefehr im November ist ein großer Cometstern ahm Himmel gesehen worden . . . Hadt . . . sich 30 Abent sehen lassen. So ist lichtlich [leichtlich] daraus abzunehmen, weiln der Deutsche Kreich im Römischen Reich 30 Jahr lanch gewehret undt anno 1648 im November durch Gottes Gnade wieder geendiget . . . Hette [ich] aber gewist, das es ein dreysigjähriger Kreich bedeutten solte, hette ich meine Sachen anders disponiret.” Franz Flaskamp, ed., Die Chronik des Ratsherrn Andreas Kothe: Eine Quelle zur westfälischen Geschichte im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, Quellen und Forschungen zur westfälischen Geschichte 90 (Gütersloh: Flöttmann, 1962), 25–26. 32 “Anno 1652 so hat man wieder auf neue angefangen, auf die Wage Waid zu ziehen, auf Walpurgistag. Und sind sie nicht hinausgezogen von anno 1624, seit 28 Jahren, [dies ist] wegen des langwierigen 30jährigen deutschen Krieges verhindert worden.” Hans Krafft, Chronik aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg, ed. Hans Medick and Norbert Winnige, http://www.mdsz.thulb-uni-jena.de/Krafft/quelle.php (accessed 4 February 2009), 104r.

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ready use of the concept of the thirty years’ war and its adaptation to the local and regional situation, even where conflict persists up to the Peace Accord of 1650 and beyond. This usage appears in the testimony of Hans Krafft and also in other Middle German texts, for example, texts from Gotha, Erfurt, Leipzig, Oelsnitz, and Weimar. In these texts, which were written close to the time of the celebrations of peace in the years 1650 and 1651, one, however, repeatedly encounters talk of the “thirty-two years’ war.”33 Yet the memory of the war and its protracted length was by no means dependent on the formal marking of its conclusion or on the emergence of a peaceful counter-image, as was re-enacted in many places in the peace celebrations of the years 1650 and 1651. On the contrary, precisely the continuation of the dangers and fears of war and the uncertainty of survival in the second half of the seventeenth century kept this memory alive. Thus in the year 1657, Johann Christian Heim, the teacher and organist from the little town of Ostheim near the Rhön mountains, attempted to preserve the memory of the devastation of his evangelical-Lutheran town during the Thirty Years’ War in a special way and at the same time to escape the uncertainties and fears of his present. On June 26, he put a chronicle, written by himself, in a capsule, which he then hid in the uppermost knob on the point of the church steeple, where it remains to this day. As a teacher who knew Latin, Heim as eyewitness and author recounted in this chronicle the horrors and encroachments experienced in and around Ostheim (above all, during the years 1634–36 on the occasion of the invasion of the Croats in 1634 and the Swedish occupation that had preceded it).34 His writings have the character of a testament for posterity. He opens and closes them with the requisite comments. At the beginning of the text there is a paradoxical heading in which the memory of past 33 Keller, “Das ‘eigentliche wahre und große Friedensfest,’ ” 667; on Erfurt, see Ventzke, “Das Ende des Dreißigjährigen Krieges,” 51–52. 34 The text is available in a new and complete version within the framework of a comprehensive documentary edition that reproduces the entire contents of the numerous documents collected in the church steeple ball-capsule of the Michaelis Church of Ostheim from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a veritable “album [of the village] in the ball on the church steeple,” as the editor, Karl Zeitel, writes. Karl Zeitel, “Die kirchlichen Urkunden im Kirchturmknopf der Michaeliskirche in Ostheim v. d. Rhön: Ein Blick in die Kirchen-, Schul- und Kulturgeschichte der Stadt Ostheim v. d. Rhön,” Jahrbuch des Hennebergisch-Fränkischen Geschichtsvereins 19 (2004), 219–82, document no. 10 from 26 June 1657, 233–39.

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sufferings from the distance of a few years is termed by comparison quite pleasant: “Praeteritorum malorum recordatio jucundissima est.”35 The meaning of this heading and of the monitory remembrance of the war that the text intended posterity to hear is articulated in the concluding sentence: thus for the most part [we] managed to live through the entire war, suffered bad and good, saw strange things. And since people like to hear and find it pleasant to hear old stories, especially those that happened to the Fatherland, thus these are included briefly herein in chronological order for the purpose of remembrance, but nevertheless true to fact.36

The recounting of occurrences concludes with an image that makes it possible for the town to remember and comprehend the devastations of the war in the future: “In sum if from such time up to the year [16]49 or [16]50, all the soldiers who were here during this thirty years’ war were lying on top of one another, they would cover over this little town so that one couldn’t see a single house sticking out above them.”37 One of the most informative testimonies that has come down to us from an autodidact, the “Zeytregister” of the cobbler Hans Heberle who lived in the countryside near the town of Ulm, likewise characteristically exhibits ready use of the term and image of the Thirty Years’ War and the adaptation of this picture according to the author’s own personal experiences.38 Andreas Merzhäuser has demonstrated how Heberle, down to the very use of the chronicle form in his text, gave expression to the “tension between the desire for order and the experience of the loss of order” in the war.39 Thus in the revised version 35 “The memory of past suffering is quite pleasant.” Zeitel, “Die kirchlichen Urkunden,” 233. 36 “so [haben wir] mehren theilß den ganz[en] Krieg ausgestanden[,] Ubel/ und Guthes gelitten, selzame Ding gesehen: Und weiln alte Geschichte/ zu mahl [solche, die] dem Vatterland begegnet[,] zu hören lieb u[nd] angnehmb/ also ist solche der Zeith Kürzheit [sic] nach eilent [d. h. nacheinander] hierin zum Andenkhen/ iedoch in wahrhafft[igen] Grundt [sic] eingelegt worden.” Ibid., 238–39. 37 “In Summa wenn von solcher Zeith biß ao p.[erge; i.e., lat. usw.] 49. 50. alle die Soldaten, so/ in diesem 30iährigen Krieg alhier gewesen, bey ein ander [lägen], bedeckten solche hiesiges Städtlein, d[a]z nit ein Hauß oben vor zu sehen.” Ibid., 235–36. 38 See the excellent edition, Gerd Zillhardt, ed., Der Dreißigjährige Krieg in zeitgenössischer Darstellung. Hans Heberles “Zeytregister” (1618–1672): Aufzeichnungen aus dem Ulmer Territorium. Ein Beitrag zu Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsverständnis der Unterschichten (Ulm: Kohlhammer, 1975). 39 “Spannung zwischen dem Verlangen nach Ordnung und der Erfahrung des

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of his chronicle, which Heberle had composed close to the time of the events, the author numbered the accounts of the many times he had had to flee to the protective walls of the nearby city of Ulm over the course of the war; by the end of the war he had gotten up to the number twenty-nine. He then again had to flee on Sunday, November 12, 1648, at exactly that point in time when the city council of Ulm had announced for the following day the festival of thanksgiving and rejoicing to celebrate the peace that had just been signed in Münster and Osnabrück.40 The cobbler assessed this last of his twenty-nine flights to the city in a belated addition to his writings, and in this belated addition rounded the total up to thirty. Writing for his descendents so that they would remember and be warned,41 Heberle took up a schema that was well-known after 1648 when he recorded it. He employed precisely this schema to make conceivable to himself and his intended audience that the great war and his own relatively regularly occurring flights to the city formed a single unit. Twenty years later he would employ the label “Thirty Years’ War” as he recalled the past war in the face of present danger.42 He was aware that the oppressive experience of his many other retreats to neighboring villages and into the woods could not be pressed into this numerical ordering but that they had instead simply to be included within the framework of the general history of the war:

Ordnungsverlusts.” Andreas Merzhäuser, “Das ‘illiterate’ Ich als Historiograph der Katastrophe: Zur Konstruktion von Geschichte in Hans Heberles ‘Zeytregister’ (1618– 1672),” Zeitenblicke 1, no. 2 (2002): http://www.zeitenblicke.historicum.net/2002/02/ merzhaeser/index-html (accessed 4 February 2009). See also Shin Demura, “Flucht der Landbevölkerung in die Stadt im Dreißigjährigen Krieg am Beispiel der Reichsstadt Ulm und ihrem Territorium,” in Krieg, Militär und Migration in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Matthias Asche, Michael Herrmann, Ulrike Ludwig, and Anton Schindling, Herrschaft und soziale Systeme in der Frühen Neuzeit 9 (Berlin: Lit, 2008), 187–202. 40 Zillhardt, Zeytregister, 224n472, 473. 41 Cf. Heberle, Zeytregister, 89. 42 Heberle used the concept in his depiction of renewed and feared perils of war raised by a French as well as a Turkish invasion in the year 1667, invasions that revived the memory of the “Erfahrung” (experience) of the Thirty Years’ War for him: “Mir wollen Gott, den Allmechtigen, von Grundt unsers Hertzens bütten, daß er unßer Teütschlandt und das gantze Römische Reich woll bewahren und behüeten vor dem Erbfeindt, dem Türckhen und andere außlendischen Völckher. Dan wir haben leider gnug in dem 30jerigen Krieg erfahren und außgestanden.” (We should ask God the Almighty from the bottom of our hearts that he protect and keep us from the ancient enemy [Erbfeind], the Turk and other foreign peoples; for we unfortunately experienced and endured quite enough in the thirty years’ war.) Heberle, Zeytregister, 267.

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hans medick We were happy to flee this time because it was the last escape, the 29th or approximately 30th or even more, all of which could not possibly be described. These flights and still others besides, to other destinations, which I could not write down at the time on account of being sorely distressed. For often one village or hamlet fled to another and vice versa. There were also often escapes to the thickets and forests that simply cannot be described.43

But in his concrete expression of his experience of fleeing in his retrospective look at his escapes to the city and in his admission of the indescribability of all his escapes—“on account of being sorely distressed” (einer Not halber) and because of their great number, as he says—Heberle does not confine himself to the scheme of thirty. In the end, he once again emphatically recalls what are typical personal experiences of flight and then contrasts these with the “noble peace” (edlen Frieden): In sum it was such a pitiable affair that even a stone would have taken pity, let alone a human heart. For we were hunted like game in the woods. One was caught and badly beaten, the other clubbed and stabbed, the third was even shot, and the last one robbed of his bit of bread and his clothes. Thus we cannot praise and glorify God enough for the noble peace that we have witnessed.44

One characteristic of this and many other personal accounts from the Thirty Years’ War is striking: wherever the authors begin to speak of what is special about the events that they have experienced in conjunction with the general context of the experience of the war, they characterize it as a unique excess of violence, destruction, suffering,

43 “wir seyen dißmall noch gern geflohen, weil es die leste Flucht war, die 29 oder ungefehr 30 und woll mehr, die einer Not halber nit alle beschriben hat. Dise und andere mehr, welche hin und wider in andere Fleckhen, die wir zueinander getaun haben. Dan offt ein Dorff und Weiler zue dem ander geflohen ist. Es sindt auch vül Fluchten in die Heltzer und Wäldt geschehen, die einem nicht möglich alle zu schreiben sein.” Heberle, Zeytregister, 224–25. Immediately following the passage quoted, Heberle emphatically clarifies the vaguely indicated number of his thirty flights when he writes, “Dan waß haben wir außgestanden in denen 30 Fluchten, die allein nach der Stat Ulm geschehen sindt” (For what all did we endure alone in those thirty flights to the city of Ulm). 44 “In summa es so ein jämerlicher Handel geweßen, das sich einem Stein solt erbarmet haben, wüll geschweigen ein menschliches Hertz. Dan wir seyen gejagt worden wie das Gewildt in Wälden. Einer ist ertapt und ubel geschlagen, der ander gehauwen, gestochen, der drit ist gar erschoßen worden, einem sein Stückhle Brot und Kleider abgezogen und genomen worden. Darumb wir Gott nit könen gnug loben und preißen für den edle Friden, den wir erlebt haben.” Heberle, Zeytregister, 225.

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and fear, such as has never before been experienced—as a rupture in experience that surpasses the experiences of war of all preceding generations. It is not rare in these documents for the author to reference his own “experience” (Erfahrung)—or, as a synonym, his personal “Erleben”—in conjunction with the suffering and acts of brutality recounted.45 A locution in a contemporary lexicon—“Experience is the master. Experience is the master of things”46—makes one’s “own experience” (eygene Erfahrung) the guiding principle and touchstone of moral precepts and wise judgment and also of the validity of texts; experience emerges as the court of appeals and the argument for lending credence to the depiction of the horrors of war in personal accounts from the age as well. Experience served to a certain degree as a category for testing suffering as well as being a category tested by suffering.47 The extreme experience of one’s own witnessing of this present war is, moreover, exposed here as a difference that separates it from the experience of earlier or later generations. At the end of the short biography he wrote in 1636 as a bequest to his son and daughterin-law, the Nassau pastor Johannes Plebanus thus characterized his experience of the war in terms that marked its incommensurability. On the run and in peril of his life, he expressed the wish that they would never experience such misery as he had: “God grant what we wish both him and his beloved young wife: that his and their descendents too never again witness such ineffable misery, ruin, and destruction, the like of which our ancestors back ten generations and more

45 In Heberle’s personal account, the intention for writing is described as follows: “thus I will not make a big fuss about it, but will only note down what I hear to be certain and true and also saw and heard with my own eyes and ears. Also along with what I experienced and witnessed myself, that is the very thing I will briefly describe.” (so will ich nicht vüll Umbstendt machen, sondern nur ein wenig . . . verzeichne[n], was ich für gewiß und wahrhaffte höere und auch selbs mit meine Augen und Ohren gesehen und gehert hab. Auch darneben, was ich selbs erfahren und erlebet hab, das selbig will ich kürtzlich beschreiben.) Heberle, Zeytregister, 86. 46 “Erfahrung ist der Meister. Rerum magistra Experientia est.” Christophorus Lehmann, “Erfahrung,” in Florilegium Politicum: Politischer Blumengarten, darinn außerlesene politische Sentenz, Lehren, Reguln und Sprüchwörter auß Theologis, Jurisconsultis, Politicis, Historicis, Philosophis, Poeten und eygener Erfahrung . . . zusammengetragen (n. p.: self-published, 1630), 183; see also, “Erfahrung,” in Johann Rudolph Sattler, Teutsche Ortographey und Phraseologey . . . (Basel: Ludwig König, 1631), 177. 47 “One’s own experience must endure a great deal. Prudence is a very awful thing, when it comes from one’s own risk and effort” (Eigene Erfahrung muß sehr viel leiden. Est miserrima, quae venit ex propriis periculis et laboribus prudentia). Lehmann, “Erfahrung,” 183.

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never experienced.”48 Precisely the ascertainment of a rupture in experience—a difference in experience from what previous generations had seen—and the feeling of having lived through a literally previously unheard-of event are frequently cited in these personal accounts as the immediate occasion for writing. The often-cited topos of the indescribability and ineffability of the horror that is being recounted is what signifies the perception—and representation—of this rupture in experience; it is thus not merely a question of the “spatial and material capacity” (räumlicher und materieller Kapazität) of writing,49 as Andreas Bähr has recently argued. The question is how we approach these recorded perceptions of the violence of war and suffering and the fear and anxiety about them. Are they really to be deduced across the board from a specifically religious-cosmological schema of interpretation? Bähr traces the fear of war described in these texts for the most part back to a contemporary understanding of this fear as punishment for the failure of the victims of violence to fear God, asserting, “This fear was not merely the fear of imminent physical violence perpetrated by soldiers. . . . It was rather always the fear as well of a divine power that manifested itself in the soldiers: the fear of a God who made use of the violence of war in order to punish the sins of human beings.”50 In Bähr’s opinion, this religious interpretation, which shapes the testimonials, remained largely impervious to historical changes and actions resulting from the war. Thus Bähr is skeptical of Johannes Burckhardt’s interpretation of the contemporary view of the Thirty Years’ War as an “extreme experience that threatened culture” (kulturbedrohenden Grenzerfahrung) and the “first great disruption of the early modern historical imagination” (ersten großen Störfalls des frühneuzeitlichen Geschichtsbildes).

48 “Gott gebe, das wir beyde ihm und seiner vielgelibten Jungen Frau wünschen: dass seine, [und] auch ihre Nachkommen nimmermehr einen solchen unausprechlichen Jammer, Ruin und Verderben erleben, dergleichen fürwahr unsere Voreltern in das zehnde und mehr Glieder hinaufwerts nicht erfahren haben.” Ferdinand Heymach, ed., “Aufzeichnungen des Pfarrers Plebanus von Miehlen aus den Jahren 1636/37. Im Auszug mitgeteilt,” Nassauische Annalen 38 (1908): 267. 49 “Diese Furcht war nicht allein die Furcht vor bevorstehender physischer Gewalt durch Soldaten. . . . Sie war, vielmehr, immer auch die Furcht vor einer göttlichen Gewalt, die sich in der soldatischen manifestierte: die Furcht vor einem Gott, der sich der Kriegsgewalt bediente, um die Sünden der Menschen zu strafen.” Andreas Bähr, “ ‘Unaussprechliche Furcht’ und Theodizee: Geschichtsbewusstsein im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” WerkstattGeschichte 49.17 (2008): 18. 50 Bähr, “ ‘Unaussprechliche Furcht,’ ” 11.

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He is, however, also skeptical of Bernd Roeck’s sense of the healing effects of religious convictions and practices of both confessions on the mental trauma resulting from the experience of violence and suffering in the war.51 My historical anthropological view aims to move beyond this mere semantic analysis of fear and anxiety as relatively constant dispositions of perception. Such an analysis remains much too wedded to an intellectual historical approach and ignores changing contexts and thus changes in semantic fields. The historical-anthropological approach by contrast takes seriously the concrete descriptions of fear, anxiety, suffering, and death that appear in personal accounts as well as the lifeworld of the authors’ experience and actions—in the first place, it locates itself on this side of any kind of cosmological situatedness. It is precisely in their emphatic conjuring up of what they have witnessed and experienced in the way of suffering and violence—and not merely as a kind of topos of fear of divine punishment—that these personal accounts lay claim to their commemorative and monitory function. Hardly anyone describes his own fear and the resultant impulse to remembrance and mindfulness more impressively than the Upper Hessian Catholic peasant Caspar Preis, when in his 1640 chronicle he addresses his later readers and auditors: Now I loudly and imploringly beg all those who read or hear this story for the sake of God to remain quiet for a moment and consider and reflect on what we poor people experienced. In those times there was misery, fear, distress, and heartrending suffering among all the people. We were so fearful and so cowed that the rustle of a leaf chased us away, and I myself was several times affrighted, when the wind blew strong and the slate shingles in the church rattled, and I sprang from my bed many a night and thought that horsemen were running in the village.52

51 “Kulturbedrohenden Grenzerfahrung” and “ersten großen Störfalls des frühneuzeitlichen Krieg,” as formulated in Johannes Burkhardt, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 242, and 243 respectively; Bernd Roeck, “Der Dreißigjährige Krieg und die Menschen im Reich: Überlegungen zu den Formen psychischer Krisenbewältigung in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Krieg und Frieden: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Berhard R. Kroener and Ralf Pröve (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 265–80. 52 “Nun bitte ich all diejenige, so diese Geschicht lesen oder hören lesen, lautter und fleentlich umb Gottes Willen, das ihr doch wöllet ein wenig stielhalten und euch bedenken und besinnen, was doch wir arme Leuth erlitten haben. Es war Jamer, Angst, Noth und Hertzenleyd mit den armen Leuthen in der Zeit. Wir waren so gar geängstiget und verzaget, das uns auch ein rauschendes Blat verjaget. Und wie ich auch selbst etliche mal, wan der Wint stark hatt gewehet und die Schifferstein in

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There is, however, admittedly a striking discrepancy in these personal accounts, one first identified by the English historian Geoff Mortimer, namely, a discrepancy between the description of brutality that one has experienced oneself and one’s fear of it, on the one hand, and, on the other, the recounting of extreme horrors of the war that the authors did not witness themselves.53 The extreme forms of brutality depicted—from the often-reported cannibalism to rape and brutal murder—appear in numerous personal accounts largely only as indirect reports from a secondary oral or written source. To be sure, these reports tend to be religiously and cosmologically based. However, they too are founded on close-up personal experience of violence and fear (and cannot be understood simply as a reflection of a religiously grounded cosmological fear). One of the testimonials I have edited brings this particular historical logic and reciprocality forcibly to our attention: the “Chronicon Thuringiae” (Chronicle of Thuringia) of Volkmar Happe, steward of the Schwarzburg-Sonderhausens and later court counselor. Witnessing the plundering of troops as they passed through or as they blackmailed the locals in his administrative territory toward the end of the year 1634, Happe saw the intensification of violence as becoming, as it were, a general sign, precisely on the basis of his concrete experience: “These are certainly signs,” Happe writes close to the time of the occurrence, that our redemption through the second coming of Jesus Christ is near. In Schernberg in the evening around eight o’clock on the first of December a terrible fiery beacon was seen so people were certain that the entire village was in flames and so the schoolmaster rang the bells and everybody, greatly shaking and quaking, was of the opinion that Judgment Day was at hand.54

der Kirchen geklabert haben, erschrocken sein und auch des Nachts etlich Mal aus dem Bett gesprungen und gemeinet, es ränten Reiter im Dorf.” Wilhelm A. Eckhardt and Helmut Klingelhöfer, Bauernleben im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Krieges: Die Stausebacher Chronik des Caspar Preis 1636–1667, Beiträge zur hessischen Geschichte 13 (Marburg: Trautvetter & Fischer, 1998), 46. When he wrote his account, Preis assumed that a substantial portion of his audience would not be able to read and thus that they would have the text read aloud to them. 53 Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 174–78. 54 “Das sind ja gewiss Zeichen dass unsere Erlösung durch die Zukunft Jesu Christi nahe sey. Den 1. Dezember ist zu Schernberg abends umb 8 Uhr ein grausames Feuerzeichen gesehen worden, dass man nicht anders vermeinet, das gantze Dorf brenne lichterlohe, also dass der Schulmeister an die Glocken geschlagen und hat alles Volck in großen Zittern und Zagen anders nicht gemeinet, als dass der Jüngste Tag

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In this linking of portentous signs to personal witnessing, a basic trait of the personal accounts from the Thirty Years’ War becomes visible: the attempt to convert the recollection of war from the perspective of one’s own, personal memory into a further-reaching, general historical remembrance. We must distinguish oral, written, and other symbolic forms of memory in postwar recollection with regard to their duration as well as their form. The non-written transmission of remembrance of the Thirty Years’ War—at least insofar as it took place outside of the official, representational commemorations in churches and secular celebrations of peace—has been little researched. A few examples demonstrate nevertheless that war memories endured for many generations in everyday remembrance among the populations of specific regions affected by war. Thus under the date August 16, 1673, the Hamburg Newspaper Nordischer Mercurius wrote with regard to the continued deployment of French and imperial troops in South Germany of the fears thereby unleashed among the people in Franconia: “There is a general terror among all these people, as there was in 1634 and ’35 in the previous German War.”55 Nevertheless the reservoir of memory of the Thirty Years’ War was by no means confined to the “communicative remembrance” of the generation that immediately followed.56 It was written onto the “cultural memory” of the societies of Middle Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in a multitude of forms of expression, in monuments, and in practices. Among these are not only many local “lieux de memoire” with battle monuments—for example, the memorial stones erected on the Rhine crossing at Erlfelden or on the battlefield of Lützen—but also less spectacular places of memory and symbols like the numerous Swedish or Tilly redoubts, the names given

kommen würde.” Volkmar Happe, Chronicon Thuringiae, ed. Hans Medick, Norbert Winnige, and Andreas Bähr, with Joachim Ott, Thomas Rokahr and Bernd Warlich (Jena 2008), http://www.mdsz.thulb.uni-jena.de/Happe/quelle.php: I 349r–v. 55 “Es ist ein allgemeines Schrecken bey all disen Leuten, als etwas 1634. und 35. in dem vorigen Deutschen Krige gewesen ist.” Nordischer Mercurius (Hamburg 1673), 493–94, quoted in Repgen, “Geschichtsschreibung,” 105. 56 Jan Assmann, “Formen kollektiver Erinnerung: Kommunikatives und kulturelles Gedächtnis,” in Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992; 2nd. ed. 1997), 48–66; Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19.

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to fields, or other special memorials and monuments.57 The bronze chandelier in the Preachers’ Church in Erfurt, donated in 1647 by Eduard Bode, constitutes a salient example. Bode, the owner of the inn Zur hohen Lilie that had served as King Gustavus Adolphus’s headquarters in Erfurt, thereby commemorated the repeated sojourn of the Swedish king in the city 1631/32 as well as his death in the battle at Lützen. This chandelier captures the viewer’s attention in the nave of the church even today. When one takes a closer look, it reveals itself as a monument that immortalizes the “Lion of the North” as a chivalricProtestant hero, and on the other hand demonstrates his enduring connection to Protestant Erfurt: on the upper point of the chandelier there is a horseman on a prancing horse, over which an angel holds a laurel wreath. Beneath it there is a lion that in each of its extended paws holds an engraved tablet: on the one we read the words “with God and knightly weapons” (Mit Gott und ritterlichen Waffen) and on the other tablet, “In the year 1647, Eduard Bode donated this chandelier to honor the glorious memory of His Royal Majesty of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, and to adorn the church.”58

57 The commemorative stone, called a “Swedish column,” located on the Altrhein (Old Riverbed of the Rhine) at Erlfelden was erected in 1632 at the personal command of Gustavus Adolphus to commemorate his crossing the Rhine in this year. An illustration of it can be found in Rudolf Kunz and Willy Lizalek, eds., Südhessische Chroniken aus der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Lorsch: Larissa, 1983), 246. The commemorative stone for the battle of Lützen came to be erected as follows: very soon after the death of King Gustavus Adolphus in the Battle of Lützen on November 6, 1632, a Swedish soldier who was recovering from his wounds in a village near the battlefield took the initiative to have a heavy boulder rolled as a commemorative stone from this village to the vicinity of the place were the king was said to have been killed. The strength of the thirteen peasants who had undertaken this task is said to have given out, and thus the stone never reached the exact spot of the king’s death. F. Eduard F. Philippi, Der Tod Gustav Adolphs, Königs von Schweden in der Schlacht bei Lützen am 6. November 1632: Zur Erinnerung bei der zweiten Säkularfeier (Leipzig: Reclam, 1832), 81. On November 6, 1837, 205 years after the king’s death, the commemorative stone was made into a monument. On this day, in the presence of ten thousand men and women, a cast iron canopy designed by the Prussian State Architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was placed over the memorial stone. On the north and south sides above the four arches there are labels with the inscription “Gustavus Adolphus died here on November 6, 1632” and “He was fighting the battle of the Lord” (1 Sam 25:28). Cf. Maik Reichen and Inger Schuberth, eds., Gustav Adolf, König von Schweden: Die Kraft der Erinnerung 1632–2007 (Dössel: Janos Stekovics, 2007), 204–8. 58 “Anno 1647 zu glorwürdigstem Angedenken Ihrer kgl. Majestät zu Schweden Gustavi Adolphi zu Ehren und der Kirchen zur Zierat Eduard Bode diesen Leuchter verehret hat.” The words of the inscription on the two tablets can be found in Carl Beyer and Johannes Biereye, Geschichte der Stadt Erfurt von der ältesten bis auf die neueste Zeit (Erfurt: Keysersche Buchhandlung, 1910–1930), 547.

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The tin reproduction of a large canon ball with a fiery tail that was hung from the ceiling in the central nave of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig in the year 1663 constitutes a further especially striking monument of commemoration and warning from Middle Germany (the monument may have remained there up to the renovation of the church at the beginning of the nineteenth century).59 This commemoration occurred exactly thirty years after the siege and bombardment of Leipzig of August 1633, over the course of which the roof of the Nikolai Church was struck by a cannon ball and destroyed. The cannon ball with its comet-like fiery tail in the interior of the church was simultaneously commemoration and warning from above. It reminded the faithful every time they attended church of the horrors of the past war but also brought to mind the disciplinary rod of God that continued to menace them as it took on symbolic form in the fiery tail of the comet. Numerous local rituals of remembrance should be mentioned here too, most of them connected with memorializing the miraculous rescue of the community from certain destruction and including the celebrations of peace and the commemorative church services sponsored by the ruling authority. The best-known of these is surely the Augsburg Festival of Peace; since 1650 Augsburg Protestants have celebrated without interruption the restoration of the confessional parity in their city that had been lost in the Thirty Years’ War.60 The remembrance of the Thirty Years’ War after the seventeenth century, however, was definitively shaped by its textualization in poetry, pamphleteering, and historiography. In each case, the images of the war that had been handed down were thereby variously related to the discourses of the present day and reinterpreted. The enlightened distancing from the catastrophe of the war and the referencing of the accomplishments of the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück by the Enlightenment differed fundamentally from the confessional-religious appropriation of the memory of the Thirty Years’ War that was already circulating in the eighteenth century and culminated in the nineteenth

59 See Iccander (J.C. Crell), Das in gantz Europa berühmte, galante und sehnswürdige Königliche Leipzig in Sachsen . . . (Leipzig: Martini, 1725), 36–37. I thank Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville) for alerting me to this lost monument; see also the mention of it in her study Baroque Piety, Religion, Society and Music in Leipzig 1650–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 19n55. 60 Johannes Burkhardt and Stephanie Haberer, eds., Das Augsburger Friedensfest: Augsburg und die Entwicklung einer neuzeitlichen europäischen Toleranz-, Friedensund Festkultur (Berlin: Akademie, 2000).

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century. In such appropriations, the Thirty Years’ War was invoked as a period of extreme barbarism and violence, but also as a story shaped by acts of sacrifice and heroism on behalf of particular confessions. Seen in this way, it thus became the cornerstone of divergent national and political foundation narratives.61 Up to the development of the academic discipline of history starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, these divergent historical recollections had in common the characteristic image of this war as a historical extreme case and a negative example of a war with the greatest number possible of civilian casualties. It became, at least in the German-speaking societies of Middle Europe, the absolute historical measure of a war catastrophe. As a “superlative of horror” (Superlativ des Entsetzens), an “extreme case of the possible” (Extremfall des Möglichen) with regard to the devastating effects of a “great war” (großen Krieges), the Thirty Years’ War shaped the historical perception and evaluation of later wars.62 Not until the experience of the First World War in the societies of Middle Europe did this old idea of the “great war” relinquish its role as a negative measure. But even then, it did not do so completely. With the experience of the First World War, the image of the Thirty Years’ War was historicized anew. To be sure, in 1919 in the face of the German defeat, the historian Fritz Kaphahn was still able to make the following statement with the aid of a comparative glance at the effects of the Thirty Years’ War: “. . . we have to look back to the saddest periods of German history if we are to gain measures for the present. It is the time of the Thirty Years’ War, whose image rises up in us with hard clarity.”63 Yet just a few years later in 1929, the historian

61 On this subject, see Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Hilmar Sack, Der Krieg in den Köpfen: Die Erinnerung an den Dreißigjährigen Krieg in der deutschen Krisenerfahrung zwischen Julirevolution und deutschem Krieg, Historische Forschungen 87 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2008). 62 Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer coined the phrase “Superlativ des Entsetzens” in 1892 in his attempt at a critical methodological distancing. Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer, Deutsche Geschichte vom Westfälischen Frieden bis zum Regierungsantritt Friedrichs des Großen: 1648–1740, vol. 1 (Berlin: Baumgärtel, 1892), 102. 63 “. . . wir müssen in die traurigsten Abschnitte deutscher Geschichte zurückblikken, wenn wir Maßstäbe für die Gegenwart gewinnen wollen. Es ist die Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, deren Bild mit harter Deutlichkeit in uns aufsteigt.” Fritz Kaphahn, “ ‘1648 und 1919’: Ein historischer Vergleich,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte 15 (1919): 252.

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and fiction writer Ricarda Huch felt compelled to change the title of her great novel on the Thirty Years’ War. Having originally called it Der große Krieg in Deutschland (The Great War in Germany) when it first appeared over the course of the years 1912–14, she altered its title in the face of the experience of another recent “Great War,” seizing instead on the less grand formulation Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (The Thirty Years’ War).64 This retraction did not however mean that from the 1920s on the memory of the Thirty Years’ War had completely faded away and lost its significance in the twentieth century, in that “Age of Extremes” (Hobsbawm) of violence and war. Rather it is worth noting how the concept and image of the Thirty Years’ War in the course of and following the second “great war” of the twentieth century gained a new, although limited, currency when the concept of a “Second Thirty Years’ War” was coined in a referential and comparative gesture.65 This formulation served to characterize the continuities and concentration of war and other forms of extreme violence in the period of the two world wars (1914–45). It is nevertheless striking that this coining of a “Second Thirty Years’ War” remained confined to the perspectives of the political and intellectual elite and of professional historians. After sporadic early applications of the concept of a “Second Thirty Years’ War,” applications that went as far back as the late-nineteenth century, a conspicuous public use of the concept ensued after the Second World War broke out; it is to be found in a speech by Charles de Gaulle broadcast in 1941 and then again in a speech by Winston Churchill in 1944. Referring back to the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century, both de Gaulle and Churchill spoke of the Second World War as one episode in a protracted thirty-years’ war that had occurred as a result of the violent striving of Germany and its Germanism for hegemony and universal rule.66 Yet the fact that a few intellectuals, in particular Raymond Aron, and thereafter professional historians took up the concept of a “Second Thirty Years’ War” should not prevent us from recognizing that this concept lacked and still lacks precisely that background of experience

64 Ricarda Huch, Der Große Krieg in Deutschland, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Insel, 1912–14); Ricarda Huch, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Insel, 1929). 65 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweiter_Dreißigjähriger_Krieg (accessed 26 March 2009). 66 Ibid.

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and witnessing that from the start belonged for contemporaries themselves to the concept of a “Thirty Years’ War” and that thus determined the concept’s longue durée.67 Likewise, it lacked a mooring in popular memory. It was therefore not by chance that at the end of the fourth volume of his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler looked back—by his own admission from a bird’s eye view—at the years 1914–49, the “era of unparalleled upheaval,” asserting that “for this reason the question becomes still more pressing for the history of Germany than it is with reference to other turbulent periods, such as the Reformation or the age of reform after 1800, that is, the question as to the relationship of continuity and discontinuity in the historical process.”68 Wehler thus certainly posed an important historical question, yet he was unable to provide a satisfactory answer to it. The idea of a “Second Thirty Years’ War” with its implication of a continuous structural and experiential nexus between the two world wars of the twentieth century remains a mere historical concept; it lacks a broad mooring in the social culture of memory—in contrast to the “first” Thirty Years’ War, which even in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries can still exert the enduring effect of its legacy within the field of historical memory as a measure of size. However, precisely for this reason a comparison between a “first” and “second” Thirty

67 On Aron’s differentiated use of the concept in opposition to de Gaulle’s essentializing statement attributing the case of the two world wars to a “domination universelle de germanisme” (de Gaulle), and on the enrichment of Aron’s interpretation by means of an interesting reference to Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, see the insightful study by Matthias Oppermann, Raymond Aron und Deutschland: Die Verteidigung der Freiheit und das Problem des Totalitarismus (Ostfildern: Jan Torbecke, 2008), 432–37. The coining of the concept of a second thirty years’ war in the following works is important: Albert Muller, S. J., La seconde guerre de trente ans, 1914–1945 (Brussels: Édition Universelle, 1947); Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981) 3, 314–23; Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), esp. 20, 31–33; Fritz Stern, “Der zweite Dreißigjährige Krieg,” in Der Westen im 20. Jahrhundert: Selbstzerstörung, Wiederaufbau, Gefährdungen der Gegenwart (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 9–29. 68 “Drängender noch als im Hinblick auf andere bewegte Epochen, etwa das Reformationszeitalter oder die Reformphase seit 1800, stellt sich daher für die Geschichte Deutschlands im ‘zweiten Dreißigjährigen Krieg’ die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Kontinuität und Diskontinuität im historischen Prozess.” Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Vom Beginn des ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914–1949, vol. 4 of Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 2003), 985.

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Years’ War must strive for critical differentiation. This is what Eric Hobsbawm formulates in an unparalleled fashion in Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 as he casts a retrospective glance at his own life-long experience and work as an historian: Looking back on the thirty-one years from the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo to the unconditional surrender of Japan, they must be seen as an era of havoc comparable to the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth-century German history. And Sarajevo . . . certainly marked the beginning of a general age of catastrophe and crisis in the affairs of the world. . . . Nevertheless, in the memory of the generations after 1945, the Thirty-one Years’ War did not leave behind the same sort of memory as its more localised seventeenth-century predecessor. This is partly because it formed a single era of war only in the historians’ perspective. For those who lived through it, it was experienced as two distinct though connected wars, separated by an ‘inter-war’ period without overt hostilities. . . .69

The “shadow image” (Schattenbild) of the Thirty Years’ War that Friedrich Schiller evoked with reference to Wallenstein for the time around 1800 did not lose its power to set the standard in the twentieth century, the age of extreme violence, either.70 This phantom outlasted the world wars of that century and it resisted attempts to historicize these and to make them absolute, attempts that characterized all previous wars as lesser wars. It remains to be seen whether the Thirty Years’ War retains its function as a point of reference, as a shadow image, in the twenty-first century, in a time in which the might of the media and the ubiquitous presence of images charge and overlie the reality of wars and their historical memory.

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Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 52. 70 Friedrich Schiller, prologue to Wallenstein, in Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, ed. Fritjof Stock, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000), 16.

CHAPTER TWO

VANITAS, VANITATUM, ET OMNIA VANITAS: THE BAROQUE TRANSIENCE TOPOS AND ITS STRUCTURAL RELATION TO TRAUMA Claudia Benthien Cultural reflections about human loss usually appear in the form of retrospect: something is mourned that is essentially and inevitably gone. The bereaved endure their loss by imagining the ongoing presence of the deceased or the missing object or by trying to resuscitate past incidences and moments by means of their imagination. There is, however, another form of reflecting loss particular to early modern aesthetics that is structured in the mode of anticipation. This peculiar type of “endured loss” is to be found in the so-called vanitas topos prominent in Baroque literature and the visual arts alike.1 The present essay seeks to investigate the paradoxical time structures of this topos with regard to its treatment of loss and trauma. As a religious concept, vanitas—“vanity,” “transience,” or “Vergänglichkeit”—is often constructed in direct opposition to eternity. The radical brevity and evanescence of human life is effectively contrasted with the timelessness of heaven, as some lines from the poem “Vergänglichkeit” (Transitoriness) by Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau illustrate: Dein falsches scheinen In glück und freud/ Kehrt bald in weinen Der schnellen zeit Vergänglichkeit.

1 Cf. Ferdinand van Ingen, Vanitas und memento mori in der deutschen Barocklyrik (Groningen: Wolters, 1966); “Vanitas,” in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonografie, vol. 4, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum (Freiburg: Herder, 1994), 409–12; “Vanitas mundi,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 11, ed. Joachim Ritter et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 542–44; “Vanitas,” in Zum Sterben schön. Alter, Totentanz und Sterbekunst von 1500 bis heute. Catalogue Museum Schnütgen Köln, ed. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen (Cologne: Schnell + Steiner, 2006), 201–29; Walter Rehm, Der Todesgedanke in der deutschen Dichtung vom Mittelalter bis zur Romantik (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928), 189–243.

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claudia benthien [. . .] Mein gantzes leben Zu iederzeit/ Bleibt fest ergeben/ In freud und leid/ Der ewigkeit.2

In these lines, vanitas is depicted with its stereotypical attributes such as mere appearance, fluctuating affects—from bliss to suffering— and the central adjective “schnell” (fast, hurrying). Eternity, on the contrary, receives attributes such as “Zu iederzeit” (always/ever) and “fest” (firm/firmly). In some poems, its characteristics are enacted through the poetic language itself, for instance, in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s sonnet “Verlangen/ nach der herrlichen Ewigkeit” (Yearning for Glorious Eternity): Ach ich meyn die Ewig=Ewig=Ewig=Ewig=Ewigkeit/ in die der belebend Tod wird entleibend einverleiben.3

Greiffenberg not only evokes eternity here but also creates its correlative time structure in repeating the word “Ewig” (eternal/everlasting) as often as the alexandrine line permits. She further illustrates the paradoxical state of eternity in characterizing it as a hybrid form of “lifegiving death.” In effectively contrasting the earthly “Eitle Zeitlichkeit” (vain temporality) with the “Zeit=befreyte Zeit” (time-freed time) to be experienced in heaven, the author suggests that human temporality itself is but an illusion.4 Another prominent example for the lit-

2 “Thy false appearance | In happiness and joy | Will quickly turn into weeping | The transitoriness | Of hurrying time [. . .] My entire life | Always | Remains firmly devoted | In joy and sorrow | To eternity.” Benjamin Neukirchs Anthologie. Herrn von Hoffmannswaldau und anderer Deutschen auserlesener und bißher ungedruckter Gedichte, vol. 1 [1697], ed. Angelo de Capua and Ernst Alfred Philippson (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961), 466, 468. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by Lynne Tatlock and Claudia Benthien. 3 “Oh, I mean the ever-ever-ever-ever-everlastingness | In which animating death, taking life, will embody.” Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, Sämtliche Werke in 10 Bänden, vol. 1, Geistliche Sonette, Lieder und Gedichte, ed. Martin Bircher and Friedhelm Kemp (Millwood, NY: Krauss Reprint, 1983), 248. 4 “SChwing dich, meine Seel’/ in Himmel/ aus der Eitlen Zeitlichkeit! | schwing dich hin/ woher du kommst/ wo du auch wirst wider bleiben. | Wollst mit süsser Denke=Lust deine weil dieweil vertreiben: | biß du wirst ergetzt/ versetzet in die Zeit=befreyte Zeit” (Fly up to heaven, my soul, from vain temporality | Fly up from whence thou comest, where thou too will abide anew | Wouldst thou with sweet thinking-lust divert thy time | Until thou wilt be joyfully moved into time-freed

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erary depiction of eternity is the “Prolog der Ewigkeit” (Prologue of Eternity) of Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien, where a personification of eternity appears on the stage and presents the “Trauerspiel” prologue, deconstructing the desperate human efforts to preserve fleeting time.5 From the Middle Ages onward, the fact of human transience has been the central element of memento mori as a moral imperative: a constant confrontation of the religious self with its own mortality.6 A closely related concept is the so-called contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) with its main features: the poverty, powerlessness, and guilt that characterize human nature, the worthlessness of a life that leads only to decay, and, finally, the ugliness of death itself.7 Constant meditation on these inescapable facts was essential to acquiring the coveted virtue of constantia so prominent in Baroque neo-stoicism.8 “In the linking of Memento mori (contemptus mundi) and Ars moriendi, dying is represented as something close at hand; indeed, death is actually already there, and the reader witnesses, by speaking the verses, his own death, as it were, up to the final throes of death.”9 Van Ingen here rightly emphasizes an inevitable performance of death that is to be found especially in poetry, where the act of speaking is not only present in reference but is also often simultaneously executed.10 time). Ibid. Quoted here is the first quatrain directly preceding the two lines given above. 5 Cf. Andreas Gryphius, “Catharina von Georgien oder Bewehrte Bestaendikeit,” in Dramen, ed. Eberhard Mannack (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 125–28. 6 See van Ingen, Vanitas und memento mori, 66, and Marianne Mischke, Der Umgang mit dem Tod. Vom Wandel in der abendländischen Geschichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1996), 74–99. 7 See van Ingen, Vanitas und memento mori, 90. 8 Transience as well as the continuous transformation of all earthly beings was a theme that Seneca himself brought up time and again. See Friedrich Gaede, Humanismus, Barock, Aufklärung. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Bern: Francke, 1971), 119; Xaver Stalder, Formen des barokken Stoizismus. Der Einfluss der Stoa auf die deutsche Barockdichtung—Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius und Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976). 9 “In der Verknüpfung von Memento mori (Contemptus mundi) und Ars moriendi wird das Sterben als etwas nahe Bevorstehendes dargestellt, ja der Tod ist eigentlich schon da, und der Leser erlebt, indem er die Verse nachspricht, sozusagen sein eigenes Sterben bis zum Todeskampf.” Van Ingen, Vanitas und memento mori, 129. 10 A drastic form of such literary performativity is employed in the poetic subgenre of final “speech-acts” of jurists, rhetoricians, and scholars eloquently mourning their loss of voice in a paradoxical delivery of their own eulogy. See Claudia Benthien, “ ‘Itzt nun die Zunge fault.’ Der Tod als ‘Stumm-Macher’ in Andreas Gryphius’ Lyrik

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A further element of the vanitas topos is the notion of an emphatic present tense, expressed through the carpe diem idea, as a stanza of Andreas Gryphius’s religious ode “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!” (Vanity! Vanity of Vanities) demonstrates: Wach’ auff mein Hertz vndt dencke; Das dieser zeitt geschencke/ Sey kaum ein augenblick/ Was du zu vor genossen/ Ist als ein strom verschossen Der keinmahl wider fält zu rück.11

These lines emphasize the “Augenblick” (blink of an eye) as the one and only certain mode of existence. In love poetry, this argument about the evanescence of life and beauty often appears in a secularized form where it is deployed to persuade a woman to surrender to erotic love, e.g., in Hoffmannswaldau’s poems “ALbanie/ gebrauche deiner zeit” (Albanie, use thy time) and “WAs wiltu Doris machen/ Brich deinen stoltzen geist” (What, Doris, wilt thou do, break thy proud spirit) in the lines “Laß deine jugend brennen/ | Und laß der liebe glut | Durchwandern hertz und blut” (Let thy youth burn, | And let the fire of love wander through heart and blood), or in the rather drastic imagology of Johann Christian Günther’s poem “Als er der Phyllis einen Ring mit einem Todten-Kopf überreichte” (When he presented Phyllis with a ring with a death head).12 In accordance with this rhetoric of pleasure, in every Baroque still life, if one looks closely, one will find somewhere, hidden within the obscene beauty and opulent arrangement of exotic flowers or fruits, one tiny brown spot, a half rotten leaf,

und Trauerspielen,” in Memoriae Silesiae: Leben und Tod im Barock. Zum Gedenken an Marian Szyrocki (1928–1992), ed. Mirosława Czarnecka et al. (Breslau: Breslau University Press, 2003), 227–40; Claudia Benthien, “Ambiguities of Silence: The Provocation of the Void for Baroque Culture,” in Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and Creativity 1550–1750, Studies in Central European Histories 17, ed. Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 253–79. 11 “Awake my heart and consider; | That time’s gift | Is but a blink of an eye | All that you have previously enjoyed | Has discharged like a stream | That never will fall back down.” Andreas Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe der deutschsprachigen Werke, vol. 2, Oden und Epigramme, ed. Marian Szyrocki (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1964), 20. 12 Hoffmannswaldau, in Benjamin Neukirchs Anthologie, 1:70–71, 385–87, and 386, ll. 28–30, and Johann Christian Günther, Werke, ed. Reiner Bölhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 825, respectively.

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a fly, or some other indication of the coming—and yet conceptually present—decay. To summarize these introductory remarks on the motifs and aesthetic modalities of the vanitas topos, it is appropriate to refer to one of the most famous poems of the German Baroque, Gryphius’s sonnet “Vanitas, vanitatum, et omnia vanitas” ([Vanity, of vanities, and everything is vanity]; in a later version entitled “Es ist alles eitell” [Everything is in vain]): Ich seh’ wohin ich seh/ nur Eitelkeit auff Erden/ Was dieser heute bawt/ reist jener morgen ein/ Wo jtzt die Städte stehn so herrlich/ hoch vnd fein/ Da wird in kurtzem gehn ein Hirt mit seinen Herden: Was jtzt so prächtig blüht/ wird bald zutretten werden: Der jtzt so pocht vnd trotzt/ läst vbrig Asch vnd Bein/ Nichts ist/ daß auff der Welt könt vnvergänglich seyn/ Jtzt scheint des Glückes Sonn/ bald donnerts mit beschwerden. Der Thaten Herrligkeit muß wie ein Traum vergehn: Solt denn die Wasserblaß/ der leichte Mensch bestehn Ach! was ist alles diß/ was wir vor köstlich achten! Alß schlechte Nichtigkeit? als hew/ staub/ asch vnnd wind? Als eine Wiesenblum/ die man nicht widerfind. Noch wil/ was ewig ist/ kein einig Mensch betrachten!13

1

5

10

The speaker presents the all-embracing transience and vanity of all that surrounds him: buildings, cities, human bodies, plants, fame, even iron and marble, will vanish in a day. The central argument of the sonnet is made evident through a rhetorical employment of the antagonistic halves of the alexandrine verse in lines 2, 5, 6, and 8: Both “half-verses” of those lines state opposing facts; the first half creates something verbally whereas the second half brutally depicts— and performs—its coming or even present decay. An experience of

13 “No matter where I look I see nothing but vanity on earth | What this person builds today, that person tears town tomorrow | Where towns stand so gloriously, tall and fine | There a shepherd will shortly roam with his herds: | What now blooms so splendidly will soon be stamped to bits: | Whatever now so boasts and provokes, will leave behind nothing but ash and bone | There is nothing in the world that could not be transient | Now the sun of luck shines, soon it thunders with troubles. | The glory of deeds must vanish like a dream: | Shall then the water bubble, the fickle human endure | Oh! What is all this that we regard as precious! | But wretched nothingness? But hay, dust, ash and wind? | But a wild flower that one will not find again. | And yet no one can consider what is eternal.” Andreas Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe der deutschsprachigen Werke, vol. 1, Sonette, ed. Marian Szyrocki (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1963), 7–8.

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suddenness, of fleeting time, as the thematic content of the poem, is likewise expressed through the dualistic formal structure. The reader or listener has no time to intellectually grasp the change as a natural process but is rather subjected to its sudden occurrence. The personal pronoun “ich” (I) is used only once, as the very first word of the poem;14 thereafter a fundamental homogenization takes place, equating every part of the human sphere and incorporating all elements in the overall process of decay. The anonymity of this distinction is further emphasized through the vague demonstrative pronoun “dieser” (this) and “jener” (that) in line 2. Only once, in line 11, is a collective “we” addressed; the anonymous speaking “I” here includes himself in the decaying crowd. The tendency to generalize human destiny by referring to such rhetorical conventions as the notion of fortuna15 (luck) in line 8 is to be understood as a psychodynamic defense against the suffering of the first-person speaker. Through the choice of highly conventionalized images of destruction, decay, and death—like the rotting and ultimately vanishing flower (“Wiesenblum” [wild flower], line 13)16 or the body, transforming into bone and ash (line 6)—individual fears are at the same time de-substantialized and negated. In this regard, poetry fulfils—apart from its cultural functions of lament and consolation—a further function of making unbearable knowledge more palatable. Primary rhetorical strategies of such a psychic defense of loss are (1) a speaking through and of a general “you” or an abstract “we” instead of the first person singular; (2) the elimination of linear time structures and historical continuity; (3) a cyclic conception of

14 In the “Es ist alles eitell” variant, the first line begins by directly addressing the reader or listener “DV sihst, wohin du sihst nur eitelkeit auff erden” (Wherever you look you see nothing but vanity on earth). Ibid., 33. 15 See also the second “Reyen” in Gryphius’s “Trauerspiel” (tragic drama) Leo Armenius: “2. Gilt denn nichts, als Fall und Stehen, | Nichts denn Cron und HenckerStrang? | Jst denn zwischen Tieff und Hoehen | Kaum ein Sonnen Vntergang? | 3. Ewig wanckelbares Gluecke! | Sihst du keine Zepter an? | Jst denn nichts das deinem Stricke | Auff der welt entgehen kan!” (2. Does nothing matter but declining and standing upright | Nothing but crown and hangman’s noose? | Is there between abyss and heights | Scarcely a sunset? | 3. Eternally vacillating fortune! | Doest thou respect no scepter? | Is there then nothing in the wide world | That can escape thy noose!) Gryphius, Dramen, 60. For the anthropological implications of these lines, see Claudia Benthien, “Historische Anthropologie: Neuere deutsche Literatur,” in Germanistik als Kulturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung in neue Theoriekonzepte, ed. Claudia Benthien and Hans Rudolf Velten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), 56–58. 16 Cf. van Ingen, Vanitas und memento mori, 62, 134–35.

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creation and decay, becoming, and evanescence;17 (4) the gesture of contemptus mundi, a topical denial of worldliness—as a mere illusionary sphere of appearances—and a utopian projection onto an afterlife in an idealized beyond; and (5) the transformation of the vanitas complaint into a carpe diem persuasion. As should be evident from my remarks thus far, the vanitas topos in German Baroque literature operates with a specific, intrinsic notion of time, a notion that does not work on a referential level alone but on a performative level as well. The key element of the vanitas topos lies in the anticipation of fate by the creation of a conceptual simultaneity of present and future, by evoking the uneasy impression of their coexistence. A further element of this technique is literary deixis that allows the reader to experience the very transitoriness and decay that the poem simultaneously addresses, as some lines from Gryphius’s sonnet “Der Todt” (Death) illustrate: Nun wird die schönheit rauch; nun muß die Tugend weichen/ Nun ist dein Adel dunst/ die stärcke wird bewegt! Hier fällt auff eine Baar der Hutt und Krone trägt Hier feilt die grosse kunst kein Tagus schützt die reichen.

5

17 For instance, in the poem “Wende dich zum Beständigen. An die Eitelkeit” (Turn to what is constant. To Vanity) by Daniel Czepko: “Der WaßerBlast der geht im TropffenFalle fort, | Die Tropffen nimmt die Well’ und schlägt sie an den Port: | Den Wellen geht der Flug des Vogels weit vor hin, | Dem Vogel sucht ein Pfeil der Armbrust vor zu ziehn: | Der Wind gewinnet ab dem Pfeil an Schnelligkeit, | Dem Winde sieget ob die Flucht der raschen Zeit. | Den Zeiten laüfft zuvor der Sinn, den nichts beschleust | O Mensch, wie flüchtig nun dis alles fleucht und fleust: | Doch kan der Eitelkeit am Fliehn nicht abgewinnen | Blast, Tropffen, Welle, Flug, Pfeil, Winde Zeiten, Sinnen.” (The water bubble goes forth in the fall of the drops, | The wave takes the drops and throws them against the port: | The flight of the bird precedes the waves by far, | An arrow of the crossbow seeks to outdo the bird: | The wind surpasses the arrow in speed, | The flight of hurrying time wins out over the wind. | The mind, that nothing encloses, runs out ahead of the times | Oh mankind, how quickly all of this flies and flows: | But nothing can compare with vanity | bubble, drop, wave, flight, arrow, wind, times, thinking.) Daniel Czepko, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1.1, Lyrik in Zyklen, ed. Hans-Gert Roloff and Marian Szyrocki (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 84; or in Hoffmannswaldau’s poem “Die allgemeine Vergänglichkeit” (Universal Transitoriness): “Was hier verfaulen wird/ keimt zu dem neuen Leben; | Der Höchste wird den Leib der Seelen wieder geben/ | Denn sol auf Ewigkeit ein neu Verlöbnüß seyn. | Last ruhen/ was ihm Gott zu Bette hat geführet/ | Der Vater liebt ein Kind/ wenn er Gehorsam spüret/ | Kommt doch auf diese Nacht der rechte Sonnenschein.” (What shall here decay | Germinates new life; | The Highest will give the body back to the soul, | Then a new betrothal eternally shall be. | Let rest what God has put to bed, | A father loves a child, when he perceives obedience. | This night will be followed by true sunshine.) Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau, Gedichte, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 107.

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claudia benthien Man siht kein Alter an/ die gantz verstellte Leichen (O Freunde! gutte nacht!) wird in den staub gelegt Du scheidest! gantz allein! von hier! wohin! so schnelle! Diß ist deß Himmels bahn! die öffnet dir die helle!18

10

The here and now is emphasized by local and temporal pronouns (“nun,” “hier,” “diß” [now, here, this]). Death is evoked and anticipated in a plastic manner so that it can be experienced—according to the memento mori imperative—already in the “spring of life.” The very act of dying, of parting from this world, is mimetically depicted in line 9 in an exclamatory mode (“Du scheidest! gantz allein! von hier! wohin! so schnelle!”). Gryphius also uses such dramatic enumerations and unusual rhythmic patterns to depict an “actual damnation,” seen from the perspective of a spectator standing outside of the action, for instance, in his famous metrically irregular sonnet, “Die Hölle” (Hell).19 The temporality of the vanitas topos is paradoxical, insofar as it fundamentally denies linear time as such: present life and future death melt into a single, unified “tense,” creating an uncanny, hybrid state of being—a state that resembles our contemporary cultural notion of the “zombie” with his peculiar form of existence as a “living dead without memory.” Taken literally, it is precisely such a transhuman hybridity that is depicted in such formulas as “Der Mensch ist Leichenvoll/ wenn er sich recht beschaut” (Man is corpse-filled, if he rightly considers himself ), “O Mensch, du Grab der Eitelkeit!” (Oh mankind, thou grave of vanity!) or “IRdisches und Sterblich Volck/ lebend-todte Erden-Gäste” (Earthly and mortal folk, living-dead earthly guests), lines taken randomly from poems by Hoffmannswaldau, Czepko, and Lohenstein.20 Through such temporal inversions, death is present in life as much as life is present in death. The best description of

18 “Now beauty will become smoke; now virtue will give way, | Now your nobility is vapor, strength will be moved! | Here he who wears hat and crown falls onto a bier | Here no great art polishes, no Tagus protects the rich | One pays no respect to age, the completely disfigured corpse | (O friends! Good night!) is laid in the dust | You depart? all alone! from here! whither? so quickly | This is heaven’s path! It opens up the brightness for you!” Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe, 1:90. 19 See Angelo George de Capua, German Baroque Poetry: Interpretative Readings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), 105; Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe, 1:91. 20 Hoffmannswaldau, “Die allgemeine Vergänglichkeit,” in Gedichte, 104; Czepko, “Red aus seinem Grabe,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2.2, Deutsche Gedichte, ed. Hans-Gert Roloff and Marian Szyrocki (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 87; Lohenstein, “Umbschrifft eines Sarches,” in Gedichte des Barock, ed. Ulrich Maché and Volker Meid (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), 287.

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this odd temporality is perhaps the formula “Die Zeit eilt gleichsam selbst zu Grab” (Time itself rushes to the grave), a strange personification of time that Michael Franck chooses in his poem “Die Eitelkeit, Falschheit und Unbeständigkeit der WELT” (The Vanity, Falsehood and Inconstancy of the World)—or rather Hoffmannswaldau’s drastic version, “Die Kindheit ist verwest,” (Childhood has rotted), from his poem “Die allgemeine Vergänglichkeit” (Universal Transitoriness).21 Here, time is again personified and itself subject to a process of physical aging and decay. With its irregular and concurrently negating notion of time, aptly described by Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterochrony,”22 the traditional vanitas idea intersects with a much more recent cultural concept of coping with loss, suffering, and decay: the concept of trauma. At first glance, these concepts seem essentially antagonistic, since vanitas implies that the future is already present, whereas trauma implies that the past is still present. Both concepts share, however, the fact that time is not conceived as linear but—to quote a famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet—as fundamentally “out of joint.”23 According to Thomas Elsaesser, a central characteristic of trauma is precisely the loss of differentiation between psychic temporality and linear chronological time. Trauma theory deals, in this regard, with the “rival claims of memory time and historical time and their respective relation to perception, to self-awareness and the subjectivity of media experience.”24 A comparable loss of temporal differentiation is to be found in the vanitas concept. The Greek word trauma (wound) originally refers to an injury inflicted on a body; in psychoanalytic theory, however, it is understood as a wound inflicted upon the mind.25 In its most general definition, “trauma” describes the overwhelming experience of a sudden, catastrophic, or violent event that cannot be fully grasped as it occurs. 21 Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 4, ed. Albert Fischer and Wilhelm Tümpel (Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), 219; Hoffmannswaldau, Gedichte, 104. 22 See Michel Foucault, Die Heterotopien—Der utopische Körper. Les hétérotopies— le corps utopique: Zwei Radiovorträge. Bilingual Edition, trans. Michael Bischoff (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 7–22. 23 William Shakespeare, Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 228. 24 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” Screen 42, no. 2 (2001): 197. 25 See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3.

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The response to such an event or accident can take shape in the often delayed, uncontrolled appearance of intrusive phenomena, such as flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations, or other repetitive phenomena.26 The traumatized person is haunted or possessed by the shocking event and therefore cannot find closure.27 This event is ever present and subject to a continuous repetition.28 It can neither be completed—that is to say, lived through—nor fully repressed and is therefore suffered time and again. Cathy Caruth notes that “in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness.”29 Accordingly, the reader of vanitas poetry experiences a comparable “shock of belatedness.” The speaker in the poem cannot understand (and experience) how the state of the described object or body changes abruptly from life to death, from presence to absence. Here traumatic structures are not to be understood as (hidden) motifs for the writing of such poems but as being literally transformed into poetry. This observation corresponds to poststructuralist trauma theory, which itself is essentially based on a performative theory of language.30 It is useful to compare these notions of trauma with the vanitas poems in question, since there seems to be a striking structural analogy: in the poems the same metaphors and images of decay, brutality, cruelty, ugliness, and disgust are repeatedly invoked as in a magic ritual. The poets employ almost identical rhetorical formulas again and again, frequently “quoting” their own earlier poems or those of others. One has to ask, then, whether this poetic practice of producing such a multi-layered “corpus” of “Leichentext” (corpse text) can itself be considered the manifestation of an unbearable past rather than of a, so to speak, “unbearable future.” 31 The manic repetition of the invariable formulas of decay can be characterized as a form of numbing the speaker and at the same time as a—albeit only partly successful— 26

Ibid., 11, 91. See Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4–5. 28 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 92. 29 Caruth, “Introduction,” 6. 30 See Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 275, who refers critically to this notion by labelling it a “pathos of the literal” (266–97). 31 The word “Leichentext” refers to Kemper’s formula “Lyrik als Leichentext” (lyric as corpse text). Hans Georg Kemper, Deutsche Lyrik der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 4.2, Barock-Humanismus: Liebeslyrik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 320. 27

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form of “self-medication.” Caruth describes trauma as a specific kind of shock: It is not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late. The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death is thus not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known.

Caruth also emphasizes that the traumatic threat is precisely “a break in the mind’s experience of time.”32 The incomprehensibility of survival in the face of war, disease, and more generally the frailty and transience of human life preoccupies Baroque culture; the experience of trauma is not restricted to the individual but can also be collective.33 Therefore, I am not claiming that the authors mentioned in this essay necessarily experienced specific and concrete traumas in their own lives that can be inferred from their writing; however, all of them were subject to a collective traumatic disposition that becomes evident in their literary treatment of decay and transience.34 “Existenzangst” (existential anxiety) is the “Grunderfahrung der Epoche” (basic experience of the epoch) and the Thirty Years’ War has been frequently named a “Trauma der deutschen Geschichte” (trauma of German history).35

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Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62 and 61, respectively. I am indebted to Christopher J. Wild who initially developed the idea of discussing trauma theory within the context of the 2008 FNI conference on “Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany” by conceptualizing a panel on this very theme. 34 My argument is in accordance with Hans Medick’s essay in the present volume. I refer also to Mauser who rightly distinguishes between a “persönliches Erlebnis” (personal experience) and “persönliches Interesse” (personal interest); it is the latter that initiates poetry: “Was von allgemeinem Interesse ist, ist es unter anderem auch deshalb, weil es für viele von persönlichem Interesse ist. Nicht das persönliche Erleben und Empfinden zählt also, sondern das persönliche Interesse. . . . In diesem Sinn haben die bitteren Erfahrungen des Dichters [Gryphius] Eingang in das Werk gefunden.” (What is of general interest is so, among other things, because it is of personal interest for many people. It is therefore not personal experience and feeling that count, but rather personal interest. . . . In this sense the bitter experiences of the poet [Gryphius] gained entrance into his work.) Wolfram Mauser, Dichtung, Religion und Gesellschaft im 17. Jahrhundert: Die ‘Sonette’ des Andreas Gryphius (Munich: Fink, 1976), 134. 35 Conrad Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” in Deutsche Dichter des 17. Jahrhunderts: Ihr Leben und Werk, ed. Harald Steinhagen and Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Schmidt, 1984), 444, and Michael Maurer, “Geschichte und gesellschaftliche Strukturen des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Albert Meier (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 43, respectively. 33

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As it is well known, Gryphius, who wrote the most significant religious vanitas poems of the era, was exposed to the savagery of war and the vehemence of Counter-Reformation zealotry as a child.36 He developed his “negative anthropology” as a response to war and its physical as well as spiritual consequences.37 It is, for example, an established view in early modern scholarship that the sudden death of Gryphius’s father when the poet was a small child was closely related to religious and political controversies and their depressing results. At the age of twelve, Gryphius was orphaned and became dependent on the help of people who themselves suffered persecution, misery, and distress.38 Conrad Wiedemann explicitly speaks of a “traumatisches Jugenderlebnis der Kriegsnot” (traumatic experience of the misery of war in his youth) as the most obvious reason for the “Trauer und Jammerton” (grief and tone of lament) so significant for Gryphius’s literary works and attributes a “Kriegsschock als Ursache poetischer Melancholie” (shock of war as the cause of poetic melancholy).39 Conversely, Hoffmannswaldau, who created a more “worldly” type of vanitas poetry, did not suffer as much personally— because, among other things, he was away from Silesia for a couple of years as a student—but he nevertheless came of age in the same atmosphere of war and misery.40 Accordingly, Frank Heiduk speaks of his “Mutlosigkeit” (lack of courage) and refers to Hoffmannswaldau’s ambivalent description as a “zutiefst gespaltene, eine heillos zerrissene Persönlichkeit” (deeply split, hopelessly disintegrated personality).41 36

De Capua, German Baroque Poetry, 97. I invoke here the helpful category of a “Negative Anthropologie” that Mauser develops for Gryphius’s sonnets. Cf. Mauser, Dichtung, Religion und Gesellschaft im 17. Jahrhundert, 149–52. 38 See Marian Szyrocki, Der junge Gryphius (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1959), 25–42; Eberhard Mannack, Andreas Gryphius (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), 3–4; Nicola Kaminski, Andreas Gryphius (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), 15–18. 39 Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” 447–48. 40 See Erwin Rothermund, Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1963), 3; Eberhard Mannack, “Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau,” in Deutsche Dichter, vol. 2, Reformation, Renaissance und Barock, ed. Gunter E. Grimm and Frank Rainer Max (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989), 251–65; Frank Heiduk, “Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau,” in Deutsche Dichter des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ihr Leben und Werk, ed. Harald Steinhagen and Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Schmidt, 1984), 473–96; Lothar Noack, Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau: (1616– 1679). Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999). Hoffmannswaldau was away from Breslau from 1636 to 1641; only when he returned was he confronted with the terrible destruction in Silesia. 41 Heiduk, “Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau,” 489, 493. 37

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Contrary to Gryphius, whose “manische Fixierung” (manic fixation) on mourning and lamentation is to be considered a somewhat singular “habitus,” for Hoffmannswaldau and many other poets of the German Baroque, the “Klagegestus” (gesture of lament) was only one form of poetic expression among many others.42 Their vanitas poems, however, are in my reading implicitly related to a collective traumatic disposition.43 A central characteristic of Baroque poetry, and especially of such formally elaborate forms as the sonnet, is its dependence on a given set of images, topoi, and stylistic means taken from poetic and rhetoric manuals of the period with their high esteem for the concept of imitatio. With the exception, of course, of occasional literature and such genres as the funeral sermon, this literary system in and of itself fundamentally rejects a subjective category like “experience.”44 In vanitas poetry, however, poets generally refer to no such concrete historical incidents. Also, there are no identifiable speakers or addressees—on the contrary: both are mere personae; they are fictionalized as masks or reciprocal topical role models. The speaker is not grammatically present in the text, and most of the poems do not relate to a self but rather deal with an anticipation of the death of the other: the addressee (who is often, but not always, a woman). A further tendency is to generalize the theme of transience by speaking about humankind per se. The absence of the speaker and his “human fate” can be understood as a contradictory strategy of distancing: on the one hand, the

42

Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” 444. Weithase rightly speaks of a “[m]ittelbare Darstellung des Kriegs,” (mediated representation of war) which also influences the representation and reflection of transience. See Irmgard Weithase, Die Darstellung von Krieg und Frieden in der deutschen Barockdichtung (Weimar: Böhlau, 1953), 37–42. One might also refer to Kaminski’s study whose general thesis regarding the relationship of the war and the genealogy of a “German” national literature is much stronger: Nicola Kaminski, Ex Bello Ars oder Der Ursprung der ‘Deutschen Poeterey’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004). 44 See, among others, Maria Fürstenwald, Andreas Gryphius ‘Dissertationes funebres.’ Studien zur Didaktik der Leichabdankungen (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967); Sibylle Rusterholz, Rostra, Sarg und Predigtstuhl. Studien zu Form und Funktion der Totenrede bei Andreas Gryphius (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974); Eberhard Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener (Munich: Kaiser, 1967); Rudolf Lenz, ed., Studien zur deutschsprachigen Leichenpredigt der frühen Neuzeit (Marburg: Schwarz, 1981); Liselotte Popelka, “Trauer-Prunk und Rede-Prunk: Der frühneuzeitliche Trauerapparat als rhetorische Leistung auf dem Weg zur virtuellen Realität,” in Oratio Funebris. Die katholische Leichenpredigt der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Birgit Boge and Ralf Georg Bogner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 9–80. 43

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poems try hard to evoke the coming decay by creating its uncanny, intense presence through the medium of language. On the other hand, there appears to be a fundamental split between the speaker and the object of his discourse. One may therefore argue in accordance with trauma theory that the very fact of the exclusion or elimination of the “I” can be taken as a proof of its (traumatic) “survival.” This elimination would imply that the speaker distances himself from the violence he describes in order to feel alive. He is subject to guilt due to the absence of remembrance, as the second quatrain from Gryphius’s sonnet “Menschliches Elende” (Human Misery) illustrates: Diß Leben fleucht darvon wie ein Geschwätz vnd Schertzen. Die vor vns abgelegt des schwachen Leibes kleid/ Vnd in das Todten Buch der grossen Sterbligkeit Längst eingeschrieben sind; sind vns auß Sinn’ vnd Hertzen:45

It appears that this reference to the dead in the lines that follow the quotation mainly indicates the fate to which all human beings—the collective “we” of the sonnet—are subjected. At the same time “our” cold-hearted forgetting of the dead can be considered a form of survivor’s guilt on the part of those who are still alive. An exemption from this literary tendency to generalize human fate by referring to the vanitas topos are those exceptional poems where the speaker laments his own sickness or anticipated death. Early modern scholarship has dealt intensely with such poems as Simon Dach’s “Als er die gantze nacht für engbrüstigkeit nicht geschlafen” (When he could not sleep the entire night on account of a constriction of the heart), Gryphius’s “Trawrklage des ‘Autoris’/ in sehr schwerer Kranckheit” (Lament of the “Author” in his Grave Illness) and “Threnen in Schwerer Kranckheitt” (Tears during a Grave Illness), and Paul Fleming’s “Herrn Pauli Flemingi der Med. Doct. Grabschrifft, so er ihm selbst gemacht . . . auf seinem Todtbette, drei Tage vor seinem seligen Absterben” (Epitaph of Mr. Paul Fleming, Medical Doctor, which he himself made . . . on his deathbed, three days before his blessed passing).46 These texts also illustrate human transitoriness and decay—due to their 45 “This life flies forth like chattering and joking. | Those who before us removed the cloth of the weak body | And in death’s book of great mortality | Have long since been inscribed; | They have vanished from our mind and heart:” Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe, 1:9. 46 Simon Dach, Werke [1876], ed. Hermann Österley (Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 803–5; Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe, 1:8 and 1:59, as well as related poems on 60–61

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personal appeal in a highly unsettling tone—but their aim is not a linguistic depiction of the suddenness of death. The speaker, at least, is still able to express himself in carefully formulated lines and complete sentences! Through their explicit self-referentiality, these texts overcome the aesthetic distance so prominent in other vanitas poems. Gryphius, for instance, depicts in his disease sonnets his own limbs as “verdorrt wie ein verbrandter Grauß” (dried out like a burned horror) or “Nichts wird als Haut vnd Bein mehr an mir vbrig funden” (nothing is left of me but skin and bones) and expresses his fear and pain: “Ich weine tag vndt nacht/ ich sitz in tausend schmertzen; | Vndt tausendt fürcht ich noch. . . .” (I cry day and night/ I suffer a thousand pains; | And fear a thousand more. . . .).47 The author’s present sufferings are employed as exempla; they are painfully described in the opening lines of the poem and are generalized and de-individualized in the following stanza. This transition is marked by a clear temporal shift from present tense (description of physical pain) to future tense (allegorical depiction of human transience). Only after their transformation from personal to general do the sufferings appear in metaphorical form and in such topoi as the decaying “Wiesenblum” (wild flower) or the comparison of human life with foam, a soap bubble, fog, or shadow.48 The process of distancing takes place here within the poem itself; the traumatic depiction of one’s own bodily decay is immediately succeeded by a reintegration of this singular pain into the common “body” of human agony.49

and 78 in the same volume; and Paul Fleming, Deutsche Gedichte, vol. 1, ed. J.M. Lappenberg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), 460. 47 Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe, 1:8 and 1:59, respectively. 48 In this regard, Mauser’s analysis of Threnen in Schwerer Kranckheit as a classical vanitas poem needs to be corrected. Cf. Wolfram Mauser, “Was ist dies Leben doch? Zum Gedicht ‘Thränen in schwerer Krankheit’ von Andreas Gryphius,” in Gedichte und Interpretationen, vol. 1, Renaissance und Barock, ed. Volker Meid (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 223. 49 Kühlmann makes a similar argument; he maintains that with his poem Gryphius “Front [mache] gegen eine offenbar als bedrohlich empfundene, weil im eigenen Ich angelegte säkulare Einstellung zur Welt” ([Gryphius] opposes a secular attitude toward the world, an attitude that he clearly feels as menacing because it is seated in his own ego). Wilhelm Kühlmann, “Selbstverständigung im Leiden. Zur Bewältigung von Krankheitserfahrungen im versgebundenen Schrifttum der Frühen Neuzeit (P. Lotichius Secundus, Nathan Chytraeus, Andreas Gryphius),” in Vom Humanismus zur Spätaufklärung. Ästhetische und kulturgeschichtliche Dimensionen der frühneuzeitlichen Lyrik und Verspublizistik in Deutschland, ed. Joachim Telle, Friedrich Vollhardt and Herman Wiegand (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 158.

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One may confront these vanitas poems, where the personal physical pain and decay of a male author are expressed, with those poems that explicitly take the coming—and yet present—destruction of the female body as their theme. In the latter texts, the beauty of the body and its anticipated decay are effectively contrasted. The first eight lines of Gryphius’s sonnet, “An Eugenien” (To Eugenie), illustrate this contrast: Was wundert ihr euch noch/ Ihr Rose der Jungfrawen Das dieses spiel der zeit/ die ros/ in ewrer handt Die alle rosen trotzt/ so vnversehns verschwandt? Eugenie so gehts! so schwindet was wir schawen. So bald des Todes seens wird diesen leib vmbhawen: Mus dieser hals/ die stirn/ die augen/ dieses pfand Der liebe diese brust/ der mund/ der arm in sand/ Vnd dem/ der euch mitt lieb itzt ehrt/ wird für euch grawen!50

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The poem is addressed to a fictitious female who is holding a rose—the vanitas emblem per se—in her hand.51 The sudden decay and seeming disappearance of this ephemeral, fragile flower is analogous to the future rotting of Eugenie’s beautiful body after it has been “slain” by personified death with his scythe. The male speaker assumes that the ugly corpse of his beloved will only evoke horror—he does so, however, in a highly aesthetic manner, as a “masquerade of cruelty as art.”52 Not only does the speaker emphasize the brevity of time left before the occurrence of her terrible death, he also linguistically decrees the woman’s future in a sadistic tone. 50 “Why are you still surprised, you rose of maidens | That this plaything of time, the rose, in your hand | That defies all roses, so unexpectedly vanished? | Eugenie that’s how it goes! thus vanishes what we see | As soon as Death’s scythe shall cut down this body: | Must this neck, the forehead, the eyes, this token | Of love this breast, the mouth, the arm turn into sand | And he, who now honors you with love, will shudder at the sight of you.” Gryphius, Gesamtausgabe, 1:44. 51 Gryphius repeatedly uses the rose motif allegorically, most prominently in his “Trauerspiel” (tragedy) Catharina von Georgien where it is embedded in a complex reflection on the tragic sudden “fall” of the young queen. See Gryphius, Dramen, 135–37. For an interpretation of the rose allegory in Catharina, see Thomas Borgstedt, “Andreas Gryphius: ‘Catharina von Georgien’: Poetische Sakralisierung und Horror des Politischen,” in Dramen vom Barock bis zur Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 42–44; Hans-Jürgen Schings, “Catharina von Georgien oder Bewehrete Beständigkeit,” in Die Dramen des Andreas Gryphius. Eine Sammlung von Einzelinterpretationen, ed. Gerhard Kaiser (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), 61–62. 52 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 37.

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In his famous Petrarchan sonnet, “Vergänglichkeit der Schönheit” (Transitoriness of Beauty), Hoffmannswaldau depicts the “Grim Reaper” not as a brutal executioner but, with reference to the medieval motif of “death and the maiden,” as a seemingly sensitive lover whose tender touch lets the erotic body parts fade and gradually lose their beauty and charm:53 ES wird der bleiche tod mit seiner kalten hand Dir endlich mit der zeit umb deine brüste streichen/ Der liebliche corall der lippen wird verbleichen; Der schultern warmer schnee wird werden kalter sand/ Der augen süsser blitz/ die kräffte deiner hand/ Für welchen solches fällt/ die werden zeitlich weichen/ Das haar/ das itzund kan des goldes glantz erreichen/ Tilgt endlich tag und jahr als ein gemeines band. Der wohlgesetzte fuß/ die lieblichen gebärden/ Die werden theils zu staub/ theils nichts und nichtig werden/ Denn opfert keiner mehr der gottheit deiner pracht. Diß und noch mehr als diß muß endlich untergehen/ Dein herzte kan allein zu aller zeit bestehen/ Dieweil es die natur aus diamant gemacht.54

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Like other traditions of a lyrical deconstruction of the female body— for instance the medieval minne poetry with its top-to-toe praise or the sixteenth-century French blasons anatomiques55—single parts of the female corpus are metaphorically described ‘in the mode of a

53 Cf. Christian Wagenknecht, “Memento mori und Carpe diem. Zu Hoffmannswaldaus Sonett ‘Vergänglichkeit der Schönheit,’ ” in Gedichte und Interpretationen, vol. 1, Renaissance und Barock, ed. Volker Meid (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 337. 54 “In time, Death with his cold hand will | At the last caress your breasts | The delicious coral of your lips will pale; | The warm snow of your shoulders will turn to cold sand. | The sweet flash of your eyes, the powers of your hand | Will at last surrender to him, before whom all such things will fall. | Your hair, that now rivals the gleam of gold itself, | Will be destroyed by days and years like an ordinary ribbon. | Your neat foot, your delightful ways | Will turn to dust or to nothingness itself; | Then no one will pay homage any more to the divinity of your splendour. | This and much more than this must come to an end at last, | Your heart alone can endure to all time, | For Nature has fashioned it of diamond.” Benjamin Neukirchs Anthologie, 1:46–47; “Transitoriness of Beauty,” in The Penquin Book of German Verse, introd. and ed. Leonard Forster (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1957), 139. 55 See Hartmut Böhme, “Erotische Anatomie: Die Blasons auf die weiblichen Körperteile,” in Körperteile. Eine kulturelle Anatomie, ed. Claudia Benthien and Christoph Wulf (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2001), 228–53; Nancy Vickers, “Members Only,” in The Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3–21.

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“Summationsschema” (scheme of summation).56 Several of the alexandrine lines (4, 5, 7, 9) employ the antagonistic structure so typical for German Baroque sonnets: in that “the beauty of the beloved that is invoked in the first half of the line is effectively constrasted with its decay in the second half ,”57 the poetic praise suddenly turns into desengaño (disillusion). At first glance, the primary rhetorical impetus of Hoffmannswaldau’s poem is memento mori. Upon a closer look, however, one perceives a shift toward the contrasting carpe diem impulse from line 11 onward.58 Both motifs are contradictory insofar as one explicitly denies and the other affirms life—both with the aid of vanitas imagology. It is precisely the motif of the vanity of beauty that can be taken as proof for the general assumption that, in the seventeenth century, memento mori not only stands for “Diesseitsverachtung” (contempt for the world) and “Jenseitssehnsucht” (longing for heaven),59 but also serves as an admonition, not to miss life. Instead of the oftenproclaimed antithetic of the Baroque mentality, a relationship of interdependence would be a more appropriate description since “it is death, which lurks everywhere, that calls forth lust for life. . . . Meanwhile . . . the dominance of the unvarnished description of ‘pale death’ in the role of the lover demonstrates the burden of catastrophe and the depressing pressure under which the feeling of being alive had to clear the way for itself in the seventeenth century.”60 The poem is based on a coherent structure of persuasion in its suggestion that the female addressee make better use of her beauty as long as it endures by surrendering to erotic love.61 The speaker threatens the addressee by evoking the terrible fate that awaits her body. The poem’s time structure is inverted mostly due to the use of the adverb “endlich” in its various meanings: on the one hand, it implies a future

56 Peter-André Alt, Von der Schönheit zerbrechlicher Ordnungen: Körper, Politik und Geschlecht in der Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 48. 57 “[D]ie in der ersten Vershälfte beschworene Schönheit der Geliebten [wird] in der zweiten unmittelbar mit deren Verfall wirkungsvoll kontrastiert.” Kemper, Deutsche Lyrik der Frühen Neuzeit, 4.2:214. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 215. 60 “Der allenthalben lauernde Tod treibt die Lebens-Lust gerade hervor. . . . Indessen . . . zeigt die Dominanz der unverschleierten Deskription des ‘bleichen Todes’ in der Rolle des Liebhabers, unter welcher Katastrophen-Last und unter welchem depressivem Druck sich das Lebensgefühl im 17. Jahrhundert freie Bahn schaffen mußte.” Ibid., 215. 61 Ibid., 211.

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far away (in the meaning of German schließlich, that is, “finally”); on the other hand, it is the “coming presence” of this unbearable future that is intensely produced through language. Semantically, endlich also refers, of course, to the frightful “end” of individual life—as well as its latent association with the so-called “little death” of sexual climax. And finally the gallant poet also knows about, and bemoans, the very evanescence of the carnal pleasure of which he is trying to persuade the anonymous addressee: WO sind die stunden Der süssen zeit/ Da ich zuerst empfunden/ Wie deine lieblichkeit Mich dir verbunden? Sie sind verrauscht/ es bleibet doch dabey/ Daß alle lust vergänglich sey.62

These somber lines might be taken as a self-deconstruction of the rhetorical aim of Hoffmannswaldau’s own poem “Vergänglichkeit der Schönheit.” Both in Gryphius’s and in Hoffmannswaldau’s sonnets the speaker’s own body seems to be miraculously excluded from the tragic—or, rather, the profane—process of decay. It is only the female body that will decay in time and that therefore functions as an allegory of vanity. The speaker himself, who “enigmatically survives,” implicitly claims, in addressing a female other, to be exempt from the vanitas trauma.

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“Where are the hours | Of the sweet time | When I first felt | How your charm | Bound me to you. | They have passed away, the truth remains | That all desire is transient.” Hoffmannswaldau, “Wo sind die Stunden,” in Benjamin Neukirchs Anthologie, 1:437.

CHAPTER THREE

DÜRER’S LOSSES AND THE DILEMMAS OF BEING Jeffrey Chipps Smith [I]t happened that my father was so ill with dysentery that no one could stop it. And when he saw death before his eyes, he gave himself willingly to it, with great patience, and he commended my mother to me, and exhorted me to live in a manner pleasing to God. He received the Holy Sacraments and passed away Christianly (as I have described at length in another book) in the year 1502, after midnight before St. Matthew’s eve [September 19]. God be gracious and merciful to him.1

Albrecht Dürer’s remarks about his father’s death are poignant. The eventual loss of one’s parents is a universal, albeit personally painful, experience. What distinguishes Dürer from most of his early modern contemporaries is the visual and textual documentation of his feelings. From 1491 to 1492 the artist made a quick sketch of himself on the verso of another drawing of the Holy Family (see fig. 1).2 He rests his right hand against his head as he stares out at a mirror. Since as viewers we occupy roughly the same position as the mirror, Dürer seems to look intently at us. If we return his gaze, it is easy to imagine his probing intellect and his introspective self-examination. The Nuremberg master wrote a family chronicle, a diary of his journey from 1520 to 1521 to the Low Countries, innumerable letters, poems, three theoretical treatises plus many unpublished drafts, inscriptions annotating works of art, and a host of other texts.3 More records exist for Dürer

1

Martin Conway, ed., The Writings of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 40. This book was originally published as The Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889). 2 Rainer Schoch, 100 Meister-Zeichnungen aus der Graphischen Sammlung der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, exhibition catalog, Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2008), no. 38. 3 Hans Rupprich, ed., Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlass, 3 vols. (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956–69); Conway, Writings; Heike Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte: Konventionen als Spielraum für Individualität (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002). For the convenience of researchers, I have supplied the corresponding German citation in each case where I quote an English translation of Dürer’s writings.

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than for Altdorfer, Baldung, Cranach, Grünewald, the Holbein family, and virtually all of their peers combined. Unlike his fellow artists, he left us his intimate thoughts on family, friends, life’s challenges, and of course art. Inspired by the novel theme of this conference, I wish to explore Dürer’s understanding of the concept of loss (verlieren, der Verlust) as expressed in his writings and art. His Self-Portrait of 1493, now in Paris (Musée du Louvre), for example, expresses a sentiment that we can all perhaps identify with—the loss of control. It contains an inscription that reads, “My affairs go as ordained on high.”4 Whether he refers to his fate as being in God’s hands or, alternatively, to his parents calling him back from his Wanderjahre along the Rhine to Nuremberg where he was expected to marry and settle down is unclear. Briefly, he is resigned to the commands of others. I shall consider five aspects of loss here: the loss of people, everyday losses, the perceived loss of self, the losses of art and artists, and, finally, the loss of Dürer as voiced by his acquaintances. Ultimately, Dürer consciously and unconsciously grappled with his own mortality as he as sought to create a lasting personal legacy through his art. The Loss of People Dürer wrote most poignantly about the loss of family, friends, and others whom he admired. The cruel realities of death certainly impressed him while he was growing up. His mother, Barbara Holper, bore eighteen children. Only Albrecht and two brothers lived to adulthood. Even by the standards of the day, such high child mortality rates were unusual. In 1524 he gathered together his father’s papers, which included a sober list of each child’s birth. The entry for our future artist reads, “Item, in the year 1471 after the birth of Christ, in the sixth hour of the day, on St. Prudentia’s day, a Tuesday in Passion Week (21 May), my wife bore me my second son. His godfather was Anton Koberger, and he named him Albrecht after me.”5 To this list Dürer

4 Fedja Anzelewsky, Albrecht Dürer: Das malerische Werk, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1991), no. 10; Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, introd. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Princeton Classic Edition (1943; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6. 5 Conway, Writings, 34.

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Figure 1: Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1491–92, pen and ink drawing, Erlangen, Graphische Sammlung der Universität (Photo: museum).

Figure 2: Albrecht Dürer the Elder (attributed), Self-Portrait, 1486, silverpoint drawing, Vienna, Albertina Museum. (Photo: museum).

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penned, “All these, my brothers and sisters, my dear Father’s children, are now dead, some in their childhood, others as they were growing up; only we three brothers still live, so long as God will, namely: I, Albrecht, and my brother Andreas (Endres), and my brother Hans, the third of the name of my father’s children.” Endres (1484–1555) and Hans (1490–1534), both artists, were the fourteenth- and seventeenthborn children. Concerning his father (see fig. 2), he writes, This Albrecht Dürer the elder passed his life in great toil and stern, hard labour, having nothing for his support save what he earned with his hand for himself, his wife, and his children; so that he had little enough. He underwent moreover manifold afflictions, trials, and adversities. But he won just praise from all who knew him, for he lived an honourable, Christian life, was a man patient of spirit, mild and peaceable to all, and very thankful towards God. For himself he had little need of company and worldly pleasures; he was also of few words and was a God-fearing man.6

Dürer found comfort for his losses through recording his thoughts. Perhaps, too, it is not surprising that the personification of death haunts many of his compositions.7 On March 19, 1514, Dürer made an unflinching charcoal sketch of his mother at age sixty-three (see fig. 3).8 The elderly are often shown in contemporary art as decrepit or morally impaired.9 Dürer, however, tenderly portrayed the ravages of age. Barbara was old by the standards of the time. The skin is taut over her sunken cheeks and almost emaciated-looking neck. Rows of wrinkles crease her fore-

6 Ibid., 35, for both quotations. On the drawing, see Klaus Schröder and Maria Luise Sternath, eds., Albrecht Dürer, exhibition catalog, Albertina (Vienna: Albertina, 2003), no. 2. 7 For instance, see his drawing Death Riding a Horse (1505) in London (British Museum) or his engravings Ravisher (ca. 1495) and Promenade (ca. 1498). Giulia Bartrum, ed., Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, exhibition catalog, London, British Museum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), no. 95; Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, eds., Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, 3 vols. (Munich: Prestel, 2001–4), 1: nos. 1 and 19. 8 Friedrich Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, 4 vols. (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1936–39), no. 559; Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, 6 vols. (New York: Abaris Books, 1974), 3: no. 1514/1; and especially Michael Roth, ed., Dürers Mutter: Schönheit, Alter und Tod im Bild der Renaissance, exhibition catalog, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin: Nicolai, 2006), no. 1 and passim. I wish to thank Helmut Puff for sharing his essay in the current volume. 9 On the elderly in German art, see Roth, Dürers Mutter, nos. 51–81.

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head. A prominent vein protrudes at her left temple. Barbara’s long nose almost overhangs her upper lip. The mouth is rather hard and slightly pulled down. Her eyeballs bulge forward while the surrounding sockets recede. Barbara looks weary and ill. The portrait’s apparent accuracy has inspired a medical diagnosis speculating that Barbara suffered from a cancerous stomach tumor. This ailment has caused her cachexia, the general wasting of her body, as well as the loss of her front teeth especially on the upper jaw.10 When Dürer finished the drawing, he added the date and Barbara’s age. A second inscription confirms her death less than two months later. In the surviving fragment from his Gedenkbuch, Dürer penned a lengthy description of his mother and her death. He notes that her health had been poor since his father’s death in 1502 and that in 1504 she had moved into his household. On April 26, 1513, Barbara was so weak that they had to break into her room and carry her downstairs. She received the sacraments and absolution but, to the artist’s surprise, Barbara did not die. When therefore Dürer drew her portrait, Barbara’s health had been extremely fragile for almost a year. On May 16, 1514, she again received last rites and told her son to keep himself from sin. He observes, she feared death very much, but she said that she was not afraid to come before God. Also she died hard, and I noticed that she saw something frightening; for she asked for the holy water and then said nothing for a long time. Then her eyes closed. I saw, too, how Death gave her two great strokes to the heart, and how she closed her mouth and eyes and departed in pain. I repeated to her the prayers. I felt so grieved for her that I cannot express it. God be merciful to her. . . . And in her death she looked more lovely [or sweet; liblicher] than in life.11

Barbara’s illness and death compelled Dürer’s pictorial and written responses. Although some of his comments about his mother’s piety, not quoted here, sound rather formulaic, as if in keeping with the admonitions of treatises about the “good” death, there is still a raw

10 Wolfgang Pirsig, “ ‘Dürers Mutter’—aus ärztlicher Sicht,” in Roth, Dürers Mutter, 17–22; Magdalena Bushart, “ ‘Dürers Mutter’ im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Roth, Dürers Mutter, 177, fig. 5, which compares Dürer’s mother and actress Sophia Loren at sixty-three. 11 Conway, Writings, 77–78; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:36–37; Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer—A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 121–22; Peter Parshall, “Albrecht Dürer’s Gedenckbuch and the Rain of Crosses,” Word & Image 22 (2006): 207.

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Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, Barbara Holper (Dürer’s Mother), 1514, charcoal drawing, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY).

Figure 4: Albrecht Dürer (copy after), Death of Crescentia Pirckheimer, original dated 1504, pen and ink drawing, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett. (Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY).

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poignancy and deep filial love in his words. No other German artist and perhaps no other Renaissance artist authored such a vivid account of personal loss. Dürer also grieved over the deaths of other family members and friends.12 He writes, for example, of his father-in-law: In the year 1523 (as they reckon it), on our dear Lady’s day when she was offered in the Temple [November 21], early, before the morning chimes, Hans Frey, my dear father-in-law, passed away. He had lain ill for almost six years and suffered quite incredible adversities in this world. He received the Sacraments before he died. God Almighty be gracious to him.13

Dürer also sketched the deathbed scene of Crescentia, the wife of his best friend, Willibald Pirckheimer, who died due to childbirth complications on May 17, 1504 (see fig. 4).14 The original watercolor disappeared in the seventeenth century but survives in four copies. The composition recalls depictions of the Death of the Virgin Mary and the ars moriendi, which suggests the arrangement was invented rather than observed. Priests, family, and friends surround Crescentia. Willibald, standing stooped at the head of the bed, wipes his tears away with a cloth. His grief is noted in the accompanying inscriptions along with information about her death.15 Pirckheimer himself ordered this pictorial record of loss, which remained in his family until his heirs sold it in 1633. Although Dürer and Martin Luther never met, they admired each other. The artist owned numerous pamphlets authored by the Reformer and was a member of a Nuremberg group known as the Sodalitas Staupitziana that met at the local Augustinian monastery to discuss contemporary religious issues. By the end of the 1510s, the group was dubbed the Sodalitas Martiniana because of the members’ interest in Luther’s evolving theology. Dürer was visiting Antwerp when, on May 17, 1521, news came that Luther had been abducted on his return to

12 For example, he writes from Venice to Pirckheimer on September 8, 1506: “I have given Bernhard Hirschvogel your greeting and he sent you his service. He is full of sorrow for the death of his son, the nicest lad I ever saw.” Conway, Writings, 55; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:55. 13 Conway, Writings, 128; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:31. 14 Anzelewsky, Das malerische Werk, 185–90, no. 81; Roth, Dürers Mutter, no. 31. 15 Anzelewsky, Das malerische Werk, 187.

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Wittenberg from the Diet of Worms. Fearing that Luther had been murdered, Dürer composed a poignantly bitter lament directed to God. This, the lengthiest of any of his writings about his contemporaries, appears within his Netherlandish journal. Near the beginning he remarks, And whether he yet lives I know not, or whether they have put him to death; if so, he has suffered for the truth of Christ and because he rebuked the unchristian Papacy, which strives with its heavy load of human laws against the redemption of Christ. And if he has suffered, it is that we may again be robbed and stripped of the fruit of our blood and sweat. . . . Oh God of heaven pity us! Oh Lord Jesus Christ pray for Thy people! Deliver us at the fit time.

He continues by comparing Luther to the suffering Christ who “die[d] by the hands of the priests.”16 Dürer praises Luther’s books and their clarity: “Oh God, if Luther be dead, who will henceforth expound to us the holy Gospel with such clearness? What, oh God, might he not still have written for us in ten or twenty years!” In vain, he hopes that Erasmus will pick up Luther’s mantle. These few excerpts convey something of the raw emotion and intense sense of spiritual loss Dürer felt upon hearing the initial reports from Germany. Again, no comparable remarks are recorded by any other German artist. Dürer’s comments about Luther, while less personal than those about his immediate family and friends, are no less poignant. He grappled with his religious faith privately and publicly throughout the last decade of his life. As a member of the city council, he would vote in 1525 to make Nuremberg officially Lutheran. I suspect that in 1521 Dürer, like many others, questioned the traditional tenets of his faith and saw Luther as a powerful force for renewal. His reaction to the news of Luther’s disappearance is therefore understandable. Dürer’s spiritual identity was an integral and absolutely sincere aspect of his artistic and textual self-portrait (see figs. 8 and 10). Everyday Losses Dürer died a very wealthy man. Yet he fretted over actual and potential financial losses throughout his career. In this respect, he may not

16

Conway, Writings, 158–59; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:170–72.

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have been different from many of his contemporaries living in an age of opportunities and uncertainties. Dürer, however, repeatedly wrote about this topic in his letters and his Netherlandish journal. Sometimes he comes across in a less than flattering light. During his second trip to Venice, which lasted from December 1505 to February 1507, Dürer corresponded regularly with his best friend, Pirckheimer, in Nuremberg. The humanist saved Dürer’s letters, ten of which survive. Dürer’s reasons for journeying once again to Venice are varied and most are beyond our immediate concern in this volume. The catalyst may have been the commission to paint the large Feast of the Rose Garlands Altarpiece for San Bartolomeo, the church of the German merchants in Venice (see fig. 5). Writing to Pirckheimer on February 7, 1506, Dürer acknowledges the lack, rather than loss, of respect that he received from most local artists, remarking, “Amongst the Italians I have many good friends who warn me not to eat and drink with their painters. Many of them are enemies and they copy my work in the churches and wherever they can find it; and then they revile it and say that the style is not antique and so not good.”17 In his letter of April 2, 1506, Dürer observes, furthermore, “[T]he painters here, let me tell you, are very unfriendly to me. They have summoned me three times before the magistrates, and I have had to pay four florins to their school.”18 He bristles at their insinuation that his paintings are insufficiently antique in style and therefore inferior. Others have chided him for not being a good colorist. Stung by the persistent slights of many Venetian painters, Dürer determined that the Feast of the Rose Garlands would be a statement about his powers as a painter and colorist. His conversations with Giovanni Bellini, whom Dürer states was friendly, and his own careful scrutiny of the Italian master’s painting techniques allowed him to make a picture more in the Venetian mode. On September 8, 1506, he writes Pirckheimer: “My picture . . . is well painted and beautifully colored. I have earned much praise but little profit by it. . . . I have stopped the mouths of all the painters who used to say that I was good at engraving but, as to painting, I did not know how to handle my colors. Now everyone says that better coloring they have never

17 18

Letter 2; Conway, Writings, 48; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:44–45. Letter 5; Conway, Writings, 51; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:49.

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Figure 5: Albrecht Dürer, The Feast of the Rose Garlands, 1506, oil on panel, Prague, Národní galerie. (Photo: National Gallery in Prague 2008).

seen.”19 In his next letter, he remarks, “they [the Venetian nobles and painters] had never before seen such a sublime, lovely painting.”20 The doge, patriarch, and local nobility visited San Bartolomeo to admire his picture. The altarpiece’s painted surface, which was already in a fragile state around 1600 was damaged permanently during the disastrous restorations of 1839–41 when whole sections were scraped off and repainted. With the success of the Feast of the Rose Garlands came new recognition of his talents. In his letter of August 18, 1506, Dürer declares, “I have become a gentleman in Venice.”21 He makes this statement amid his mock complaint about having to purchase rings and other rarities for Pirckheimer. Far better known is his lament at the end of his final letter of October 13, when he states, “How I shall freeze after this sun!

19 Conway, Writings, 55; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:55. On his colors, see Andreas Baumeister and Christoph Krekel, “Von Dürers Farben,” in Albrecht Dürer: Die Gemälde der Alten Pinakothek, ed. Gisela Goldberg, Bruno Heimberg, and Martin Schawe (Heidelberg: Braus, 1998), 54–101. 20 Conway, Writings, 56; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:57; and Katherine Crawford Luber, Albrecht Dürer and the Venetian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 89, who challenges Conway’s translation as “nobler.” 21 Conway, Writings, 53; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:52.

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Here I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite [ein schmarotzer].”22 The first comment might literally be about the weather, especially with late fall and winter approaching in Nuremberg. The second statement, however, alludes to the rigid social hierarchy of his native city where artists typically were held in less esteem by the patrician class than in Venice. He fears a loss or, at least, diminution of personal status back home where there is little precedent for the social prominence accorded to Italian masters such as Bellini or Mantegna. Almost two decades later, in a letter of 1524, Dürer informs the Nuremberg city council that the Venetian government even once offered him a civic position as painter with an annual salary of two hundred ducats.23 Dürer also experienced direct financial losses because of the unlicensed replication of his prints. He complains to Pirckheimer that Venice’s artists copied his works wherever they found them; however, he never mentions lodging a formal complaint with the Senate. In the 1568 edition of his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari claims that Dürer traveled to Venice to stop Marcantonio Raimondi’s unauthorized copying of his prints.24 Vasari relates that when Raimondi moved to Venice he spent almost all of his money buying Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings on sale in the Piazza San Marco.25 Raimondi turned his attention to every detail of those prints with all diligence, and thus to copying Albrecht’s prints, carefully studying stroke by stroke how the whole of the prints he had bought had been made. . . . Marcantonio copied there the sign which Albrecht had made on his works, that is, the letters A.D. He succeeded in capturing Albrecht’s style to such an extent that the prints were believed to be by Albrecht, and were bought and sold as such, since no one knew that the prints had been made by Marcantonio. When this situation was described to Albrecht in Flanders, and when one of the said copies was sent to him, Albrecht was moved to such fury that he left Flanders and went to Venice, where he complained about Marcantonio to the Senate.

22 Conway, Writings, 58; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:59–60. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 9, translates the first sentence as “How shall I long for the sun in the cold.” 23 Conway, Writings, 132; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:110. 24 Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 39–41. 25 Vorbild Dürer: Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte Albrecht Dürers im Spiegel der europäischen Druckgraphik des 16. Jahrhundert, exhibition catalog, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Munich: Prestel, 1978), 22–23 (with a list of catalogue entries for Raimondi); László Mészáros, Italien sieht Dürer (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1983), 352–53 (with a list of copies); Pon, Raphael, 39–48.

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jeffrey chipps smith However, he got nothing but the sentence that Marcantonio could no longer add the name or monogram of Albrecht to his works.26

Raimondi did copy about seventy of Dürer’s prints, including the entire Life of the Virgin and Small Passion series. His replica of the Adoration of the Magi reveals how adeptly he mimicked Dürer’s woodcuts (see figs. 6 and 7).27 Side by side, Dürer’s expressive woodcut lines contrast with the rigid, rather lifeless character of Raimondi’s engraved strokes. Although Vasari’s story may be apocryphal, almost half of Raimondi’s versions, though not his print shown here, bear Dürer’s monogram. Given the lack of copyright or legal restraints against unauthorized copies, there was little that Dürer could do. When he discovered pirated impressions of his prints being sold near the Nuremberg Rathaus in 1511, he sought action by the city council.28 On January 3, 1512, it ruled that only Dürer’s monogram was legally protected, a decision in line with the Venetian Senate’s reputed response. Copies bearing his mark could be confiscated but others issued without the monogram could be sold. I do not know whether Dürer was more vexed by his financial losses or by the theft of his inventio or creativity. The concept of one’s intellectual property with appropriate legal protection was just beginning to be discussed during this period. In fact, Dürer sought and obtained imperial privileges for his four books published in 1511 as well as his later treatises. The text beneath the final woodcut in the Life of the Virgin series reads, Beware, you envious thieves of the work and invention of others, keep your thoughtless hands from these works of ours. We have received a privilege from the famous Emperor of Rome, Maximilian, that no one shall dare to print these works in spurious forms, nor sell such prints within the boundaries of the empire. . . . Printed in Nuremberg, by Albrecht Dürer, painter.29

26 Pon, Raphael, 40–41. Vasari incorrectly stated that Dürer came to Italy from Flanders. I suspect that Vasari used Flanders to refer broadly to Northern Europe. 27 Konrad Oberhuber, ed., The Works of Marcantonio Raimondi and of His School, vol. 27 of The Illustrated Bartsch (New York: Abaris Books, 1978), no. 633. 28 Werner Schultheiss, “Albrecht Dürers Beziehungen zum Recht,” in Albrecht Dürers Umwelt (Nuremberg: Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1971), 241–43. 29 Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:76; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of SelfPortraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 213 (with English translation).

Figure 6: Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1503, woodcut from the Life of the Virgin series.

Figure 7: Marcantonio Raimondi, Adoration of the Magi (after Dürer), c. 1506, engraving.

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Such privileges were often difficult to enforce outside of the domain of the granting town or nobleman. Maximilian’s authority did not extend to Venice or Rome. Nevertheless, Dürer sought to limit his financial losses through all legal means. To expand the market for his prints, the Nuremberg artist hired several sales agents as early as 1497. Each had his own territory. The artist gave them strict instructions about seeking the best prices for the prints and not lingering where the prospects of sales were not good. Writing years later in his Family Chronicle, Dürer remarks that while he was in Venice, one agent’s death in Rome resulted in considerable losses.30 This likely involved the loss of the agent’s cash and the theft of his print stock. Dürer already had borrowed money from Pirckheimer for the trip to Venice. His financial concerns, heightened by his losses in Rome, may have prompted him to remain in Venice to take advantage of local demand for his art following the successful unveiling of the Feast of the Rose Garlands. Occasionally, Dürer frets over the loss of his time, which he equates with the loss of income. This is particularly evident in some of the nine surviving letters that he wrote to Jakob Heller, an influential Frankfurt merchant, between August 28, 1507, and October 12, 1509.31 Heller commissioned a large altarpiece for his city’s Dominican church. The correspondence tells us much about the artist’s working practices. Dürer distinguishes between “ordinary paintings” (gamine gmäll) and painstakingly detailed ones, such as the Heller Altar. He brags that he could paint a large “pile” of these common paintings in a year. A laborious painting, like Heller’s, on which he worked over a year, requires too much of his time especially since he promised to paint the now destroyed central panel by himself. Dürer famously remarks, “So henceforth I shall stick to my engraving, and had I done so before I should today have been a richer man by 1,000 florins.”32 He employs this and other remarks about costs, such as the high price of ultramarine, in what is to modern eyes an unflattering effort to renegotiate their agreed contract for the altarpiece. In response to what must 30

Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:36, 38. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:61–74; Conway, Writings, 62–71. The center panel, destroyed in the fire of 1729 at Munich’s Residenz, exists only in a copy by Jobst Harrich (1613–14) in Frankfurt (Historisches Museum). Bernhard Decker, Dürer und Grünewald. Der Frankfurter Heller-Altar: Rahmenbedingungen der Altarmalerei (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 1996). 32 Conway, Writings, 70; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:72–73. 31

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have been a sharply worded letter from Heller, Dürer replies, “to retain your friendship, if I had to suffer loss by the picture, I would have done so, but now since you regret the whole business and provoke me to keep the picture I will do so, and that gladly, for I know how to get 100 florins more for it than you have given me. In future I would not take 400 florins to paint another such as this.”33 Both men ultimately backed down, the painting was completed, Heller paid 130 guilders plus tips, and both sides were satisfied. Heller even made a gift of wine to Dürer when he and his wife passed through Frankfurt in the summer of 1520. From mid-July 1520 until early August 1521, Dürer traveled to the Netherlands, which he explored from his base in Antwerp. The remarkable journal that he kept during this trip is filled with fascinating observations about people, places, and art.34 The main purpose of the voyage was to obtain Charles V’s reauthorization of his annual imperial pension of one hundred Rhenish guilders, which Maximilian first awarded to him in 1515. The artist feared the loss of this annuity especially at a time when he fretted over growing old, a topic that we shall return to shortly. The journal is replete with financial information, including fairly mundane entries about his many gambling losses or the theft of his wife Agnes’s purse, whose worth he estimated at three florins, in Antwerp Cathedral.35 He remarks too on his monetary losses when he drew portraits, typically on social occasions, but was not rewarded with either payment or an equal gift. On June 29, 1521, as he prepares to start his journey back to Nuremberg, he observes, “In all my doings, spendings, sales, and other dealings, in all my connections with high and low, I have suffered loss in the Netherlands; and Lady Margaret in particular gave me nothing for what I made and presented to her.”36 His partially unsuccessful dealings with Margaret of Austria affected his financial assessment of his trip.37 Although she supported his pension petition and gave him a tour of her palace in Mechelen, the regent

33

July 10, 1509; Conway, Writings, 58. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:146–202; Jan-Albert Goris and Georges Marlier, introd., Albrecht Dürer: Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands 1520–1521, trans. Martin Conway (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971). 35 Conway, Writings, 106–13, 122. 36 Goris and Marlier, Diary, 98; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:175–76. 37 Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:155, 158, 173, 175–76; Goris and Marlier, Diary, 64, 68, 95–96, 99. 34

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failed to compensate him for his gifts to her of an Engraved Passion and, on another occasion, a whole set of his prints plus “two pictures on parchment [done] with the greatest pains and care” that he valued at thirty florins.38 Furthermore, when Dürer visited Margaret earlier in June, she disliked his portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, her father, so he took it away before offering it to her. In a gift economy, with its unwritten rules for exchanges between nobles or the upper class and someone, like Dürer, of lesser social standing, the Nuremberg master felt that he had suffered significant financial losses in his dealings with Margaret. He also coveted a book of constructed figures drawn by Jacopo de’ Barbari that the regent had already promised to one of her artists. Unless the artist kept a separate account book, which seems unlikely, his conclusion is based on his general perception rather than on an accurate tally of his dealings. The value of the prints and portraits that he created, both through sales and gift-equivalences, covered his expenses. Some of his earnings were in the form of objects rather than cash. Furthermore, in a letter of October 17, 1524, addressed to Nuremberg’s city council, Dürer states that he was once offered a civic painting post in Antwerp: “So too, only a short time ago when I was in the Netherlands, the Council of Antwerp would have given me 300 Philipsgulden a year, kept me there free of taxes, and honored me with a well-built house; and besides I should have been paid in addition at both places for all the work I might have done for the gentry.”39 In spite of his complaints, he ably supported himself, his wife, and a servant abroad for almost thirteen months while also amassing a substantial collection of art and wonders, especially of non-European origins, which he shipped back to Nuremberg. The Loss of Self In 1522, Dürer sketched this Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows, a drawing that was believed to be lost after World War II but was subsequently rediscovered in the Soviet Union (see fig. 8).40 Although one can argue justifiably for a spiritual explanation for his self-portrayal as 38

Goris and Marlier, Diary, 68. Conway, Writings, 131–32; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:109–10. 40 This drawing is is now stored in Moscow as a pawn in the cultural patrimony disputes between Russia and Germany. 39

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Figure 8: Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows, 1522, metalpoint drawing, Bremen, Kunsthalle (currently stored in a bank in Moscow) (Photo: museum).

Christ, Dürer was ill when he created it. He had contracted malaria in December 1520 while traveling by boat through Zeeland in his quest to see a giant whale, the largest anyone could remember, that reportedly had washed ashore near Zierikzee. The drawing raises the issues of physical loss and the awareness of one’s mortality. Already in Venice in 1506, the thirty-five year old Dürer, who was rather vain, complained to Pirckheimer that he had found a gray hair, a sure sign of his loss of youth.41 Early in 1519, Dürer wrote Georg Spalatin, secretary and chaplain of Elector Friedrich the Wise in Wittenberg, that his concern over the potential loss of his imperial pension following Maximilian’s death was heightened by worries about his own health. He laments, “As I am losing my sight and freedom of hand my affairs do not look well.”42 Although vision changes are inevitable for most people, it is a potentially devastating impairment for an artist, as is any sort of hand tremor or palsy. During the Netherlandish trip, Dürer lists buying three sets of corrective eye glasses.43

41 42 43

Conway, Writings, 57; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:57. Conway, Writings, 89–90; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:86–87. Goris and Marlier, Diary, 71, 77; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:159, 162.

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By his own account, Dürer almost lost his life in a boating mishap en route to Zierikzee.44 At Arnemuiden, where he witnessed extensive flooding of nearby fields and villages, he and Georg Kötzler, a Nuremberg citizen traveling with him, almost drowned. In a long passage Dürer recounts how, as they were unloading, his vessel was bumped hard by a larger ship, which broke their docking ropes. Suddenly a “storm of wind” pushed his boat back into the Scheldt. All of the crew other than the captain and his lad were already on shore. The skipper “tore his hair and cried aloud” fearing that all was lost. Dürer writes that he calmed the captain, asked what he and the others could do, and after a small sail was hoisted halfway the boat was able to make land once again: “And when the people on shore, who had already given us up, saw how we helped ourselves, they came to our aid and we got to land.” This episode would be immortalized in Ferdinand Fellner’s Dürer in the Storm on the Scheldt, one of seven episodes of his life created for Nuremberg’s Dürer jubilee in 1828.45 As the boat founders, Dürer alone is shown to be clear-headed as he grabs the captain by the arm. Fellner modeled his image on scenes of Christ on the Sea of Galilee. Dürer’s curiosity proved deadly. Even though it was almost winter, the artist contracted malaria or a similar malady, likely resulting from a mosquito bite. Soon afterward, entries for doctors’ visits and medicines plus such healing gifts as sandalwood from his friends appear in the journal. From April 14 to 20, 1521, Dürer was incapacitated by fever. He notes, “In the third week after Easter a violent fever seized me, with great weakness, nausea, and headache. And before, when I was in Zeeland, a wondrous sickness overcame me, such as I never heard of from any man, and this sickness remains with me.”46 The artist’s health was weakened permanently. In 1522, after returning to Nuremberg, Dürer drew himself as the Man of Sorrows.47 His body sags while his face conveys a weary resignation. His physical decline vexed the once vigorous artist.

44

Goris and Marlier, Diary, 78; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:163. Berthold Hinz, Dürers Gloria: Kunst, Kult, Konsum, exhibition catalog, Berlin, Kunstbibliothek (Berlin: Mann, 1971), 19, figs. 7 and 13. 46 Goris and Marlier, Diary, 88; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:168–69 and n585. 47 Winkler, Die Zeichnungen, no. 886; Strauss, Drawings, no. 1522/8; T.A. Ilatovskaya, introd., West European Drawing of XVI–XX Centuries Kunsthalle Collection in Bremen—Catalogue (Moscow: Kultura, 1992), no. 40. 45

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Dürer valued the insights of his dreams yet bemoaned their fleetingness as another kind of loss. During the night of June 7–8, 1525, the Nuremberg master experienced a vivid nightmare of a watery cataclysm. Perhaps fearing the loss of memory or, at least, the potential diminution in the visual acuity of his dream, Dürer recorded the disturbing vision in words and in a remarkable watercolor when he awoke that morning (see fig. 9).48 The broad landscape is dotted with trees and, in the distance, are the towers and walls of a city. These are dwarfed by the gigantic plumes of falling water that upon striking the earth explode with tremendous force. Some spread horizontally. Other waves, drawn with faint blue brushstrokes, splash back into the air. Dürer varied the intensity of color of these clouds of water according to their proximity to the foreground. For a modern viewer, this specter eerily anticipates images of a nuclear explosion, though inverted. Even seen seemingly in slow motion and at a distance, the flood has a truly horrific potential for devastation. Dürer’s drawing is as remarkable as it is unique. The detailed documentation of an actual dream has few precedents in Renaissance art though it was an occasional literary device.49 I am, however, mentioning the sketch here not for its potential meaning at a particularly critical moment in German history. Rather this sketch was Dürer’s solution for recording fleeting mental images. In an early draft of his thoughts on beauty, dating to 1512, the artist remarks, “I often see great art and good things while asleep that do not occur to me awake. However, when I wake up the memory of them is lost.”50 Dürer clearly was determined to record this disturbing 48 Conway, Writings, 145; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:214–15. Winkler, Die Zeichnungen, no. 944; Strauss, Drawings, no. 1525/4; A. Rosenthal, “Dürer’s Dream of 1525,” Burlington Magazine 69 (August 1936): 82–85; Karl Schütz, ed., Albrecht Dürer im Kunsthistorischen Museum, exhibition catalog, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1994), 89–101, esp. 99–101; Joachim Poeschke, “Dürers Traumgesicht” in Traum und Träumen, ed. Rudolf Hiestand (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1994), 187–206. 49 Joachim Knape, “Autopräsenz: Sebastian Brants Selbstinszenierung in der Oratorrolle im ‘Traum’-Gedicht von 1502,” in Self-Fashioning/Personen(selbst)darstellung, ed. Rudolf Suntrup and Jan R. Veenstra (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 79–108 and fig. 8 showing Sebastian Brant asleep on the frontispiece to Doctor Sebastianus Brants traum Jn tütsch (Pforzheim, 1502); Joachim Telle, “Ein Traumgesicht von Hieronymus Brunschwig (1512),” Geschichte der Pharmazie 58, nos. 2–3 (21 September 2006): 20–22. See also Dürer’s Dream of the Doctor engraving (ca. 1498); Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Das druckgraphische Werk, 1: no. 18. 50 Jean Michel Massing, “Dürer’s Dreams,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 238–44, here 40 (with translation); Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 2:115.

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Figure 9: Albrecht Dürer, The Dream, 1525, watercolor, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Photo: museum).

vision before its memory slipped away. We know that on occasion he shared his dreams with Pirckheimer and other friends. The Loss of Art and Artists At different times in his career, Dürer voiced his thoughts about the loss of art. He also took specific actions to assure the survival of his own art and reputation. In 1525, he responded to the increasing criticism of art and to the growing number of acts of iconoclasm. In the dedication to Pirckheimer of the Instruction in Measurement, published in that year, Dürer writes, And [all eager students of Art] will not be misled by those now amongst us who, in our own day, revile the Art of Painting and say that it is the servant to Idolatry. For a Christian would no more be led to superstition by a picture or effigy than an honest man to commit murder because he carries a weapon by his side. He must indeed be an unthinking man who would worship picture, wood, or stone. A picture therefore brings more good than harm, when it is honorably, artistically, and well made.51

51

Conway, Writings, 212; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:115.

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It is not coincidental that Dürer’s last great religious painting, the socalled Four Apostles of 1526, was destined for Nuremberg’s town hall (see fig. 10). Its iconographic message’s steadfast support for the city council’s official embrace of Lutheranism a year earlier is not our present concern. Instead, we are interested in his wish to be remembered. Dürer intended his life-size painting to be viewed in the seat of civic power, a prestigious, highly visible, and secure site, rather than in a church where it would be vulnerable to future iconoclasm. He worried about the preservation of his memory as he highlights in his letter to the council that accompanied his gift. This reads in part as follows: I have been intending for a long time past, to show my respect for your Wisdoms by the presentation of some humble picture of mine as a remembrance; but I have been prevented from so doing by the imperfection and insignificance of my works, for I felt that with such I could not well stand before your Wisdoms. Now, however, that I have just painted a panel upon which I have bestowed more trouble than on any other painting; I considered none more worthy to keep it as a reminiscence than your Wisdoms.52

He was conscious of the painting’s function as a monument to his own artistic skills, religious beliefs, and—critically—his enduring reputation. Dürer’s active promotion of his art and his person has complex and multiple roots, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay. One central feature, however, that bears examination here was the Nuremberg artist’s growing historical awareness, a subject that recurs in his theoretical writings.53 Through his contacts with Pirckheimer and other Nuremberg humanists, as well as through his travels to Italy, Dürer learned stories of great classical artists. Although their works were lost, anecdotes about their art lived on through the accounts of Pliny the Elder, specifically his Natural History (book 35), and other ancient writers.54 Dürer keenly felt their loss. As he first started writing down his thoughts on art from 1512 to 1513, he observed,

52

Conway, Writings, 135; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:117. See also the 1523 draft of his dedication to Willibald Pirckheimer of his Four Books of Human Proportions published in 1528; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:101–2. 54 Jacob Isager, Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art (London: Routledge, 1991). 53

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Figure 10: Albrecht Dürer, Four Apostles, 1526, oil on panel, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek (Photo: museum). Many hundred years ago there were still some famous painters, such as those named Phidias, Praxiteles, Apelles, Polycleitus, Parrhasius, Lysippus, Protogenes, and the rest, some of whom wrote about their art and very artfully described it and gave it plainly to the light; but their praiseworthy books are, so far, unknown to us, and perhaps have been altogether lost. . . . Often do I sorrow because I must be robbed of

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the aforesaid Masters’ books of art; but the enemies of art despise these things.55

He recognized that time had destroyed all vestiges of their creativity other than a few scant references in classical texts. In addition to their facility with brush or chisel, some of these fabled masters wrote about art. They offered a model for what great artists should do to achieve immortality through images and words. Even without any access to their writings other than the treatise of Vitruvius, Dürer assumed that they intellectualized art. His Four Books on Human Proportions includes numerous male and female figures designed according to Vitruvius’s theory, according to which the proportions of the body are based upon the ratios of the different parts to the whole.56 In the woodcut illustrated here, the man’s head equals one-eighth of the length of the body (see fig. 11). Dürer’s designs for perspective devices in his Instruction in Measurement, published in 1525, reflect the humanistically inspired idea that painting was a liberal art rather than a mere craft.57 Dürer defined art [Kunst] as skill and knowledge. He lamented that there were no books “that I might read for my improvement. For some hide their art in great secrecy and others write about things whereof they know nothing, so that their words are nowise better than mere noise.”58 To rectify this sad situation, Dürer decided to share what he knew about art with all who were eager to learn. While his intentions were laudable, he obviously kept one eye focused on his current and posthumous fame. Indeed, even his private writings, such as those in the Netherlandish journal, assume a future audience. Dürer’s celebrated Self-Portrait of 1500, based in part on timeless iconic images of Christ as savior, is a statement about immortality and an antidote to professional oblivion (see fig. 12). The painting is inscribed with his monogram, date, and the Latin text: “I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, painted myself thus, with undying colors [(or, alternatively,) with my own colors], at the age of twenty-eight years.”59 As Goldberg, Heimberg, and Schawe observe, the Latin word “proprius”

55

Conway, Writings, 177–78; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 2:100, 109. Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Das druckgraphische Werk, 3: no. 277. 57 Ibid., 3: no. 274, esp. the illustrations 274.197–98 and 274.215. 58 Conway, Writings, 178; Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 2:100. 59 “Albertus Durerus Noricus / ipsum me proprijs sic effin- / gebam coloribus aetatis / anno XXVIII.” Goldberg, Heimberg, and Schawe, Die Gemälde der Alten Pinakothek, 56

Figure 11: Albrecht Dürer, Back View of a Man Eight-Head Lengths Tall, woodcut illustration in Albrecht Dürer, Four Books on Human Proportions (Nuremberg, 1528), folio C2 recto.

Figure 12: Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500, oil on panel, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek (Photo: museum).

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can carry a double sense of “own” and “immortal.” Dürer alludes to the durable quality of his colors and to his enduring image, both markers of fame that would survive long after his own death. Either toward the end of his life or soon afterward, the portrait was transferred to Nuremberg’s town hall where it was prominently displayed until it was sold in 1805. Dürer certainly would have been pleased, and perhaps rather bemused, to discover that in 1637 Georg Vischer, a Munich court artist, used this Self-Portrait as the model for Jesus in his Christ and the Adulterous Woman.60 Dürer employed many strategies to assure that his art and his memory would not be lost. He was remarkably prolific. Some scholars have estimated that upwards of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand impressions of his prints circulated throughout Europe and beyond during his lifetime, and even more thereafter, as his woodblocks and metal plates continued to be used and printed by others.61 Far more than any other artist before him, Dürer monogrammed or signed the majority of his prints. Through the distinctive style of his works and his initials, he created a brand that was recognized across the continent. In the aftermath of his reported copyright battle with Raimondi and other artists, Dürer’s monograms become dramatic actors in many of his prints. By this I mean that his monograms often conform to the mood of the particular subject. In Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple from the Small Woodcut Passion, everyone flees the scourging Christ (see fig. 13).62 He knocks over seats and, at the lower left, Dürer’s monogram, which threatens to tumble out of the composition. In Christ’s Descent into Limbo from the Large Passion (published 1511), the partially shaded monogram appears cut into the rock between Christ and those whom he is saving.63 In the subsequent woodcut of the Resurrection, his AD, like the sleeping soldiers, is shaded in the foreground. In his four major altarpieces—the Feast of the Rose Garlands (see fig. 5), the Martyrdom of 10,000, Jakob Heller’s Assumption of the Virgin, 332–34; David Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 94. 60 Goldberg, Heimberg, and Schawe, Die Gemälde der Alten Pinakothek, 326, fig. 6.15. 61 Wolfgang Schmid, Dürer als Unternehmer (Trier: Porta Alba, 2003), 127, 547. 62 Schoch, Mende, and Scherbaum, Das druckgraphische Werk, 2: no. 192. 63 Ibid., 2: nos. 164–65.

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and Matthäus Landauer’s Adoration of the Holy Trinity, all painted between 1506 and 1511—Dürer inserted his own self-portrait. In each painting he holds an identifying text or proto-billboard, just in case the original viewers in Venice, Wittenberg, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg were uncertain as to the identity of this long-haired, bearded man. There are no real precedents for this bold presentation of self. Dürer clearly did not want to be forgotten. This quest for enduring fame recurs, albeit with a different twist, in Philipp Melanchthon, perhaps Dürer’s finest engraved portrait (see fig. 14).64 The text reads, “1526. Dürer was able to depict Philipp’s features as if living, but the practiced hand could not portray his soul,” that is, Dürer skillfully records the scholar’s appearance but his true essence transcends the boundaries of art. There is a bit of false modesty expressed here, since the artist did his utmost to portray Melanchthon as an inspired thinker. Inscription and monogram appear chiseled into the stone. The whole composition imitates an ancient Roman funerary stele, a form designed to perpetuate one’s memory after death. Dürer also links his own creativity and fame with the celebrity of Melanchthon. The Loss of Dürer I originally titled this essay “Did Dürer Die?” The answer to this question is, of course, yes and no. The flesh and blood Dürer died on April 6, 1528. Yet posthumously, Dürer as an ideal and a symbol lives on. This duality was succinctly articulated by Willibald Pirckheimer who composed the following words for the brass plaque adorning the artist’s tomb in the St. Johannis cemetery outside the western walls of Nuremberg.65 He writes, “To the Memory of Albrecht Dürer. Whatever is mortal in Albrecht Dürer, reposes under this stone. He departed on April 6, 1528.”66

64

Ibid., 1: no. 101. He was buried beneath the Frey family tombstone. The original brass plaque is attributed to the Vischer family. Joachim von Sandrart renovated the tomb in 1681 and added the laudatory Latin and German texts. Mende, Albrecht Dürer: ein Künstler in seiner Stadt (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 2000), 29, 37. 66 Jan Białostocki, Dürer and His Critics (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1986), 35 (with translation); Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:304. 65

Figure 13: Albrecht Dürer, Christ Expelling the Money Changers, c. 1508–09, woodcut from the Small Passion.

Figure 14: Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, 1526, engraving.

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Just a day after his burial, a group of Dürer’s friends opened his grave.67 They desired a tangible memento once the living artist was taken from their midst. Writing in 1542, Christoph Scheurl reports that they made a cast of his face. Commemorative death masks, whether of wax or clay, were then rare but more common in Italy than in Germany. Thus his friends’ action was quite extraordinary. The fate of Dürer’s cast is unclear, though either the original or a copy of the face and a separate cast of the artist’s right hand were owned by the painter Frederick van Valckenborch in Frankfurt in the early seventeenth century, and after passing into the collection of Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria, are thought to have been destroyed, along with other works by Dürer, in the devastating 1729 fire in Munich’s Residenz palace. A separate wax impression of the artist’s hand, reportedly rendered quite naturalistically, was recorded in Christoph Weickmann’s collection in Ulm in 1659. These were not the only relics. A lock of Dürer’s blondbrown hair was cut off and sent to Hans Baldung Grien in Strasbourg, perhaps as a token of friendship.68 The subsequent provenance of the hair can be documented fully through various private collections until it was sold to Vienna’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste in 1873. Encased between two sheets of glass and framed in silver, the lock of hair is displayed occasionally to the faithful. Reactions to Dürer’s death came quickly.69 Pirckheimer and other Nuremberg humanists informed their correspondents of the news and their bereavement. Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, and Georg Spalatin, among other notables outside of the city, commented on his passing. Sabina Pirckheimer, a nun at Kloster Bergen, tried to console her brother Willibald, who was “robbed” of his old and dear friend. Published eulogies by Erasmus, Christoph Scheurl, Eobanus Hessus, the mathematician Thomas Venatorius, and the theologian Sebastian Franck soon followed. Pirckheimer’s elegy appears in the 67 Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 3:297–98; Michael Roth, “Eine Dürerreliquie in Ulm?” in Aus Albrecht Dürers Welt: Festschrift für Fedja Anzelewsky, ed. Bodo Brinkmann, Hartmut Krohm, and Michael Roth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 189–98. 68 Heinz Lüdecke and Susanne Heiland, eds., Dürer und die Nachwelt (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1955), 66–68, 285–86; Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture, 248–50; Mende, Künstler in seiner Stadt, no. 119; Lothar Schmitt, “Dürer’s Locke,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 66 (2003): 261–73. 69 Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:279–88 (letters) and publications (296–320). See also Erwin Panofsky, “ ‘Nebulae in Pariete’: Notes on Erasmus’ Eulogy on Dürer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 34–41; Matthias Mende, Dürer-Bibliographie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1971), nos. 266–324.

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first edition of Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportions published on October 31, 1528. For the 1532 Latin translation of this treatise, Joachim Camerarius composed an extensive introduction that is part biographical panegyric and part glorification of the art of painting.70 This same text also includes verses by Eobanus Hessus, which directly address the issue of the loss of Dürer’s art and fame. He writes, the author [Dürer] had not only the hands of an artist, but also immense knowledge, good judgment, and a sharp mind; nothing escaped him. . . . But reader, you know Dürer’s immortal accomplishments; consider him worthy of a lofty prize. Be thankful to him and to his Nordic homeland, by means of which this monument [i.e., his Treatise on Human Proportions] is passed on to you. What great proofs of his art Apelles left are attested by many writers; but nothing has survived that can be attributed to his brush. Could the same fate await Dürer? I think not: the cause of the loss of one will work toward the preservation of the other. The strokes of Apelles were recorded with the fleeting pen, whereas we safeguard Dürer’s with shining bronze [i.e., his copper engraving plates], so no misfortunes can wipe them out. . . . Dürer will live a thousand years more. By his art monuments have long been made ready which—books aside—were unworthy to die. For who better than he has mastered the art of painting? Who cleverer in mind or hand? He has left all others behind, predecessors and contemporaries alike. The threnodies I have written on him show that the works of such a man are more fitting than praise.71

Dürer’s contemporaries, beginning with Pirckheimer, recognized the artist’s singular greatness. Their profound sense of having lost a unique genius and friend turned to an enshrining of his achievements. Quickly Dürer became both the standard of and the standard bearer for German art, a role that in spite of its frequent later political misuses he continues to play today. Celebrity portraits of Dürer, such as Erhard Schön’s often reissued woodcut, appeared before and even

70 Folios A2r–A4r. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:307–15; David Price, Commentary, Albrecht Dürer, De Symmetria Partium in Rectis Formis Humanorum Corporum (Nuremberg, 1532) and Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538) [CD-ROM] (Oakland: Octavo, 2003) with an English translation; Peter Parshall, “Camerarius on Dürer: Humanist Biography as Art Criticism,” in Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574): Beitrage zur Geschichte des Humanismus im Zeitalter der Reformation, ed. Frank Baron (Munich: Fink, 1978), 11–29. 71 Dürer, De Symmetria Partium, folios A6r–A6v; with translation in Price, De Symmetria Partium, CD view 8 and 9.

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more frequently after April 6, 1528 (see fig. 15).72 Over the following centuries, as the German-speaking lands periodically struggled for cultural identity and artistic heritage, Dürer was invoked and evoked.73 Christian Daniel Rauch’s over-life-size bronze statue of Dürer, designed in 1828 and placed in 1840 in the newly renamed AlbrechtDürer-Platz in Nuremberg, is Europe’s first public monument honoring an artist (see fig. 16).74 In addition, Rauch’s marble bust of Dürer is enshrined in the classically inspired pantheon of famous Germans at Walhalla above the Danube River near Regensburg. And most major new nineteenth-century museums, such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna or the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, have or had painted and carved homages to Dürer as the embodiment of the greatness of German art. Through his writings and art as well as the comments of his contemporaries, Albrecht Dürer was reassuringly human. He witnessed the deaths of family and friends. He acknowledged his financial insecurities, notably his fear of losses. Dürer fretted over his mortality, especially as he started to lose his youthful eyesight and his steady hand. He pondered fame, especially his own enduring reputation, as well as the fickleness of fortune that had deprived him of the art and writings of great classical masters. More than any other early modern artist, he self-consciously constructed an identity, one that encompassed the products of his hand, his mind, and his physical features. Dürer’s fear of loss or personal oblivion proved to be one of the potent catalysts that powered his remarkable creativity and, fortunately, assured his enduring legacy.

72 Joseph Meder, Dürer-Katalog (Vienna: Gilhofer & Rauschburg, 1932), 240–42; Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Nuremberg, a Renaissance City, 1500–1618, exhibition catalog, Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983), nos. 66–67; Mende, Albrecht Dürer: ein Künstler in seiner Stadt, no. 19, 299. On Gebel’s medal, see Matthias Mende, Dürer-Medaillen (Nuremberg: H. Carl, 1983), 82–93, 211–31. 73 Białostocki, Dürer and His Critics, 91–143. 74 Jutta von Simson, Christian Daniel Rauch: Oeuvre-Katalog (Berlin: Mann, 1996), nos. 161–63.

Figure 15: Erhard Schön, Portrait of Albrecht Dürer at Age 56, c. 1528, woodcut.

Figure 16: Christian Daniel Rauch, Albrecht Dürer Monument, 1828–40, bronze statue cast by Jacob Daniel Burgschmiet, Nuremberg, Albrecht-DürerPlatz (Photo: Jeffrey Chipps Smith).

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CHAPTER FOUR

MEMENTO MORI, MEMENTO MEI: ALBRECHT DÜRER AND THE ART OF DYING* Helmut Puff “Vnd jm jrem tot sach sÿ fill liblicher, dan do sÿ noch daz leben hett.” (In her death she looked much sweeter than when she was still alive.)1 With these words, Albrecht Dürer, the Renaissance artist from Nuremberg, concluded an entry on the final months of his mother, Barbara—an account beginning with the morning of April 26, 1513, when her chamber had to be broken into and the emaciated woman was brought into a downstairs room in Dürer’s house, and ending with her death on May 16, 1514. In fact, Dürer brought his description to an end more than once. Before finalizing his account, he offered the following supplication: “vnd daz vns der allmechtig got daz ewig leben geb. Amen.” (And may God Almighty give unto us eternal life. Amen.)2 Using a “different quill and ink,” Dürer then supplemented this concluding phrase with the note quoted above on the peaceful expression of the departed: “In her death she looked much sweeter than when she was still alive.”3 In this final twist, painlessness in death takes the place of the agony Dürer had described in such great detail before. The account of Barbara Dürer’s last year stems from the so-called memorial book or “Gedenkbuch,” a folio with writings and one illustration in Dürer’s hand (see figs. 17 and 18).4 The paper leaf must have been part of a larger omnibus, though no other folios survive.5 The

* To the memory of my father, Walter Puff. 1 Albrecht Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” in Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, of Autobiographische Schriften, ed. Hans Rupprich (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 37; The Writings of Albrecht Dürer, trans. William Martin Conway (London: Peter Owen, 1958), 79. This essay goes back to a transatlantic workshop of medievalists, held at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2007, organized by Hans-Jochen Schiewer and Markus Stock. Sara Jackson has helped me in generating an English version. 2 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; Dürer, Writings, 79. 3 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37. Other critics have agreed with the editor’s reading of the evidence. 4 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 35–38. Conway (Writings) usually refers to it as the “other book,” using the term Dürer himself used in his family chronicle to refer to other writings he kept on himself that have usually been seen as the “Gedenkbuch.” 5 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Cim. 32 (311 × 215 mm), last published in Michael

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fragment is something of an assemblage. Its pieces, among which the account of his mother’s death is but one (though the most comprehensive by far), do not make up a coherent whole.6 First, the two pages we have address a variety of themes that are loosely connected rather than tightly sewn together; second, the text’s scaffold, once erected, invited later additions and extensions. Such “incoherence” is not unique. The structure of Dürer’s memorial folio is comparable to early modern texts described by their modern editors as “autobiographical.”7 Not only did such texts frequently accommodate a variety of information; on occasion, they were also the product of a layered writing process, as is the case here. In sum, the memorial book represents a thematictemporal composite, lacking the stringency and boundedness associated with the term text in common parlance. It functioned as ledger and archive.

Roth, Dürers Mutter: Schönheit, Alter und Tod im Bild der Renaissance (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2006), 26–29 (with illustrations of both pages). See also Fedja Anzelewsky, “Kreuztragung aus dem Gedenkbuch,” in Dürer Holbein Grünewald: Meisterzeichnungen der deutschen Renaissance aus Berlin und Basel (Ostfildern-Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1998), 132–33. The assumption that this folio leaf must have been part of a larger bundle rests on the observation that the first page of what we have starts in the middle of a sentence and on several pagination marks. Heike Sahm has pointed out that a scrap with accounting data is attached to the leaf, suggesting that this commemoration unfolded in the context of an account book, as is quite common for this type of record (“Vom Sterben berichten: Aufzeichnungen Albrecht Dürers im Kontext der spätmittelalterlichen Autobiographie und der ars moriendi,” in Roth, Dürers Mutter, 45). 6 For an analysis, see Heike Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte: Konventionen als Spielraum für Individualität (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002). For a general discussion of early modern texts within their contexts, see Jan-Dirk Müller’s discussion of a published text, Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (“Literarischer Text und kultureller Text in der Frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel des ‘Narrenschiffs’ von Sebastian Brant,” in Zwischen den Disziplinen: Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. Helmut Puff and Christopher Wild [Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003], 81–101). 7 The literature on the history of early modern autobiographies is vast and growing. The following volumes help to contextualize my reading: Stephan Pastenaci, Erzählform und Persönlichkeitsdarstellung in deutschsprachigen Autobiographien des 16. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Psychologie (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993); Winfried Schulze, ed., Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie, 1996); Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky, and Urs Martin Zahnd, eds., Das dargestellte Ich: Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späteren Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Bochum: Winkler, 1999); Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, and Patrick Veit, eds., Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001); Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis: Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. Und 16. Jahrhunderts aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002); Helga Meise, Das archivierte Ich: Schreibkalender und höfische Repräsentation in Hessen-Damstadt, 1624–1700 (Darmstadt: Hessiche Historische Kommission, 2002).

Figure 17: Albrecht Dürer, Gedenkbuch (Memorial Book), recto, bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

Figure 18: Albrecht Dürer, Gedenkbuch (Memorial Book), verso, bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

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Texts like the memorial book are directed outward, embedding a person’s writings in a non-textual nexus of acts and human bonds. Yet a blanket designation of this or similar early modern documents as “permeable” or “open” to the sphere of social interaction would be reductive, if we did not at the same time take note of the inner ruptures, small as they may be, that run through the text’s fabric. The varying semantic, pragmatic, and other registers have left textual seams as markers of difference that need to be preserved for the purpose of analysis. To be sure, our text has frequently been mined for information on Dürer’s life or for social conditions during this period. But all too often the search for data has resulted in smoothing out its agitated weave. In the case of Dürer’s memorial book, these signal vibrations allow us to reflect on sixteenth-century responses to enduring loss.8 The year 1514 when Albrecht Dürer suffered the loss of his mother, Barbara, was an extraordinary moment in the history of death. After the city of Nuremberg threw in its lot with Luther’s reforms a decade later, many of the ties that had previously connected the living to the dead in Catholic Europe were severed. Purgatory, the place of temporal punishment for the dead, was no more, and the community of the living and the dead disintegrated in Protestant cities and territories. There, the living could no longer alleviate the suffering of the departed through prayers or intercessions. When Dürer died in 1528, the conditions of death and dying—in terms of theology as well as religious practice—had changed considerably as a result. In the following, I will apply pressure to notions of radical changes in the history of death by bringing into focus cultural dynamics that persisted throughout this period. Before and after the advent of Protestantism, scenes at the deathbed set into motion triangulated scenarios between the living, the dying, and Christ. As we shall see, such scenarios were predicated on proximity and distance: what the dying experienced served as an exemplum for the living, and the living often sought to commemorate their lives beyond death. In highlighting continuity as well as change in the sixteenth-century history of death, I will first focus on the textuality 8 This investigation is part of a monograph in progress on textuality within German Renaissance imagery: “Pictorial Textuality: Text on Image in German Renaissance Art.” See also my “The Death of Orpheus (according to Albrecht Dürer),” in Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 71–95; and “Violence, Victimhood, Artistry: Albrecht Dürer’s ‘The Death of Orpheus,’ ” in Gender Matters, ed. Mara Wade (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming).

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of the memorial book and the many layers of information embedded in this account. A second part will expand this analysis by exploring this text’s pragmatic functions as they undergird the scenario of dying. A third part will take into account the role of images in scenarios of dying. A discussion of Dürer’s own death and what we know of it will finally elucidate the emerging Protestant “art of dying.” By arranging concentric circles of contexts around one text, I hope to instill a sense of distance in my reader, the precondition for seeing clearly—even in the face of death. After all, whether rendered textually or visually, scenes of dying have the power to pull the observer into their immediate orbit, if only because such representations remind us of our own transience. The memorial book’s multilayered structure arises first and foremost from the events reported in it. This folio combines entries written down over a period of time. According to the text’s editor, Hans Rupprich, individual passages pertain to the years 1502, 1503, 1506/07, and 1514. In the “Gedenkbuch,” Dürer reports on his father’s death; portents he witnessed, namely, the miracle of the cross and a comet; his belongings; and his mother’s death. Even though thematic similarities can be identified between several layers that are distinct, the narrated episodes do not form a linear account.9 A passage revealing the artist’s financial circumstances, to take a notable example, defies a summary description that would subsume all sections under a spiritual rubric. This passage contains an inventory of the gain the artist accumulated from his studio as well as the damage he incurred from debtors or disloyal assistants, a list probably recorded between 1506 and 1508. To be sure, the death of his father foreshadowed Dürer’s, and taking account, financial or otherwise, numbered among the acts prescribed in preparation for one’s end. Tellingly, however, the belongings listed are expressly the fruits of his own labor and not a complete inventory: household items, clothing, pewter ware, chests, and other vessels as well as paint worth ca. 100 florins.10

9 The partitions between passages are marked by signal dividers, such as “Amen,” which concludes the narration of Albrecht Dürer père, the connector “Item daz nachfolget” (Item what follows) to introduce the passage on his belongings, and “Nun solt jr wissen” (Now you shall know)—the formula that initiates the passage on his mother. 10 The list is incomplete. Dürer was among Nuremberg’s wealthiest citizens. See Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 34–36, on this point.

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What informs this passage therefore is not only a sense of being prepared but also pride in honest gain and ownership.11 The author shows himself at pains to project an image of economic probity. Accounting in this fashion might have had legal reverberations in the case of Dürer’s death, though such a context is not explicit. The “Gedenkbuch” is then best understood as a collection of memorabilia. Occasionally, Dürer incorporated information from others, especially when it supplemented his own.12 Yet the collection’s connecting thread resides in information of relevance to its author as well as potentially to others in his immediate circle—I will return to this question below.13 In addition to this stacked assemblage of partially interlocking passages, there is secondly a multilayered ordo temporum. This is particularly evident in the section on Barbara Dürer’s decline. What took place over a period of a little more than a year appears to be treated summarily. The mix of retrospection and introspection, the past of narrated time, the present of writing, and the anxious anticipation of a future whose sting is eased through supplications yields a complex temporality.14 This sense of time is reminiscent of the literature of ars moriendi with its call to ready oneself in life for the final accounting to ensure future salvation.15 Having witnessed his mother’s death, Dürer exhibits such readiness in a formula he had deployed previously, though in a shorter version, when writing about his father’s end;16 he wishes his own final moment to be a peaceful family romance with God and God’s helpers at his deathbed: “Gott der her verleich mir,

11 A similar mentality informs his portrait in writing of his father; see Dürer, “Familienchronik,” in Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 1:30. 12 This is so with regard to his father’s final moments, which Dürer did not witness but recounted according to what the servants told him. 13 The fact that what we have is a fragment, lacking a preface or other paratextual elements, makes the identification of addressees even more difficult. 14 Johannes Nider’s fifteenth-century Dispositorium moriendi, for instance, has three parts: that which precedes death, that which accompanies death, and that which follows death. See Rainer Rudolf, “Ars moriendi (I),” Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 145. 15 This has been noted, above all, by Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 22, 28, 37, 39–40. The best introduction to the ars moriendi tradition is Nigel F. Palmer, “Ars moriendi und Totentanz: Zur Verbildlichung des Todes im Spätmittelalter,” in Tod im Mittelalter, ed. Arno Borst et al. (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1993), 313–34. 16 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 36: “Der barmhertzig gott helff mir awch zw eim selligen end.” (the merciful God help me also to a [blessed] end, Writings, 40). Conway translates “selich ent” as “happy end,” which here and elsewhere I have changed to “blessed end.”

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daz jch awch ein selchs ent nem, vnd das got mit seinem himlischen her, mein vater, muter vnd freuwnd zw meinem ent wöllen kumen, vnd daz vns der allmechtig got daz ewig leben geb.” (God, the Lord, grant me that I too may attain a [blessed] end, and that God with his heavenly host, my Father, Mother, relations and friends may come to my death. And may God Almighty give unto us eternal life.)17 Inserted after a description of his mother’s agony, this statement, formulaic though it sounds, resonates deeply. Among other things, this formula invokes sixteenth-century images of the dying who in their final hours were surrounded by family members, friends, and other people, turning the transition from life to death into a public moment. Thirdly, when writing up Barbara Dürer’s illness and death, the author revisited his account repeatedly. We do not know how soon after his mother’s demise Dürer started to jot down his notes. The fact that he made an error when reporting the day of her death—as Rupprich notes, May 17, 1514, was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday, as Dürer falsely wrote—may suggest a time lapse between witnessing and reporting, though we cannot be sure since he made the same mistake in later documents.18 Be that as it may, Dürer added to the folio page multiple times, as the use of space, different inks, and different shades of his handwriting demonstrate. This layered, if not convoluted, writing process speaks to the urgency that this particular account must have held for its author. Thanks to paleographic evidence, we are able to reconstruct the section’s genesis to a certain degree. When Dürer decided to complement the description of Albrecht the Elder’s death with that of his other parent, the verso page was already covered with writing and an illustration. Nonetheless, he arranged for the account of his mother’s death immediately to follow his father’s, drawing a line to separate an event that occurred no less than twelve years after the latter. He filled the remainder of the recto page with fifteen densely written lines, mentioning in a gesture of closure the date of Barbara Dürer’s death.

17 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; Dürer, Writings, 78–79. Cf. “Gedenkbuch,” 36, as cited in the previous footnote. For ars moriendi images and their potential reception, see Palmer, “Ars moriendi,” 322–23; Arthur E. Imhof, Geschichte sehen: Fünf Erzählungen nach historischen Bildern (Munich: Beck, 1990), 59–92. Dürer was certainly familiar with the satirical counterpart of these images in The Ship of Fools, the early modern best seller to which he had contributed images as a woodcutter. See Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964), 136, 193, 313 (nos. 38, 55, 85). 18 The shared mistake suggests the interrelatedness of these various writings.

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Thereafter, he moved to the verso page, making use of the margins on the top and to the right of the page. Here, he added to the account at least three times: first, with a detailed description of the care he took of the sick and dying woman—a section concluding with a reference to her age at the time of death—then with a passage on her funeral and his future death, and finally with a mention of her peaceful expression in death. The addenda, crammed into the margins, were separated from the account of the miraculous crucifix in the center of the page by a vertical line.19 Dürer’s vivid description is therefore the effect of a montage, of elements added at different moments, of zooming in from a variety of angles, all within a given narrative frame. In rendering such intricate evidence, any edition, even an excellent one like Rupprich’s, inevitably falls short. After all, an edition is constrained by the printed page in its two-dimensionality. As opposed to the autograph, the edited folio is organized sequentially, following the temporal sequence of historical layers, as constructed by the editor. In the actual “Gedenkbuch,” by contrast, time veers toward circularity, related themes are stacked on one another, and writing takes on a spatial dimension.20 Finally, the complex structure of the memorial book also affects its communicative profile. After all, to write means to relate. During the 1500s, writing was rarely a self-serving exercise. But whom then does the memorial book address? That Dürer must have had readers other than himself in mind is signaled by the formula “Nun solt jr wissen” (Now you must know), the very formula that introduces the account of his mother’s death. The text’s pragmatic profile is further evidenced in Dürer’s appeal to the folio’s readers, asking them to pray for his deceased father. (While the address in this context, “jr all mein freunt” [all ye my friends], could translate either as relatives or as friends, the former meaning is primary, given the ritual context of the description).21 It is not surprising that the text’s audience surfaces most prominently in passages dealing with dying; the rituals for

19 The closest analysis of the paleographic evidence is given in Dürers Mutter, 26–29, though strangely, its author, Michael Roth, treats the entries on the verso page summarily, without marking out its layeredness. 20 In addition to the accounts of his parents’ death, this is also the case with the portents, the miracle of the cross and the comet. When Dürer added the entry on the comet is unclear. 21 This is what the editor Hans Rupprich suggests (Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 38) who footnotes “frewnt” as “friends; relatives” (Freunde; Verwandte).

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the dead required the assistance of helpers, family members above all. These sections contrast with others, however, whose addressees are less clear. In a compact space, the “Gedenkbuch” unites different textual modes. The text oscillates between narrating, describing, and recording, with interspersed religious formulae that, among other functions, punctuate or emphasize particular elements. The memorial book thus emerges as a porous text. A word-by-word analysis would bring to the fore how the text’s different parameters— temporality, writing process, audience, and textual modes—intersect and overlap. Yet its porousness is manifest. Among other indicators, the folio features an illustration depicting one of the crucifixes that reportedly fell from the Nuremberg skies in 1503, especially onto children (as our author remarks). Dürer reports that he saw one (“Vnder den [krewcz] allen hab jch eins gesehen jn der gestalt, wÿ ichs hernoch gemacht hab” [Of all the crosses I saw one that looked just like the one I later drew]): a simple image of Mary and John at the foot of Jesus on the cross, executed in broad brushstrokes as if “made” of one piece.22 It is noteworthy that the manuscript’s layout places the “cross”-illustration and Dürer’s account of mourning his mother’s death parallel to one another, a placement of image and text that might bear some significance even if the available space dictated such an arrangement. In a composition of striking simplicity, this illustration is reminiscent of contemporary religious iconography, authenticating these same representations.23 Christ’s crucifixion represents the pivotal scene in the Christian drama of incarnation and human salvation, while St. Mary’s and St. John’s mourning by the cross models the appropriate human response to Christ’s sacrifice for humanity. Understood as an evil omen, however, the raining of crucifixes instilled fears of dying in a servant-woman in whose lap one such “cross” fell: “Vnd sy was so betrübt trum, daz sy weinet vnd ser klackte; wan sÿ forcht, sy müst dorum sterben.” (And she was so grief-stricken as a result that

22 On this enigmatic miracle whose occurrence is testified to in other sources, see Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 31–33. 23 Dürer represented this scene repeatedly, both before and after 1503, not least since it is part of the iconography of the passion cycle that he designed in several series. The composition closest to the “miracle cross” is probably the “Christ on the Cross” from the 1511 passion cycle. Cf. Martin Sonnabend, Albrecht Dürer: Die Druckgraphiken im Städel (Frankfurt am Main: Städel Museum, 2007), 189. See also, ibid., 127, 171; Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Maria Luisa Sternath, Albrecht Dürer (Vienna: Albertina, 2003), 322.

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she wept and lamented greatly since she feared she would have to die because of it.)24 A comparison of the “Gedenkbuch” with the so-called family chronicle or “Familienchronik” of 1524 is instructive.25 In the later family chronicle, Dürer redacted information about his family’s history in a “ricordanza” or “Hausbuch”—a genre relatively common among patrician families in Nuremberg, though rare in the milieu of artisans.26 The family chronicle was a receptacle for facts of importance to the living as well as to future family members, comprising the names of ancestors; places of origin and habitation; dates of birth, baptism, and death; and the occasional anecdote told in a matter-of-fact manner. As such, it was based on the notes archived in the memorial book as well as, one can surmise, memories and documents. In fact, the artist refers in the “Familienchronik” to the existence of precursors.27 We would therefore know about the so-called “Gedenkbuch,” even if the one folio we have had not survived. For the “Familienchronik,” the author redacted the same information, making it fit a smooth narrative format. Here, for instance, reports on the death of family members conclude as a rule with a conventionalized “Amen.” Here, seemingly random entries, such as the mention of a comet, are missing. It is consistent with the logic of the respective text that the observation about the peaceful expression of the departed Barbara Dürer only appears in the memorial book and not in the family chronicle. In Dürer’s memorial book, Barbara Dürer’s agony becomes an occasion to review her life’s course as a path of personal suffering. The reader learns that two years after her husband’s death she moved

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Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37. The translation is my own. Dürer, “Familienchronik,” 27–34. 26 See Urs Martin Zahnd, Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen Ludwig von Diesbachs: Studien zur spätmittelalterlichen Selbstdarstellung im oberdeutschen und schweizerischen Raume (Berne: Burgerbibliothek, 1986), 279–377. For Florence, see Mark Phillips, The ‘Memoir’ of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 33–37. For Nuremberg, see Andrea KammeierNebel, “Der Wandel des Totengedächtnisses in privaten Aufzeichnungen unter dem Einfluß der Reformation,” in Das dargestellte Ich, 93–116. Kammeier-Nebel canvasses a broad corpus of ego-documents, without including Dürer, showing how in the latesixteenth century expressions of emotional grief over the death of family members became more common. 27 Sahm discusses the fact that a reference to “the other book” does not need to indicate that the whole book was devoted to similar records, as Rupprich and others have assumed. In fact, she suggests that it might have been an account book. Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 26–28. 25

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into her son’s house where for nine years she led a rather solitary life marked by physical weakness and illness: “Dan sy het kein gesunde czeit nie noch meines vaters tot” (After my father’s death, she never lived in full health).28 The flashback encompasses Barbara’s entire adult life. Dürer reports that she gave birth to eighteen children (three of whom lived into adulthood) and survived numerous life-threatening illnesses, until contracting an unnamed disease in her old-age from which, after lingering for a year, she did not recover. The narrative perspective thus positions her death as the culmination of a life of suffering. Barbara Dürer’s death, “jr tot”—her death—is the summa of a vita. The description of an individual life as a progression toward its end intertwines the report in the memorial book with the moving portrait of Barbara Dürer as an elderly woman on the verge of death (see Smith in this volume, fig. 3).29 The drawing bears an inscription that dates its making to March 19, 1514, approximately two months before her death. On the sheet, the depiction of a woman marked by sickness and suffering is noted as that of a particular person, though she is not called by her own name: “Daz ist Albrecht Dürers muter, dÿ was alt 63 jor” (This is Albrecht Dürer’s mother who was sixty-three years old). The artist inscribed the drawing thus, before he updated it after May 16, 1514, adding the date of her death.30 The portrait with its sculpted physiognomy—the upper body remains sketchy—is a snapshot as well as a memorial. It is as though the deep furrows and wrinkles on her face bear the imprint of time and could intimate a vita.31 Yet Barbara’s mouth is closed; the gaze of the elderly woman is turned away from the viewer—directed at some distant place.32 Erwin Panofsky has drawn attention to the uneven

28 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; the translation is my own. Cf. Dürer, Writings, 78: “ever since my Father’s death she had kept her health.” 29 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, KdZ 22 (422 × 306 mm). See Roth, Dürers Mutter, 24–25. 30 This is not unique in Dürer’s oeuvre. As the artist inscribed some of his works of art after they had been completed, he also updated descriptions and added to them. A comparable example is the one given in the painting of his eighty-two-year-old teacher, Michael Wolgemut, painted in 1516 and equipped with a notice containing information about his death in 1519 (cf. Roth, Dürers Mutter, 30–31). 31 From a medical perspective, see Wolfgang Pirsig, “‘Dürers Mutter’—aus ärztlicher Sicht,” in Dürers Mutter, 17–22. 32 This is true in general of Dürer’s depictions of women, whether portraits or representations of female saints.

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eyes—a discrepancy that accentuates the inaccessibility of the object of their intense gaze.33 At the same time, the drawing’s effect is enhanced in that it partakes of a nexus of references, to which writings, images, and inscriptions on images contribute—a memorializing that Dürer produced, effected, and shaped. Pain isolates; suffering connects. As much as Barbara Dürer’s death throes appear as the synthesis of a life story, the documentation of death in the memorial book serves as a model—namely, as an exemplum for a Christian life and death. In the “Gedenkbuch,” the dying mother provides an alternate self—to use Christian Kiening’s formula—or, as in this case, a closely related alter ego.34 According to Albrecht, Barbara Dürer stoically endured the many hardships of her existence. After the death of her husband, she occupied herself mainly with prayer and pious and good works. She took to instructing her fellow Christians, particularly her children.35 Dürer stylizes his mother as a pious Christian widow: the term widow comes up in the section devoted to his father’s death; the adjective pious appears numerous times as if posthumously to commemorate the person thusly described.36 In her final hour, she took it upon herself to exhort her son to prepare for his own death by “schöner ler” (good instruction), admonishing him to avoid sin. The personal is enmeshed with the exemplary. In the memorial book, Barbara Dürer’s life, a life of suffering, becomes a propaedeutic for human life as a progression to death. Inversion is so deeply inscribed into the Christian imaginary

33 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 171. 34 Christian Kiening, Das andere Selbst: Figuren des Todes an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003). 35 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37: “vnd jr meinster geprawch was vill in der kÿrchen, vnd stroffet mich albeg fleisig, wo jch nit woll handlet. Vnd sÿ het albeg meing vnd meiner prüder gros sorg for sünden, vnd jch ging awz oder ein, so was albeg jr sprichwort: ‘ge jn dem nomen Cristo!’ Vnd sy tette vns mit hohem fleis stettiglich heilige vermanung, het albeg grosse sorg vür vnser sell. Vnd jre gute werck vnd barmherzikeit, dy sy gegen jderman ertzeigt hat, kan jch nit gnugsam anczeigen und jr gut lob” (Dürer, Writings, 78; “Her most frequent habit was to go much to the church. She always upbraided me well if I did not do right, and she was ever in great anxiety about my sins and those of my brother. And if I went out or in her saying was always, ‘Go in the name of Christ.’ She constantly gave us holy admonitions with deep earnestness and she always had great thought for our soul’s health. I cannot enough praise her good works and the compassion she showed to all, as well as her high character”). 36 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 36–37.

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that her exemplum is all the more compelling since it concerns a lowly woman and housewife.37 Although Barbara Dürer’s dying is accorded exemplary features, one’s death reflected one’s life, or so it was believed. In that sense, no death resembled another. Yet what Barbara experienced will inevitably be experienced by the text’s author as well. Death and dying therefore provided a stimulus to meticulous observing and learning through seeing. After all, every Christian had to learn the ultimate lesson, how to die well. Not by chance does Dürer’s meditation culminate in an emphatic “ich awch” or “me, too”: “Got der her verleich mir, daz jch awch ein selichs ent nem.” (May God the Lord grant me that I also have a blessed end.)38 Dying with fortitude links the generations. In this genealogy of death, every detail warrants meticulous attention and documentation. Communication through sensual perception emerges as crucial, particularly since words may fail the dying, as they did Barbara Dürer. In her final moments, she “beheld” a vision that the dutiful caregiver by her side was unable to see, “something dreadful,” at a time when she no longer communicated verbally (“vnd het doch for lang nit gerett”; for a long time, she had not spoken).39 Yet the account has her son’s perception echo her own; “he also saw,” he writes, using the same German word “sach” that he deployed when describing his mother’s vision a line below its first mention. Dürer uses the word a third time when he summarizes his mother’s Christian character, “Item jr meinst frewd ist albeg gewest, von got zw reden, vnd sach gern dy er gottes” (To speak of God was ever her greatest delight and gladly she beheld

37 This point is made explicit in Johann von Staupitz, “De imitanda morte Jesu Christi libellus,” in Johann von Staupitzens sämmtliche Werke, ed. J.K.F. Knaake, vol. 1: Deutsche Schriften (Potsdam: Krausnick, 1867), 78. On this complex, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). With regard to death, see Lucinda M. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 33. Klaus Staeck’s poster of 1971, the year of the quincentennial of Dürer’s birth, used the well-known 1513 drawing of Barbara Dürer, adding the text “Würden Sie dieser Frau ein Zimmer vermieten?” (Would you rent a room to this woman?), thus translating a well-known individual physiognomy into an exemplum for an old and sick woman. See Roth, Dürers Mutter, 176. American artist Robert Arneson used Dürer’s drawing for a critique of modern beauty ideals in “Mother Dürer” of 1979, an earthenware sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. 38 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37. Conway (Dürer, Writings, 78): “God, the Lord, grant me that I too may attain a [blessed] end.” 39 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; Dürer, Writings, 78.

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[sach] the honour of God).40 Furthermore, her pain is reflected in the pain of a son: “Do fan hab jch solchen schmerczen gehabt, daz jchs nit aws sprechen kan” (I experienced such pain because of this that I cannot express it), Dürer writes regarding the moment when her ordeal was over.41 Again, one word, the term “schmerczen” (pain), is used twice, interlacing her departing the world in pain (“verschid mit schmerczen”) with his lamentation about her having passed on to the next world—a tentative bridge across the ultimate divider, death. The intimate interplay between mother and son seems to dominate the narrative about Barbara Dürer’s dying. The bed for the decrepit woman had been set up in the center of the house, as we read early on; however, other household members, who, one suspects, would have witnessed the scene of her dying, remain in the shadows in the account. When Dürer’s father died in 1502, only a servant was present. Within the confines of the passage on his mother’s dying, others are relegated to the supplications for his family. “Death,” writes Philippe Ariès, “is governed by a familiar ritual.”42 Among other functions, the memorial book records these rituals as they were administered to the dying parent in this case, a testament of sorts, bearing witness to the excellent care she received (with possible implications for Dürer’s own death in the future). Barbara Dürer did not experience the infamous sudden death feared in the late Middle Ages; a mors repentina, it was said, would leave humans extremely vulnerable at a time when one needed support the most. A well-ordered passage into the next world occurred in the company of the living who were called upon to provide crucial support in spiritual as well as bodily matters. This is how Barbara Dürer died, and this is what the memorial book tells the reader. As noted, Barbara Dürer’s descent into sickness unleashed a plethora of activities in the household to which she belonged. On the morning when her chamber had to be broken into, she was moved to a room

40

Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; Dürer, Writings, 78. Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37. Conway (Dürer, Writings, 78) translates the line as “I felt so grieved for her that I cannot express it,” which accentuates Dürer’s compassion, whereas the German puts the stress on causation and sequence. 42 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1981), 6. See also Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), who offers a critique of Ariès. 41

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where she could be tended to and comforted when in need.43 Properly interpreted, signs announce a person’s impending death, as they did that fateful morning in 1513. Since her death seemed imminent, she received the last rites without further delay, though she would live for more than a year thereafter.44 She was the beneficiary of a papal plenary indulgence, the “Gedenkbuch” notes, destined to relieve her of all penance for her sins in purgatory; she received a liturgical farewell drink; after her death, Dürer provided her with the finest funeral he could afford—these are some of the acts recorded here.45 These passages reflect not only a household coming to terms with the dying of one of its members (although, remarkably, most of them, among them Dürer’s wife, Agnes, have left no traces in the account); the account with its many official registers is itself embedded in this community. With its conspicuous accounting and recording, the memorial book thus puts Dürer on display as an exemplary caretaker for everybody in his circle of “friends” to see. The passage has undeniably apologetic overtones. His father slipped away when Albrecht Dürer the Younger was temporarily absent.46 Yet at his mother’s deathbed, he assisted assiduously, he tells us, doing whatever he could to accompany her on this final journey. Yet by recording what he observed, Dürer also gathers evidence for the efficacy of the religious rites administered in this moment of crisis. Barbara’s departure was blessed: the facial expression makes it evident; the memorial book commemorates her Christian passage, storing this fleeting sight for the future. Viewed thus, lieblich, the word Dürer

43 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37: “[sy] an eim morgen frẅ jehling also töttlich kranck ward, daz wir dy kamer awff prachen, dan wir sunst, so sy nit awff kunt than, nit zw jr kunten. Also trug wir sÿ herab in ein stuben.” Cf. Dürer, Writings, 78: “[she] was one morning suddenly taken deadly ill that we broke into her chamber; otherwise, as she could not open, we had not been able to come to her.” 44 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37: “man gab jr pede sacrament. Dan alle welt meinte, sÿ solt sterben.” Cf. Dürer, Writings, 78: “she received both sacraments, for everyone thought she would die.” 45 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37: “aws pepstlichem gewalt van pein vnd schuld geabsolfÿrt”; “Sÿ begert awch for zw trÿncken sant Johans segen, als sÿ dan tett”; “Vnd jch hab sy erlich nach meinem vermügen begen lassen.” Cf. Dürer, Writings, 78: “absolved by papal power from pain and sin”; “[s]he asked also to drink S. John’s blessing, which she then did”; “I have buried her honourably according to my means.” 46 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 36: “Und dy jung magt, do sy dy verentrung sach, do luff sy schnell zw meiner kamer, mich weckte, vnd e jch herab kam, do was er verschiden.” Cf. Dürer, Writings, 40: “And the young maid, when she saw the change, ran quickly to my chamber and woke me, but before I came down he was gone.”

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deploys to describe his dead mother (translated by Martin Conway as “sweet”), may not only signal an inner quality of peace after the agony of death but also the fact that, as far as one could tell, God had kept up his part of the bargain. As a detailed account of an individual’s dying, Dürer’s memorial book has few rivals in its time.47 Among other things, it opens a rare window onto the care given by the living to a person on the verge of death. The description thus breathes life into the ars moriendi manuals that swept through late medieval Europe with their exhortations to readers to prepare for death while alive. At the same time, the account does not spare its readers the gruesome signs of death’s encroachment on human life. Despite a life lived according to Christian ideals (according to the memorial book), despite elaborate preparations by her son (if we follow Dürer’s account), Barbara Dürer did not experience a smooth transition to the afterlife. Her death was visibly difficult: shortly before slipping away, she perceived something horrible, Dürer writes; Death accosted her with two blows. What is more, she suffered pain in her final moments: “Sy ist awch hert gestorben, vnd jch merckt, das sÿ ettwas grawsams sach; dan sy fortret das weichwassr, vnd het doch for lang nit gerett. Also prachen jr dy awgen. Ich sach awch, wÿ jr der tott zwen gros stos ans hercz gab, vnd wÿ sy mund vnd awgen zw tet, vnd verschid mit schmerczen.” (Also she died hard, and I marked that she saw something dreadful, for she asked for the holywater, although, for a long time, she had not spoken. Immediately afterwards her eyes closed over. I saw also how Death smote her two great strokes to the heart, and how she closed mouth and eyes and departed with pain.)48 To be sure, this was not the beautiful death one expected to reap as the reward of a life well lived. Concluding the description of his father’s final passage, Dürer had expressed a widely held view when he wrote, “Wan es ist nit müglich, der woll lebt, daz er ˜vbell abscheid fon dÿser welt.” (For it is not possible for one who has

47 Compare, however, Ludwig von Diesbach’s extensive account of the death of his wife, Antonia von Ringoltingen, 1487, in Zahnd, Die autobiographischen Aufzeichnungen, 90–101, or Giovanni di Pagolo di Bartolomeo Morelli’s account of the death of his son Alberto, which bears a strong resemblance to Dürer’s. See Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 172–74. 48 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; Dürer, Writings, 78.

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lived well to depart ill from this world, for God is full of compassion.)49 Yet in the wake of the cruel death as experienced by his mother, the author apparently needed to reconcile what Barbara endured with the ideal death he thought she deserved. This is the tension that animates Dürer’s written portrait, a portrait of his mother as a Christian exemplar in both life and death. In commenting on this passage, Heike Sahm has argued that the notion of the sovereign Christian death, as propagated in the ars moriendi, was accompanied by “an insecurity” about how to interpret a rough death.50 To be sure, the arts of dying subscribed to a vision of the good death as a calm death. At the same time, contemporary block book illustrations figured death as a battle fought with Satan over the departing soul. The personified figure of Death as invoked by Dürer is reminiscent of this scenario. What mattered, however, was the battle’s outcome. Dürer’s final remark thus seeks to put to rest lingering doubts about where his mother’s soul went. But how could one be certain? Ultimately, certainty regarding the afterlife was difficult to come by. The patchwork of formulae and other elements marshaled in this text makes this uncertainty indeed all the more visible. The closeness of mother and son in their confrontation with death as represented in the “Gedenkbuch” brings a third person into play: Christ. His presence has been looming in the background of my description. When reminiscing on his mother’s life, Dürer contends, invoking the Christ of the New Testament, that despite his mother’s many travails, she “bore no malice” (nÿ rochselig gewest), and adds: “Dyse mein frume muter . . . hat grosse armut gelitten, verspottung, verachtung, hönische wort, schrecken vnd grosse widerwertigkeit.” (My pious mother . . . suffered great poverty, mockery, contempt, scorn,

49 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 36; Dürer, Writings, 41. Cf. Johann von Staupitz, “De imitanda morte Jesu Christi libellus,” 73: “ein geruet leben hat einen stillen todt, so der freuele sunder grausam, erschrecklich mit brullen sein leben endet” (a calm life has a quiet death, while the wicked sinner ends his life wailing and terrified). These different deaths were pictorialized in contemporary crucifixion scenes by means of the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus, providing contrasting models for the dying. See Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 50 Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 39. This aspect is particularly striking in comparison with Ludwig von Diesbach’s description of his wife’s death (see note 47 above).

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fright, and great hardship.)51 The choice of words alone suggests that Barbara Dürer’s life and death mirror the Passion.52 Christ’s suffering was a pervasive theme in the “art of dying.” In what is the source text for many treatises of ars moriendi, Jean Gerson’s Opus tripartitum—whose third part teaches “the art of all arts,” namely, the art of dying—the chancellor of the University of Paris recommends that one comfort the dying with an image of Christ on the cross (or one of a saint).53 Such widely copied treatises on the subject of a Christian death in the German language as Thomas Peuntner’s Kunst des heilsamen Sterbens (Art of Salutary Dying), took their cues from Gerson, among others, disseminating practical advice for the dying and their loved ones.54 Modeling one’s life and dying after Christ continued to preoccupy devotional theology well into the sixteenth century. In 1515, Johann von Staupitz devoted an entire treatise to the matter, a publication with the programmatic title Buchlein von der Nachfolge des willigen Sterbens Christi (Booklet on the Imitation of the Willing Dying of Christ). With affective fervor, Staupitz approached the theme of dying from the vantage point of Christ’s crucifixion. Every trial a human could possibly face when dying had been prefigured in Christ on the cross, according to Staupitz; Christ’s example—a life of doing, suffering, and dying—is an inspired gift of God to humankind. Instead of placing false trust in one’s own righteousness before God, therefore,

51

Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37; Dürer, Writings, 78. This description has many parallels in the one that is part of the family chronicle in regard to Dürer’s father: “Jtem dieser obgemelt Albrecht Dürer der elter hat sein leben mit großer mühe und schwerer harter arbeit zugebracht und von nichten anders nahrung gehabt, dann was er vor sich, sein weib und kind mit seiner handt gewunnen hat. Darumb hat er gar wenig gehabt. Er hat auch mancherlej betrübung, anfechtung und widerwertigkeit gehabt. Er hat auch von menniglich, die jhn gekannt haben, ein gut lob gehabt. Dan er hielt ein erbar christlich leben, war ein gedultig mann und sanfftmütig, gegen jederman friedsam, und er waß fast danckhbar gegen gott.” Dürer, “Familienchronik,” 30. Dürer, Writings, 35: “This Albrecht Dürer the elder passed his life in great toil and stern, hard labour, having nothing for his support save what he earned with his hand for himself, his wife, and his children; so that he had little enough. He underwent moreover manifold afflictions, trials, and adversities. But he won just praise from all who knew him, for he lived an honourable, Christian life, was a man patient of spirit, mild and peaceable to all, and very thankful towards God.” 53 Gregory the Great, “Regulae Pastoralis,” in PL 77, 14: “ars artium.” On Jean Gerson’s Opus tripartitum: Praesentetur informo imago Crucifixi vel alterius Sancti quem sanus et incolumis specialiter venerabatur, see Rainer Rudolf’s introduction to Thomas Peuntner, ‘Kunst des heilsamen Sterbens’ nach den Handschriften der Österr. Nationalbibliothek (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1956), 64. 54 Thomas Peuntner, ‘Kunst des heilsamen Sterbens,’ 45. 52

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the believer ought to learn dying from Christ, and those around the dying should hold up his example to those in their care.55 No longer a household name, Staupitz was in his time the spiritus rector of the Nuremberg sodality named in his honor, the sodalitas Staupitzana, of which Dürer was a member. As a vicar-general of the Observant Augustinians, he was also the mentor of a fellow monk, Martin Luther, in whose honor this same circle of Nuremberg humanists renamed itself as sodalitas Martiniana. In fact, when asked in 1519 to offer his reflections on the art of dying, Luther recommended Staupitz’s treatise, before proceeding to author his own in the same year, a treatise entitled “Ein Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben” (A Sermon on Preparing to Die)56—a topic to which he would return several times throughout his career.57 Luther’s consolatory piece elaborates themes familiar from the ars moriendi literature: he insists that one should prepare oneself for death while healthy; like Staupitz and many others, he presents dying as a time of trials or “anfechtung” (impugnatio); therefore, believers need to be forearmed against the evil forces they will encounter during their final moments in life.58 Yet the brunt of his treatise is concerned with the psychology of the dying who are, Luther claims, greatly at risk. They are likely to dwell on their sins, despair, and, as a result, become the devil’s prey. Whereas meditating on one’s sinfulness is time well spent during one’s life, such rumination when one is on the verge of death endangers the believer, he argues. It is best to respond to one’s imminent death by focusing on the fact that, thanks to Christ’s sacrifice, every Christian can be saved:

55 Staupitz, “De imitanda morte,” 73: “wer nicht von Christo sterben lernet, der kans nymmer mehr” (who does not learn how to die from Christ will never master it). 56 Martin Luther, “Ein Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben,” in Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1884), 2:685–97 (hereafter cited as WA). English translation: Martin Luther, “A Sermon on Preparing to Die 1519,” trans. Martin H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works (Devotional Works, vol. 1), ed. Martin O. Dietrich (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1969), 42: 99–115. One of the early printed copies was issued in Nuremberg (introduction to “Ein Sermon,” 681). 57 Cf. Martin Luther, “Ob man vor dem Sterben fliehen möge (1527),” in WA (Weimar: Böhlau, 1901), 23: 323–86; Luther, “Vorrede zu der Sammlung der Begräbnislieder 1542, ” in WA (Weimar: Böhlau, 1923), 35: 478–83. 58 Dick Ackerbom, “ ‘. . . only the image of Christ in us’: Continuity and Discontinuity between the Late Medieval ars moriendi and Luther’s Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben,” in Spirituality Renewed: Studies on Significant Representatives of the Modern Devotion, ed. Hein Blommestijn, Charles Caspers, and Rijcklof Hofman (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 209–72.

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helmut puff You must not look at sin in sinners, or in your conscience, or those who abide in sin to the end and are damned. If you do, you will surely follow them and also be overcome. You must turn your thoughts away from that and look at sin only within the picture of grace. Engrave that picture in yourself with all your power and keep it before your eyes. The picture of grace is nothing else but that of Christ on the cross and of all his dear saints.59

Images of the crucified Christ (with company), be they inner visions or real artworks, deliver a much needed antidote, pulling the believer away from a harmful focus on sinfulness while dying. As a distancing device from the self, such images promise to fortify the believer’s trust in salvation. These religious treatises on death resonate with late medieval images of the dying. The influential illustrated ars moriendi block books— one of which was printed in Nuremberg in 1473—show the crucified Christ appearing at the point in the pictorial narrative when the dying subject triumphs over demons and tribulations.60 A painting commemorating the last hour of Crescentia Pirckheimer (d. 1504), wife of Willibald Pirckheimer—Dürer’s patrician mentor and friend—corroborates the practice of providing images for the dying: as in the ars moriendi woodcuts, an anonymus artist has represented death as a communal event, capturing the moment of the spouse’s passage into the next world. Lying in bed, she is surrounded by women and men, members of the household and members of the clergy (though, unlike in the illustrated ars moriendi, there are no demons present). While her life is slipping away, the dying woman holds a crucifix in her left hand (see Smith in this volume, fig. 4).61

59 Luther, “A Sermon on Preparing to Die,” 104. “Alßo mustu die sund nit ansehen yn denn sundern, noch yn deynem gewissen, noch yn denen, die yn sunden endlich bliben vnd vordampt seyn, du ferest gewißlich hynach vnd wirst ubirwunden, sondern abkeren deyn gedancken unnd die sund nit dan yn der gnaden bild ansehen, und dasselb bild mit aller crafft yn dich bilden und vor augen haben. Der gnaden bild ist nit anders dan Christus am Creutz und alle seyne lieben heyligen.” Luther, “Ein Sermon von der Bereitung,” 689. 60 Jochen Hesse, “Ars moriendi,” in Himmel Hölle Fegefeuer: Das Jenseits im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Jezler, 2nd ed. (Zurich: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, 1994), 262–65. Like other artes moriendi, Hans Sporer’s 1473 Nuremberg edition has eleven woodcuts: five pairs showing the tribulations and overcoming them as well as one final image with Christ. 61 Willehad Paul Eckert and Christoph von Imhoff, Willbald Pirckheimer: Dürers Freund im Spiegel seines Lebens, seiner Werke und seiner Umwelt, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Wienand, 1982), plate iv. Held at the Rochus Chapel in Nuremberg, the painting

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From this Christocentric perspective on death, one may reevaluate the nexus between Albrecht Dürer’s report of his mother’s death and his imagistic experiments, which, in the truest sense of the word, mix the image of the artist as a prototypical man with that of Christ. This strand of Dürer’s works develops in a variety of media (paintings, prints, drawings) and spans almost his entire lifetime. From the Karlsruhe Man of Sorrows of 1493, to his self-portrait of 1500, to the late drawing of Dürer as a man of sorrows from 1522, allusions to the Passion play a prominent role in this complex. The memento Christi and the memento mei are frequently drawn together on the stages of suffering and loss. (Me[m]ento mei is the inscription Dürer inserted on a charcoal drawing of a personified death on horseback from the year 1505.)62 In a number of representations, Dürer remakes the aging, suffering, and dying body into a dialogical monument, suspended between Christ’s humanity and the human condition after the Fall. In 1503, the year after his father’s death and the year of an epidemic in Nuremberg, he characterized a pair of charcoal drawings as the product of his own sickness. While one drawing shows the head of a man contorted with pain, its parallel piece depicts Christ’s post-mortem head adorned with the crown of thorns. On the latter drawing with its depiction of Christ, the artist entered an inscription referencing his personal disease: “Die 2 angesicht hab ich uch erl . . . [?] gemacht in meiner Kranckeit.” (I produced these two countenances for you . . . when I was ill.)63 The undated, so-called Self-Portrait as a Melancholic belongs in the same context of reflecting on individual suffering in Christ.64 This selfportrait has occasionally been said to be from the time around his

probably was based on a model image by Dürer. See Fedja Anzelewsky, Albrecht Dürer: Das malerische Werk (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971), 182–84. 62 Albrecht Dürer, “Death Riding a Horse,” charcoal drawing (British Museum). See Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (London: The British Museum Press, 2002), 156. The arrangement of the letters in three lines (ME / ENTO / MEI) on the piece is reminiscent of a word grid, foregrounding the “me” and “mei” as well as the drifting apart of language in confrontation with death. Dürer used this inscription also in a drawing of Samson’s fight against the Philistines, a drawing of a design made for the tomb of Georg Fugger in the church of St. Anna in Augsburg. See Dürer Holbein Grünewald, 148–49. 63 Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, 146–47. 64 Schröder and Sternath, Albrecht Dürer, 232–33. In fact, the date ascribed to this image has varied between 1508 and 1526.

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mother’s dying and the three famous engravings, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), St. Jerome in his Study (1514), and the “image of images” (Klaus-Peter Schuster), the Melencolia I (1514).65 It has been claimed repeatedly that Dürer consulted a doctor by means of this drawing. Along with the artless casualness of the draftsmanship, this assumption harks back to the inscription on the drawing: “Do der gelb fleck ist vnd mit dem finger drawff dewt do ist mir we.” (Where the yellow stain is and where I point with my finger is where I experience pain.) The multifarious appellative impetus of the composition is intensified by the figure’s gaze, which is directed at the viewer. In a recent catalogue, Matthias Mende remarks, “If Dürer made the drawing in order to consult a doctor, as many of us would like to claim, even today he would have a difficult time making a diagnosis from afar.”66 While the drawing may be practically motivated, one can hardly imagine that it functioned as a diagnostic instrument. This assumption reduces what constitutes an excess of signification and of deictic references to a pragmatic context that ultimately cannot be proven.67 Even this drawing’s multilayered indexing of pain is incapable of revealing pain itself. As opposed to pain, which is registered in the body—in this case in the spleen (marked by yellow coloration in the drawing), the organ of melancholy, according to medical theory—this woefulness eludes representation. Pain becomes communicable through the ascription of words and meanings. What is most striking about this image is the calm and confident posture of the depicted figure that faces the viewer. This drawing then derives meaning from the extravagant display of pain, taking up the iconographic tradition of the epiphany of St. Thomas and alluding to the presentation of the wound in Christ’s side.68 Dürer’s self-representation as a sick man thus gestures toward the resurrected Christ, the

65 Bartrum, Dürer and his Legacy, 186–89; Klaus-Peter Schuster, “Das Bild der Bilder: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Dürers Melancholiekupferstich,” Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 (1982): 72–134. 66 Matthias Mende, “Selbstbildnis als Melancholiker,” in Albrecht Dürer, 232 (my translation). 67 On the symbolic excess of this portrait, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 177. 68 On this theological and pictorial context, see Glenn W. Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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physicality of Christ in its painless singularity. The representation of suffering unfolds between a reference to an experience of acute pain and to the humoral constitution of melancholy, between the bodily and the mental states of pain, between the human and the divine, between what is represented and what cannot be shown. Through a surplus at the level of signification and through a gaze directed outward, the image ensnares its viewer, as though it were created to give an afterlife to the momentariness of pain. It is as if the beholder entered into a community of pain and suffering with the artist. According to Joseph Leo Koerner, the uncanny encounter between the figure of the artist and that of Christ in Dürer’s work can be attributed to a particular moment in the history of the portrait as a painterly medium. The rapprochement of humanity and God incarnate would thus stand at the interface between the search for an auratic sacrality of the image, on the one hand, and a naturalism in the representation of the human body, on the other—a constellation that finds its climax in the excessive physicality of the suffering Christ.69 Since the gesture of pointing, as it appears in some of Dürer’s compositions, indicates a symbolic nexus that leads beyond what is visible, forms of deixis remain predicated on difference, even where the figure of Christ and the figure of the artist are fused at the surface—the difference between the nature of Christ and that of man, on the one hand, and the difference between the vera icon, the true image, and representation, on the other.70 The “outstretched finger” of John the Baptist in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (ca. 1516), for example, works to effect an imitation of Christ in the observer, without imaging this imitatio itself, or so Andrée Hayum suggests.71 This altar, originally on display in St. Anthony Hospital in Isenheim, was part of a therapeutic-liturgical program attuned to hospital occupants stricken with St. Anthony’s Fire. The ailing observers were exhorted to follow St. John’s lead and confide in the verus medicus, that is, Christ, therewith seeking physical as well as spiritual healing, in full recognition of their sinfulness and

69

Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture, 63–246. Hans Belting, Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: Beck, 2005). 71 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 191; Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), passim. 70

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impending death. The index finger thus points in a direction, namely, to an arduous path that the ailing have to follow by themselves and whose vanishing point is the crucified Christ depicted on Grünewald’s panel. In Dürer, suffering and loss are suspended in an almost inextricable double move: many images—and, as we have seen, texts as well—openly invoke the Passion of Christ as an exemplary path of human suffering; at the same time, they incite the viewer to ponder an individual physicality, moving their audience to consider loss and to forge a community of suffering beyond the person’s death—an impulse particularly pertinent to an artist who left no progeny. Many viewers, in fact, followed suit, commemorating the “new Apelles” from Nuremberg in subsequent generations.72 It is the blurring of difference in the triangulated scenario among the dying, the living, and Christ that troubled many Reformers. Martin Luther and others insisted that bodily agonies ought to be approached from a distance. As a result, believers were positioned at a distance from the dying. They were also asked to engage the suffering, crucified Christ only from afar, through mediation or the intermediary of verbal instruction.73 It is not surprising therefore to find that St. John’s outstretched finger remained a prominent motif in staples of Protestant iconography such as “Law and Grace,” or that representations of Christ on the cross, whether from before or after the Reformation, suffered no loss in popularity.74 After all, “das crucifix das da steet, ist mein got nicht, dann mein got ist im himmel, sonder nur ein zeichen” (the crucifix that you see is not my God who is in heaven; it is a sign only), as Luther first formulated his theology of

72 The humanist Conrad Celtis coined this appellation. On Dürer as a “new Apelles” and on the ways in which the artist was commemorated, see David Hotchkiss Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), especially pp. 7–28, 78. To my knowledge, a study on this aspect of Dürer’s life and works is a desideratum; cf. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 73 In the predella to the main altar in Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach the Elder pictorialized this idea. See the discussion in Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 175–90. 74 Ingrid Schulze, Lucas Cranach d. J. und die protestantische Bildkunst in Sachsen und Thüringen (Bucha: Quartus, 2004); Heimo Reinitzer, Gesetz und Evangelium: Über ein reformatorisches Bildthema, seine Tradition, Funktion und Wirkungsgeschichte (Hamburg: Christians, 2006).

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the image in one of his Invocavit-sermons from 1522.75 The negation of identification and immediacy, however, is not merely a denial; it is also enabling. Among other possibilities, observation is predicated on distance. Observing the dying survived the historical shifts that the Reforms brought about.76 In Lutheran Protestantism, the linguistic complex that encapsulates this distancing is the widespread reference to the cross that every Christian must bear. The subtleties of Luther’s theologia crucis might have escaped ordinary believers.77 Yet German Protestantism cultivated the devotional formula of all people bearing their cross in a plenitude of catechetic-homiletic texts. The topos of the cross-bearing believer struck a median between exemplarity and individuality in one’s consideration of Christ. In its Lutheran version, for instance, the imagery of the cross works toward having each individual accept his or her arduous path in life, that is, his or her social position, gender, and marital status, all in view of salvation. The topology of the cross is thus bound to one’s station in life and therefore reminiscent of the representation of different estates. What is more, the cross is to be borne by each Christian alone. According to the Nuremberg Protestant theologian Veit Dietrich, even in marriage, “the marital cross” of husband and wife is not a shared burden.78 In the relevant literature, collectivity

75 Martin Luther, “Ein Sermon durch M.L.: Mittwoch nach Invocavit gepredigt,” in Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur, vol. 1, Renaissance und Barock (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassikerverlag, 1995), 36. 76 According to Becker, “It is impossible to delineate a clear and irrevocable move towards a wholly and permanently Protestant deathbed.” And she views “witnessing” of death as a crucial lesson in a believer’s “journey towards death. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman, 17 and 18, respectively. 77 Cf. Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, trans. Herbert J. Bouman (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976). Loewenich surveys the relevant passages in Luther; for our context, see especially 117–32. The crossimagery is based on New Testament sources (Mt 10:38; Mt 16:24; Mk 8:34; Lk 9:23; Lk 14:27); see Erich Dinkler, “Jesu Wort vom Kreuztragen,” in Signum Crucis: Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament und zur Christlichen Archäologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1967), 77–98. 78 Veit Dietrich, “Eine kurtze vermanung an die Eheleut,” in Etliche Schriften für den gemeinen man / von vnterricht Christlicher lehr vnd leben / vnnd zum trost der engstigen gewissen. Durch V. Dietrich. Mit schönen Figuren. Nürmberg. M.D.X.VIII., ed. Oskar Reichmann (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), 133. See also Helmut Puff, “‘. . . ein schul/ darinn wir allerlay Christliche tugend vnd zucht lernen’: Ein Vergleich zweier ehedidaktischer Schriften des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Geschlechterbeziehungen und Textfunktionen: Studien zu Eheschriften der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Rüdiger Schnell (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 59–88.

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is established only in knowing that one’s spouse, indeed everyone, has his or her own cross to carry. When one must bear one’s cross, compassion is reduced to Christian assistance in everyone’s individual confrontation with critical life events. It is thus fitting that Protestantism disconnected the community of the living from that of the dead, a community we have seen at work in Dürer’s coming to terms with his own mother’s death.79 For according to Protestant theologians, ultimately, no act of the living could aid the salvation of the dead: Christian mercy comes to an end with the death of the believer and does not concern the afterlife. Death thus acquired a new finality.80 Dürer took up the emerging Protestant theologia crucis when designing two dialogic images for his friend Lazarus Spengler, a fellow member of the Nuremberg sodality and the staunchest Lutheran during the transitional years before the imperial city officially became Lutheran in 1525.81 As with the paired charcoal drawings of 1503, these carefully executed drawings forge a dialogue between Christ and an ordinary human, most likely Spengler himself, whose coat of arms adorns the latter’s image. Intriguingly, the parallelism serves to emphasize difference and distance, as opposed to identity or immediacy of contact: Jesus and his follower walk in different directions, and the prominence of textual elements bespeaks the primacy of the Word (although the drawings are undated and we do not know when Dürer made them). The subscription has Christ’s call ring out forcefully in a quotation from St. Matthew (Mt 10:38): “he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (QVI NON TOLLIT CRVCEM SVAM ET SEQVITUR ME NON EST ME DIGNVS).82 Note that it is not Christ’s cross the reader is called upon to help bear but one’s own; note also that the cross depicted is not a crucifix. Christ’s cross-bearing follower responds with a quotation from the Psalms that thematizes death (Ps 23:4): “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me” (NAM SI AMBVLAVERO IN MEDIO VMBRE MORTIS NON TIMEBO MALA QVONIAM TU

79 Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 80 Cf. Kammeier-Nebel, “Wandel des Totengedächtnisses” (see note 26 above). 81 Friedrich Winkler, Zeichnungen von Albrecht Dürer (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1938), 3:13–14 n. 273–74; on Dürer’s religious development in general and on the woodcuts, see Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, 229–30. The literature on Dürer has discussed these two drawings only rarely. 82 Winkler, Zeichnungen, 3:13.

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MECUM ES.) Only when the two images are folded together will Christ and his follower in the sign of the cross touch each other. What we are left with, then, is a paradox that runs through the whole complex of death and commemoration in the sixteenth century. Memorializing—whether the memory of one’s dead mother, of Christ, or of the artist was at stake—was predicated on difference and distance. Yet how does one forge a connection between the dead and the living, the past and the present, the artistic maker and the beholder? In order to deal with loss and counter the danger that readers, addressees, or beholders might drift away, Dürer interlaced a plethora of semantic layers in writings as well as images, inscribing individuality in exemplarity and vice versa. The Protestant Reformation may have constrained the discourses available for relating to the dead while at the same time creating novel channels to preserve the memoria of the dead like the funeral sermon, but it did not do away with this basic paradox. *

*

*

When Albrecht Dürer died after a long illness at the age of fifty-six on April 6, 1528, only three years had passed since the council had thrown in the city’s lot with Luther’s reforms. The artist is known to have supported the Reformation in the beginning, but whether he became disaffected during the period of its consolidation in Nuremberg, as did his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, or even what his faith finally was, eludes us.83 Throughout the 1520s, Nuremberg continued to experience radical transformations in religious life that left a profound mark on the rituals of dying. When Dürer composed the account of his mother’s death in 1524 for the family chronicle, he mentioned only one sacrament as opposed to “all sacraments” in the earlier memorial book.84 This change may well reflect his reform leanings; after all, Luther had significantly reduced the number of sacraments, striking down, among others, extreme unction—a fact of which Dürer was well aware.85 No

83 See Albrecht Dürer, “Tagebuch der Reise in die Niederlande,” in Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 148–202, with its famous “Klage um Luther,” 170–72. On the passage’s authenticity, see Sahm, Dürers kleinere Texte, 170–82. Cf. Gerd Unverfehrt, Da sah ich viel köstliche Dinge: Albrecht Dürers Reise in die Niederlande (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 176–80. 84 Dürer, “Familienchronik,” 31; Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37. 85 Reinhard F. Timken-Zinkann, Ein Mensch namens Dürer: Des Künstlers Leben, Ideen, Umwelt (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1972), 15.

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report exists on Dürer’s transition from life to death, certainly nothing comparable to the intricate portrait in writing of his mother’s death fourteen years earlier. Yet what we do know of Dürer’s death and how it was remembered gives us at least some measure of how Lutheranism was changing and preserving people’s ways of living and dying. We do not know who was present in the hour of his death, for instance. One would imagine that his wife, Agnes, provided succor in prayer, as Dürer had done for his dying mother and as would remain common in Lutheran Germany.86 The formulaic wish for a gathering of the living and the dead, however—a vision Dürer had espoused in 1502 and again in 1514—would no longer have been in tune with the Protestant art of dying; dying had become a more solitary affair. Dürer might have received communion, as did his mother. Yet it is unlikely that a clergyman administered the sacrament of extreme unction at his deathbed.87 What is more, by the late 1520s, indulgences, like the one Dürer had acquired for his mother, had become anathema in Protestant Nuremberg—a popish practice in the opinion of pamphleteers, whose critique had inspired the Reformation. Intercessions on behalf of the dead no longer bore the promise of alleviating a person’s sins. Now, every believer was called upon to recognize his or her inexorable sinfulness—a fundamental recognition tempered only by the belief in one’s salvation through Christ. The closest we get to the scene of dying is a remark Pirckheimer made in a letter to a friend, attributing Dürer’s rapid and rough decline to Agnes’s greediness.88 If this were true—and there is good reason to exercise caution here— Dürer experienced a rough death, although the hardships he suffered were different from his mother’s. Let us remind ourselves, however, that to ask whether Dürer died a Protestant or a Catholic is the question of a later generation—a question at risk of superimposing a welldeveloped confessionalism onto the different landscape of the 1520s with its more fluid identifications.89 In any case, in 1538, when Agnes Dürer died childless, her will stipulated that a permanent fellowship be

86 Dürer, “Gedenkbuch,” 37: “Ich pettet jr for.” See also Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead, 3, 106–7, 157. 87 Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, 26; Price has treated Dürer’s death in extenso in the introductory chapter to his book. 88 W. Pirckheimer an Johann Tschertte, Nuremberg, November 1530, in Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 284. 89 Price speaks of a “Christian humanist death.” Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, 22.

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set up in her late husband’s memory that allowed the sons of artisans to study at Wittenberg University, the center of Lutheran theology.90 Whereas Dürer’s final hour went unreported, his death certainly did not. In life, the artist’s career had inspired unprecedented interest; not surprisingly, the end of his life was news worth sharing. Importantly, this son of a well-to-do artisan was remembered, if not monumentalized, in the most elegant verse and prose, crafted to withstand human forgetfulness. The foremost northern humanists from Nuremberg and beyond—Eobanus Hessus, Philipp Melanchthon, and Caspar Peucer, among others—eulogized the artist in Latin. Hans Sachs, Nuremberg’s poet-shoemaker, as well as other writers in the vernacular commemorated his achievements.91 If commentators had heralded his art as a sign of the age’s achievements, his death signaled the time’s troubles. Eobanus Hessus composed a series of funerary poems in Dürer’s honor, an opus reported already in the works the day after Dürer’s death.92 “All who will be famous in your art will mourn, this is the honor that they owe you,” he writes, forging an imaginary connection between the deceased Dürer and future generations of visual artists (Lugebunt quicunque tua sunt arte futuri/ Illustres, honor est debitus ille tibi).93 Willibald Pirckheimer published the fragmentary Vier bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four Books of Human Proportions) in 1528, the year of Dürer’s death, framing his posthumous edition with elegiac paratexts.94 Joachim Camerarius’s translations spread Dürer’s legacy as a theorist of the visual arts to humanists across Europe, a publishing endeavor that included one of the first vitae of an artist north of the Alps.95 If “Albertus Durer Noricus,” Albrecht Dürer from Nuremberg, as he had called himself with pride, had aspired to be reckoned with as a humanist among humanists, the poetic furor over the artist’s death

90

Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, 7–9. Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 305–6, 319–24. 92 Ibid., 298–303; 279–80. 93 Ibid., 300. See also Helius Eobanus Hessus, “In morte consumatissimi pictoris Alberti Dureri Nurembergensis Epicedion,” in Humanistische Lyrik des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wilhelm Kühlmann (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassikerverlag, 1997), 282. 94 Ibid., 303–4. 95 De symmetria partium in rectis formis humanorum corporum (Nuremberg: In aedibus viduae Durerianae, 1532) and De varietate figurarum (Nuremberg: Hieronymus Formschneider, 1532); Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 307–12. On Camerarius, see Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574): Beiträge zur Geschichte des Humanismus im Zeitalter der Reformation, ed. Frank Baron (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978). 91

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placed him center stage, as a primus inter pares.96 Already during his life time, he had become a prime example for how far the studia humanitatis had advanced. Yet there was an unwavering enthusiasm for Dürer’s life and art after 1528. Even the family chronicle he had authored was avidly copied.97 In fact, Dürer became something of a secular saint. Relics of his mortal body were highly cherished. On April 8, 1528, two days after he had died, his students cut off a curl of his hair. The painter Hans Baldung Grien was the first to be entrusted with this treasure, which is now in Vienna.98 Even more strikingly, according to the trustworthy Christoph Scheurl, Dürer’s dead body was disinterred one day after the funeral so that a death mask could be made.99 The mask with its imprint of Dürer’s post-mortem likeness has not survived. It is therefore impossible to know whether his expression equaled the sweetness he had ascribed to his mother’s features in death. Needless to say, the loss is ours—and it will endure.

96 On the engraving Adam and Eve of 1504, see Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, 150–51. 97 Dürer, “Familienchronik,” 27–28. 98 Rupprich, Schriftlicher Nachlass, 251. See Ernst Reibel, “Apelles Germaniae— Koordinaten von Leben und Kunst,” in Albrecht Dürer, ed. Schröder and Sternath, 24–25. 99 Ibid., 297–98.

CHAPTER FIVE

ENDURING LOSS AND MEMORIALIZING WOMEN: THE CULTURAL ROLE OF DYNASTIC WIDOWS IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY Jill Bepler Dynastic widows were a group whose social identity was predicated on loss—the loss of a husband and often the loss of influence. Given the sheer number of territories and dynastic branches of the ruling families in early modern Germany, this group encompassed a considerable number of women. In his survey of widows in the houses of Mecklenburg, Wettin, and Hohenzollern from 1200 to 1600, KarlHeinz Spieß shows that approximately eighty percent of rulers were survived by their consorts.1 I have surveyed marriages concluded between 1450 and 1720 in sixteen different ruling houses and registered two-hundred-twenty widows who did not remarry after the deaths of their husbands.2 A quarter of these widows had no children; another quarter had no sons who survived to become rulers. One hundredtwenty-two saw their sons accede to power, and in some cases consorts acted as regents during their widowhood. More than half of this total group were widows for twenty years or longer, with the longest widowhood lasting sixty years.3 In the terms of the theme of this volume, this was indeed enduring loss. Widowhood, which meant coming to terms with various kinds

1

Karl-Heinz Spiess, “Witwenversorgung im Hochadel: Rechtliche Rahmen und praktische Gestaltung im Spätmittelalter und zu Beginn der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Witwenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. Fürstliche und adlige Witwen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung, ed. Martina Schattkowsky (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003), 87–114. 2 This survey was based on data from the relevant volumes of Detlev Schwennicke, Europäische Stammtafeln: Stammtafeln zur Geschichte der europäischen Staaten, begründet von Wilhelm Karl Prinz von Isenburg. Fortgeführt von Frank Baron Freytag von Loringhoven, Neue Folge, vol. 1.1 (Marburg: Stargard and Klostermann, 1998), vol. 1.2 (1999), vol. 1.3 (2000). 3 Clara of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1571–1658), a daughter of Duke Wilhelm of Celle, married Wilhelm of Schwarzburg-Frankenhausen (1534–97) in 1593.

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of deprivation, also provided many dynastic women with an opportunity to establish an independent identity, especially in the cases of those who had no children. Their function as guardians of tradition and upholders of the status quo was crucial to the construction of this identity. Dowagers’ courts formed important centers of education for young princesses, and they generated and perpetuated female networks rooted in conservative values. The mentality of these figures and their networks were reflected in their publishing and book-collecting activities, hitherto virtually uncharted territory. I will concentrate on women with long widowhoods, from mainly Lutheran dynasties, for whom the Crypto-Calvinism of the 1590s and the experiences of the Thirty Years’ War were formative. First, I will look briefly at the position of the dynastic widow and society’s expectations of her and at how the social capital of the dynastic widow was centered on her reputation for piety. In a second step, I will examine how a widow’s books and publishing underpinned her authority and functioned as symbols of dynastic tradition. As a political figure, the dynastic widow herself was a focus of tradition and conservatism. Her natural allies were her theologians as she sought to ensure her own place in dynastic memory by careful and timely preparation for her own death and, in some cases, by using her own funeral as an exhortation to posterity, usually to uphold confessional tradition. This address to posterity is the focus of the final part of this essay. Dynastic widows confronted a sudden and often radical loss that had not just emotional but also immediate political and social consequences. Widows found themselves abruptly relegated to a lesser status within the court hierarchy, which—depending on individual circumstances and constellations—could be very bitter. As Friedrich Carl von Moser’s Teutsches Hofrecht (The Law of German Courts) of 1754 explains, although the widow retained the respect that she had enjoyed as consort, she immediately had to cede her place in the hierarchy and lost her authority over the court itself.4 Of course, wid4 Friedrich Carl von Moser, Teutsches Hof-Recht, In zwölf Büchern (Frankfurt am Main: Knoch and Esslinger, 1754), 1:610, 615: “The widow of a ruler retains all the privileges of inviolabilty and general respect and honor due to her birth and rank, just like those of the consort of a ruler. On the other hand, immediately after the death of her husband she loses her right to precedence and must cede her place to the wife of the new ruler. . . . Immediately after the death of the husband, the rights that a consort has had in his court and over his courtiers and vice versa the duties that they owe her cease in respect of the widow. This means that commands turn into mere

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ows who were regents retained their status and found their authority increased, often for many years, until they passed on the reins of government to their sons. This handover sometimes involved a power struggle in which the son had to assert his right to rule in opposition to a mother unwilling to step down.5 But this scenario was just a postponement of an inevitable loss of authority for the mother, all the more bitter for the experience of power that preceded it. A widow’s decision to remarry and thus enter a new framework of family ties was usually dictated by dynastic and financial constraints, and it was not taken lightly. In 1588, Hedwig of Hesse-Marburg, a born princess of Württemberg, was urging her sister, the thirty-six-yearold widow Eleonore of Anhalt, to marry into the Hesse dynasty. This marriage would mean that all the branches of the Hesse dynasty in Marburg, Kassel, and Darmstadt in their generation would have had Württemberg sisters as their consorts. For financial, confessional, and dynastic reasons, Eleonore finally accepted the proposal made to her by Georg I of Hesse-Darmstadt, but her initial reaction was spontaneous and outright refusal. Her first argument against remarriage was her obligation to her dead husband’s memory.6 Her second, however, was her personal freedom, as she wrote to her sister: So, at the moment I enjoy good days. I have no worries, I go to bed and get up whenever I want, I go wherever I want to go. I live in peace and harmony with my children and take all my pleasure in them and I know of nothing that gives me cause for complaint. If I took a husband again,

requests and duty into respectful politeness.” (Die Wittib eines Regenten behält alle der Geburt und Würde anklebende Vorzüge der Unverletzlichkeit und allgemeinen Ehrerbietung gleich einer Gemahlin des regierenden Herren. Hingegen verliert sie gleich nach dem Tod ihres Gemahls den Vorgang im Rang und weicht der Gemahlin des neuen Regenten. . . . Gleich nach dem Tod des Gemahls hören die Rechte, welche eine Gemahlin in und über dessen Hof-Staat gehabt hat, und so hinwiederum die Pflichten dieser gegen die Wittib, auf; dergestalt, daß das sonstige Befehlen sich in ein blosses Bitten und die Schuldigkeit in eine ehrerbietige Höflichkeit verwandelt.) Unless otherwise stated, all English translations are my own. 5 Pauline Puppel, Die Regentin. Vormundschaftliche Herrschaft in Hessen 1500–1700 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004). 6 “Although it was beloved God’s will that he remove my cherished, blessed husband from my sight, yet he has not been removed from my heart, and he will remain there until we are reunited in the joy of eternity.” (Dieweil es ja des lieben Gottes wille also ist gewesen, das er mir mein herzallerliebsten Herrn vorselig auß meinen Augen genhommen, so ist er mir doch auß meinem Hertzen nit kommen, wird auch nit raußer kommen, biß wir zu der ewigen Freude wieder zusammen kommen.) Gottlieb Krause, Ludwig, Fürst zu Anhalt-Cöthen, und sein Land vor und während des dreißigjährigen Krieges, 1579–1624 (Cöthen: Krause, 1877), 1:4–5.

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jill bepler then all the worry, effort, and work would start over again—I would no longer be free. . . .7

In the majority of cases, dynastic widows did not remarry, nor did they remain at the central court.8 They moved to the dower castles appointed to them by their marriage contract and the specifications of their husband’s will and set up their own households.9 Dynastic widows had administrative jurisdiction over the districts (Ämter) that provided their income. In some cases, this included the right to nominate preachers and even to punish minor offenses.10 They were, of course, sovereign within their own households. Many enjoyed considerable economic success and their examples could be used by theologians to criticize their male counterparts. In 1626, the Magdeburg court chaplain Paul Röber used a funeral sermon for Elisabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in this way, a sermon that he preached at the court of her son-in-law. Röber refers to Elisabeth’s good administration of her widow’s estate (Wittum) with its well-appointed castles and gardens, which put those men who consider women unfit to rule to shame.11 Röber compares women like Elisabeth to Esther, Miriam, 7 “So hab ich itzund guthe Tage, Ich habe nichts zu sorgen, Ich lege mich nieder und stehe auf, wan ich will, ich gehe hin, wo ich will, Ich lebe in Friede und einigkeit mit meinen Kindern und habe alle meine Freude an ihnen und weiß daraus nichts zu klagen. Wan ich nun wider ein Man nheme, So ginge die sorg, mühe und arbeit wider ann, Ich wehre nit mehr frei. . . .” Ibid., 5. 8 In a contribution to a catalogue on the town of Erlangen as a widows’ residence in the eighteenth century, Helmut Neuhaus looked at widows in the monarchies of Europe (Spain, France, England, Denmark, and Sweden); the Electorates of Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria; the margravates of Brandenburg-Bayreuth and Ansbach; and the Imperial family from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Eighty-seven of the rulers he identified died leaving widows. From his sample, he also concludes that most widows failed to remarry. Helmut Neuhaus, “Die Fürstin als Witwe in der europäischen Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Das Erlanger Schloß als Witwensitz 1712–1817. Ausstellungskatalog, ed. Christina Hofmann-Randall (Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek, 2002), 9–39. 9 Ute Löwenstein, “ ‘Daß sie sich uf iren Withumbsitz begeben und sich sonsten anderer der Herrschafften Sachen und Handlungen nicht undernemen. . . .’ Hofhaltungen fürstlicher Frauen und Witwen in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Frühneuzeitliche Hofkultur in Hessen und Thüringen, ed. Jörg Jochen Berns and Detlef Ignasiak (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1993), 115–41. 10 Sybille Oßwald-Bargende, “Von ‘Wittumbs Freyheit und gewohnheit.’ Eine Skizze über herzogliche Witwen in Leonberg,” in Nonne, Magd oder Ratsfrau: Frauenleben in Leonberg aus vier Jahrhunderten, ed. Renate Dürr (Leonberg: Stadtarchiv, 1998), 33. 11 “So that the many politicians blush with shame who completely deny women government over lands and peoples and rejoice when their dower lands revert to the male members of the family, claiming that princely matrons are unsuited to rule. . . .” (Da denn viel Politici schamroth werden/ die dem Frawenzimmer das Regiment uber

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Deborah, and Jael, who ruled better in times of peace and war than did their male counterparts: Female Christian rulers usually put more store by the word of God, both they and their subjects are less likely to miss hearing sermons, they do not put up with the swearing, blasphemy, tyranny, and infamous behavior that usually happens at great courts during hunting, on journeys of the court, or other occasions. . . . In their normal households, women rulers do not waste money unnecessarily on excessive victuals and splendor as men do. Their subjects are not burdened like Egyptian serfs with compulsory service, with hunting and waiting, with war taxes and service. Medicine and provisions are stocked up and distributed when needed. . . .12

Here Röber names the two fields in which the consort and the widow were expected to excel: piety and medicinal care.13 As with every other estate (Stand), there were normative standards by which widows were measured. Britta-Juliane Kruse has written a fascinating general study of the widow in early modern Germany, based mainly on sources for the city of Nuremberg.14 As she is examining an imperial city, she naturally does not deal with dynastic widows. In order to contextualize her study, Kruse analyzes many handbooks

Land und Leute gäntzlich aberkennen/ und sich erfrewen/ wenn die Leibzucht widerumb an die Herren verfället/ fürgebende/ es seyen auch Fürstliche Matronen untüchtig zur Regierung. . . .) Paul Röber, Christfrewdige Trostpredigt/ Von dem lechtzenden Hirschen . . . (Halle: Salfeld, 1627), fol. )(:)(r. 12 “Gemeinlich halten Christliche Regentin mehr auff Gottes Wort/ verseumen sich und die Untertanen weniger am angehör der Predigten/ leiden nicht solch fluchen/ lästern/ tyrannisieren und schandieren/ wie in grossen Hofwesen/ bey Jagten/ auff Reisen und sonsten zu geschehen pflegt. . . . Im gemeinen Haußwesen wird ia auch so übermässige Kost und Pracht/ so unnötige Geldspildung nicht getrieben von Frawenzimmer/ als von Herren; die Unterthanen werden mit so viel Egyptischen Frohnen/ mit jagen und auffwarten/ mit Kriegslasten/ nicht beschweret/ Artzeney und Labsal wird in Vorrath geschaffet/ und nothdüfftig außgetheilet. . . .” Ibid. 13 For a study of the importance of medicinal knowledge and the dispensing of herbal remedies by dynastic widows, see Margot Dungus, “Sibylla von Anhalt—Profil einer vielseitigen Persönlichkeit,” in Nonne, Magd oder Ratsfrau. Frauenleben in Leonberg aus vier Jahrhunderten, ed. Renate Dürr (Leonberg: Stadtarchiv, 1998), 43–52. 14 Britta-Juliane Kruse, Witwen. Kulturgeschichte eines Standes in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007); see also Gesa Ingendahl’s recently published, but with a narrower focus and based on sources for the town of Ravensburg, Witwen in der Frühen Neuzeit. Eine kulturhistorische Studie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006); see also Dagmar Freist, “Religious Difference and the Experience of Widowhood in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (London: Longman, 1999), 164–77.

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for widows written and published between the mid-fifteenth and the early-eighteenth centuries and extrapolates from them the prevailing socially accepted expectations of widows’ comportment and behavior. The main expectation is that, unless they are very young, widows should not remarry. They were to live lives of seclusion and chastity, avoiding society. Preserving the memory of their husbands, they were to devote themselves to prayer and charitable works. The withdrawal of the widow from society and her concentration on prayer is justified mainly by reference to Paul’s first epistle to Timothy (1 Tm 5:5): “Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day.” One of the most prominent self-representations of dynastic widowhood and withdrawal from society is contained in Sophia Eleonora of Hesse-Darmstadt’s funeral work for her husband published in the mid-1660s, Mausoleum, in which she herself figures as the focus of the publication, as Artemisia, the architect of her husband’s tomb, as the turtle dove, solitary and separated from the court, or withdrawn in her study, meditating and writing. Her granddaughter Magdalena Sibylle of Württemberg, widowed after only three years of marriage, followed suit when she published a work centered on the theme of the grotto into which she had retreated in her sorrow and where she had her portrait painted in the family burial vault.15 Unlike their Catholic counterparts, Protestant widows could not enter an order.16 However, many funeral sermons play on the idea that widowhood itself is akin to a monastic order. In Ehrenspiegel einer Christlichen Widtwen (Mirror of Honor of a Christian Widow), published in 1607 for the Electress Elisabeth of Brandenburg, the Lutheran theologian Simon Gedicke expounds on the verses from the Epistle 15 For both these examples, see Jill Bepler, Birgit Kümmel, and Helga Meise, “Weibliche Selbstdarstellung im 17. Jahrhundert. Das Funeralwerk der Landgräfin Sophia Eleonora von Hessen-Darmstadt,” in Geschlechterperspektiven. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Heide Wunder and Gisela Engel (Königstein/Taunus: Helmer, 1998), 441–68; Jill Bepler, “ ‘zu meinem und aller dehrer die sichs gebrauchen wollen, nutz, trost undt frommen.’ Lektüre, Schrift und Gebet im Leben der fürstlichen Witwen in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Witwenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. Fürstliche und adlige Witwen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung, ed. Martina Schattkowsky (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003), 303–19. 16 On self-representations of Catholic dynastic women as members of Holy Orders, see Barbara Welzel, “Die Macht der Witwen. Zum Selbstverständnis niederländischer Statthalterinnen,” in Das Frauenzimmer. Die Frau bei Hof in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2000), 287–309.

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to Timothy, “Now she that is a widow indeed . . .” and declares that a widow’s life should be entirely devoted to prayer, which he calls “a really difficult spiritual art” (eine recht schwere Geistliche Kunst).17 He compares the solitude of her life to that of a nunnery and explains the convent rules (Ordensregeln) that govern it. For Gedicke, there is no link to what he terms the decadence of Catholic orders, for the widow’s order is founded by God at the moment of her husband’s death: “In this way He commands her to enter this order and get used to being clothed in a special habit.”18 Solitude, faith in God, and prayer are the three main rules of the order. Although Gedicke denies the connection, his comparison links the power of the prayer of the widow to the intercessionary prayer of contemplative monastic orders.19 Intercessionary prayer is the hallmark of the prayer of the dynastic consort, which thus becomes heightened when she is a widow. The visible model of piety provided by the female consort was explicitly seen as part of the division of labor between the ruling couple, sanctioned by biblical example. The image of the pillar so widely used to describe her role is taken among others from Ps 75:3: “The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved: I bear up the pillars of it.” In 1659 a funeral sermon for the widowed Electress of Saxony characterized her prayer as a work of fortification: “Our most dear and blessed Electress and mother of our lands, the dear Judith, who by the hand of God benefited the land with so many good deeds, the pious Deborah, who . . . by prayer made herself into a wall around the country, standing in the breach, so that no enemy could set foot in it. . . .”20 The biblical imagery—the wall, the pillar, the strength to prevent ruptures—stresses the role of the consort as a central and stabilizing factor in the structure of the early modern state embodied in expressions of her piety.21

17 Simon Gediccius, Exequiae Marchiobrandenburgicae Anhaltinae: Oder Leich und Begengniß Predigten . . . (Berlin: Runge, 1607), fol. Li. 18 “So heist Er sie inn diesen Orden treten/ und sich inn einen besondern habit und Kleidung einschleiffen.”Gediccius, Exequiae, fol. Kii. 19 Bepler, “zu meinem und aller dehrer,” 310. 20 “Unsere hochtheuere hochseligste ChurFürstl. LandesFrauMutter/ die theuere Juditha/ die dem gantzen Lande so viel Wolthaten durch die Hand Gottes geleistet/ die fromme Debora/ welche . . . mit Ihrem Gebet sich zu einer Mauer umb das Land gemachet/ wieder den Riß gestanden/ daß kein Feind dasselbe betreten können. . . .” Jakob Weller, Chur-Sächsischer Macht- und Ehren-Schild . . . (Dresden: Bergen, 1659), 68. 21 When, in the 1720s, Christiane Eberhardine, the long-suffering Lutheran wife of the Catholic convert, the Saxon Elector and King of Poland, August the Strong, was

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The piety expected in general from widows in early modern society was thus especially demanded of the dynastic widow. The authority accruing to this status seems to have legitimated her writing and publishing activity, which was the result of extensive devotional and theological reading.22 Women’s book collections played both an important role in their devotions and in the construction of their religious authority, and this role is the focus of the second part of this essay. The significance of books within the Prussian ducal family in the sixteenth century is the subject of an excellent dissertation that also sheds light on the part played by dynastic women in the cultural use of the book at court in the Reformation.23 The history of women’s book collections at courts of the Empire in general has yet to be researched, however.24 What information we have comes from chance finds of inventories or from information contained in funeral sermons. In the libraries of dynastic women, devotional works in the vernacular predominate. The size of these chamber libraries was considerable, as a few examples will show. From an inventory made in 1539, we know of nearly seventy theological works from Elisabeth of Calenberg’s library.25 The chamber library of her daughter Anna Maria of Prussia was composed of eighty-nine books.26 A generation later, there were around two hundred twenty volumes in the library of the next duchess

apostrophized as a “pillar of prayer for her country” (eine Betsäule des Landes), those commending her and likening her to the biblical heroine Esther were placing her in a long tradition of exemplary consorts—not just from Saxony—stretching down from the sixteenth century. See Jill Bepler, “Die Fürstin als Betsäule—Anleitung und Praxis der Erbauung am Hofe,” Morgen-Glantz 12 (2002): 249–64; Helen WatanabeO’Kelly, “Religion and the Consort: Two Electresses of Saxony and Queens of Poland (1697–1757),” in Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort, ed. Clarissa Campbell-Orr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 264. 22 Mara R. Wade, “Invisible Bibliographies: Three Seventeenth-Century German Women Writers,” Women in German Yearbook 14 (1998): 41–69. 23 Nadezda Shevchenko, Eine historische Anthropologie des Buches. Bücher in der preußischen Herzogsfamilie zur Zeit der Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). 24 Jill Bepler, “Early Modern German Libraries and Collections,” in Early Modern German Literature 1350–1700, ed. Max Reinhart, vol. 4 of The Camden House History of German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 722–24. 25 Ingeborg Mengel, “Ein bisher unbekanntes Bücherinventar der Herzogin Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Lüneburg aus dem Jahre 1539,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte 50 (1952): 1–16. 26 Shevchenko, Eine historische Anthropologie, 257.

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of Prussia,27 whereas the inventory of the Lutheran Electress Anna of Brandenburg shows that she kept around one hundred theological works in her rooms. These books obviously served her in the confessional conflict in which she engaged with both her husband, and, after his death, with her son when they became Calvinists.28 One of the largest female, exclusively theological libraries appears to have belonged to Sophia of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who, when she died in Nuremberg in 1639, had over twelve hundred volumes. By contrast, her husband’s chamber library, which she inherited in 1603, contained only one-hundred-forty-eight works.29 The fact that these noble women had large book collections and were well-versed in theology, and especially in points of confessional controversy, is often noted in their funeral sermons. Their love of debate at table is commented on using the topos that they were able to drive learned theologians back to their books in search of arguments.30 Their own libraries were described in their funeral sermons as arsenals of faith, with particular reference to books they had compiled themselves: “What was this library with so many ingenious, costly and useful books? It was a particular pleasure to behold, like a spiritual armory. . . . In the armory there were also three books neatly and cleanly written by the tireless hand of the princess, full of choice, devout prayers, heartfelt sighs, moving battle and victory songs full of heavenly joy.”31 The “Bet- und 27

Ibid. Anna’s book collection is sketched by Magdalena Drexl, Weiberfeinde— Weiberfreunde? Die Querelle des femmes im Kontext konfessioneller Konflikte um 1600 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006), 353; numbers for the collection are taken from the inventory of Anna’s estate, Geheimes Preußisches Staatsarchiv: BPH Rep. 33 R4, 40r-44 r; 61 v-62 r. 29 Günther Schuhmann, Ansbacher Bibliotheken vom Mittelalter bis 1806 (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1961), 82. 30 Jean M. Woods, “ ‘Die Pflicht befihlet mir/ zu schreiben und zu tichten’: Drei literarisch tätige Frauen aus dem Hause Baden-Durlach,” in Die Frau von der Reformation zur Romantik, ed. Barbara Becker-Cantarino (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), 36–57, cites the funeral sermon for Anna of Baden-Durlach (1672): “She was not just able to give sufficient justification of her faith . . . but also to adduce good arguments against those who contradicted her and make them shut their mouths, to the astonishment of all, even of the theologians themselves.” (37; Sie nicht allein Ihres Glaubens genugsahme Rechenschafft geben/ . . . sondern auch den Widersprechern mit gutem Grund/ und zu männigliches/ auch der Theologorum selbst eigener Verwunderung/ . . . das Maul stopffen können.) 31 “Was war die schöne Bibliothec, von so gar vielen/ geist-reichen/ kostbaren und nützlichen Büchern? Mit sonderbarer Lust war sie anzusehen/ als eine Geistliche Rüst-Cammer. . . . In solcher Rüst-Kammer/ haben sich auch gefunden/ Drey mit Hoch-Fürstl. unermüdeten Hand/ gantz sauber und reinlich geschriebener Bücher/ 28

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Schreibkammer” (prayer and writing chamber) of the princess often seems to have been the same room, to which she, like her noble and burgher counterparts, would withdraw to read and to write, sometimes even locking herself in to avoid interruption and distraction. Like these other women, dynastic women also personally compiled handwritten prayer and song manuals for use in times of duress, in illness, and at a person’s deathbed. In funeral works for both burgher and aristocratic women, references are legion to women calling for these manuals or asking to be read to from them in their final illnesses or during childbirth.32 In the case of aristocratic women, such personal prayer books were often given costly bindings and were obviously handed down through generations. In 1568, Anna Maria of Prussia’s library contained, for example, a handwritten prayer-book by her mother Elisabeth of Calenberg.33 A century later, Sophia Eleonora of Hesse-Darmstadt was in possession of a manual of consolation originally written for her grandmother, Sophia of Saxony, by the latter’s sister in 1596. Sophia Eleonora was still reading it seventy years later and used its composition as a model for her own personal prayer book.34 Just before her death in 1652, Sibylle of Dannenberg, a childless widow, presented Duke August of Wolfenbüttel with a manuscript prayer book dated 1534 and bound in velvet with silver ornaments, which had belonged to her ancestress Dorothea of Denmark (see fig. 19). The beautifully illuminated work had been commissioned for Dorothea by her husband,

voller auserwählter/ andächtige Gebet/ hertzlicher Seuffzer/ bewegliche Streit- und himmlische Freuden-reiche Sieges-Lieder.” Oration by Gottfried Strauss in funeral sermon for Sophia Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst (1630–80), Umständlicher Auffsatz und Beschreibung/ Wie/ bey der am 8ten Februarii Anno 1681 beschehenen Abführung/ Der . . . Fr. Sophien Augusten/ Verwittibter Fürstin zu Anhalt/ gebohrner Hertzogin zu Schleßwig-Holstein . . . Hochseligst verblichenen Leichnams/ Von Dero Wittumbs-Sitz Coswig/ nacher Zerbst/ Desselben Beysetzung in das Fürstliche Erb-Begräbnis Selbigen Ortes/ und darauff am 9ten besagten Monats Februarii abgelegten Gedächtniß-Predigt/ In der Fürstlichen Schloß-Kirchen zu St. Bartholomæi, es in einem und andern gehalten worden (Zerbst: Hoff-Druckerey [1682]), Fol. aiiv . 32 Cornelia Niekus Moore, “The Quest for Consolation and Amusement: Reading Habits of German Women in the Seventeenth Century,” Chloe Beihefte zum Daphnis 19 (1994): 253. 33 Shevchenko, Eine historische Anthropologie, 150, 258. 34 Helga Meise, Das archivierte Ich: Schreibkalender und höfische Repräsentation in Hessen-Darmstadt 1624–1790 (Darmstadt: Hessische Historische Kommission, 2002), 135.

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Albrecht of Prussia, when she adopted the Lutheran faith.35 Obviously the closer they were to the Reformation generation, the more valuable such books were as “relics” of family faith, but women also saw their own books and texts anchored in this tradition and deemed themselves responsible for its preservation. In 1545, Elisabeth of Calenberg, a widow who had become regent for her young son, Erich, wrote a text with political and moral advice for him, of which she made a fair copy in her own hand. The duchess had a precious silver binding made for her manuscript.36 The silver binding was a way of ensuring that her text would be preserved for posterity and treasured. She explicitly termed it an “Erbbuch” (a book heirloom), a book to be read and respected not just by her son, but also by future generations. Her words to Erich are worth quoting extensively because they illustrate her sense of authority as a mother and a regent and her concern for her own place and that of her writings in dynastic memory: Dear son, now that I have brought this book to its conclusion with great toil and labor and treated everything, God be praised, I want to forward it to you hereby, asking you amicably to accept it from me like a child, and let me commend it to you as an introduction to godliness, both in religious and in worldly matters, at the beginning of your princely reign, to be kept in our principality as a book heirloom: for I have exerted so much diligence on it, that I doubt not that if with God’s help you emulate all this, you will surely become and remain a Christian prince in the eyes of God and the world. However, should you not have male issue, then see to it that my daughter, your beloved sister, inherits it, so that my diligence, pains, and motherly good opinions . . . remain in the memory of our posterity and serve as an introduction to Christian government for you and all young rulers.37

35 Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 68.12 Aug. 8°. Iselin Gundermann, Untersuchungen zum Gebetbüchlein der Herzogin Dorothea von Preußen (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966), 18. 36 Paul Tschackert, Herzogin Elisabeth von Münden ( gest. 1558) geborene Markgräfin von Brandenburg die erste Schriftstellerin aus dem Hause Brandenburg und aus dem braunschweigischen Hause, ihr Lebensgang und ihre Werke mit Beilagen: Elisabeths “Unterricht für Herzog Erich d.J.” (1545) und ihr “Mütterlicher Unterricht für die Herzogin Anna Maria” (1550) nach ihren eigenhändigen Originalhandschriften zum ersten Male vollständig herausgegeben (Berlin: Devrient, 1899). 37 “Lieber son, nachdem ich dan nu mit grosser muhe und erbeit dis buch zum ende, got habe lob, gebracht und abgehandelt, so will ich dir solchs hiemit zugestelt haben, mit freuntlicher bitte, du wollest es kintlicher weise von mir anehmen und als eine einleitung zur gotseligkeit, beide in geistlichen und weltlichen sachen, zum

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These personal possessions of female ancestors whose confessional stance formed part of dynastic history were treasures, both in their emotional value and as physical objects. However, as we have seen, they were also used and read. The large theological library belonging to Sophia of BrandenburgAnsbach mentioned above shows how a book collection could become part of a widow’s public persona and contribute to her religious authority. Sophia was fifteen when she married Markgrave Georg Friedrich in 1589; he was fifty-nine.38 Georg Friedrich was the guardian of the mentally unstable Duke Albrecht Friedrich in Prussia and regent in Königsberg, where Sophia resided with him for some years. After Albrecht Friedrich’s death, the couple returned to Ansbach. Despite their age difference of forty-four years, their childless marriage lasted twenty-four years. When Georg Friedrich died in 1603, Sophia was forty. She remained a widow for thirty-five years, until her death in 1639. Her marriage contract had made handsome provisions for her, and Georg Friedrich improved on these just before his death, also making her the universal heir of his private property. He was the last of the Ansbach line, but when his successor acceded, Sophia remained at the castle in Ansbach where a whole new wing was built as her widow’s residence. The Margravine used her book collection as a monument to her spousal fidelity by inscribing all the volumes with her own initials and those of her husband (Markgraf Georg Friedich Zu Brandenburg); they also stand for her personal motto: “Mein Gott Fügs Zum Besten” eingang deines fürstlichen regiments, dir befohlen sein lassen und als ein erbbuch bei dem fürstenthum behalten: den ich habe solchen vleis hirin angewant, das ich nicht zweifele, wo du dem also mit gots hulfe nachkomen wirdest, du werdest wol ein christlicher furst fur got und der welt sein unde pleiben. So du aber menliche erben . . . nicht kriegen wurdest, so laß es meinen tochteren, deinen lieben schwestern, in erbschaft zukomen, damit mein vleis, muhe und mutterliche wolmeinung, . . . im gedechtnis bey dem nachkomen pleiben und dir und allen jungen hern ein anfang zu christlicher regirung sein moge.” Ibid., 43; see also Bepler, “Die Fürstin als Betsäule,” for this and additional “Mütterliche Vermahnungen.” 38 Günther Schuhmann, “Markgraf Georg Friedrichs d. Ä. zweite Gemahlin Sophia († 1639) und ihre Beziehungen zu Nürnberg,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 253–67; Günther Schuhmann, Die Markgrafen von Brandenburg-Ansbach. Eine Bilddokumentation zur Geschichte der Hohenzollern in Franken (Ansbach: Historischer Verein für Mittelfranken, 1980), 105–24. Schuhmann gives a very thorough account of Sophia’s time in Nuremberg drawn from the archival material there. He was not, however, able to consult the funeral works for her, or visit the archives in Berlin and Hannover. He had no knowledge of the fact that some of her books have survived in collections in Lower Saxony.

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Figure 19: Prayer book for Dorothea of Prussia, velvet and silver binding, HAB: Cod. Guelf. 68.12 Aug. 8°. Reproduced with the permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

Figure 20: Entry by Sophia of Brandenburg-Ansbach in a volume with seven sermons, mainly from Saxony, HAB: 471.7 Theol. “1.6. GF 2.4. M. G. F. Z. B. [Mein Gott Führe Es Zum Besten] S. M. Z. B. W. [Sophia Markgräfin Zu Brandenburg Witwe] Herr Lerne Uns bedencken das wir sterben Müssen uff das wir klugk werden Psalm 90 Außgeleßen den 1 Marti.” (Sophia’s motto is followed by a quotation from Psalm 90: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom” and her notation of her reading: “Finished reading on March 1st”). Reproduced with the permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

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(My God Decree What is Best).39 Above each entry, she drew a crown, and in her widowhood added a cross as a symbol of eternity. The Margravine wrote the dates on which she began and completed her reading of each particular work (see fig. 20). She was not unusual in this, as the funeral sermon for Eleonore of Hesse-Darmstadt shows.40 It is, however, unusual that traces of these libraries and reading practices should survive. It was not just her books in which the Margravine commemorated her husband—she had herself surrounded by inscriptions of her motto, as one of her funeral sermons recalls: “. . . she had it drawn, written, engraved, printed, embroidered and sewn, etc. onto nearly all the objects in her elegant princely household as an enduring and continual, daily visible memorial out of heartfelt, constant, and tenacious conjugal love, even after the death of her blessed, most beloved husband, right up to her own grave.”41 In 1632, the events of the Thirty Years’ War forced Sophia to flee from Ansbach. She sought protection in the imperial city of Nuremberg, where she rented a house and remained for the rest of her life, surrounded by her theological library of twelve hundred volumes, to which she regularly added with purchases from local booksellers.

39 For a collection of such mainly religious mottos, see Max Löbe, Wahlsprüche. Devisen und Sinnsprüche deutscher Fürstengeschlechter des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Barth, 1883). 40 Heinrich Leuchter and Johann Vietor, Piae Lacrymae, Das ist/ Zwo Christliche Leich-Klag- vnd Trawr Predigten (Darmstadt: Hofmann, 1618), 27: “One has to admire the diligence which Her Grace applied to her reading: she read the Holy Bible completely many times: Her Grace left behind a fine library with many splendid books, and whenever she came across a good book she could not rest until she had finished reading it. In many of the books one will find entries for the day on which she began and ended her reading of it, written in her own hand.” (Man muß sich aber verwundern uber ihrer F.G. angewendeten fleiß im lesen: die heilige Bibel hat sie vielmahls durchgelesen: ihre F. Gnade haben auch eine schöne Bibliothec hinderlassen; Darinnen außbündige unnd herrliche Bücher zufinden: ist ihr ein fein Buch vorkommen/ hat sie nicht geruhet/ biß es alles durchlesen/ und wird man in vielen mit ihrer F.G. Hand verzeichnet finden/ an welchem Tag sie das Buch zulesen angefangen/ unnd wann sie es mit lesen zu end gebracht.). 41 “. . . [sie hat es] fast auf alle stück ihres vornemen Fürstl: Haußgeräths/ zu einer stätigen beständigen täglich vor Augen stehenden memori auß hertzlicher ehelicher/ auch nach ihres hochseel. hertzliebsten Herrn Todt biß in ihre Grube beständig unnd beharrlich continuirten Liebe/ zeichnen/ schreiben/ stechen/ drucken/ sticken und nehen lassen etc.” Cornelius Marci, Aller Hertz-Christen Thun und Lohn. Auß der Offenbahrung Johannis cap. 2. v. 10. Zu schuldigstem/ Christlichem Ehrn-Gedächtnuß Der weiland Durchleuchtigsten . . . Frawen Sophia/ Marggräfin zu Brandenburg . . . W ittibin/ . . . den 28 May/ dieses 1639 Jahrs/ in der Pfarrkirchen bey S. Lorentzen/ zu Nürnberg/ (Nürnberg: Dümler, 1639), fol. Civ r.

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As Magadalena Drexl has shown using the example of Anna of Brandenburg, book dedications highlight the important role played by networks of patronage between dynastic women and theologians, especially in periods of confessional strife.42 When these dedications came from highly visible theologians, they obviously strengthened the reputation of the women involved. The funeral sermons for Sophia of Ansbach make special mention of the fact that Johann Arndt, erstwhile preacher at her father’s court, had dedicated a volume of his Postilla to her and they cite Arndt’s respect for her great piety. Further dedications were made to her by Johann Vogel, Johann Saubert the Elder, and Johann Gerhard.43 One of the most prominent printed dedications to Sophia in terms of her role as a model of specifically female piety is that by Hieronymus Oertel, the author of the devotional bestseller Schöne Bildnus in Kupffer gestochen der erleuchten berumbtisten Weiber Altes, und Neues Testaments (Beautiful Portraits Engraved in Copper of the Illustrious and Most Famous Women from the Old and New Testament), first published in Nuremberg in 1610. The work was to remain popular in many revised and expanded versions well into the eighteenth century.44 Oertel was not a clergyman—by trade he was a “Schreibmeister” (writing master) producing calligraphic manuscripts on a commercial basis—and his printed works are all based on his manuscripts. A copy of the manuscript version of his prayer book of biblical heroines from 1605 and other manuscripts by Oertel preserved in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel may well have belonged to Margravine Sophia.45 Although Oertel was long dead when Sophia

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Drexl, Weiberfeinde, 289–325. Johann Saubert d.Ä., Vaticinium De Deliciis Anni MDCXXXVI & seqq. Das ist: Weissagung und Bericht Von den Wollüsten/ deren die Gottseelige in dem sechzehenhundert und sechs unnd dreyssigsten Jahr und folgends/ geniessen können und sollen: In einer Predigt verfast und erklärt . . . (Nürnberg: Endter, [1636]); Johann Vogel, Die Psalmen Davids/ Sampt andern heyligen Gesängen in Newe Teutsche Verse gesetzt . . . (Nürnberg: Dümler, 1638); Johann Gerhard, De Vita Jesu Christi Homiliis vigintiquinque, illustrata Meditationes sacræ. Das ist/ Erklärung etlicher schöner Sprüch und Historien/ Göttlicher Schrifft Von dem Leben Jesu Christi . . . (Darmstadt: Hofmann, 1609). 44 Ferdinand van Ingen, “Frauentugend und Tugendexempel. Zum FrauenzimmerSpiegel des Hieronymus Ortelius und Philipp von Zesens biblische Frauenporträts,” Chloe Beihefte zum Daphnis 3 (1984): 345–83. 45 Sophia presented Duke August with an unspecified number of precious books for his library from her collections, including a manuscript from the famous library of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary. In return Duke August commissioned art works from his Augsburg agent, Philipp Hainhofer, to be presented to Sophia as a mark of 43

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moved to Nuremberg, she had close contacts with the city during her time in Ansbach and the house she rented in 1632 belonged to the Oertel family.46 It was not just as recipients of dedications that dynastic women were involved in confessional publications. Leaving aside the whole area of the publication of their own original writings,47 I want to concentrate on their less obvious contributions to confessional discourse. As keepers of dynastic memory and guardians of the faith, several widows were active as patrons in publishing or re-publishing devotional works associated with their forebears.48 I will confine my examples to Saxony. In 1610, the widowed Electress Hedwig of Saxony, a born princess of Denmark,49 re-published a work “for the promotion of devotions in the home” (zur Beförderung häuslicher Andacht), which twentysix years before had first been dedicated to her father, Frederick of Denmark.50 This book of consolation (Trostbüchlein) with meditations his gratitude. See Jill Bepler, “Vicissitudo temporum: Book Collecting in the Thirty Years’ War,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2001): 959. 46 Schuhmann, “Markgraf Georg Friedrichs d. Ä. zweite Gemahlin,” 258. 47 The indispensible reference work for this is still Jean Muir Woods and Maria Fürstenwald, Schriftstellerinnen, Künstlerinnen und gelehrte Frauen des deutschen Barock: ein Lexikon (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984). 48 The funeral sermon for Electress Katharina of Brandenburg (1541–1602) claims that she had a large number of Luther’s tracts on baptism and communion printed in Berlin and distributed to churches and parishioners there. Drexl, Weiberfeinde, 315. 49 On Hedwig of Saxony, see Mara R. Wade, “The Queen’s Court: Anna of Denmark and her Royal Sisters—Cultural Agency at Four Northern European Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 49–80; Ute Essegern, Fürstinnen am kursächsischen Hof. Lebenskonzepte und Lebensläufe zwischen Familie, Hof und Politik in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Hedwig von Dänemark, Sibylle Elisabeth von Württemberg und Magdalena Sibylla von Preußen (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag, 2007); Mara R. Wade, “Widowhood and Patronage: Hedevig, Princess of Denmark and Electress of Saxony (1581–1641),” Renaessanceforum 4 (2008), http://www.renaessanceforum.dk/rf_4_2008.htm; Mara R. Wade, “Witwenschaft und Mäzenatentum: Hedwig, Prinzessin von Dänemark und Kurfürstin von Sachsen (1581–1641),” in Orte der Musik: Kulturelles Handeln von Frauen in der Stadt, ed. Susanne Rode-Breymann (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 219–31. 50 [Justitia Sengers] Trostbüchlein, uber den Neun und Sechtzigsten Psalm: Von dem Leiden und Sterben, unsers Herrn Jhesu Christi, und von unserm Creutz und Leiden, wie wir in die Fusstapfen Christi treten müssen. Und was wir für einen herrlichen Lohn bekomen werden. Mit etlichen schönen Gebeten gezieret/ Durch eine Dienerin Jhesu Christi aus der heiligen Schrifft kürtzlich zusamen gezogen (Magdeburg: Donat, 1586); Franz Otto Stichart, Galerie der sächsischen Fürstinnen. Biographische Skizzen sämmtlicher Ahnfrauen des Königlichen Hauses Sachsen. Quellenmäßig dargestellt (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1857), 322.

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and prayers based on the 96th Psalm and on the Passion was written in 1585 by Justitia Senger, a blind girl from Brunswick.51 There is a copy of Hedwig’s 1610 edition in Gotha inscribed with a dedication by Hedwig’s sister-in-law, the Electress Magdalena Sibylle, which shows that she herself made a gift of the work to another female member of the family in 1613.52 There was clearly a strong sense of female dynastic continuity and identification with icons of the staunchest Lutheranism that motivated women both to publish and circulate such works. During the thirty years of her widowhood, Hedwig’s court at Lichtenberg was a center for the education of young princesses, one of whom was Dorothea of Saxe-Eisenach (see fig. 21). Dorothea was sent to Lichtenberg when she was fourteen and stayed there for three years.53 She died in 1675, also a widow for over thirty years, the greater part of which time she spent living at the court of her brother in Altenburg. Dorothea’s funeral sermon records her re-publication of a prayer book written by her grandmother: “because she realized that the godly, useful prayer book which her grandmother, Dorothea Susanna (†1592), Duchess of Saxony, née Countess Palatine of the Rhine, had published in the previous century was no longer available and only to be found in the possession of very few, she had it reissued and brought back into the light of day again in 1663.”54

51 Justitia Sengers, Des heiligen Geistes Beschreibung Vom Leiden und Sterben unsers Herrn Jesu Christi/ aus dem 69. Psalm Davids/ durch eine blindgeborne Jungfraw Iusticiae Sengers in Braunschweig/ zu warer Busse und letzter Warnung der jetzigen Welt erkleret und an Tag gegeben Jetzo aber auff Der Durchlauchtigsten Hochgebornen Fürstin und Frawen/ Frawen Hedwigen Hertzogin und Churfürstin zu Sachssen . . . gnedigsten befehlich wiederumb in Druck verfertiget (Dresden: Bergen, 1610). 52 Magdalena Sibylle signs the dedication: “Your Grace’s faithful and willing sister in constancy for all time.” (D. L. getrewe wilige schwester bestendig alle zeidt.) This copy can be found in the Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha under the call number Theol 8° 00702/26. 53 Johann Christfried Sagittarius, Wahrer Christen anmuthige Ruhe/ Aus Denen 7. 8. und 9. Versen des CXVI. Psalms: Sey nun wieder zufrieden/ meine Seele/ &c.: Als die Weiland . . . Fraw Dorothea/ Gebohrne und Verwittbete Hertzogin zu Sachsen/ Jülich/ Cleve/ und Berg/ Landgräffin in Thüringen . . . zu dero Fürstl. Ruhe-Kammer in der Brüder-Kirchen/ Den 8. Julii Anno 1675. Christ-Fürstlich ward beygesetzet (Altenburg: Richter, 1675), 63. 54 “weil Sie wahr genommen/ daß das Gottselige nützliche Gebetbuch/ so Dero Groß Frau Mutter/ Frau Dorothea Susanna/ Herzogin zu Sachsen/ gebohrne Pfaltzgräfin bey Rhein/ im vorigen Seculo heraus gegeben/ gäntzlich abgangen/ und fast in wenig Händen mehr zu finden gewest/ hat sie dasselbe Anno 1663. von neuem aufflegen/ und wiederum ans Tagelicht kommen lassen.” Sagittarius, Wahrer Christen anmuthige Ruhe, 16.

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Figure 21: Dorothea of Saxe-Eisenach, née Saxe-Altenburg (1601–1675). Reproduced with the permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

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Dorothea had not just one edition of this work published in Altenburg; she had it reissued a second time in 1671, eighty years after the original printing.55 Her grandmother, Dorothea Susanna, had been a key figure in the anti-Calvinist camp in Saxony. Her husband, Duke Johann Wilhelm (†1573), had fallen under imperial ban and forfeited much of his territory, and after his death Dorothea had been regent for her son. The prayer book that she had written for her children was published in 1591, the year before her death, as a New Year’s gift and solemn reminder always to adhere to the Lutheran confession of their father.56 Such texts, exhortations to future generations to respect dynastic tradition, are closely associated with the genre of the motherly admonition [mütterliche Vermahnung], like that by Elisabeth of Calenberg mentioned above, in which dynastic women set down their political and moral instructions for their sons, mostly on the occasion of handing over the reins of power. In her text, Elisabeth had justified her right to instruct by citing biblical examples. She further reinforced her claim to authority as a woman in the biblical texts which she had engraved on the front and back of the silver binding: Gn 21:12, “And God said unto Abraham . . . in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice” (Gott sprach zu Abraham alles, was Sara dir gesagt hat, dem volge) and Est 4:17, “So Mordecai went his way, and did according to all that Esther had commanded him.” (Mardocheus ging hin und

55 Gebete/ Wie sich ein Christ schicken und bereiten sol Zur Beicht/ Absolution/ Abendmal/ und sonst in allerley Nöthen derer gebrauchen/ Durch Eine Christliche/ Fürstliche Person/ Aus D. Mart. Luth. und andern Gebetbüchlein mit Fleiß zusammen gebracht/ Und In drey unterschiedliche Theil abgetheilet/ nach Ordnung des Registers. Sampt einer Vorrede M. Antonii Probi, Weimarischen Superintendenten M D XCI. Wieder auffgeleget in Altenburg (Altenburg: Bauernfinck, 1663). The 1671 edition was also printed by Bauernfinck. 56 The original prayer book was referred to in one of the funeral sermons on Dorothea Susanna’s death: “For the little prayer book which Her Grace compiled with such great toil and recently had printed and published bears sufficient witness to her diligent and heartfelt prayers and to the fact that she was ceaselessly at prayer, both day and night.” (Wie denn das Betbüchlein/ so I.F.G. mit grossem vleis zusammen getragen/ und unlangsten haben in offenen Druck ausgehen lassen/ gnugsam zeugnis giebt/ Was für eine vleissige unnd inbrünstige Beterin Sie gewesen/ Unnd wie sie mit dem Gebet angehalten zu tag und nacht.) Gregor Strigenitz, Gedechtnis vnd Leichpredigt, Aus dem Sechszehenden Capitel des Büchleins Ivdith: Nach dem Tödlichen abgang vnd Begrebnis . . . (Jena: Richtzenhan, 1592), fol. Div. Dorothea Susanna had her original manuscript of the prayer book placed in her coffin (Antonius Probus, Symbolum Dorotheae Susannae [Jena: Steinman, 1592], fol. Jivr).

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thet alles, was im Ester geboten hatt).57 Elisabeth intended her text to be read within the family, but other dynastic women, like Dorothea Susanna, published their texts in order that their admonishments would be witnessed by a larger audience of readers over generations.58 In the last part of this essay I would like to explore how dynastic widows sought to structure their own funerals and inscribe themselves in dynastic memory, especially in moments of political or confessional crisis. In other words, how did these pillars of prayer, usually in alliance with their theologians, seek to perpetuate their own function as bulwarks against change? Preparation was central, and, just like their burgher counterparts, dynastic women were expected to make careful provision for their own deaths. This included the timely making of a will stipulating where and how they were to be buried, the sewing of shrouds and other textiles, the design of a coffin, the selection of biblical or other verses that were to be inscribed on it, and the choice of preachers and texts for the funeral sermons. These provisions were often made years in advance and even demonstratively exhibited as proof of a pious readiness for death. One of the sermons for the widowed Eleonore of Hesse-Darmstadt records, for example, “that . . . Her Grace had her funeral appurtenances and clothing with her in timely readiness and wherever Her Grace traveled, she always had them with her.”59 It was in the use of epitaphs and monuments that dynastic memory was most obviously expressed.60 Usually a consort, if commemorated in such a way at all, would be included in the monument erected for her husband. This was often commissioned and erected even before one or both partners had actually died. Examples of this can be found in the city church of St. Mary’s in Celle. The parents of Sophia of Ansbach, Duke Wilhelm the Younger of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Celle (†1592) and Dorothea of Denmark (†1617), are shown together in a

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Tschackert, Herzogin Elisabeth von Münden, 16. For further examples of dynastic widows publishing their own writings, see Mara Wade, Invisible Bibliographies and Jill Bepler, “zu meinem und aller dehrer.” 59 “daß . . . ihre F.G. ihr Todtengerethe und Kleider in zeitlicher bereitschafft bey sich gehabt/ und wo nur ihre F.G. hingereiset und gezogen/ alleweg dieselbige mit sich geführet.” Heinrich Leuchter and Johann Vietor, Piae Lachrymae, 30. 60 See Kilian Heck, Genealogie als Monument und Argument: der Beitrag dynastischer Wappen zur politischen Raumbildung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002). 58

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wall monument erected between 1593 and 1594. A generation later, we see Anna Eleonora (†1659), widow of Sophia’s brother, Duke Georg (†1641), at his side in a monument first commissioned in 1643 and completed between 1650 and 1654.61 Both widows had survived their husbands by twenty-four and eighteen years, respectively, and were privy to the planning of their own memorials. In several cases, widowhood itself is made visible in the dynastic epitaph. Two spectacular monuments by Johann von Trarbach in the church at Öhringen can serve as examples of this visibility. One was erected in 1570 for Ludwig Casimir of Hohenlohe (†1568) and his wife Anna of Solms (†1594), and the other from 1573 to 1574 for Eberhard of Hohenlohe (†1570) and his wife Agata von Tübingen (†1609), women who survived their husbands by twenty-six and thirty-nine years, respectively. Both Anna and Agata, who commissioned the monuments, had themselves clearly depicted in their widows’ weeds.62 Circumstances could, however, prevent the norm of the burial of the consort or widow with her husband. The Thirty Years’ War triggered a series of displacements of dynastic families. Some were forced into exiles of long duration, the longest and most famous being of course that of the family of the Winter King, but dukes of BrunswickWolfenbüttel, Mecklenburg, and Württemberg, to name but a few, all saw their territories occupied and their families dispersed. Others had to flee time and again for shorter periods, among them many dowagers whose residences were not fortified. Deaths that took place during these times of exile could not be adequately commemorated, and dynastic burial sites were often inaccessible. The post-war decades saw a number of ceremonies in which bodies were transferred from their “exile” sites back to the family vaults with ceremonies reminiscent of the “translatio” of holy relics. Such was the case in 1655 with Barbara Sophia of Württemberg, whose coffin was taken from Strasbourg, where she had died in 1636, to be buried in the Stiftskirche in Stuttgart.63 In cases where the deceased was of little dynastic signifi-

61 Andrea Baresel-Brand, “Die Grabelege der Herzöge von Braunschweig-Lüneburg in der Stadtkirche zu Celle,” Celler Chronik 12 (2004): 19–23. 62 Barbara Ernst-Hoffmann, “Die Grabdenkmäler der Grafen von Hohenlohe von Johann von Trarbach in der Stiftskirche St. Peter und Paul in Öhringen,” Württembergisch Franken 85 (2001): 67–141. 63 Drey Christliche Leich-Predigten/ Gehalten Bey und vor der Beysetzung und Begräbnuß Deren . . . Frawen Barbarae Sophiae/ Hertzogin zu Würtemberg und

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cance such an effort might not be warranted.64 This was the potential situation that confronted Sophia of Brandenburg-Ansbach in her exile in Nuremberg. The dynastic burial site of the Ansbach Hohenzollerns was the monastery at Heilsbronn, where an elaborate stone monument to her husband Georg Friedrich had been erected and where she also planned to be buried. Sophia’s portrait was already displayed in Heilsbronn on a more modest wall epitaph together with her husband and his first wife, which had been placed there, presumably on her commission, in 1613.65 When the Margravine left Ansbach for Nuremberg in 1632, her elaborate zinc coffin, decorated with her own verses, accompanied her.66 The burial site at Heilsbronn was subsequently desecrated and the graves plundered. As a childless widow, Sophia was forced to make plans to be buried in Nuremberg and she left very careful instrucTeck/ . . . Gebornen Marggräfin auß dem Chur-Fürstlichen Hauß Brandenburg/ [et] c. Wittiben: Dero Fürstl. Gn. Sambstags den 13. Februarii, Anno 1636. . . . in. . . . Straßburg . . . entschlaffen/ und Deroselben selig-verblichener Leichnam im Jahr 1655. Dienstags des 21. Augusti/ in der Stiffts-Kirchen zu Stuttgarten . . . in dem Fürstlichen Gewölb beygesetzet worden (Stuttgart: Rößlin, 1659). Julius Friedrich of WürttembergWeiltingen died in Strasbourg in 1635 and it was with great difficulty that his widow, Anna Sabina, managed to have his body transferred to the family vault in Stuttgart five years later in 1640. In 1655, the remains of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, who had died in battle in 1639, were transferred from Breisach to Weimar, and a fully fledged funeral ceremony was conducted and commemorated in funeral publications: Des auff den 12. instehenden Monats dieses 1655. Jahrs angestelten Fürstlichen Begräbnüs/ Des weyland Durchleuchtigen/ Hochgebornen Fürsten und Herrn/ Herrn Bernhards/ Hertzogens zu Sachsen/ Jülich/ Cleve und Bergk/ Landgrafens in Thüringen/ Marggrafens zu Meissen/ Grafens zu der Marck und Ravensbergk/ Herrn zu Ravenstein/ [et]c. Hochseligen Andenckens/ und deßwegen verordneter Land-Trauer/ abzulesen auff allen Cantzeln den 1. Advent-Sontag/ wird seyn der 2. Decembr. ([Gotha]: Schall, 1655). 64 Friedrich Ulrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg died in his Brunswick exile in 1634. The childless duke’s heirs seem not to have been able to agree on who was to bear the costs for his burial in the family vault in Wolfenbüttel. Thirty-six years later, in 1670, a young prince of Saxony noted in his travel diary that Friedrich Ulrich’s plain wooden coffin was on display in one of the aisles in the cathedral in Brunswick. Annette Faber, “ ‘. . . und besahe, was noch denckwürdiges darinne wahr . . .’: Zum Aufenthalt Prinz Albrechts von Sachsen-Gotha in Wolfenbüttel und Braunschweig im Mai 1670,” Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 85 (2004): 87. 65 Schuhmann, Die Markgrafen, 115. 66 Schuhmann, Die Markgrafen, 124. Barbara Sophia of Württemberg had also had her coffin made, but had to abandon it in Stuttgart: “for before her departure from her fatherland Her Princely Highness . . . had had a coffin made here, in which she wanted her dead body laid after her demise, which could not be put into effect because she departed this world in exile. . . .” (Drey Christliche Leichpredigten [1659], 62; dann Ihr Fürstl. Gn. . . . vor ihrem Abscheiden auß dem Vatterland Ihro allhie einen Sarch machen lassen/ darein Sie nach Ihrem Tod Ihren verblichenen Leichnam wöllen gelegt haben/ welches aber wegen Ihres Welt-Gesegnens in der Frembde nit mögen in das Werck gerichtet werden. . . .)

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tions for her funeral ceremony.67 Her funeral monument was erected in St. Lawrence’s Church. The epitaph took ten years to complete. It was carved in Nordhausen and brought to Nuremberg in several sections that are still visible today.68 Sophia is shown in full figure as the embodiment of the “pillar of prayer,” looking not toward a symbol, such as the cross or a representation of the resurrection, but directly confronting the spectator (see fig. 22). In fact, the figure resembles those of her unmarried brothers, August and Friedrich, who were carved in the same pose for the family epitaph in Celle. The size of the figure of the Margravine and its demonstrative pose posit the same authority as that of her brothers as ruling dukes. Sophia’s monument remains a singular statement in the completely non-dynastic context of St. Lawrence’s in Nuremberg. Burials and funerals themselves could be planned as political and confessional statements. The most obvious case is one examined by Magdalena Drexl, that of Anna of Brandenburg, recalcitrant wife and widow of Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg and heiress of both Cleves and Prussia, the claims to which she brought into the marriage. The adoption of reformed ritual by both her husband and her son led to bitter dispute, in the course of which the dowager mobilized her Lutheran theologians against both.69 Anna’s will stipulated that she was to be buried not in the cathedral in Berlin at the side of her husband, but in Königsberg, the burial site of her own ancestors, where an epitaph was to be erected for her grandparents, her parents, and herself.70 The title of Johann Behm’s Lutheran funeral sermon preached for Anna in Königsberg and printed in 1626 is programmatic: Letzter TestamentsWille Der Weiland Durchläuchtigsten . . . Fürstin und Frawen Frawen Anna . . . Wegen Luthrischer erklerung des rechten Evangelischen Sprüchleins Johannis. Das Blut Christi des Sohns

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Three bundles entitled Acta betr: der Markgräfin Sophie, Georg Friedrichs von Ansbach Wittwe, Verlassenschaft und Schulden: 1604–1660, including records concerning the monument, Sophia’s will, and her own handwritten inventory of her possessions, have not survived in the Geheimes Preußisches Staatsarchiv, BPH Rep. 41 V Margraf Georg Friedrich R2 Nr. 5. 68 Schuhmann, Die Markgrafen, 123. Schuhmann states that the monument was commissioned by Sophia’s nephew, Christian Ludwig of Celle, who certainly paid for it. However, it may be assumed that her sister Clara of Schwarzburg-Frankenhausen, who lived just outside Nordhausen, supervised its production. She had seven sisters. 69 Bodo Nischan, Prince, People and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 70 Drexl, Weiberfeinde, 354.

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Figure 22: Detail from the epitaph for Margräfin Sophia of BrandenburgAnsbach in the Lorenzkirche, Nürnberg. Reproduced from Günther Schuhmann, “Markgraf Georg Friedrichs d. Ä. zweite Gemahlin Sophia (†1639) und ihre Beziehungen zu Nürnberg,” in Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978), 257.

Gottes machet uns rein von allen Sünden. . . . (Last Testamentary Will of the Deceased Illustrious . . . Princess and Lady, Lady Anna . . . about the Lutheran Explication of the Properly Evangelical Verse of John: “The blood of Christ the Son of God cleanses us of all sin” . . .). Anna herself had stipulated the text for her sermon in her will and ordered that the preacher use it to explain the horrors (“greuel”) of Calvin’s teachings.71 Anna’s is one of a number of funeral sermons in which we see Lutheran dynastic women warding off potential threats to ortho-

71 In Königsberg the Lutheran preacher Johann Behm was called upon to counteract a funeral sermon that had already been held for Anna in Berlin by Johann Bergius, the Elector’s Calvinist chaplain, who in his interpretation of the same Bible text had claimed Anna for Calvinism and offered a harmless explanation for her wish to be buried in Königsberg. Drexl, Weiberfeinde, 355.

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doxy, expressly demanding that their funerals be used for this purpose, wishes that were only too readily granted by the officiating preachers. The Weimar superintendent Albrecht Grawer was called to the sickbed of Dorothea Maria of Saxe-Weimar, born princess of Anhalt, shortly before her death in 1617. Confirming that she would adhere to the true evangelical faith and Augsburg confession in which she had been educated, and that it was her wish that her sons should retain and defend this faith in their lands, schools, and churches, the dowager exhorted Grawer to use her funeral in order to “bear public witness to her commitment in this matter” (solcher Bekendnüß halber offentlich Zeugnis geben).72 In her will of 1611, the duchess had stipulated the same strength of faith and forbidden her children to marry outside the Lutheran confession, referring to the many examples of the strife this could cause.73 All thirteen of the funeral sermons preached and printed in the collection published in Jena to commemorate Dorothea Maria are used as a forum for asserting staunch Lutheranism in the face of rumors of Calvinist leanings, both of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar and of the duchess herself. Dorothea Maria was using the vehicle of her own funeral not just to address her children, but also her own dynasty, which was rent by confessional differences. Dorothea Maria’s mother, Eleonore of Hesse-Darmstadt, was still alive—the Anhalt widow reluctant to remarry with whom I began this article. Eleonore, a Württemberg princess, had seven surviving children from her first marriage to Joachim Ernst of Anhalt. Her stepson Johann Georg acceded in Anhalt in 1586 and introduced Calvinism into the territories.74 Eleonore remarried in 1589 and left Dessau for Darmstadt, taking most of her children with her. When her second husband died only seven years later, she remained as a widow

72 Dreyzehen Christliche Leich- und Begängnüß Predigten/ Uber dem Hochbetrübten/ und gantz unversehenem/ doch seligem Abschied aus dieser Welt der Weiland Durchlauchtigen/ Hochgebornen Fürstin und Frawen . . . Dorotheen Marien, Hertzogin zu Sachsen/ gebornen Fürstin zu Anhalt . . . Witwen . . . (Jena: Beithmann, 1617), fol., Biv r. 73 Bernhard Gottlieb Huldreich von Hellfeld, Leben Johann Ernstes des Jüngern, Herzogs zu Sachsen-Weimar etc., ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen teutschen Krieges und des Herzoglichen Hauses Sachsen (Jena: Cröker, 1784), 305. 74 Georg Schmidt, “Die Fürsten von Anhalt. Reformierte Konfessionalisierung und überkonfessionelle Einheitsbestrebungen?” in Die Fürsten von Anhalt. Herrschaftssymbolik, dynastische Vernunft und politische Konzepte in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Werner Freitag and Michael Hecht (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2003), 173–86. Schmidt fails to mention Eleonore’s role and ignores her possible influence in the choice of Lutheran husbands for her daughters.

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in Darmstadt for another twenty-two years, actively following and vocally criticizing developments in Anhalt, especially when all three of her surviving sons, who ruled in Köthen, Zerbst, and Plötzkau, respectively, became Calvinists.75 The printed compendium for the funeral of their sister Dorothea Maria in Weimar in 1617—on which occasion the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitbearing Society) is said to have been founded—was an opportunity to regale them publicly with their sister’s adherence to the faith of their father, Joachim Ernst. Their mother, Eleonore, was lauded as a bulwark of Lutheranism: Everyone knows what a Christian, pure, Lutheran, zealously religious heart the elderly Lady Landgrave has. Is this not a great mercy? Although the religion in Her Highness’ fatherland, the Princedom of Anhalt, was changed immediately after His Royal Highness her blessed father’s death and Calvinism was introduced, despite this, God in his pious mercy, although she was only a little over twelve years old, protected her so mercifully that her pious Christian heart was in no way infected with the Calvinist errors, but at the side of Her Grace, her above-mentioned and greatly loved Lady mother, both in the Principality of Anhalt and afterwards in the territory of Hesse, and until in 1593 she was married to our deceased . . . Prince and Master . . . Johann, and from those times on until her blessed end, she was most mercifully preserved in the pure Lutheran truth.76

It was to these sons and their one remaining staunchly Lutheran sister that Eleonore of Hesse-Darmstadt’s own funeral sermon was dedi-

75 A similar example from the eighteenth century of the resistance of a Lutheran Anhalt widow supported by her theologians is to be found in Katrin Rawert, “Regentin und Witwe. Zeitliche Herrschaft und das Verhältnis zwischen Gisela Agnes von Anhalt-Köthen und ihren Kindern,” in Adel in Sachsen-Anhalt. Höfische Kultur zwischen Repräsentation, Unternehmertum und Familie, ed. Eva Labouvie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 49–77. 76 “Was . . . die alte Landgräffin vor ein Christlich/ rein/ Lutherisch/ uber die Religion eyferich Hertz habe/ das ist menniglich bekand. Ist das nicht eine grosse Barmhertzigkeit? Ob gleich nach seligem Hintritt I.F.Gn. Herrn Vatters/ die Religion in I.F.G. Vatterland im Fürstenthumb Anhalt geendert/ und der Calvinismus eingeführet worden/ dz gleichwol der Barmhertzige fromme Gott I.F.G. ungeachtet dieselbe wenig uber 12. Jahr alt gewesen/ so gnedig behütet/ daß das fromme Christliche Hertz mit dem Calvinischen Irrthumb im geringsten nicht inficiret/ sondern bey I.F.G. hochgedachten Hertzgeliebten Fraw Mutter/ beydes im Fürstenthum Anhalt unnd hernach im Lande zu Hessen/ biß dieselbe unserm Weilandt . . . Fürsten und Herrn . . . Johansen . . . 1593. ehelichen vermählet worden/ und von der Zeit an/ biß an ihr letztes seliges Ende/ bey der reinen Lutherischen Warheit aller gnedigst ist erhalten worden.” Dreyzehen Christliche Leich- und Begängnüß Predigten, fol. Miiv.

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cated a year later.77 Again, the occasion is used to underscore their mother’s battle for the Lutheran cause and opposition to Calvinism, and her sons are reminded: “and her most severe lament and anger was caused by hearing that here and there people had reformed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in contravention of the pure confession of God’s word and the Augsburg confession.”78 The text chosen by Eleonore for her funeral was from Job 6:2: “Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea.” As Manfred Rudersdorf has pointed out, Lutheran orthodoxy before and during the Thirty Years’ War was shored up by a network of women like Eleonore connected to the Reformation heartlands of Württemberg and Saxony.79 Their funeral sermons provided a vehicle for preserving this image for posterity. Their positions resonated, however, throughout the seventeenth century, as their successors had key texts of confessional orthodoxy by their female ancestors reprinted, or themselves ordered biblical texts to be used at their funerals to expound on confessional differences. When a dynastic funeral took place, sermons were held in churches throughout the territory. The reading aloud of the vita of the deceased was part of that service, and preachers were provided with the texts that had been prepared at court. Thus the versions of a dowager’s life that she and her theologians composed reached a wide audience during the ceremonies surrounding the funeral itself.80 Contemporaries 77 Anna Sophia of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1584–1652), founder of the “Tugendliche Gesellschaft”; see Klaus Conermann, “Die Tugendliche Gesellschaft und ihr Verhältnis zur Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft: Sittenzucht, Gesellschaftsidee und Akademiegedanke zwischen Renaissance und Aufklärung,” Daphnis 17 (1988), 513–626; Gabriele Ball, “Die Tugendliche Gesellschaft—Programmatik eines adeligen Frauennetzwerkes in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Sammeln, Lesen, Übersetzen. Die böhmische Bibliothek der Fürsten Eggenberg im Kontext ihrer Zeit, ed. Jill Bepler and Helga Meise (Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 2010), 341–66. 78 “und war diß ihr höchste Klag und Prast/ wann sie höret wie man hie unnd da die Evangelische Lutherische Kirche reformieret/ unnd die reine Confession Gottes Wort und der Augsp. Confession zuwider enderte.” Leuchter and Vietor, Piae Lachrymae, 27. 79 Manfred Rudersdorf, “Die Reformation und ihre Gewinner. Konfessionalisierung, Reich und Fürstenstaat im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Günter Mühlpfort, ed. Erich Donnert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 136. 80 On how difficult lives could be rewritten in the case of dynastic consorts, see Jill Bepler, “Posterity and the Body of the Princess in German Court Funeral Books,” in The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500–1700, ed. Regina Schulte (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 125–55.

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were, however, also aware of the wide distribution that funeral publications enjoyed and of the fact that they would be preserved for generations. Not the least of the guarantors of this were the book collections belonging to dynastic women in which this genre so prominently figured.81 I have concentrated in this essay on a small group of dynastic widows, Lutheran women mainly of the generation living through or educated in the era of the backlash against Crypto-Calvinism and the generation that experienced the Thirty Years’ War. Their strategies for enduring loss, whether the loss was real or feared, were conservative and highly invested in preserving the status quo. Their contribution to the devotional literature of their time, whether as guardians of texts in their book collections or as patrons, editors, and writers of texts, significantly shaped the cultural history of their generation.

81 The most prominent of these collectors was Sophie Eleonore, Countess of StolbergStolberg (1669–1745), who owned over 40,000 funeral works. Jill Bepler, “‘im dritten Gradu ungleicher Linie Seitwart verwandt’ Frauen und dynastisches Bewußtsein in den Funeralwerken der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Dynastie und Herrschaftssicherung in der Frühen Neuzeit: Geschlechter und Geschlecht, ed. Heide Wunder, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft 28 (2002), 157.

CHAPTER SIX

PAPER MONUMENTS AND THE CREATION OF MEMORY: THE PERSONAL AND DYNASTIC MOURNING OF PRINCESS MAGDALENA SIBYLLE OF SAXONY Mara R. Wade Magdalena Sibylle’s (1617–68) funeral volume for her son Christian (1654–63) is a unique document of both maternal grief and dynastic loss.1 It demonstrates how a princely mother faced terrible loss, constructed dynastic memory, and politically situated her own family among the courts of Saxony and Thuringia. Magdalena Sibylle found creative means to grieve for her dead son that introduced new funeral genres to the region, reworked existing practices, and influenced the culture of commemoration in the following decades. Her publication confirms the close competition between Altenburg and Weimar for cultural superiority among the minor courts of Thuringia and Saxony. Moreover, Magdalena Sibylle set a precedent at Altenburg for an unusually versatile representation of mourning that shaped commemorations at court in the following decades. As Maja Schmidt notes, “Only the Altenburg court preserves several corresponding representations from differing and, in part, remarkable pictorial media.”2 My research confirms that the many innovations there can be attributed to her influence.

1

Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter. . . (Altenburg: Bauerfincken, 1662 [sic]). The date is in error and should read 1663. Hereafter cited as Klage. The copies at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (HAB, Stolberg LP 19 355) and at the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (FB Gotha, Th 4o p. 939 [1–20] rara) were consulted for this study. See Das Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (http://www.vd17.de/); see item VD17 39:136730C. Hereafter cited as VD17 with the corresponding number. 2 “Nur aus dem Bereich des Altenburger Hofs haben sich mehrere entsprechende Darstellungen auf verschiedenen und teilweise außergewöhnlichen Bildmedien erhalten.” Maja Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft: Fürstliches Funeralwesen der Frühen Neuzeit in Thüringen, Ausstellungskatalog (Gotha: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, 2002), 39. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

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Prince Christian of Saxe-Altenburg died in 1663 of measles when he was only nine years old. His death meant a profound personal loss to his parents, Friedrich Wilhelm II (1608–69) and Magdalena Sibylle, who both had experienced childless first marriages. The early death of the long-awaited heir to the duchy was a political loss as well, even considering that there was a second son.3 While it was customary to publish a funeral book when a member of the aristocracy died—even for young children of the aristocracy—the number of funeral publications for Prince Christian is disproportionate to his age and status.4 Funerals for children were normally not as elaborate as those for adults, yet the funeral commemoration of Prince Christian was impressive by all measures. As Jill Bepler has argued, funeral publications do not necessarily reflect the relative rank of the deceased or the importance of that court, but most often a political moment for the dynasty.5 This promising boy had been the hope of his parents and the recently created line of Saxe-Altenburg (1603), and his death was a blow to its hope for continuation. When Prince Christian of Altenburg was born in 1654, Magdalena Sibylle published a festival book of the baptismal tournaments and even authored a large section of the volume herself, the title of which is telling: Auffzug Ihr. Durchl. Princessin M. S. Hertzogin zu Sachsen/ Jülich/ Cleve . . . In welchem vorgebildet wird Ein Im Glück und Unglück Frewde und Traurigkeit Gedult und Hoffnung zum gewünschten Ende Geübter Mensch (Pageant of Her Illustrious Princess Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Saxony, in which is portrayed a human being experienced

3 Christian predeceased both parents, while his brother, Friedrich Wilhelm III, died in 1672 shortly after both parents. With their deaths, the line of Saxe-Altenburg was extinguished and transferred to Saxe-Gotha. Their sister Johanna Magdalena married Duke Johann Adolph of Saxe-Weissenfels, the son of Magdalena Sibylle’s brother August, in 1671; she died at the age of thirty after bearing eleven children. 4 There are nine entries with thirteen funeral sermons for Prince Christian in the printed catalogue of the Stolberg collection. I would like to thank Christian Hogrefe, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, for checking this data for me. See Marion Kobelt-Groch, “ ‘Freudiger Abschied Jungfräulicher Seelen.’ Himmelsphantasien in protestantischen Leichenpredigten für Kinder,” Wolfenbütteler Barock-Nachrichten 31(2004): 117–47. 5 Jill Bepler, “Das Monumentum Sepulcrale: ein Funeralwerk im Dienste dynastischer Selbstdarstellung,” in Moritz der Gelehrte: Ein Renaissance Fürst in Europa, ed. Heiner Borggrefe, Vera Lüpkes, and Hans Ottomeyer (Eurasberg: Minerva, 1997), 414–15.

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in fortune and misfortune, joy and sadness, patience and hope and brought to the desired goal).6 According to the title page, the birth of her first son is the goal of her entire life thus far, her long “desired goal.” Prince Christian exhibited excellent qualities and the potential to become a good ruler. He was educated with the sons of Marshall von Harstall at the Altenburg court and demonstrated remarkable progress in learning German and French, the latter of which he spoke exclusively in his chambers and at play. He later made rapid progress in Latin. By the time of his premature death, Prince Christian had already danced in several ballets as well. His education in the Lutheran religion, foreign languages, and courtly accomplishments was commensurate with, and perhaps even beyond, his status as the first-born of the Altenburg line.7 Magdalena Sibylle’s Lamentation Christian’s early death compelled Magdalena Sibylle to seek consolation in the written word as she had done previously as a response to the death of her first husband, Prince-Elect Christian of Denmark (1603–47), whom she had married in 1634.8 With this marriage, she was meant to become Queen of Denmark, that is, queen of a monarchy that had not had a living queen in decades. (Queen Anna Catharina, wife of Christian IV [1588–1648] of Denmark, had died in 1612.) When her husband Prince-Elect Christian predeceased his father in 1647, leaving her a childless widow, she never became queen in any sense: she had no sons for whom she could serve as regent in their minority; nor did she have daughters to educate as future wives of Protestant rulers. At her widow’s seat in Denmark at Nykøbing on Falster, Magdalena Sibylle had given words to her grief and compiled and then published a religious volume that in a second printing was called Gebet- und Gesäng-Büchlein . . . (1650; Little Book of Prayer and 6 See Mara R. Wade, “Invisible Bibliographies: Three Seventeenth-Century German Women Writers,” Women in German Yearbook 14 (1998): 41–69. 7 Stone’s assertion that, owing to a high mortality rate, early modern parents were inured to the deaths of their children has been largely rejected. Magdalena Sibylle’s case certainly offers ample contradiction. See Laurence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 57. 8 Mara R. Wade, Triumphus Nuptialis Danicus: German Court Culture and Denmark; The Great Wedding of 1634, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 27 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996).

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Song).9 Confirming her piety, her own funeral sermon notes, “. . . as thus the illustrious princess many years ago, when she was still in Denmark, compiled her own prayer book. The same one has been expanded since then and not long before her blessed death was published again in large print.”10 Her first “paper monument” constitutes a significant document of women’s grief writing and provides a context for her son’s funeral publication. Magdalena Sibylle’s funeral publication Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter . . . is a remarkable testimony to her grief at the loss of her son and heir (see fig. 23).11 I know of no other funeral work written, compiled, and published by a princely mother for her child.12 While the publication is anonymous, the book’s title clearly identifies her by her dynastic title. Moreover, the volume moves beyond mere compilation and meaningful organization of biblical passages to her composition of original funeral poetry and a prose lamentation. A description of the publication, focusing on Magalena Sibylle’s original poetic contributions, will serve as an orientation to its structure and organization. The funeral volume is divided into distinct parts: Magdalena Sibylle clearly wrote and compiled the first section herself and directed (at her “princely command” [fürstliche Befehl]) that the five funeral sermons from important stages of the funeral ritual be appended. Magdalena Sibylle’s poetry and lamentations thus create the deeply personal application of the five funeral sermons written by Lutheran clergymen that 9 The book with this title is known today only in the second, expanded imprint from 1667. [Magdalena Sibylle,] Gebet- und Gesäng-Büchlein: In welchem enthalten Schöne Gebete/ auserlesene Psalme/ und Geistliche Lieder (Coburg: Mönch, 1667). See VD17 39:156166S. A first version most certainly existed, as the title page states: “Nunmehr aber vermehret in diese Form bringen/ und wieder auf-legen lassen.” (Now however she brought it [the Gebet- und Gesäng-Büchlein] into this expanded version and had it published again.”) I have been unable to locate a copy of the earlier publication in either Denmark or Germany. 10 “. . . wie denn auch Ihre Fürstl. Durchl. vor geraumen Jahren/ als Sie noch in Dennemarck gewesen/ ein eigenes Betbuch verfertiget/ dasselbe seither denn vermehret/ und nicht lang vor dero seligen Absterben in grössern Druck wieder herfür geben lassen.” Johann Christfried Sagittarius, Der Menschen Streit/ Knechtschafft/ und Arbeiten . . . (Altenburg: Johann Michael, [1668]), 70. 11 VD17 lists copies in Gotha (3 copies), Göttingen (incomplete), Dresden, and Halle. See VD17 39:107507V. 12 See Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 111 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 52, who states, “They [the authors] invariably belonged to the Lutheran clergy.” Her comment underscores the unique value of this publication by a female author.

Figure 23: Klage einer Hochbetrübten HochFürstlichen Fraw Mutter, the funeral lament by Magdalena Sibylle of Saxe-Altenburg for her deceased son, Prince Christian (1663). Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol-4°-p-939-12-Rara).

Figure 24: The inscriptions on the coffin of Prince Christian of Altenburg from one of the Gotha copies of the funeral sermon, Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter. Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (LP-F-8°-25_26_001).

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follow her own texts. Her twenty-four-page text is not numbered, but beginning with the funeral sermons the work is through-paginated. Her section begins with the biblical quotations she selected to be engraved on the prince’s coffin (see fig. 24).13 These are followed by a brief account of the boy’s life, a poem to the dead child, a hand-painted portrait of him on his funeral bier with poetry beneath the picture (see fig. 25), a brief description of his funeral procession (with reference to a painting of it not included in this work), and a lamentation signed M.S.P.Z.S. (Magdalena Sibylle Prinzessin zu Sachsen). There is also a short account of the boy’s death from measles. Following these items are several strophic songs written by Magdalena Sibylle and a lengthy biblical passage, probably chosen by the princess herself. The strophic songs and compilations from the Bible are entirely consistent with her earlier religious poetry from the Gebet- und Gesäng-Büchlein. The physical layout of the volume confirms that the book was planned with a blank page for the insertion of the portrait of the prince on his lit parade. Both the Wolfenbüttel and Gotha copies present it directly before Magdalena Sibylle’s prose lamentation, her meditation on her son’s death, that she signs: “The woman who has patiently borne her crosses made this from her afflicted, maternal heart.”14 After the obligatory description of the Prince’s final illness, there follows the text from the Ehrentafel (commemorative tablet) hung above the musicians’ loge in the church, the epitaph hung at the entry to the crypt, and his epitaph, a sonnet, beginning “Here lies a prince of aged youth, full of intelligent Wisdom, of great virtue . . .” and ending “If I may give faith to my illusion, such a prince will never live again.”15 After Magdalena Sibylle’s section are the five sermons by prominent figures connected to the court at Altenburg that take up over two hundred pages.16 The sermons appear in the order in which they were preached, beginning right after Prince Christian’s death on June 5 and concluding with his 13 A different copy in Gotha, one without the oil portrait, contains a little fold-out graphic of the coffin with its verses. See FB Gotha, LP F8o IV 0025(26). The coffin is still in the crypt at the court chapel in Altenburg. I would like to thank Uta Künzl for showing me the family’s coffins. 14 “Dieses hat gemacht die gedultige Creutzträgerin aus betrübten Christlichen Mütterlichen Hertzen.” Klage, CiB. 15 Beginning “Hier liegt ein Printz von alter Jugend/ voll kluger Weißheit/ hoher Tugend . . .” and ending “darf meinem Wahn ich Glauben geben/ wirdt ietzt kein solcher Printz mehr leben.” Ibid., CiijB-CiiijA. 16 The funeral sermons are by Johann Christfried Sagittarius, Abraham Triller, Magnus Schmalz, Christoph Heinrich Löber, and Paul Schmied.

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Figure 25: Prince Christian on his lit parade, color portrait in oil from the Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter. Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol-4°-p-939-13-Rara).

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burial. This long middle section can be considered the official voice of the clergy who here perform their obligations to the dynasty. At the very end of the funeral publication, after the five sermons for the dead boy, are three more Lieder that can also be considered Magdalena Sibylle’s original poetry.17 Even though she employs traditional motifs, her poetry is striking in its formal versatility.18 The first is a dialogue between the dead prince and an answering voice, presumably that of his mother. It consists of six strophes, in which the prince speaks the first five lines, while the answering voice speaks the next five lines. The poem begins with the prince’s question: “Must I then die/ Must I then shun [the living]. . . .”19 The second Lied states that princes must always be prepared for death: “To live as a Christian and to die blessed. The pious prince should begin at an early age. . . .”20 In the third and final poem, a Lied of ten strophes of eight lines each, the lyrical subject speaking is Prince Christian who comforts his parents, beginning: “Thus I have now overcome, many a misery, yes, even death. . . .”21 Magdalena Sibylle speaks in closing: “I close, a highly afflicted mother, herewith from the Holy Scripture, and lament thus: he who was our comfort is lost!”22 The last printed words are “The end of this little book.”23 The poetry and Lieder discussed here are not in Magdalena Sibylle’s Gebet- und Gesäng-Büchlein; their absence suggests that she composed new poetry in her grief for her son during the six weeks between his death and funeral.24 She was not incapacitated by the grief for her son, but rather poured forth her sorrow into poetry and a prose lamentation in his memory. Within the context of the funeral lament, these

17

Ibid., 210–21. See Anna Carrdus, “Consolation Arguments and Maternal Grief in SeventeenthCentury Verse: The Example of Margarethe Susanna von Kuntsch.” German Life and Letters 47, no. 2 (1994): 141. 19 “Muß ich denn scheiden/ Muss ich denn meiden. . . .” Klage, 210–21. 20 “Christlich zu leben und seelig zu sterben|| Hub’ an der fromme Fürst immer bey Zeit. . . .” Ibid., 210–21. 21 “SO hab ich nun überwunden/ Manches Not/ ja auch der Todt. . . .” Ibid., 210–21. 22 “Hierauff schliesse ich Hochbetrübte Mutter aus Heiliger Schrifft/ und klage also: Der unser Trost war/ ist dahin!” Ibid., 210–21. 23 “Ende dieses Büchleins.” Ibid., 210–21. 24 The poetry from the funeral sermon is not in Fischer Tümpel, which registers her other poems. See also Jean Woods and Maria Fürstenwald, Schriftstellerinnen, Künstlerinnen und gelehrte Frauen des deutschen Barock (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), 103–4. 18

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poems make a powerful, highly individual expression of maternal grief: “Because children come from the heart/ and return to the heart.”25 With this publication, Magdalena Sibylle fully and publicly performed the work of grief, fulfilling court and Christian etiquette. The volume commemorating him begins and ends with her voice; her texts frame the official male voice of court mourning. By writing and publishing this work, she created a lasting, paper monument to her son. In the publication for her funeral in 1668, the court pastor, Johann Sagittarius, writes that Magdalena Sibylle wrote Prince Christian’s funeral texts herself, and he repeats her words, “Oh, how God has once again saddened me, in sixteen years two pieces of my heart have been torn off. . . .,” words that refer to the deaths of her first husband, Prince Christian of Denmark, and her son Christian.26 He then reprints in full her lament at her son’s death, beginning “Is there also a pain, such as my pain is, that struck me on the day when I had to follow my dear obedient son to the grave!”27 Apparently, Magdalena Sibylle’s publication for her son’s death was considered so remarkable as to be included in her own funeral commemoration. Her monuments to him became testimonies to her own status as princess and mother, creating dynastic memory in the face of dynastic extinction. Magdalena Sibylle’s grief also allowed her to be recognized as a mother, something long denied her in her childless first marriage. While widowhood defined her first collection of poetry, maternal loss shaped her funeral publication. She had been seriously ill in 1662 before her son’s death and, in her weakened state, felt her son Prince Christian’s death as a gaping wound. As if bearing out the medical beliefs of the time, according to which the death of a loved one was dangerous to one’s health, Magdalena Sibylle sickened at the death of her son. She had increasing bouts of illness, and her funeral sermon states that she never really recovered from his death.28 The best

25 “Denn Kinder kommen von Hertzen/ und gehen wieder zu Hertzen.” Klage, BiijA. 26 He states that the texts were “mit eigenen Händen auffgezeichnet” (Written with her own hands). And he repeats “Ach wie hat mich Gott abermal betrübet/ in sechszehn Jahren zwey Stück von meinem Herzen abgerissen. . . .,” Sagittarius, Der Menschen Streit, 66. 27 “Ist auch ein Schmertzen/ als mein Schmertzen ist/ der mich troffen hat an dem Tag als ich meinen lieben gehorsamen Sohne muß zu der Grufft folgen!” Klage, BijB. 28 Carrdus, “Consolation Arguments and Maternal Grief,” 135–40.

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remedy, and in fact the Christian obligation, for her sorrow was to submit to God’s will. Magdalena Sibylle’s personal motto was “As God so wills/ it is sufficient for me,”29 and it seems that she did find comfort in her devotional writings for her son: “. . . how immense the death [of Christian] went to the heart of the highly blessed Princess, and nevertheless in the midst of this same misfortune she has found comfort. . . .”30 Such visible and prolonged grief was often coded female, and at the same time the admonition to repress grief was ever present and thus often pushed women to censor themselves.31 The choice to bury her child on July 22 was also symbolic: July 22 is the feast of Mary Magdalene, i.e., her name day. By interring her child on this day, Magdalena Sibylle, a staunch Lutheran, conspicuously positioned herself in the lineage of mourning women that originated with the Virgin Mary and the Magdalene. Magdalena Sibylle’s lamentation is striking because of its immediacy—in it the living mother Magdalena Sibylle addresses her dead son. Her tears are both bodily and textual. Her poetry and meditations reflect a mother’s real anguish at the death of a promising child, while simultaneously articulating a clear sense of noble familial heritage and the projection of dynastic claims for Altenburg. Magalena Sibylle’s publication of a second edition of her Gebet- und Gesäng-Büchlein in 1667 must also be considered in light of her son’s death. By reworking and expanding her earlier volume, she enacted a protracted process of intense mourning, returning to a previous act of consolation and devotion. The re-publication of her religious poetry can also be interpreted in conjunction with a strong sense of her own impending death in the following year. Creating Memory The Wolfenbüttel and Gotha copies of Magdalena Sibylle’s Klage einer Hochbetrübten Hoch-Fürstlichen Fraw Mutter contain an oil portrait of the prince on his lit parade. While her writings constitute a poetics

29

“Wie es Gott fügt/ Mir es gnügt.” “. . . wie gewaltig dieser Todesfall [von Christian] d[e]r hochseeligen Princessin zu Hertzen gegangen/ und dennoch dieselbe mitten in ihren Ungluck [sic] getrost gewesen. . . .” Sagittarius, Der Menschen Streit, 69. 31 Carrdus, “Consolation Arguments and Maternal Grief,” 140–47. 30

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of tears and represent the poetry and prose of maternal lamentation, the small color portrait of Prince Christian bound into the funeral book presents the reader with both textual and pictorial loci for meditation on death and dynasty. In addition to the poetry, biblical passages, and the prose lamentation, this small color painting is clearly intended to be a special component of a highly political, representational work portraying the dynasty. These specific copies of the book were intended for noble readers. The presence of the books today in notable collections related to the dynasty is significant and confirms that funeral publications were important documents of communication among early modern courts. Two other cultural monuments to the deceased youth are central to Magdalena Sibylle’s expression of profound maternal grief, creation of personal memory, and commemoration of the dynasty: 1) the oil painting of the funeral cortege in Altenburg; and 2) additional funeral portraits of the prince on his death bed and in his coffin. In the very large oil painting (190 × 107 cm) of the young prince’s funeral procession, the Altenburg castle assumes more than half of the large canvas, situating the residence and thus the dynasty prominently in the visual field of the viewer.32 The cortege provides a tangible link between the town (with the partial view of the town hall located geographically below the princely residence on the right-hand side) and the enormous castle that commands the central focus of the painting. The meandering funeral procession makes visible the connection between town and court, prince and subject, depicting the social hierarchy through the participants’ physical relationships to the corpse. The painting is a tangible representation of the extent of rule. Dynasty is rendered both textually and pictorially for Christian—described in his funeral sermon and then portrayed in the painted picture of the exequies. The death of the prince gave rise to an innovation at court with the inauguration of the interment site in the crypt of the court church. Whereas previous members of the dynasty had been buried in the town church, beginning with Prince Christian’s funeral, members of the Altenburg line were interred at court, thereby establishing a Fürstengruft, a special place for the deceased members of the princely

32 Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft, 38–39; Künzl, Am Hofe von Friedrich Wilhelm II, 32–33, 37–40, and 53.

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family. The creation of a special place at the castle for the burial of the family confirms a deliberate physical separation of them from their subjects. The coffins of Magdalena Sibylle, Friedrich Wilhelm II, Christian, and Friedrich Wilhelm III are all preserved in the crypt at the court chapel in Altenburg.33 That the court became a locus for dynastic mourning is further underscored by the placement of other commemorative objects in the court chapel. The gilt engraved plate etched in memory of Friedrich Wilhelm II was hung together with the monumental painting of Prince Christian’s funeral procession in the choir of the court chapel. An epitaph framing the large paintings of both Friedrich Wilhelm II and Magdalena Sibylle on the lit parade formerly hung there as well.34 Court inventories after the deaths of his father and his brother document further oil paintings in relation to Prince Christian’s death. In his father’s chamber hung a portrait of Christian on his death bed as well as an oil painting of him in his coffin, while in his brother’s rooms there hung yet another oil portrait of the deceased prince.35 As a political statement to the living, dynastic funeral publications could shape the legacy of the deceased and provided new opportunities to position the court in its political constellation. The funeral artifacts were intended to create dynastic memory among the members of the family as well as among their subjects. In addition to the ephemeral funeral procession, the reading of sermons, the tolling of the bells, the singing and playing of music, and other impermanent aspects of the funeral ritual, the durable printed funeral publication, the monumental paintings in the court chapel at Altenburg, and the establishment of the princely mausoleum there must have been well known in the town. The culture of memory was very strong in Altenburg, and the culture of commemoration initiated by Magdalena Sibylle set important precedents for memorializing the deaths of her entire family. The decade of loss from 1663 to 1672 in Altenburg meant the extinction of the line, yet it produced tangible monuments of the family that exist today. The

33

Johanna Magdalena (1656–86) is buried at Weissenfels. The epitaph was removed for restoration in 1975, revealing a medieval painting beneath it. The two funeral paintings were removed from the decorative epitaph and are presently stored at the castle. See Künzl, Am Hofe von Friedrich Wilhelm II, 42–43. 35 Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft, 53. 34

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portraits of the deceased are crucial to the creation and maintenance of personal and dynastic identity and demonstrate a conscious attempt to control the portrayal of the dynasty, especially in death.36 The establishment of a princely place of mourning where artifacts representing deceased members of the dynasty are preserved shows the development of a funerary culture intended to leave permanent reminders of the station and place in history of the dynasty of Saxe-Altenburg. Having a place of dynastic memory suggests meditative, genealogical, religious, and political practices that project a carefully defined reading of one’s own lineage within a region densely populated with smaller courts. Commemorating Deceased Children in Weimar and Altenburg Court culture at Altenburg, especially the funeral monuments and publications for Prince Christian in 1663, can be read against the backdrop of Weimar publications for deceased children from the preceding decade. While the cultural competition among other, smaller courts in Saxony and Thuringia has received critical attention, funeral publications from the two courts of Altenburg and Weimar have not been studied together.37 A brief comparison of the funeral publication

36 Ibid., 22. “Im Zentrum steht jedoch das (realistische) Porträt, das immer bedeutender als identitätsstiftender Ausweis der Herrschaft wurde.” (In the center is the realistic portrait that became ever more important in authenticating rule and establishing identity.) 37 Jill Bepler has compared funeral publications at Weimar with those from other courts in “Das Trauerzeremoniell an den Höfen Hessens und Thüringens in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Frühneuzeitliche Hofkultur in Hessen und Thüringen, ed. Jörg Jochen Berns and Detlef Ignasiak (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1993), 249–65; Jill Bepler, “Zeremonieller Hof und Musenhof: protestantische höfische Begräbniskultur im Spiegel der Funeralpublikationen Thüringens,” in Leichenpredigten als Quelle Historischer Wissenschaften, ed. Rudolf Lenz, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 157–78; Roswitha Jacobsen, “Religiösität und Herrschaftsrepräsentation in Funeralien sächsischer Fürsten,” in Religion und Religiösität im Zeitalter des Barock, ed. Dieter Breuer, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 25 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995) 163–73; Jörg Jochen Berns, “Zur Frühgeschichte des Musenhofes oder Duodezabsolutismus als kulturelle Chance,” in Frühneuzeitliche Hofkultur in Hessen und Thüringen, ed. Jörg Jochen Berns and Detlef Ignasiak, Jenaer Studien 1 (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1993), 10–43; Roswitha Jacobsen, “Höfische Kulturentwicklung und Kleinstaatlichkeit im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Literatur in Thüringen, ed. Detlef Ignasiak, Palmbaum-Studien 1 (Rudolstadt: Haine, 1995), 138–44; and Jill Bepler, “From Public Event to Publishing Event: Court Funerals and the Print Medium in Early Modern Germany,” in Cultures of Communication from

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for Prince Christian of Altenburg and those for two deceased children at Weimar illustrates the respective claims of the two courts as the predominant literary court, the Court of the Muses (Musenhof ).38 According to Jill Bepler, the funeral publications for Duchess Wilhelmine Eleonore (†1653) and Duke Friedrich (†1655) confirm the literary accomplishments of the Weimar court, juxtaposing them against the more ceremonial, primary court of the electors in Dresden.39 With the relocation of the renowned literary society, the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, to Weimar in 1651, Wilhelm IV of Saxe-Weimar began to position his court as the cultural leader in Saxony and Thuringia. With the marriage of Magdalena Sibylle and Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1652, Altenburg became a keen rival for the reputation as the premier literary court in the region. In their youth, the ruling couple had both experienced court culture in Dresden and aspired to assert the cultural dominance of Altenburg among the many small courts of Thuringia. Friedrich Wilhelm II had been born at the castle in Weimar in 1603, the year that Altenburg had been carved from the Weimar territories. He was raised at the court in Dresden, experiencing the splendor there under Christian II and Johann Georg I. Magdalena Sibylle’s own experiences at the electoral court at Dresden as well as at the royal court in Denmark made her acutely aware of the need to create a dynastic tradition in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. Her growing family provided the opportunity for the still relatively new line at Altenburg to become the leader among the Ernestine courts. As Bepler’s research has revealed, the funeral publications for the two children in Weimar integrate the literary features of the commemoration—poetry, orations, devotional songs, pastoral eclogues— fully into the ceremonial of the funeral.40 The secretary of the learned society, Georg Neumark (1621–81), wrote literary publications for the funerals of the Weimar children that must be considered as a

Reformation to Enlightenment: Constructing Publics in the Early Modern German Lands, ed. James Van Horn Melton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 39–47. 38 Volker Bauer, Die höfische Gesellschaft in Deutschland von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts: Versuch einer Typologie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). 39 Weinmarisches Trauergedechtnüß . . . (Jena: Sengenwald, 1653) and Klagbares Denkmal . . . (Weimar: Eyliker, [1655]), respectively. See Bepler, “Das Trauerzeremoniell an den Höfen Hessens und Thüringens.” 40 Bepler, “Zeremonieller Hof und Musenhof,” 168.

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unit with their published funeral works. For Wilhelmine Eleonore of Weimar he wrote a “Gesprächlied zwischen dem Selig-abgestorbenen Freulein/ und den hinterlassenen Eltern und Freunden” (Song between the deceased maiden of blessed memory, and her parents and friends who were left behind), compiled a collection of poems Klag und Trost-Gedichte. . . (Poems of Lamentation and Consolation) by several authors at court, and wrote Poetische Leichrede von der Sterblichkeit . . . (Poetic Funeral Sermon on Mortality), a sermon that, as Bepler has shown, he held as part of the girl’s funeral.41 Neumark also wrote a pastoral eclogue for Friedrich of Weimar, Ecloge Filirenus (Eclogue for Filirenus), and like the oration for his sister, a Trauriges Gesprächlied . . . (Sorrowful Song to be Spoken and Sung) that was also published independently.42 As Bepler has convincingly demonstrated, the two Weimar examples confirm a growing dynastic identity located specifically in funeral publications. The funeral publications for the Weimar court are in German; Duke Wilhelm IV himself oversaw them; and they exhibit an increasingly literary character, as opposed to the heraldic character that, for example, marks Dresden funerary works.43 While earlier funeral publications were the efforts of the universities and court officials, the courts now assumed responsibility for shaping their own legacy. The Weimar publications are therefore strongly associated with the ruler and a circle of elite men. The funeral publications for the Weimar children reflect the literary efforts of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, of which their father was head, and position the Weimar court prominently in the cultural landscape. According to Schmidt, the extravagant funeral publications in Weimar in the 1650s were intended to distinguish them from the relatively new line of Altenburg.44

41 The catalogue of the FB Gotha lists these three funeral publications for Duchess Wilhelmine Eleonore, which were published in Jena by Sengenwald in 1653. Only the two mentioned above emanated from the court. Unlike the Gesprächlied for her brother, the one for the duchess was not published separately. See Gerhard Dünnhaupt, Personalbibliographien zu den Drucken des Barock, s.v. “Neumark” (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1991). 42 Ecloge Filirenus (Jena: Sengenwald, 1656), D17 23:251835H. See Dünnhaupt, “Neumark,” item 31. Trauriges Gesprächlied . . . (Jena: Sengenwald, [1656]), VD17 39:148109F. The catalogue of the FB Gotha lists five funeral publications for Duke Friedrich. 43 Bepler, “Das Trauerzeremoniell an den Höfen Hessens und Thüringens,” 249–65. 44 Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft, 25, 42.

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Magdalena Sibylle’s funeral publication for her son not only shares features of the Weimar publications but also possesses qualities that distinguish it from those works. While all of the publications discussed here originated at court, Princess Magdalena Sibylle herself, and not a court poet, took control of her son’s funeral publication in its entirety. Furthermore, while Christian’s funeral publication by his mother is also highly literary, the grieving maternal voice codes it as distinctly female. The lamentation is in her voice; it is not an imagined grieving mother’s voice—it is her own articulation of grief—and readers can sense the immediacy of her bitter sorrow. While graphic portraits also appeared in the Weimar funeral works, the binding of miniature oil portraits into select copies of Prince Christian’s funeral publication advances the claims for cultural dominance of Altenburg by elevating the material value of these imprints. The Development of a Dynastic Tradition Magdalena Sibylle’s commemorative projects confirm that there were deliberate efforts at creating a dynastic style, or, as Jill Bepler formulates it, a “Hausstil” for loss and mourning.45 Innovations at Altenburg—such as the massive production of numerous portraits of the deceased in various constellations (on the lit parade and in the coffin), in various media (paintings, printed graphics in traditional black on white as well as the non-traditional white on black, gold-plated copper plates, and paintings on metal), and in various formats (from very large to quite small)—were part of a much larger tradition, however. The Saxon and Thuringian courts were extremely prolific in the production of funeral monuments, and efforts in the second half of the seventeenth century created distinct commemorative styles. The variety and number of such commemorative works were, however, notably greater at the relatively small court at Altenburg. Funeral portraits in Saxony significantly predate the ones for Prince Christian. The earliest one for a member of the Wettin dynasty is for Johann Wilhelm I of Saxe-Weimar (1530–73), and the earliest ones from the Albertine line are those for Electress Anna (1585) and

45

Bepler, “Das Monumentum Sepulcrale,” 415.

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Elector August (1586).46 By the time of the death in 1659 of Electress Magdalena Sibylle (mother of Magdalena Sibylle of Altenburg), funeral portraits in Saxony had enjoyed a long tradition. Nevertheless, there is evidence for a renewed interest in these art forms in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War during the 1650s, the period in which Magdalena Sibylle returned to Saxony and started her own family at Altenburg. From that period date the funeral portraits for her mother, Electress Magdalena Sibylle, in 1659 as well as two for Johann Philipp (1651–52) and Moritz (1652–53), the infant sons of her brother Duke Moritz of Saxe-Zeitz (1619–81).47 As a keen observer and adaptor of court ritual and ceremonial, Magdalena Sibylle no doubt noticed new developments in this genre and could well have been among the initiators of the portrait for her deceased mother. While Claudia Kunde asserts that Duke Moritz was initially oriented toward the courts at Dresden and Weimar with regard to funeral portraiture, the court of his sister at Altenburg, to whom Moritz remained close her entire life, undoubtedly also provided a powerful example in the 1660s.48 Moritz was a beloved brother of Magdalena Sibylle of Altenburg; he visited her in Denmark in 1642, and at her widow’s seat at Nykøbing she negotiated the double weddings in 1650 of Moritz and their brother Christian to two young duchesses of Holstein.49 Moritz was present at her death in 1668 and in 1672 also became the guardian, together with Elector Johann Georg II, of her orphaned

46 Joachim Säckl and Karin Heise, Barock Fürstenresidenzen an Saale, Unstruth, Elster (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2007), 319. 47 Ibid., 320–21. 48 Ibid., 318. There are several reasons for the lack of comparison with Altenburg. First, all of the presumably larger funeral portraits of Prince Christian recorded in early inventories are not known today. Second, the small portraits inserted into funeral publications for Prince Christian discussed here are not at all well known. Only at the conference “Enduring Loss” did Marion Kobelt-Groch and I realize we were studying two different copies of the funeral volume—one at Wolfenbüttel and one at Gotha— each with a portrait in it. Third, Altenburg was not one of the so-called appanage, or Sekundogenitur, courts presented in the catalogue by Säckl and Heise; therefore there would have been no reason to include Altenburg in this discussion. Funeral portraits for all other members of the Altenburg family, except Prince Christian, are, however, discussed in this remarkably comprehensive catalogue. See Säckl and Heise, Barock Fürstenresidenzen, II.83, 112–14 for Johanna Magdalena (1656–86); IV.20, 323–24, Magdalena Sibylle; IV.21, 324–25, Friedrich Wilhelm II; and IV.22, 325–26, Friedrich Wilhelm III. 49 Moritz arrived at Nykøbing on October 21, 1642. See Emil Marquard, Prins Christians (V)s Breve (Copenhagen: Gad, 1952), 1:628.

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second son, Friedrich Wilhelm III, during his minority.50 After his sister’s death, Moritz named his next female child after her.51 Magdalena Sibylle’s own children engaged in the culture of mourning, signaling that her efforts were successful and that memory was carried into the next generation. As an inventory of his belongings at his death in 1672 confirms, Friedrich Wilhelm III had funeral portraits of his family in his chambers.52 Of remarkable artistic quality, the funeral portrait for Friedrich Wilhelm III by Albert Glöckner elaborates motives from the funeral portrait for his mother attributed to Enoch Glöckler.53 At her burial in 1686, Friedrich Wilhelm III’s sister, Johanna Magdalena, wore a bracelet made of the hair of her brother with his portrait in enamel.54 Her funeral portrait from the court at Weissenfels, to which she had married, is a small format painting in oil on copper and probably goes back to a larger painting. A lavish funeral publication for her includes five engravings.55 The genre of funeral portraits flourished in Saxony and Thuringia in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially at the courts of Magdalena Sibylle and her brothers Dukes Moritz at Zeitz and Christian at Merseburg (1615–91).56 Whereas the court at Merseburg printed very few funeral sermons, as many as thirty-seven funeral portraits once existed there, of which nineteen are still preserved today.57 The presence of Altenburg portraits at Zeitz confirms the close relations between Magdalena Sibylle and Moritz and suggests that these images came to Zeitz at an early time. Offering a fascinating view of

50

Sagittarius, Der Menschen Streit, 77. Moritz arrived on January 5, 1668. This daughter died in 1672 at only five months old. See Säckl and Heise, Barock Fürstenresidenzen, IV.23, 326–27 for this funeral portrait. 52 Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft, 53–54, cites inventories from 1669 and 1673 confirming that in his sleeping chambers Friedrich Wilhelm II had two portraits of the deceased Christian. In an adjoining chamber, Friedrich Wilhelm III had portraits of his brother, Christian, and his mother, Magdalena Sibylle, in their coffins. Ibid., 31–32, also mentions an inventory of the Altenburg funeral paintings from 1823/1824 listing the three portraits of Magdalena Sibylle, Friedrich Wilhelm II, and Christian in their coffins. 53 Säckl and Heise, Barock Fürstenresidenzen, II.20–22, 323–26. 54 Ibid., 113. 55 Ibid., II.82, 113–14. 56 See Säckl and Heise in the individual sections on “Totenbilder” (funeral portraits) at the various courts, for example, I.83, 112–14 (Weissenfels), III.35–57, 233–36 (Merseburg), and IV.16–30, 318–33 (Zeitz, including funeral portraits for the Altenburg line). 57 See Ibid., 234–35. 51

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communication among early modern courts, the locations of these funerary pictures throughout the region suggest that multiple copies of the paintings were regularly exchanged among the dynastically related courts.58 The practices at Magdalena Sibylle’s court at Altenburg to commemorate dynastic losses appear consistent with those at the regional courts of the duchess’s male siblings—August in Weissenfels (1614–80), Moritz in Zeitz, and Christian at Merseburg. Nevertheless, the striking number and variety of funeral paintings from Altenburg in the aftermath of Prince Christian’s death in 1663 make a compelling argument for Magdalena Sibylle having taken the genre in new directions. Her funeral publication even appears modest compared with the folio volumes published by her sisters. For example, her sister Sophia Eleonora of Hesse-Darmstadt (1609–71) was the driving force behind massive funeral works for her father (1655), her mother (1659), her husband (1661), and her daughter-in-law (1669), while Marie Elisabeth (1610–84), Duchess of Holstein-Gottorf, published the funeral work for her learned husband, Friedrich III (1659). The three sisters all commemorated their family losses in printed monuments and were cultural agents among Protestant courts. As Helga Meise has asserted for Sophie Eleonora, by positioning herself in the act of representing the ruler—or in this case the next ruler—Magdalena Sibylle participates in the language of culture, allegory, and poetry and expresses her private grief as inventor of the project.59 In the context of her siblings’ funeral publications and other commemorative works, new forms of commemoration of the dynasty were part of Magdalena Sibylle’s project to situate her court among the many small courts and express its preeminence. A means of remembering the dead and of focusing meditation to prepare for one’s own death, the funeral portraits were a powerful expression of dynasty and genealogy.

58 Volker Bauer, “Höfische Gesellschaft und höfische Öffentlichkeit im Alten Reich: Überlegungen zur Mediengeschichte des Fürstenhofs im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ” Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 5 (2003): 29–68. 59 See Jill Bepler, Birgit Kümmel, and Helga Meise, “Weibliche Selbstdarstellung im 17. Jahrhundert. Das Funeralwerk der Landgräfin Sophia Eleonora von HesseDarmstadt,” in Geschlechterperspektiven: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Heide Wunder and Gisela Engel (Königstein/Taunus: Helmer, 1998), 447–9; Bepler, “Zeremonieller Hof und Musenhof,” 157–78; and Wade, “Invisible Bibliographies,” 41–69.

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Several aspects of these artistic practices can be linked to Magdalena Sibylle’s orchestration of events and artifacts specifically for Prince Christian’s funeral. The massive portrait of Prince Christian’s funeral cortege and the binding of the small oil painting into select copies of the printed funeral publication are two of her more unusual innovations. In funeral publications, such images were usually reproducible engravings of the deceased and of the exequies as a fold-out page in the funeral publication. These graphic images generally included a lifelike portrait of the deceased and perhaps one of the coffin with its inscriptions or one of the church with its funeral decorations. One such typical illustration made to commemorate Prince Christian was the Schmertzliche Klag-Seule (Painful Pillar of Lamentation), showing the lively boy standing beneath his motto, “Justitia et Pietatis,” and the crowned “C.”60 Beneath his portrait, in which he holds the staff of the ruler, stands his coffin (see fig. 26). The portraits of Prince Christian in the Wolfenbüttel and Gotha copies of the funeral volume and the large painting of the funeral procession as well as the various funeral portraits of the boy attested in court inventories are striking expressions of mourning originating at the Altenburg court. As noted above, the insertion of the funeral portrait in oil into a printed volume suggests a conscious decision to increase the material and devotional value of the publication. Graphic portrayals of the funeral cortege were also common, and large engravings with the names of the participants and locations with numbers or letters corresponding to a key were often folded into the funeral publication. The huge oil painting of Prince Christian’s exequies described above that conspicuously links the town and the court, is, however, unusual. These artifacts, together with the singular funeral writings published by his mother, confirm that Magdalena Sibylle created a new culture of dynastic memory articulated in funerary works. Further innovations at Altenburg can be linked to Magdalena Sibylle’s cult of commemoration. The production of the white-on-black

60 I would like to thank Mr. Schäfer of the Kupferstichkabinett at the Museum Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, for showing me this engraving. While this detail of the crowned initial must allude here to the prince’s heavenly crown, a Danish viewer of this image would recognize it as a royal symbol of a ruling monarch, reaffirming the strong connection to Magdalena Sibylle’s years in that country.

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Figure 26: An engraving of Prince Christian as in life with his coffin below. Reproduced by permission of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol-2°-3471_17k_003).

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engraving of her own funeral cortege reverses the normal practice of printing black on white (see fig. 27).61 The gilt engraved plates of the meandering funeral processions for her second husband, Friedrich Wilhelm II, and her younger son, Friedrich Wilhelm III, are also strikingly innovative contributions of the Altenburg court to the genres of commemoration.62 While the engraved plate is normally cut in reverse to serve for printing, these images are cut in the proper perspective for viewing. Thus, these plates were never intended for printing but meant to be the primary images. Plating them in gold increased their material value, thereby ensuring their preservation as unique art objects.63 These art works were completed for deaths after Magdalena Sibylle’s own, yet show her influence; the overview of her cultural activities at court presented here demonstrates that she was responsible for innovations and that she provided the impetus for many new practices. When the ordinary value of an object was substantially increased, it became more likely that future generations would preserve it for posterity. While a commemorative object would have possessed a strong sentimental intrinsic value for the family, its intangible worth received a material expression when the item was made physically more unusual and expensive. The above-mentioned gilt copper plates and small oil paintings tipped into funeral sermons present ways of both increasing an object’s value and rendering a customary item unique. Furthermore, the inversion of traditional practices—printing white on black and cutting elaborate engravings never meant for printing— constitutes a notable departure from usual ways of creating objects of art, suggesting through inversion that Death overturns all normal ways of doing things. While there is currently no further information about the size of the funeral paintings of Prince Christian recorded in inventories of the princes’ chambers at Altenburg or about their artists or other

61 The “Weißlinienschnitt” is held at the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Altenburg, Bildersammlung, Nr 1872a. I want to thank the staff for enabling my work there and providing me with a copy of this work. 62 Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft, 35 and item II.20, and Säckl and Heise, Barock Fürstenresidenzen, 326, item IV 22. 63 Another significant example of a gold-plated engraving depicts the entourage of Anna Sophia of Denmark for her wedding to Johann Georg III of Saxony in 1666. This art form commemorating dynastic events flourished around this time. I want to thank Mogens Bencard, former curator of the collections at Rosenborg, Denmark, for bringing this image to my attention.

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Figure 27: The “Weisslinienschnitt,” or white on black image of Magdalena Sibylle’s funeral cortege, 1668. Reproduced by permission of the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Altenburg (Bildersammlung, No. 1872a).

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pertinent data, one can assume, based on widespread practices in Thuringia and Saxony, that some of these unknown paintings were similar in format to the large funeral painting for Magdalena Sibylle and to the enormous depiction of Christian’s funeral cortege.64 The cluster of funeral paintings from Altenburg suggests that artists were employed to create numerous images in various formats, media, and sizes to commemorate the court’s dead. While these images were not mass-produced like engravings, they were often produced in multiple copies. This confirms a very strong sense of rank and status as well as privileged access to the objects of dynastic memory and devotional meditation. Magdalena Sibylle’s gendered expressions of maternal and dynastic grief constitute a significant local tradition. The Gendered Legacy of Loss Magdalena Sibylle’s small format funeral publication for her son is an important milestone in funerary publications by women. Her writings were intended to be part of the official funeral publication and to serve as a female introduction in verse and prose to the male sermons held in the church. Her writing presented the voice of the mother, keenly aware of her personal and dynastic loss. As explained above, the painted picture of Prince Christian inserted into the Gotha and Wolfenbüttel copies of the work initiated the genre of the funeral portrait in Altenburg, and the funeral depictions of Magdalena Sibylle’s family are striking examples of the genre. While funeral portraits are not unique to Altenburg, the reproducibility and sheer variety of media for the elite funeral images and their circulation among privileged members of the dynasty both in restricted architectural spaces at court and in representational publications are important innovations. The portrait of Prince Christian on his funeral bier, the published sermons, and the painted Leichenzug tangibly document various stations 64 The portrait of Magdalena Sibylle measures 160 × 195 cm (Schloss- und Spielkartenmuseum Altenburg, Inv.-Nr. V 4709), while the one for Friedrich Wilhelm II measures 32.5 × 41.8 cm (Schloss Museum Arnstadt, Inv. Nr B 533). However, the gilt engraved plate of his cortege is large, measuring (with the side panels opened) 109 × 164 cm (Schloss- und Spielkartenmuseum Altenburg, Inv.-Nr. SM 322c). The “Weißlinienschnitt” depicting Magdalena Sibylle’s funeral cortege is also large, measuring 114 × 96 cm (Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Altenburg, Bildersammlung, Nr 1872a). The picture of Prince Christian’s funeral cortege measures 190 × 107 cm (Schloss- und Spielkartenmuseum Altenburg, Inv.-Nr. SM 118).

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in the funeral ceremony stretching over several weeks. Together these artifacts of mourning testify to his mother’s orchestration of a programmatic performance of grief at the Altenburg court. They make concrete various points of the mourning process and render them visible, even tangible, as texts and images depicting ritualized moments in the dynastic articulation of loss. In the exhibition catalogue on death and dynasty, Tod und Herrschaft, Maja Schmidt tentatively suggests in a footnote that the new impetus in funeral culture in Altenburg after 1650 might be due to the prince’s new wife, that is, Friedrich Wilhelm II’s second wife, Magdalena Sibylle.65 My research confirms Schmidt’s hunch and advances current knowledge about Magdalena Sibylle and the culture of commemoration in Altenburg, situating her funeral publications in the greater context of other funerary productions and also uncovering new writings by the princess. Moreover, the research presented here links the funeral practices at Altenburg to those of the other regional courts, employing the previously unknown image of the deceased nine-year-old Prince Christian as the key to understanding the funerary practices among these courts.66 Magdalena Sibylle also introduced new ways of presenting the funeral publication by framing the official sermons delivered by the clergy with her own poetry and prose lamentation. She can be considered to have provided the impetus for entirely new forms of dynastic memory. The maternal mourning and writings of Princess Magdalena Sibylle at court in the 1660s can also be linked to the maternal funeral poetry and other writings by Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch (1651–1717) and the coterie around her that flourished from 1672, that is, from the extinction of the Altenburg line until 1720.67 This significant circle of writing women spanned three generations and constituted a cluster of educated women who wrote and circulated manuscript poetry in the decades around 1700. The modern editor of Kuntsch’s poetry, Anna Carrdus, has demonstrated that institutions and elites in town assumed the cultural work of the court when Altenburg passed to Gotha and 65

Schmidt, Tod und Herrschaft, 39n12. This picture is not known either to Schmidt or to Säckl and Heise. 67 Anna Carrdus, ed., Das “Weiblich Werk” in der Residenzstadt Altenburg (1672– 1720): Gedichte und Briefe von Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch und Frauen aus ihrem Umkreis (Hildesheim: Olms, 2004), 21–56. See also Anna Carrdus, “Noble Models for the Middle Class: Women Writing in and around Altenburg 1671–1730,” Daphnis 32 (2003): 611–35. 66

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the princely residence was removed to that town. The circulation of manuscript poetry among the women of the Kuntsch coterie was a remarkable demonstration of female literary production, a notable output that also included the poetry of mourning. The “Weiblich Werck” (Women’s Work) received the approval and support of their husbands and relatives, themselves leading men in Altenburg, while the themes and topoi of the women’s poetry were nevertheless restricted to the domestic and devotional spheres.68 The commemoration of deceased members of the Altenburg dynasty would have been well known to Kuntsch, whose own parents participated in the funeral processions.69 Kuntsch herself would have been twelve years old when Prince Christian died and thus only slightly older than the princely children. She would have had a living memory of his funeral and everything associated with it. Magdalena Sibylle’s compelling grief echoes in the manuscript poems that Kuntsch wrote at the deaths of eleven of her fourteen children, only one of whom survived her. When her twelve-year-old son Friedrich Christian (1677–85) died, Kuntsch grieved bitterly: “How [can this be]! Do the heavens want only to punish [me] with ominous clouds? And does the lightning strike only my afflicted house?”70 Like her striking predecessor Magdalena Sibylle, Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch found her voice and articulated her grief in poetry. In the Altenburg princess, the burgher women of the following generation had an important antecedent who created the cultural space for their writings. Thus, on several levels Magdalena Sibylle’s lament remains a lasting testament to her young son and to her enduring loss. Her paper monument reenacted in print the funeral ceremonies and the mourning process, creating a memory of the deceased that burst temporal confines. Mechanically reproducible and transportable, her printed book provided a site of memory and a posthumous locus for her loss.

68

Carrdus, Das “Weiblich Werck,” 47. Ibid., 29. The parents are listed as participants in the funeral publications by Johann Sagittarius for Magdalena Sibylle and Friedrich Wilhelm II. They also were in the exequies for Prince Christian. 70 “WIe! Will der Himmel nur mit düstern Wolcken dräuen/ || Und schlägt der Blitz denn stets auf mein betrübtes Hauß?” Ibid., 116. 69

CHAPTER SEVEN

LOSS AND EMOTION IN FUNERAL WORKS ON CHILDREN IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY1 Claudia Jarzebowski Historians long (and incorrectly) assumed that early modern parents felt indifferent toward their children until these offspring survived their early childhood.2 Approaches in psychohistory and developmental history especially supported this now obsolete assumption.3 This old line of argumentation centers mainly on the love that parents owed their children according to modern pedagogical/psychological belief.4 In the meantime, it has been demonstrated in many instances that in the Middle Ages and the early modern period parents also loved their offspring from the very first day, indeed, mothers often formed bonds with the unborn life in their bodies during pregnancy.5 Commonly, documents from this period particularly stress the bond between mother and child as is discernible, for example, in the many rituals focusing on pregnancy and birth, rituals that aim to sustain the child’s life and health. These newer studies often point out the

1 I would like to express my thanks to Lynne Tatlock for her patience, sedulous readings and rereadings of this article, and her generous guidance in turning a translation into a text. Lynne Tatlock was also very helpful in discussing the topic in its earlier stages. 2 This assertion can be found in every publication on childhood history and can be traced back to Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960); English trans., Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962); German trans., Geschichte der Kindheit (Munich: Hanser, 1975). Yet Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), can more appropriately be seen as the conduit for its perpetration. 3 Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 1–73; Claudia Jarzebowski, “Kindheit,” in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 6: cols. 570–79; Paula S. Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004), 1:xi–xv. 4 Elisabeth Badinter, L’amour en plus: Histoire de l’amour maternel, XVIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). 5 Barbara Duden, Jürgen Schlumbohm, and Patrice Veit, eds., Geschichte des Ungeborenen. Zur Erfahrungs- und Wissensgeschichte der Schwangerschaft, 17.–20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).

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great need of the parents to baptize stillborn children or to baptize newborns in an emergency.6 The fact that even parents belonging to the Protestant faith did not desist from this baptismal practice and disobeyed the orders of the Reformers is judged to be a particularly clear indication of the strong emotional attachment to infants across the confessions.7 In these studies, parental love of children almost seems natural and unchangeable over the course of time.8 Therefore, we can now hardly deny that parents were emotionally attached to their offspring even before 1800. Yet, this insight must be accompanied with the recognition that emotions in general and love in particular are historical constructs that must be viewed as changeable in their contents and expressions; as a result, the question of the “how” of love comes into focus more sharply than the previously prevailing question of the “whether.”9 In this essay, I am concerned with addressing the question of the “how” of the love of children.10 I am guided by the assumption that the premature deaths of children serve in particular to unleash emotions. In our times, this assumption is confirmed, for example, by the representation in the media of infants or toddlers tortured, starved, or killed. The great symbolic potential that is attributed to children becomes apparent, for instance, in our time when the targeted killing of several children in Iraq is called “a new level of cruelty.”11 Indeed, 6 Eva Labouvie, Andere Umstände. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Geburt (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998). 7 Edmund Hermsen, Faktor Religion. Geschichte der Kindheit vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). 8 Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 9 Concerning the connection of love and emotion from a philosophical perspective, see Christoph Demmerling and Hilge Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 127–65. 10 See also Antje Ernst and Mathias Ernst, “ ‘Ich habe diese Welt beschawet und bald gesegnet: Weill mir auff einen Tag all Angst der Welt begegnet.’ Kriegserfahrungen im Spiegel von Andreas Gryphius’ Grabschrift für seine Nichte,” in Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe. Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe, ed. Benigna von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 497–507. 11 “Iraq Body Count: Database,” http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database (accessed December 2, 2009); “Selbstmord-Attentäter lockte Kinder mit Süßigkeiten,” Der Spiegel, October 12, 2007 http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,511082,00.html (accessed December 2, 2009); Andrew Gully, “Blood of Women and Children stains Iraq’s Eid,” Agence France Presse, October 12, 2007, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/ (accessed December 2, 2009); Mussab al-Khairalla, “Iraq Bomb in Toy Cart Hits Children in Playground.” Reuters Foundation AlertNet, October 12, 2007. http://www .alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12230545.htm (accessed December 2, 2009).

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the innocence attributed to children, their great vulnerability, and the loss that their deaths represent for the future of those from whom they were taken feed this emotionally chargeable symbolic potential.12 Historical documents also exhibit a remarkable sensibility to the importance lent to the premature death of a child.13 As will be seen, this is the case in particular in the funeral sermons at the center of this essay. However, my focus here is not on the funeral sermon as a genre—rather, sermons constitute my material in the same way as do letters and diary entries—but on the historicity of emotions and the possibility of historicizing them, particularly love and mourning. I stress again that parental love of a child or the love of a child in an analogous relationship is not a historical constant. This caveat must also apply to ideas of childhood. Whereas childhood in the modern age can be seen predominantly as a concept related to age, physical maturing, and thus biological criteria, this idea of childhood should not be applied casually to pre-modern contexts. Therefore, I also regard it as my task in this essay to examine my sources for their inherent ideas of childhood as well as those they propagate actively, for example, the idea of a “good” child. Ultimately, I aim to establish whether deaths of children can be understood a priori as losses, or whether such a view is always already predetermined by our modern interpretive frame. From a historical perspective, in contrast, death must be conceptualized not as a secular but as a predominantly spiritual incident to which meaning is assigned largely through religious beliefs.14 Preliminary Remarks on Funeral Sermons, Childhood, and Emotions Funeral sermons have received enormous attention lately; and due mainly to the studies of Rudolf Lenz and Cornelia Niekus Moore, their

12 Barbara Hanawalt, “The Child in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” in Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, ed. Willem Koops and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 21–43. 13 Achim Aurnhammer, “Kindertotenlieder der Renaissance,” in Das Kind in der Renaissance, ed. Klaus Bergdolt, Bernd Hamm, and Andreas Tönnesmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 101–29. 14 Alois M. Haas, Todesbilder im Mittelalter. Fakten und Hinweise in der deutschen Literatur (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989).

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value for historical research is no longer disregarded.15 Both scholars have shown that funeral sermons form a distinct genre of Protestant text production serving to commemorate and honor meritorious, learned men and women as well as their families. Moore in particular has traced the ways in which funeral sermons were written, published, and circulated.16 The publication of the funeral sermon aimed to secure the public memory of the person thus honored.17 Funeral sermons are similarly illuminating for questions of family history, as funeral sermons often number among the few extant documents. In addition to answering questions about the history of the genre and of prosopography, they offer a rich source for investigating historical anthropological problems, and this is the sense in which I employ them in this essay. Their special value is grounded in their narrativity. They were written to honor a dead person and simultaneously were adapted to the family and social context; they addressed both the family of the deceased and the broader public of sympathetic men and women.18 In addition to a tribute secured in theology, they also contain a vita [Lebenslauff ], also called Personalia. This multirelational attachment and the direct reference to the enduring values of the deceased person render funeral sermons interesting for the questions I will attempt to answer here. To date, funeral sermons for children have only been marginally investigated.19 So far, there are also hardly any statistics as to how many of the funeral sermons—sermons collected, for example, in Wolfenbüttel and Marburg—were composed for children and as to which time periods stand out in particular for their high or low number of funeral sermons for children.20 For some time now, numbers have repeatedly been cited according to which approximately 2.6%

15 Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006); Rudolf Lenz, ed., Leichenpredigten als Quelle historischer Wissenschaften (Cologne: Böhlau, 1975 [1], Marburg: Schwarz, 1979 [2], 1984 [3], Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004 [4]). 16 However, in the meantime, it has become clear that the printing of the funeral sermon was an expensive affair. Jörg Witzel, “Der Tod kam im Examen. Zur Auswertung von Leichenpredigten in der Marburger Forschungsstelle für Personalschriften,” Marburger UniJournal 15 (2003), 40–43. 17 Ibid., 25–92. 18 Cf. Moore, Patterned Lives, 81–91. 19 See, e.g., Moore, Patterned Lives, 50–53; Heide Wunder, “Frauen in Leichenpredigten des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Lenz, Leichenpredigten, 3:57–68. 20 An attempt at an estimate is made by Ines Elisabeth Kloke, “Das Kind in der Leichenpredigt,” in Lenz, Leichenpredigten, 3:97–121, esp. 102–3.

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of all funeral sermons in a given sample were for children, 32% for women, and 65% for men.21 Yet, these numbers are hardly generalizable. In any case, those who died in childhood are certainly not as a rule the main subject of this genre.22 When funeral sermons for children are analyzed, the outcome, in a cumulative sense, is often that they merely confirm such general patterns as reinforcing the remembrance of a person of honor in public and giving that person attention, particularly as the son or daughter of a famous or learned father.23 Lately, there have been calls for placing funeral sermons for children in the context of parents coping with mourning. That they do (also) belong there has never been contested, and this view, among others, forms one of the starting points of my essay. As indicated above, funeral sermons have also been understood as normative texts that modeled Christian behavior and a Christian— particularly Protestant—way of life. In funeral sermons, the childhoods of deceased adults are elucidated (and glorified) as that phase in which all the good qualities and capabilities, the talents and “brilliance” (ingenium) were already visible, as, for example, in the case of a person capable of memorizing hundreds of psalms as a child. The childhood of the deceased in such sermons becomes a laboratory-like phase of life whose meaning carries weight equal to the meaning of heritage. From this perspective, it must have been interesting for contemporaries to compose funeral sermons about children whose biographies by definition remained fragmentary with regard to the redemption of the promise of childhood. Potentially, the unfulfilled promise of the child’s life on earth creates possibilities for reading those funeral sermons with different emphases from those for adults. Research on childhood has been somewhat hesitant to take funeral sermons into account. One reason may be that funeral sermons

21

Theologische Realenzyklopädie, s. v. “Leichenpredigten,” 668. Like all those following him, the author also refers to Rudolf Lenz, “Vorkommen, Aufkommen und Verteilung von Leichenpredigten. Untersuchungen zu ihrer regionalen Distribution, zur zeitlichen Häufigkeit und zu Geschlecht, Stand und Beruf der Verstorbenen,” in Studien zur deutschsprachigen Leichenpredigt der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Rudolf Lenz (Marburg: Schwarz, 1981), 246. 22 Cf. also Marion Kobelt-Groch, “ ‘Freudiger Abschied Jungfräulicher Seelen.’ Himmelsphantasien in protestantischen Leichenpredigten für Kinder,” Wolfenbütteler Barock-Nachrichten 31 (2004): 117–147, esp. 122. 23 Christian Schmitz, Ratsbürgerschaft und Residenz. Untersuchungen zu Berliner Ratsfamilien, Heiratskreisen und sozialen Wandlungen im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 1–43.

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constitute a relatively self-contained type of source and thus their potential for historical anthropological research was long left untapped. Another reason may be that funeral sermons give access only to specific demographic groups: those confined to the learned, academic, Protestant upper classes; members of the aristocracy; and burghers, whose social capital was often enormous. However, it may also be the case that the persistence of paradigms of childhood history established in the 1970s and ’80s simply left no room for historical interpretation in childhood research that superseded these same paradigms.24 If we leave aside these discussions, however, and ignore the question as to when parents began to love their offspring in an allegedly modern sense, the history of childhood comes into focus rather than the history of historiography. To date, the history of childhood has been examined mainly by social historians who have studied the lives of farm laborers, maids, and servants. This essay, however, focuses on other children, precisely those from learned households that belonged to the academic elite. To date, their life realities have been little researched.25 It is, of course, hardly surprising that these households placed great importance on education; indeed, their educational aspirations often threatened to drive these families to financial ruin. Letters between parents and their sons at the university show this, for example, as do diary entries as well.26 Studies from the perspective of gender have also provided clear evidence that daughters from this social group often enjoyed similar 24 Cf. Albrecht Classen, “Philippe Ariès and the Consequences: History of Childhood, Family Relations, and Personal Emotions: Where do we stand today?” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: de Gruyter, 2005), 1–67. 25 Susanne Knackmuß, “ ‘Meine Schwestern sind im Kloster . . . ’: Geschwisterbeziehungen des Nürnberger Patriziergeschlechtes Pirckheimer zwischen Klausur und Welt, Humanismus und Reformation,” Historical Social Research 3 (2005): 80–107; Stefan Kroll, “Bildung und Ausbildung Stralsunder Kinder und Jugendlicher zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhundert—ein Überblick,” in Kindheit und Jugend in der Neuzeit 1500–1900, ed. Werner Buchholz (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), 177–89. 26 Martin Dinges, “Mütter und Söhne (ca. 1450–ca. 1850): Ein Versuch anhand von Briefen,” in Lesarten der Geschichte: Ländliche Ordnungen und Geschlechterverhältnisse; Festschrift für Heide Wunder zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Jens Flemming et al. (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2004), 89–120; Mathias Beer, Eltern und Kinder des späten Mittelalters in ihren Briefen. Familienleben in den Städten des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Nürnbergs (1400–1550) (Nuremberg: Stadtarchiv, 1990); Jan Peters, “Beamtenkinder. Zur kindlichen Selbstwahrnehmung in Familienbriefen aus Pommern im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Kindheit und Jugend, ed. Buchholz, 131–46.

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access to education as their brothers—at least as long as these brothers were taught at home or when the academic business was conducted at home, for example, in the case of an astronomer’s household.27 Previous analyses of autobiographical documents have shown that the births of children as well as their early deaths were only brief notes in diaries.28 As will be demonstrated over the course of this essay, this brevity was in fact not the rule. Legal historians have sometimes examined the importance of children in penal law. The starting point for studies relating to the early modern period is formed by the assumption that there are no rules that specifically aim at children in the Lex Carolinae (1532) and its precursor, the Lex Bambergensis, with one exception: thieves who are minors should be punished less severely than adults. From this, it has been deduced that children played no role as perpetrators in early modern criminal law. This assumption is erroneous, however, as research on court cases of child witches and studies of specific offenses have shown.29 These studies make clear that children did play a role in legal proceedings and were subject to the usual “mitigating circumstances” (mitigationes), such as Unvernunfft. Unvernunfft meant without reason, and was applied to people who were either very young or very old, mentally ill, sick, drunk, or otherwise incapacitated at the time they committed a crime. The above-mentioned studies in legal history are revealing in that they point to a specific awareness of children as defined by age and not by their emotional and intellectual maturity.30 27 Monika Mommertz, “Schattenökonomie der Wissenschaft: Geschlechterordnung und Arbeitssysteme in der Astronomie der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Frauen in Akademie und Wissenschaft. Arbeitsorte und Forschungspraktiken 1700–2000, ed. Theresa Wobbe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002), 31–62. 28 See, e.g., Jan Peters, ed., Ein Söldnerleben im Dreißigjährigen Krieg. Eine Quelle zur Sozialgeschichte, Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 1 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993)—as will be discussed below. 29 Wolfgang Behringer, “Kinderhexenprozesse. Zur Rolle von Kindern in der Geschichte der Hexenverfolgung,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 1 (1989): 31–47; Claudia Jarzebowski, “Verhandlungen über sexuelle Gewalt gegen Kinder vor Gericht: Preußen, 18. Jahrhundert,” Werkstatt Geschichte 35 (2003): 81–98; Herbert Langer, “Kindsein im Spiegel hansestädtischer Rechtsquellen und Justizakten des 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Kindheit und Jugend, ed. Buchholz, 69–96. 30 Debates about reducing or increasing the age of legal accountability flare up again and again, for example, currently in France; cf. Alain Salles, “Rachida Dati justifie la décision de fixer à 12 ans l’âge de la responsabilité pénale,” Le Monde, December 5, 2008, http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_ item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=1061016 (accessed December 2, 2009). In the

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This difference is of interest, for instance, when we move further into the domain of historical anthropology and emotions and look into the possible meaning of age for the fashioning of emotional relationships without presupposing a constitutive meaning. In 1941, when Lucien Febvre attempted in his subsequently famous essay to determine the meaning of feelings in history and in the science of history, he aspired to illuminate a possible histoire de mentalité.31 This aspect is almost always overlooked in current histories of emotions.32 Febvre was concerned with ascribing a systematic place to the irrational as historical agent and rendering it thus observable. In his approach, emotion and spirit are brought together in the term mentalité or, respectively, sensibilité and are interrelatable as historically effective potentials. However, even though the newer history of emotions is willing to assign emotions a historical potential, the analysis never gets much beyond postulating their historicity. One reason may be that emotions have so far largely been studied with methods derived from literary studies and applied to literary texts. These approaches predominantly aim to explore intertextual discourses. The concrete, the historical context, for the most part does not play a major role in the analyses. Thus, so-called “real” feelings remain obscured in the thicket of the unexplorable into which there is no analytical path. Moreover, the hope of discovering “real” emotions can lead the historical investigation astray in the same way as does the equation of emotion and intertextual discourse. And yet, there is a gray area in human interaction between “real” and “intertextual,” which, if we follow Febvre, has always also been emotional interaction.33

United States some states still execute offenders for crimes they committed as minors; cf. Amnesty International. “Todesstrafe: Wenn Staaten Kinder Töten,” AI-Journal, October 2003, http://www.amnesty.de/umleitung/2003/deu05/129?lang=de%26mime type%3dtext%2fhtml (accessed December 2, 2009). 31 Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire: comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?’’ Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941): 5–20; Peter Burke, trans., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 12–26. 32 Ingrid Kasten, Gesa Stedman, and Margarete Zimmermann, “Lucien Febvre und die Folgen: Zu einer Geschichte der Gefühle und ihrer Erforschung,” in Kulturen der Gefühle in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Ingrid Kasten, Gesa Stedman, and Margarete Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 9–25. 33 Febvre’s contribution is important for my approach because it refers to largely forgotten concepts of historical psychology in which the psyche was considered to be generated variably in history.

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It has become commonplace to understand discourses as practices. And surely this is what they are. However, as practices, they are not only placed in intertextual relationships but also, and possibly above all, in contextual relationships. They are parts of a field of action in which the text, the author, the addressee, and structural and accidental conditions relate to one another and, in so doing, constitute the field. Seen in this way, emotions whose meanings historians derive from texts stand in a concrete relationship to their contextual fields and unfold their own agencies there, transmitted by different means. From this perspective, potentially, emotions that are graspable through the text fundamentally alter their form, aim, and content, and extend beyond the mere intertextual performance that medieval literary studies, for example, has hitherto attributed to them.34 The textual genre of funeral sermons in itself suggests placing emphasis on those emotions belonging to that loss in the broadest sense, an approach followed by this essay that allows the researcher to make a statement about the emotional relationships between parents and children. Mourning is the most obvious one. To date there is a lack of relevant research on the history of emotions that attempts to historicize the feeling of mourning.35 It is certain, though, that mourning has a historicity of its own.36 In antiquity, the feeling of mourning was preeminently conceptualized as an impediment, as “something that harms human beings and destroys those whom it possesses.”37 For this reason, mourning is numbered among the so-called eight main vices. By the Renaissance, however, it has disappeared from the catalogue of the seven cardinal sins; scholars believe that mourning blended with idleness.38 But on its way to the Renaissance, mourning was also entwined with love via the circuitous route of the tristitia secundum

34 Elke Koch, Trauer und Identität: Inszenierungen von Emotionen in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, Trends in Medieval Philology 8 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006). See in particular the introduction, 1–18. 35 Cf. Burkhard Liebsch and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Trauer und Geschichte, Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur 22 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), particularly the essay by Jörn Rüsen, “Historisch trauern—Skizze einer Zumutung,” 63–84. 36 This understanding is occasionally called into question from a philosophicalhistorical perspective. See Catherine Newmark, Passion—Affekt—Gefühl: Theorie der Emotionen von Aristoteles bis Kant (Hamburg: Meiner, 2008). 37 “den Menschen schadet und denjenigen zerstört, von denen sie Besitz ergreift.” Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 270. 38 Michael Theunissen, Vorentwürfe von Moderne: Antike Melancholie und die Acedia des Mittelalters (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), 32.

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Deum, which was imagined “as a sorrow about the world insofar as the world has fallen away from God.”39 At this point, mourning over the loss of God in the world and love of God in the world merge, and this Augustinian line of thought shapes the multi-layered, multi-faceted, and close correlation of mourning and love even into modernity. At least from a philosophical perspective, love proves to be a necessary condition of mourning. Here, the connection becomes visible that might be pathbreaking for the interpretation of early modern funeral sermons for children. In research on the newer history of emotions, love does not in any sense play a large role. This research focuses instead on the so-called negative feelings. This focus has to date remained largely unquestioned.40 Moreover, even when love is actually made the subject of discussion historically, either its historicity is averred or its binding quality—for example, for parents and children—is asserted as anthropologically constant.41 It is striking, furthermore, that love is usually dealt with in terms of the love between partners or parental love in historiographical studies. As love between partners, love is closely associated with the erotic, with sexual desire. For the early modern period, the question of whether love finds its privileged place within or outside of marriage is central, especially when marriage is simultaneously declared the sole legitimate locus of sexuality.42 When parental love is taken up by early modern studies, it is mostly ideologized instead of historicized. And yet, the question of the structure of parental love in the early modern period is intensely interesting because it lies right at the intersection of various discourses, such as that of the Augustinian love of God and that of Platonic self-love.43

39 “als eine Traurigkeit über die Welt, sofern diese von Gott abgefallen ist.” Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 274. 40 Claudia Jarzebowski, “Liebe,” in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, 8: cols. 896–905. 41 Ingrid Bauer, Christa Hämmerle, and Gabriella Hauch, eds., Liebe und Widerstand: Ambivalenzen historischer Geschlechterbeziehungen, L’HOMME Schriften 10 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005); Otto Ulbricht, “Der Einstellungswandel zur Kindheit in Deutschland am Ende des Spätmittelalters (ca. 1470–1520),” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 2 (1992): 159–87. 42 Richard van Dülmen, “Fest der Liebe: Heirat und Ehe in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Armut, Liebe, Ehre, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Munich: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1988), 67–107; Marion Lischka, Liebe als Ritual: Eheanbahnung und Brautwerbung in der frühneuzeitlichen Grafschaft Lippe, Forschungen zur Regionalgeschichte 55 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006). 43 Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 150–57.

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If we examine texts from the seventeenth century, we note that in these early modern texts children are predominantly seen as entrusted to (their) parents for a limited period of time. Their reciprocal relationship thus develops so that both sides have to prove themselves worthy of the trust that God puts in them. From this perspective, parental love in early modern Germany may be understood first and foremost as a normative concept echoing the structural attributes of God’s love. However, it would be hasty to assume that early modern parental love exhausted itself in the attempt to realize this normative concept. This notion of love for one’s own children, a love given freely from within, has so far only been derived tenuously from a few autobiographical documents and songs on the death of children [Kindertotenlieder].44 In the process of researching such documents, the two ways of approaching parental love in the early modern period are occasionally juxtaposed, leading to the impression that a normative concept of parental love could exclude “real” parental love. This idea recalls the troubling and obstructive presupposition that material interest stood in the way of genuine emotional relationships (i.e., the love between partners) and that, therefore, only the bourgeois society of the late-eighteenth century allowed “true” love between marriage partners. In the meantime, it has been established in many cases that this idea of love is a modern projection backwards that salvaged the romantic ideal for history when it was threatened in the second half of the twentieth century.45 In fact, what is now connected with “romantic love” was interpreted differently in the early modern period and again in the eighteenth century. If need be, this love included material interest arising from the social logic of survival.46 Future research will show whether it might be necessary to speak of categorically different “loves” instead of iterations of an overriding concept of “love.” My focal point here is the close relationship between love and mourning

44

Aurnhammer, “Kindertotenlieder,” 101–29. Rebekka Habermas, Frauen und Männer des Bürgertums: Eine Familiengeschichte, 1750–1850 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). 46 Nevertheless, it has been statistically proven that marriage bonds are still formed largely within classes; marriage partners bring a similar educational and financial potential to a partnership intended to endure. Etienne François, “Städtische Eliten in Deutschland zwischen 1650 und 1800: Einige Beispiele; Thesen und Fragen,” 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 Hermann Diederiks (Cologne: Böhlau, 1985), 65–83. 45

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in early modern funeral sermons; I will define both terms based on my sources. Loss and Emotion In the spring of 1628, the mercenary Peter Hagendorf noted in his diary: “At this time my wife gave birth early, to a premature child, and the child died within only a few days; may God give him a joyous resurrection. It was a young son.”47 About a year later Hagendorf writes, “This time my wife was blessed with a young daughter, while I was gone, she was baptized while I was gone, too, Anna Maria, and she died while I was gone.”48 Yet another year later, in the early summer of 1630, Hagendorf remarks, “Again, my wife was granted a young daughter, she was baptized Eliesabedt.”49 But Eliesabedt, too, died before reaching the age of one year. With his first wife, Anna Stadlerin, Hagendorf had yet another daughter in the spring of 1633 who also died a few weeks after her birth, as did his wife: “May God give her and all her children a joyous resurrection, Amen, for we long to see one another in heaven, So my wife along with all her children has passed away.”50 In January 1635, Hagendorf married Anna Maria Buchlerin. He had six children with her, of whom four also died before their first birthday. Only two of the total number of at least ten children survived beyond a year during the period in which Hagendorf kept his diary. According to the diary, his son Melchert reached the age of seven, his daughter Anna Maria one-and-a-half. The meagre notes about the births and deaths of his children correspond to the characteristic style of the diary

47 “zu diesen mal Ist mein Weib niederkommen, Aber das kindt Ist noch nicht zeitieg gewessen, sonder also balt gestorben, godt gehbe Ihnen eine fröliche aufferstehung. Ist ein Iunger sohn gewessen.” Jan Peters, ed., Ein Söldnerleben im Dreißigjährigen Krieg. Eine Quelle zur Sozialgeschichte, Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 1 (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1993), 43. All English translations of historical German sources are by Lynne Tatlock unless otherwise indicated. 48 “zu diesen mal weil ich bin aus gewessen Ist Meine frauw, wieder mit einer Iunge tochter erfreuwet Ist auch In abwesens meiner getaufft worden, anna maria, ist auch gestorben weil ich bin aus gewessen.” Ibid., 43. 49 “Alhir ist mein fraw wieder mit eine Iunge tochter verehrete worden, ist getaufft worden Eliesabedt.” Ibid., 46. 50 “godt verleige Ihr sambt den kindt, und alle Ihren kindern eine fröliege aufferstehung Amen, den In den ewiegen sehliegen lehben woollen wir einander wiedersehen, Also ist nun mein Weieb samt Ihren kindern entschlaffen.” Ibid., 53.

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that Hagendorf kept during the Thirty Years’ War. He merely mentions them and then continues on another subject. It would be easy to interpret this scant mention as coldness, and indeed it has often been asserted that, in times of war, soldiers and camp followers become indifferent to death due to the omnipresence of death and illness. But the frequent deaths of his children also, one could argue, captured the father’s attention only when his son or daughter had reached a reasonably safe age of survival. This disposition would also explain why Hagendorf, as quoted above, mostly speaks of the children as “her” children, the children of his respective wives. A superficial comparison with funeral sermons from the seventeenth century could make it easy to regard this supposed indifference as typical of the way death was dealt with in the lower social classes. And, indeed, this view was long in favor. In the following analysis of some funeral sermons, I will take a different approach. By examining these funeral sermons, I will try to uncover different ways in which the early deaths of children were dealt with. At the same time, I will make a plea for opening oneself to the interpretations offered by the texts themselves. Henrica, née Countess of Stolberg-Königstein, was born July 9, 1627. Her parents were Heinrich Vollrath, Count of Stolberg-Königstein, Rutschenfurt, Wernigerodt, and Hohenstein, and Margarita, née Countess of Solms Laubach. As a knight, Henrica’s father belonged to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Henrica must have had at least one sister, because the author mentions that together the two had prayed to God to give their “dear parents, the count and countess, and all their household temporal and eternal well being during the current heavy wartime afflictions and concerns.”51 Henrica died at the age of eight on August 15, 1635, after having been ill for four weeks, beginning on July 11 with a fainting fit, followed by chicken pox, and finally dysentery. Her funeral sermon was written (and delivered) by the Reverend Johann Götz(e) and was printed in “Franckfurt” (by Wolffgang Hoffmann) in 1635. In the customary long description of her last day of life, only the presence of her “now saddened father and her governess” (jetzo betrübten Herrn 51

“lieben Gräfflichen Eltern und Angehörigen zeitliche und ewige Wohlfahrt bey jetzigen schwern Kriegspressurn und Anliegen.” Funeral sermon (FS) for Henrica, née Gräffin zu Stolberg—Königstein, Frankfurt 1635 (#1381 at the Personalschriftenstelle of the University of Marburg), 21.

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Vatters und dero Fraw Hofmeisterin) plays a part.52 In his sermon of consolation, Götze dwells above all on two aspects. On the one hand, his text is strongly marked by imagery from nature. Henrica is called a “rose” or a “lily.” Nature—surging and abundant—serves him as a metaphor of nascent, flourishing, and fading life.53 At the same time, he underlines the fragile qualities of blades of grass, delicate flowers, and tiny plants, evidently assigning Henrica to these categories. On the other hand, Götze is very keen on making the early death of a child understandable to people as an act of God’s love: the fact that God called her to him so soon shows that she was “very loved” by God. Thus Henrica’s early death is, as it were, proof of her perfection. To make this aspect of God’s love understandable, Götze explains his alternate conception of age as he derives it from the Bible (Ws 4:8–9): “For honorable age is in not that which standeth in length of time, nor that is measured by number of years. But wisdom is the gray hair unto men, and an unspotted life is our age.”54 Obviously, the author suggests, Henrica had already fulfilled her age, though not in years of life. Besides, Götze stresses, children are especially qualified for perfection due to their purity: “They have not been polluted by the lot of women.”55 At the same time, he dissociates himself strongly from the idea of the “Papists” who consider nuns and monks to be Jesus’ brides. In Götze’s view, only children and only Protestant children could be these brides, marked by the love of truth, since “they speak no falsehoods.”56 Götze even goes so far as to credit “young children” with the special ability of self-denial [verläugnen] and of following God’s will in their “childhood years” and their “Christian simplicity,” for which they are rewarded with paradise. Perhaps this logic of innocent submission to God’s will explains why this consolatory sermon can do without a single reference to the mourning and grief of the parents or other bereaved survivors, for example, the Christian community. Still, Henrica’s death meant a loss for her parents—as also becomes clear—and their loss is mainly linked to her good qualities. The sermon 52

Ibid., 25. Concerning the metaphor of the lily, cf. FS for Friedrich Leyser below. 54 “Dann das Alter ist ehrlich, nicht das da lang lebet oder viel Jahr hat, Klugheit under den Menschen ist das rechte grawe Haar, und ein unbeflecktes Leben ist das rechte Alter.” FS Henrica, 15. 55 “denn sie seynd mit Weybern nicht beflecket.” Ibid., 11. 56 “sie in ihrem Mund kein falsches kunden.” Ibid., 14. 53

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mentions first of all her “childlike fear” of her parents, then the “honor” and finally the “love” she rendered them. Further qualities listed are her “obedience,” “humility,” and “patience.” Thus, in this text, the experience of loss is explained less by the loss of this specific child than by the loss caused by the absence of the experience of her good qualities. When Maria Elisabeth Niederstättin died on January 12, 1680, at age thirteen, her father, Burchard Niederstätt, felt that the world was collapsing. This is how Niederstätt himself formulated it in a letter to Caspar Peter Hülsemann, to which Hülsemann, who was the young girl’s parson and confessor, refers in his forty-page pamphlet consoling Niederstätt on the “pre-mature death of his only beloved maiden daughter.”57 The cause of Maria Elisabeth’s death is not made clear in this consolation, but nothing could have reduced the great “pain” of the father, from whose letter Hülsemann occasionally quotes: “I really have to confess that this incident has so gotten to me that I won’t be able to shake it off for the rest of my life.”58 To begin with, Hülsemann shows great understanding for the pain of the father: “I can easily imagine how agonizing it must be for him to give her up to death, who received life from him, she who is, as it were, the life of his life. His heart is doubtless sorely afflicted, because she dies, who sprang from his heart and who was the best part of his heart.”59 Hülsemann reinforces the closeness of father and daughter; he paints it in lively colors. Nobody could entirely comprehend his “pain”; his “tears” are the proof of his sincerity: “She was the hope of his life and the heart of his heart . . . the crown of his head . . . the delight of his eyes.”60 Not until page nineteen does the reader learn that this child also had a mother, still alive, though her name is not disclosed.

57

“Frühzeitigen Todt Seiner eintzigen Hertzgeliebten Jungfer Tochter.” Trostschrift for Burchard Niederstätt, Hamburg 1680 (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Da 608 (9)). Unfortunately, the letter has not yet been found. 58 “Ich muß wohl bekennen, dass dieser Zufall mir so ans Hertze greiffet, dass ich die übrige Lebens-Zeit mich dessen nicht werde entschütten können.” Ibid., 7. My pagination. 59 “Ich kann mir leicht einbilden, wie schmertzlich Er dieselbe dem Todt übergeben muß, die von Ihm das Leben hatte, welche gleichsam das Leben seines Lebens war. Sein Hertz wird ohne Zweiffel hart angegriffen, weil die stirbt, die aus seinem Hertzen entsprossen, und das beste Theil seines Hertzens war.” Ibid., 7–8. 60 “Sie war die Hoffnung seines Lebens und das Hertz seines Hertzens . . . die Krohn seines Haupts . . . die Lust seiner Augen.” Ibid., 11.

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This is where Hülsemann comes to the real subject of his Trostschrift (consolation pamphlet), that is to say, the proper and the improper way of mourning. Burchard Niederstätt serves him as an example of excessive mourning. This excessive mourning is attributed by Hülsemann, who is well-disposed toward the grieving father, to the latter’s great “love” that he felt for his “darling” (hertzensliebe) daughter. And so Hülsemann sees it as his task to help the father in his effort, even if it is hardly noticeable, to moderate his mourning and accept his daughter’s death as a gift from God. Hülsemann’s attempt is doubly motivated. First, Hülsemann wants to help the father to carry on in the world, in his temporal life. He reminds him of his “lovely helpmeet” (holdsehlige Gehülffin) and of the fact that “they are still in the age in which they could still have more dearly beloved children to kiss”61 Hülsemann blames the circumstance that Maria Elisabeth was their only child for the excessive grief of the father: “Didn’t he love her entirely too much? This commonly happens to parents who have only one child to kiss.”62 Hülsemann’s second motivation thus quickly becomes clear; he wants to convey that Niederstätt had loved his daughter too much. Hülsemann links this excessive love to two relationships: first, to Niederstätt’s love of his “dearly beloved wife” (Allerliebste); and, second, to his love of God. He takes the view that love cannot be infinitely increased but has to be distributed “reasonably” (vernünfftig). The greatest part of one’s earthly love should be directed toward one’s wife; one’s children take second place here. By far, the larger part of one’s love should be devoted to God. Every surplus bit of love that is given away on earth risks diminishing one’s love of the Lord: “Might it be, pardon my honesty and my writing so frankly, that God perhaps took her away so that he wouldn’t turn his love from heaven and so his heart wouldn’t be too deeply rooted in the love of a mortal daughter. God doubtlessly wanted to teach him that he must embrace even what is the most dearly beloved on earth as if he did not embrace it.”63

61 “Sie sind beyde noch in dem Alter, dass sie noch mehr allerliebste Kinder küssen können.” Ibid., 17. Burchard Niederstätt passed away in 1684 without having any more children. 62 “Hat er Sie auch etwa gar zu sehr geliebet? Dies pfleget eine gemeine Eigenschafft zu seyn derer Eltern, die nur ein eintziges Kind küssen.” Ibid., 11. 63 “Wäre dieses, so verzeihe er meiner Auffrichtigkeit, daß ich ohne Heucheley schreibe, daß vielleicht Gott sie deswegen hinweg genommen, damit seine Liebe nicht gar vom Himmel sich wegwenden, und sein Hertz nicht gar zu tieff sollte eingewurtzelt werden in der Liebe einer sterblichen Tochter. Ohne Zweiffel hat ihn Gott lehren

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The solace of this argument is that his daughter’s death puts Burchard Niederstätt in the position of once again being able to give God the love that God is due. Hülsemann thus emphasizes that the death of the daughter and her entering into heaven is a gift of God with which God evinces his eternal love for the parents and for the daughter in particular. By contrast with the father, Maria’s mother represents an acceptable and proper way of mourning, that is, of loving. Her love for her daughter, Hülsemann argues, orients itself along the ordinary rules of “natural love” (natürlichen Liebe) and therefore is “reasonable” (vernünfftig). Hence, she could also be consoled, for example, with the remark that by remaining a virgin her daughter was spared “wedlock” (Ehestand), which, rhyming, Hülsemann calls the “painful estate” (Wehe Stand).64 Here, the reference to the Niederstätts’ life context is fairly straightforward, as Hülsemann repeatedly points out that the grief of the mother had increased because Maria had died “abroad” (in der frembde), that is, in Hamburg: “It seemed to her a hard price that she had to pay in Hamburg. In Schleswig her child was healthy and strong, but in ill-fated Hamburg it became sick and weak.”65 The attribution of “reasonable love” (vernünfftige Liebe) and moderate mourning to the mother, “who gave weeping its time,”66 is rather surprising, as is, likewise, the turning of the father’s love into a symbol of excessive grief, arising from a “voluptuous love” (wollüstige Liebe), a love that tends to overstep boundaries and is therefore judged unhealthy. Perhaps to redress this imbalance and to underline the drama of loss that the death of one’s own child constitutes, Hülsemann cites his own example in conclusion: he is able to give comfort, he writes, “since our gracious God gave me my first dear

wollen, daß Er auch das allerliebste auff Erden so besitzen soll, als besesse er es nicht.” Ibid., 17. 64 As far as I could ascertain, even though she was only thirteen, Maria Elisabeth Niederstättin was already engaged to Andreas von Ulcken (1645–88) from Hamburg, twenty years her senior, and was staying with his family. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1895/1971) 39:178–80. 65 “Es daucht ihr ein schwerer Zoll zu seyn, den sie in Hamburg lassen muss. Zu Schleßwig sey ihr Kind gesund und starck gewesen, aber in dem unglücklichen Hamburg sey es Kranck und Schwach geworden.” Ibid., 19. 66 “dem Weinen seine Zeit gelassen.” Ibid., 33.

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little son a few months ago, but then soon took him away again.”67 Hülsemann presents himself as a fellow sufferer offering solace, one who found it easier to resign himself to the spiritual logic of infant death. Still, he writes in his last paragraph: Let my gracious sir be certain that I am hereby comforting myself along with him in a wound that I have not yet forgotten and that, as a result of this occurrence, has been torn open again. May God the Father of mercy grant him and me grace that, not only in the loss of our children but also in the loss of all worldly gifts, we look to God alone and that we can find in His perfection compensation for all our losses.68

And thus this consolation pamphlet ends with solidarity in suffering. The pamphlet aims to support those who, like Burchard Niederstätt, are unstable. At the same time, in expressing solidarity with the experience of loss, Hülsemann acknowledges the pain that the loss causes the father—pain beyond any spiritual logic. This is the decisive element of this fatherly solidarity. It becomes all the more interesting because Hülsemann in the end embraces the father who had gone astray by means of a circumlocution that invests norm-transgressing emotionality with legitimacy, the very emotionality that he otherwise strictly distinguishes from the normative love and mourning of the mother. The mother’s authority is thus undermined. Since the text juxtaposes two different models of parental love, models connoted by gender and the age of the child, this undermining of the mother’s authority is particularly interesting. Hülsemann labels proper parental love “natural love” (natürliche Liebe), occasionally even “the power of nature” (Gewalt der Natur). In view of the early modern concept of nature, traits designated as “natural” can best be understood as what we would now call anthropological preconditions. Parents’ spontaneous love of their children is one of these.69 The naturalness of this love is, however, also an indication of

67 “da mir der gnädige Gott vor wenig Monathen ein liebes erstes Söhnlein zeigte, selbiges aber, alsobald wiederum wegnam.” Ibid., 31. 68 “Mein hochgeehrter Herr glaube sicherlich, daß ich nebst ihn auch mich selbst in einer noch nicht vergessenen, sondern durch diese Begebenheit wiederumb aufgerissenen Wunde getröstet. Gott der Vater der Barmherzigkeit gebe ihm und mir Gnade, daß wir nicht nur in dem Verlust unser Kinder, sondern auch im Verlust aller zeitlichen Gaben, allein auff Gott sehen, und in seiner Vollkommenheit die Ersetzung aller Verluste suchen können.” Ibid., 41. 69 In the early modern period, parents’ spontaneous love of their children was mostly associated with the mother, as Montaigne writes in “De l’affection des pères

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this love’s godly adherence to norms. It enables moderate mourning; in Hülsemann’s funeral sermon, it is embodied by Maria’s mother. By contrast, the father is overcome by the death of the daughter; he cannot come to terms with it. His love, visible and noticeable in his great mourning, surpasses the natural amount that is pleasing to God. Even though Hülsemann is certain of his critical assessment of Niederstätt, he also acknowledges the latter’s emotional misery. The father here becomes a figure who, on the one hand, gets carried away but, on the other hand, embodies the variation, to which Hülsemann admits an affinity, when he notes that his own wound can reopen at any time. The father is the more animated soul, the one who is hit harder by the death of the daughter than the mother. Given the manner in which these funeral sermons establish norms, the question arises as to whether there is room in such funeral sermons for the historical children themselves, for their singularities, the specifics of the emotional attachment to them, and for expressing the love and sadness of the parents, relatives, and greater community. Furthermore, we need to consider here to what extent the funeral sermons also reveal emotional ties developed from specific children and parents and thus did not exclusively represent a norm that reproduced God’s love.70 Up to now we have dealt with funeral sermons for girls. The following section treats a pair of brothers in order to connect the question of the age of the deceased with the question of gender.71 Polycarpus Lyserus or, with his civil name, Polycarpus Leyser, was born on November 22, 1619, in Eilenburg, Saxony. His brother Friedrich saw the light of day on November 19, 1623. They died within a few days of one another in Wittenberg where both of them were studying: Polycarpus on November 9, 1636, and Friedrich on November 16. Paul Rober,

aux enfants.” However, it was thought that fathers, too, could and should experience such love, as Hülsemann makes clear in his funeral sermon. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Livre 2, Chap. VIII, “De l’affection des pères aux enfants.” 70 Rudolf Dekker, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland from the Golden Age to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Els Kloek, “Early Modern Childhood in the Dutch Context,” in Beyond the Century of the Child. Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, ed. Willem Koops and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 43–62; Benjamin B. Roberts, Through the Keyhole: Dutch Child-Rearing Practices in the 17th and 18th Century; Three Urban Elite Families (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998). 71 FS for Polycarpus and Friedrich Leyser, Wittenberg 1636 (#50 at the Personalschriftenstelle of the University of Marburg).

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one of the leading theologians in Saxony in his time and a friend of the boys’ father and grandfather, composed the funeral sermons for both boys.72 He intended these sermons as an act of friendship with the parents and thereby also commemorated boys who were his own students at the theological college [Kolleg] at Wittenberg. Polycarpus, Rober writes, was “from his youth onward taught to pray, fear God, and do good; his caring parents also spared no expense and instead always hired private tutors.”73 Rober would have “wished from the bottom of his heart” (hertzlich gewünschet) for the parents, Friedrich Leyser and Dorothea, née Schmidt, that their son had followed the father and grandfather: “But it pleased the Highest in accordance with his wise judgment and will to do otherwise. For inasmuch as the blessed deceased had always had a sickly constitution, he was able to endure all the less.”74 The course of Polycarpus’s illness is dealt with in two sentences; according to the description, no medicine helped, but the prayer book that his mother sent him did reach him in time at his grandmother’s house. After one-and-a-half days, Polycarpus’s life ended with great inner heat and finally with a severe convulsion.75 He had participated in the Lord’s Supper five days before and, on the evening before his death, he was able to confess to his teacher, Martin Huthen (Hutten). It is striking in this funeral sermon that the loss is framed around Polycarpus’s not being able to redeem the promise of his learned heritage. In this context, reference is also made to his grandmother, the youngest daughter of Lucas Cranach the Younger: “Oh how we would have wished from the bottom of our hearts that this now departed Polycarpus Lyserus had survived long enough in this ephemeral world to follow in the footsteps of his esteemed grandfather. Oh

72 Moore, Patterned Lives, 148–49. Paul Rober was court chaplain at the main Protestant church in Halle and eventually became a professor at the University of Wittenberg where he was regarded as a polymath. 73 “von seinen lieben Eltern von Jugend auf zum Gebet, zur Gottesfurcht und allem guten mit fleiß erzogen, [sie haben] auch an keinen Kosten es mangeln lassen, sondern jederzeit zu hause Privatos Informatores gehalten.” FS Polycarpus, Lebenslauff, 1. 74 “Es hat aber dem Allerhöchsten nach seinem allein weisen Rath und Willen ein anders gefallen. Denn wie dieser selig verstorbene von jugend auff schwacher natur gewesen, also hat Er auch desto weniger ertragen können.” Ibid., 2. 75 Ibid., 2.

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how very much we wish that he would have become the third Dr. Polycarpus.”76 This description gains importance in the context of this essay in comparison with Friedrich’s vita. At seven pages in all, Friedrich’s vita is significantly longer than Polycarpus’s, which is only four pages long. More room is given to the “pain” and “sorrow” of the parents and the “Christian friends of the family” (christliche freundschafft), thus raising the question as to whether his younger age tipped the balance toward the greater need for consolation and mourning on the part of his parents. Friedrich died a few days before his thirteenth birthday, also in the house of his grandmother, and had been able to receive the Lord’s Supper and to confess. In the funeral sermon, we learn that Friedrich, too, enjoyed a private education in his parents’ home “since he was small” (von Kindesbeinen an); soon those around him could feel a “glorious talent” (herrlich ingenium) and his “soul.” “This dear soul,” writes Rober, came to flower in the fear of God, discipline, obedience, industry, humility, and everything else that befits and suits a praiseworthy student. Not a single ugly word emerged from his mouth, but instead praying, reading, and singing. He did not open his ears to evil conversation, but rather to sermons, lessons, and disputations so that he might comprehend everything right well. His eyes were not turned toward vanity but toward his books. His feet were not disposed to run around or to visit all sorts of trollops but instead to go to church and lecture halls. He accustomed his hands not to playing cards but to the quill. He was respectful toward his parents, and peaceable and fair to his peers; kind and sympathetic toward the poor.77

76 “O wie hertzlich hetten wir gewünschet, dass dieser nunmehr selige Polycarpus Lyserus so lang in dieser zergänglichen Welt überbleiben mögen, dass er in seines hochgeehrten Herren Großvaters . . . fußstapfen treten mögen. Wie höchlich hetten wir gewünschet, dass er der dritte Dr. Polycarpus worden were.” Ibid., 3. 77 “Es hat diese liebe Seele geblühet an Gottesfurcht, an Zucht, Gehorsam, Fleiß, Demut und was einem löblichen Studenten mehr geziemet und wol anstehet. Da ist kein unschön Wort aus seinem Munde gangen, sondern Beten, Lesen und Singen. Seine Ohren hat er nicht eröfnet zu bösen Gesprächen, sondern die Predigten, Lectiones, und Disputationes anzuhören, und alles wohl zu fassen. Seine Augen wurden nicht auff Eitelkeit, sondern auff die Bücher gewendet. Seine Füsse waren nicht gerichtet zum Umblauffen, oder allerley Gelack zu besuchen, sondern in die Kirchen und Auditoria. Seine Hände hat er nicht zum Kärtlein, sondern zur SchreibeFeder gewehnet. Gegen seine Eltern erzeiget er sich ehrerbietig, gegen seines Gleichen friedlich und schiedlich, gegen das Armut mildreich und mitleidentlich.” FS Friedrich, Lebenslauff, 3.

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These points, which vaguely sketch the ideal young student, could probably appear in many funeral sermons; they are, however, missing in that for the elder brother, Polycarpus. Rober does not make the attempt to paint Polycarpus in similar colors or to characterize him with similar features. As a result of the invocation of so many—albeit stereotypical—traits and, finally, the emphasis on his spiritual beauty in comparison with Polycarpus, Friedrich acquires a distinct profile and inner value. The “child” Friedrich is described as splendid, even morally perfect. Above all, Friedrich surpasses his brother by having been better able to cope with life. It is probably this characteristic that makes him appear so much more vivid in the words of the funeral preacher. In contrast to Polycarpus, who was constitutionally “weak,” Friedrich did not carry the seeds of death in his “nature.” Death did not mark him in the same manner: “But it pleased God who alone is wise to do otherwise and last Tuesday to have this lovely lily be exposed to and startled by a noxious little breeze. Whereupon the dear heart prayed assiduously to God and obediently gave his child’s will over to the judgment of the highest father in heaven.”78 The blight of pestilence by which he was “blown upon” (angewehet) from without caused him to die within a couple of days. While Polycarpus’s death is blamed on his “weak nature,” Friedrich’s death appears as an eruptive event. Even though Friedrich was the junior by three years and is described as a “child” throughout, the younger age does not seem to constitute the reason for the greater need of written consolation in the case of his death. The extent of the loss arises from the abruptness of his death, the unexpected duress of having to forego Friedrich’s “talent” (ingenium), his “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele), and all his good character traits. This sense of loss is a key reason for the fulsome portrayal of the mourning of Friedrich in this funeral sermon. Thus, it also becomes understandable why there is an allusion to the war in Friedrich’s funeral sermon that is missing in Polycarpus’s.79 The mourning congregation, Rober insists, should rejoice that “[God] suddenly saw fit to free him from all the storms and cloudbursts of

78 “Aber dem allein weisen Gott hat ein anders gefallen, welcher diese schöne Lilien am vergangenem Dienstage mit einem schädlichen Lüfftlein anwehen und schrecken lassen. Da denn das liebe hertz fleissig zu Gott gebetet, und seinen kindlichen Willen in den Rath des Obristen Vaters im Himmel gehorsamlich gestellet hat.” Ibid., 4. 79 We can assume, though, that both boys died of pestilence, one of the typical accompaniments of war.

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this world and to make him safe in heaven.”80 Here war becomes the explanatory context of death that makes consolation possible. This explanation is especially the case with those kinds of unexpected and unforeseeable deaths. In his funeral sermon, Rober completely desists from calling pestilence a punishment of God. He instead insists that death by pestilence can also be a death that is pleasing to God. Comparison of the funeral sermons for the Leyser brothers shows that differences in the predictability of death produce differences in the way death is mourned. Nevertheless, despite the different forms of mourning, we should not assume that the death of the one son was mourned more deeply than that of the other. There is no evidence for that, and Rober writes of Friedrich’s death “Now it’s easy to envision what kind of pain this new wound along with the old one will cause.”81 Indeed, in the locution “new wound,” the notion resurfaces that the pain caused by children dying multiplies, that pain increases exponentially with the number of children who die. What happened, however, when the child mourned was still very young, and mourning and consolation could not be attached to a more or less “reasonable” (vernünfftiges), spiritually mature child? This problem can be illustrated here with the example of a younger brother. Fifteen years earlier in 1621, Polycarpus’s and Friedrich’s parents had lost their infant son Georg. On November 21, 1621, at the age of twelve weeks and twelve days, Georg had “gently and blessedly gone to his eternal rest in Lord Jesus Christ.”82 For three weeks he had suffered from a cough and “phlegm” (zuselligem Fluß): “Thus it pleased the Almighty to do otherwise, namely, not merely to free him from the affliction of the croop but to free him at once from all afflictions and misery and thus soon to redeem him completely.”83 Georg’s illness

80 “er Ihn auff einmahl von allerley Sturm und Ungewitter dieser Welt befreyen, und in Himmlische Sicherheit versetzen wollen.” FS Friedrich, Lebenslauff, 4. Regarding the metaphor of Sturm and Ungewitter signifying war, see Ernst, Kriegserfahrungen, 504; Hans Medick and Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Die Nähe und Ferne des Dreißigjährigen Krieges,” in Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe, ed. Benigna von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 13–36, esp. 14. 81 “Nun ist leicht zu erachten, was für Schmertzen diese Neue Wunden sambt der alten verursachen wird.” FS Friedrich, Lebenslauff, 5. 82 “in seinem Herrn Christo sanfft und selig entschlaffen.” FS for Georg Leyser, Leipzig 1621 (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: 1517). 83 “So hat doch dem Allmechtigen viel ein anders und bessers gefallen, nemlich es nicht nur von diesem Creutzhüstlein alleine, sondern in gemein von allem Creutz und Elend auff einmal, und also bald gäntzlichen zu erlösen.” Ibid., 25.

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is called a “sign of God’s love” (Liebszeichen) by Martin Rinckhardt, the author of the funeral sermon. The funeral sermon imbeds Georg’s death in the love of God who in his providence was releasing the young child from pain and misery. The child is sketched in general terms of his patient forbearance and his peacefully passing away. The parents’ pain, however, is gauged in the same parameters as in the funeral sermons for Polycarpus and Friedrich fifteen years later. As could be predicted from the evidence above, the alleged rule that the younger the children, the more incomprehensible their deaths, does not apply. But the loss does not increase in proportion to the advancing age of the children either. Instead, the funeral sermons for the brothers Leyser indicate that there was possibly a different need for explanation in the case of the death of an older child. Perhaps this death demanded a more complex explanation because there was a longer stretch of life to which to pay tribute. In my work, I have found no differences in mourning relating to the sex of the deceased child.84 It is striking, in fact, that the criteria by which the funeral sermons measure the extent to which girls and boys are pleasing to God are mostly the same. The virtues of loving parents, obeying them, and being humble and patient as well as the marked interest in memorizing and praying are apparently gender neutral. In the case of girls, their foreseeable aptitude for becoming a good Protestant wife and mother is underlined; in the case of boys, as in the example of Polycarpus and Friedrich, their success in institutions of learning and their career promise are highlighted. Gender only becomes useful as a category of analysis in the normatizing of parental mourning in the funeral sermons. The mothers are depicted as those who are able to mourn in moderation and who are able to handle their pain in a way that conjoins it with their love of God and their trust in the love of God. Those overwhelmed by the grief and the pain of losing a beloved child are instead the fathers, as the example of Burchard Niederstätt indicates.85 It appears that the fathers’ way of loving and mourning may contravene religious norms but that there may be an acceptable frame even for this transgression

84 As far as I am aware, no statistics on the number of funeral sermons for girls and for boys have been compiled to date. 85 This changes fundamentally in the eighteenth century; see, e.g., Johann Heinrich Kirchhof, Juristische Abhandlung von dem, was die Rechte bey Erziehung der Kinder erfordern [1745], 3rd ed. (Bützow/Wismar, 1771).

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of norms. Niederstätt does not in the end exceed this frame because he is capable of reflection, as Hülsemann explains with his own example. This is where further research should begin, research that could shed light on the relation of gender to the normatizing of parental love and mourning. Conclusion This essay has examined the emotional relationships between parents and children in the early modern period, particularly the seventeenth century, as these relationships become visible in funeral sermons. Two principal forms of love are discussed in these funeral sermons for children: the love of God and the love that children owe their parents. As we have seen, these forms of love do not mark exclusive relationships but, on the contrary, signify inclusive ones. The love of parents arises from the same spiritual source as charity toward the poor and compassion for aged or infirm people. This source is the love of God or caritas. Nevertheless, as these funeral sermons indicate, the relationship between parents and children is occasionally personalized, for the parents’ suffering over a deceased child is very deep, and parents are greatly in need of consolation. And, apparently, grieving parents are also susceptible to emotions that transgress norms, emotions that nevertheless were viewed as legitimate in their own time depending on the circumstances. Considered theologically, the love of parents for children ranks in third place in the seventeenth century—after the love of God and after the love of one’s spouse. Despite this norm, the funeral sermons offer numerous examples in which this concept of hierarchical love does not entirely prevail. Still, the sermons demonstrate that parents aspired to a balance and that they were admonished to maintain it in love as well as in mourning. The furthest reaching observation to be made on the basis of the funeral sermons examined here is that distinguishable norms of parental love existed and that they could also be linked to the life contexts of the families and the community of mourners. How these norms were lived, observed, and modified, however, cannot be determined with certainty from the funeral sermons. Overwhelmingly and unsurprisingly, the children appear as role models in the funeral sermons; their lives up to their deaths are

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viewed as exemplary and thus illustrate binding norms. And yet, the depiction of these lives amounts to more than a mere reproduction of these norms. Henrica, for example, felt an “unusual love for music” (sonderbahre Lust zur Music) and even learned three languages on her sickbed. Maria Elisabeth Niederstätt, too, and Friedrich Leyser, as well as the children who died within their first year, are distinguished by “charming attitudes” (holdsehlige Geberde) in their “humility” or, sometimes, by contrast, the sermons describe a loud, dolorous struggle with illness. Death is, however, in the end accepted quietly by all the children depicted in these funeral sermons. This example of pleasing God in a childlike manner then gives the parents the certainty that their children have gone to heaven. Funeral sermons are thus a way of gaining knowledge of specific forms of expression of parental love and mourning in the early modern period. Here a specific kind of parental love becomes visible, one that is radically different from most modern forms of love. The fundamental difference is grounded in the strict commitment to God in early modern concepts of love as they become visible here for the Christian context. The faith that God’s love is greater than any form of parental love at any time and in any situation changes the emotional relationship between parents and children. It does not, however, diminish this relationship between parents and children, but rather changes its quality. To have knowledge of the love of God means to have knowledge both of the individual ability to love and of mutual love as a binding social norm. The love of children occupies a special place here deriving from the close proximity within the family and the experience of birth and childrearing.86 In principle, though, it is indistinguishable from other early modern forms of love. The rationale of love does not change until the eighteenth century. Parental love is then integrated into civic discourse and experiences a reinterpretation: from then on, parental love puts less emphasis on pleasing God and more on the child’s becoming a member of civil society.87 The love of parents for their children enters discourse and therefore becomes negotiable. This 86 See, e.g., The Babees Book (1475/1500); Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, (1433–41); John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693); Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Livre 1, Chap. XXVI, “De l’institution des enfants.” 87 Yvonne Schütze, Die gute Mutter: Zur Entwicklung des normativen Musters ‘Mutterlieb’ (Bielefeld: Kleine, 1991); Claudia Opitz, “Der Wandel der Vaterrolle in der Aufklärung,” in Familienstrukturen im Wandel, ed. Joachim Küchenhoff (Basel: Reinhardt, 1998), 13–32.

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may be one reason for the scant mention of the many dead children of Peter Hagendorf. As a gift from God, their deaths cannot be criticized; as a gift of love, their deaths become acceptable in the knowledge of the children’s well-being in paradise. Indeed, Hagendorf refers to the “Resurrection” each time he mourns the death of a child. Finally, while age does emerge as a relational category in the funeral sermons, it is not the years that are decisive in these funeral sermons for determining age, that is, biological maturity, but the measure of prudence and the child’s adroitness in religious and social affairs. Childhood thus becomes identifiable not so much as a biological construct but rather as a social concept whose class-specific aspects, however, exceed the scope of this essay. Furthermore, norms and emotions do not necessarily contradict one another. This is evident in the example of love. Love [caritas] constitutes the norms of social and political life and those of interpersonal relations. At the same time, love becomes perceptible in the funeral sermons as an emotional factor, thus tending to transgress its own normativity, yet remaining within the elastic bounds of the Christian frame. It is against this background that the loss of a child in this world becomes graspable as a gain for the child as a child of God—and for paradise.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ENDURING DEATH IN PIETISM: REGULATING MOURNING AND THE NEW INTIMACY Ulrike Gleixner Upon the death of her husband in 1763, the then thirty-five-year-old widow, Maria Dorothea Caspart (née Rieger, 1728–1800), formulated the pain of her loss not explicitly, but rather implicitly, as a secret kept with Jesus: Oh Lord Jesus, you alone know the tribulation in my humble heart and soul brought on by this loss, so painful and seemingly premature to me. Be true to your promise to be husband and father and do not desert us, but stand by us with your powerful strength. I cannot speak of my sorrow as it is. Lord Jesus, teach me to wait until your help and comfort still my heart. Amen.1

The pious Pietist cannot find words for her sorrow. In place of its articulation, she pleads in her diary for divine support for herself and her children and for the attainment of the God-given composure stipulated by Pietism in the case of such strokes of fate. In Lutheran Protestantism of the seventeenth century, the moderate expression of grief over the loss of a loved one was acceptable, and written representations of deep sadness are to be found in many genres of text. However, even though the inner-churchly Pietism of the eighteenth century had developed from the Lutheran tradition, here grief and despair over the death of a near relative were subject to a commandment of massive transformation: grief, in the humble acceptance of the divine decision, was to be transformed into joy, since the newly

1 “O Herr Jesu, du weist allein, was bei diesem mir gar zu frühen schmerzlichen Verlust in meinem tiefgebeugten Herzen u. Seele vorgegangen. Seye du nach deiner Verheißung Mann und Vater, und verlaß uns nicht, sondern stehe du uns bey mit deiner kraftvollen Macht. Mein Kummer läßt sich nicht so ausdrücken, wie er ist. Herr Jesu, lehre mich warten, bis deine Hülfe und Trost mein Herz stillet. Amen.” Archiv für Familienforschung Leonberg (AFFL), 18 I 13/1 Charlotte Williardts, Tagebuch meiner 1. sel. Großmutter Caspart, geb. Rieger, 23 January 1763. I thank Carol Jenkins for translating this essay from the original German.

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departed were, by virtue of their blessed deaths, already home in the Kingdom of Heaven. In pietistic autobiographies, however, the pain of mourning can only find implicit expression, while explicit descriptions of despairing sadness seem banned from the pietistic topos. These empty spaces in the autobiographies correspond to the pastoral-theological guidelines for behavior and reflect a new structure of affect. This essay will examine the representation of mourning and the pain of loss in the autobiographical writings of Pietists from the region of Württemberg. The authors, both male and female, adhere to the tenets of inner-churchly Pietism and belong, in terms of social status, to the academically educated bourgeoisie. In the following, I will examine the expression in language left behind in diaries and letters by the death and loss of children and spouses. I will, furthermore, investigate to what extent the topos of the autobiographical texts is formed by Pietism. My first step will be to clarify the relationship between the pastoral-theological demands and actual human affect experienced in daily life. Ian Hacking, in a post-structural approach to his work on the classification of people, has demonstrated that human self-perception corresponds closely to externally imposed categories.2 It certainly can be shown that the pietistic precept to show no sorrowful mourning over the death of a previously converted Pietist influenced the subjective perception of the faithful and constituted new structures of language. The self-reflexive character of both the pietistic diary and its culture of letters, in which the writers articulate their efforts to perfect themselves in accordance with their faith, render these sources ideal for the examination of the authors’ emotional self-censorship.3 An analysis of the texts will show how pastoral-theological precepts regulate the authors’ expression of affect. In addition, it can be shown that the sheer ineffability of the authors’ personal grief constitutes a new emotional space for them—one of great intimacy with the divine being. Thus Pietism proves itself not only to be a midwife to a new

2 See Ian Hacking, “Making up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individualism, and the Self in Western Thought (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 222–36. 3 See also Ulrike Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit. Württemberg 17.–19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); Magnus Schlette, Die Selbst(er)findung des neuen Menschen. Zur Entstehung narrativer Identitätsmuster im Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 134–35.

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language aiming to express affect, but also to be the agent of a new inwardness in the form of a separate and separating intimacy with God for the expression of personal suffering. Consequently, in his or her grief, the pietistic subject does indeed communicate with an imagined reader, but the explicit emotional content remains unspoken. Let us recall the Lutheran tradition of the mid-seventeenth century. Bonifacius Stöltzlin (1603–77), a Lutheran pastor in the imperial city of Ulm as well as a popular and prolific writer, sketches out in his Christian Hausbuch (housebook), Bethesda, Oder Geistliche HaußApotek (1660; Bethesda, Or Spiritual Home-Dispensary), consolation for those dismayed and mourning.4 When the death of close relatives leads to bitter tears, dismay, and distress, one need not suffer also from a guilty conscience, as God not only allows these responses to loss but demands them: “Weep with those who weep; mourn with those who mourn.”5 “When someone dies, weep for him and be sad of heart.”6 While using the argumentation customary in this context, Stöltzlin does, however, insist upon a Christian restraint to grief, since (1) only heathens are without hope, (2) one must be confident in God and accept his will, (3) a blessed death is accompanied by deliverance from the vale of tears and entry into the Kingdom of God, and (4) a reunion following Judgment Day is assured.7 In his book of consolation for pregnant women, Der Geistliche Adlerstein (1652; The Spiritual Talisman), Stöltzlin offers a prayer of consolation for husbands of women who die in childbirth: I have now lost my dearest treasure on earth/ who always embodied to me all marital love/ duty/ loyalty/ honor and friendship: for you have torn away from me a rib and a piece of my heart/ and so injured that heart, but I know and believe, that it does not happen without your knowledge and goodwill; you gave her to me/ and let her stay a while/ and now you have taken her back/ because she knew your son as lord

4 Bonifacius Stöltzlin, Bethesda, Oder Geistliche Hauß-Apotek und Seelen-Cur: Darinnen zu finden Christlicher in Frag und Antwort verfaßter Underricht/ von deß Menschen Gesund- Krankheit und Tod: Andächtige Gebet/ bewegliche Herzenseufzer/ und geistreiche Gesäng/ in schmerzlichen Krankheiten/ . . . (Ulm, 1660) [Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) M: Th 2592]. 5 “Weinet mit den Weinenden; Trauert mit den Traurigen.” Analogous to Rom 12:15. 6 “Wenn einer stirbt, so beweine ihn und sei herzlich betrübt.” Stöltzlin, Bethesda, Oder Geistliche Hauß-Apotek, 713–15. 7 Ibid., 716–21.

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ulrike gleixner and called to him. Now Lord/ what should I think/ and say to that? You have certainly hurt me/ and reached deep into my heart; but because your judgments are unfathomable/ and your ways mysterious/ thus I say with patient Job Chap. 1:21. The Lord giveth/ the Lord taketh away/ blessed be His name. . . .8

In this book of consolation, as in others penned by Lutheran pastors, believers are encouraged to express the pain of loss and the misery of mourning in an affective fashion. In the poetic tradition of Lutheranism as well, one finds examples of affective, pain-centered lyricism. In her research on elegiac Lutheran poetry in German-language regions, Anna Carrdus has discovered that the acceptance of divine will follows on the heels of lamentation.9 Cornelia Niekus Moore and Jill Bepler, in their work on elegiac Lutheran poetry by women, likewise verify the explicit expression of grief and anguish.10 A look at the abundance of surviving funeral ser-

8 “Ich habe nun mein liebsten Schatz auff Erden/ welcher mir jederzeit alle Eheliche Lieb/ Pflicht/ Trew/ Ehr und Freundschafft erwiesen hat/ verlohren: Denn du hast mir ein Ripp und Stuck aus meinem Hertzen weggerissen/ und dasselbige sehr verwundet, doch weiß und glaube ich, daß es nicht ohn dein Wissen unnd Wolgefallen geschehen; du hast sie mir gegeben/ jetzt eine Zeitlang gelassen/ und nun wieder zu dir genommen/ weil sie deinen Sohn erkand unnd angeruffen hat. Nun Herr/ was soll ich gedencken/ und dazu sagen? Mich hastu zwar hart verwundet/ unnd tieff in mein Hertz hinein gegriffen; Aber weil deine Gerichte unbegreifflich/ unnd deine Wege unerforschlich/ so sage ich mit dem gedultigen Hiob è Cap. 1.21. Der Herr hats gegeben/ der Herr hats genommen/ der Nahme deß Herrn sey gelobet. . . .” Bonifacius Stöltzlin, Geistlicher Adler-Stein: Das ist/ Christlicher Unterricht/Trost/ und Andächtige/ Geistreiche/ und Schrifftmässige Gebett/ für Schwangere und gebährende Frawen/ vor/ in/ und nach der Geburt/ so wol auch anderer Christen für sie/ auff alle Fälle gerichtet: Deßgleichen auch für Christliche Eltern/ wann ihnen ihre Liebe Kinder kranck werden und sterben (Ulm, 1652): 429–30. [HAB A: 811.6 Theol.]. 9 Anna Carrdus, “Thränen=Tüchlein für Christliche Eltern: Consolation Books for Bereaved Parents in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Germany,” German Life and Letters 49 (1996): 1–17. See also Carrdus, “Consolation Arguments and Maternal Grief in Seventeenth-Century Verse: The Example of Margarethe Susanna von Kuntsch,” German Life and Letters 47 (1994): 135–51; and by the same author, “Consolatory Dialogue in Devotional Writings by Men and Women of Early Protestant Germany,” The Modern Language Review 93 (1998): 411–27. 10 Cornelia Niekus Moore, “Anna Hoyers (1584–1655),” in Deutsche Frauen der Frühen Neuzeit. Dichterinnen, Malerinnen, Mäzeninnen, eds. Kerstin Hall and Heide Wunder (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), 67–76; Jill Bepler, “‘Zu meinem und aller dehrer die sichs gebrauchen wollen, nutzen, trost undt frommen,’ Lektüre, Schrift und Gebet im Leben der fürstlichen Witwe in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Witwenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. Fürstliche und adlige Witwen zwischen Fremdund Selbstbestimmung, ed. Martina Schattkowsky (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag, 2003), 303–19.

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mons shows how verse written for this occasion takes pain as its point of departure. In 1659, at the age of twenty-two, Ernesta Augusta of AnhaltBernburg (1636–59) died. Pious, virtuous, single, highly educated, and engaged in lively correspondence with numerous scholars, the young woman succumbed to a mysterious fever. The memorial poem written by her sister, the Lutheran nun Eleonore Hedwig, deaconess of the convent at Gandersheim, is redolent with images of pain and suffering, as demonstrated here by verses one and four: 1. Come in number you mountains and forests/ Come you meads/ cliffs/ and stones/ Become the very landscape of my tears/ Join me in my lamentations/ As here has mortally succumbed Who once won praise for stellar virtue/ Oh! Mourn the utter deprivation/ My sister lies dead. ... 4. Oh! How should I stop the tears? The radiance of my sister’s being Will never more illuminate my path/ All joy is now foreign to me/ Because I must give up as lost/ The better half of my own life. Flow on oh tear-soaked lamentation/ All happy times are gone.11

The topos of pain dominates another memorial poem for the same young woman, this time from the pen of Joachim Mechov, privy counselor and member of the reformed church in Anhalt. It opens as follows:

11 “1. Komt zu hauff ihr Berg’ und Wälder/ | Komt ihr Auen/ Felsen/ Stein/ | Werdet mir zu Thränen=Felder/ | Stimmet klagend mit mir ein/ | Weil entseelt niederlieget/ | So der Tugend Lob ersieget/ | Ach! Beweint die grosse Noht/ | Meine Schwester lieget todt. 4. Ach wie sol ich nun nicht weinen? | Meiner Schwester Strahlen Zier |Wird bey mir forthin nicht scheinen/ | Alle Freud’ ist weg von mir/ | Weil ich muss verlohren geben/ | Die so war mein halbes Leben | Fließ’ O meiner Thränen=Klag/ | Es seynd weg die guten Tag.” Eleonore Hedwig, “Komt zu hauff ihr Berg’ und Wälder,” in Andreas Hesius, Christ=Fürstlich Gelübde Der Weiland Durchleuchtigen/ Hochgebornen Fürstin und Fräulein/ Fräulein Ernestæ-Augustæ Gebornen Fürstin zu Anhalt/ . . . (Köthen, 1660) [HAB LP Stolberg 5464].

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ulrike gleixner Jewel and pride of Anhalt/ Oh most highly praised of decorations/ You who are so bountiful/ to you I lament my woe/ How very disturbed/ dismayed and sad I became/ When news reached me of the young lady’s all-too-early death/ A young woman so loved by God and man/ So young/ beautiful/ moral/ pious/ sweet and learned Who practiced constantly the word of God and the fear of Him/ And cared only for virtue and its defense. Oh! I cry too loudly/ Could none help her Of those who are so experienced with medicine/ That this image of virtue could just once more recover/ And escape death’s cruel noose?12

In this example, again the expressions of pain are quite explicit. In the eighteenth century, the guidelines of the pietistic pastoral theology for the regulation of affect deviate from the Lutheran and reformed practices sketched above. Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), Samuel Urlsperger (1685–1772), and Magnus Friedrich Roos (1727– 1805) all make the same demands on the converted Christian, namely,13 (1) the humble acceptance of all things sent by God, (2) a penitent attitude born of the knowledge of one’s own sinfulness, (3) joy upon a blessed death on the part of those left behind, and (4) hope for the eventual joyous reunion of all the Chosen Ones.14 These precepts also apply to the Pietism practiced in Halle.15 But even if the goal of both traditions is the same, namely, the acceptance of loss, pietistic writing does not grant grief the right of expression. Instead, God’s decision is

12 “Anhalt Ruhm und Zierd’/ O Hochgepriesner Orden/ | Der du viel Früchte bringst/ dir klag’ ich meine noth/ | Wie sehr ich sey bestürtzt/ betrübt/ und traurig worden/ | Als mir zu Ohren kam des Fräuleins früher todt/ | Des Fräuleins/ so von Gott und Menschen war geliebet/ | So jung/ schön/ sittig/ from/ holdselig und gelehrt/ | Sich stets in Gottes wort und dessen Furcht geübt/ | Und das/ was Tugend war/ allein hoch hielt und wehrt. | Ach! Ruff ich überlaut/ Ist dann kein Raht gewesen | Bey denen/ so erfahren seynd in der Artzneuy/ | Daß dieses Tugendbild nur dismahl noch genesen/ | Und von des Todes Strick geworden frey? . . . .” Ibid. 13 Spener’s treatise Pia Desideria (1675) is considered the foundational text of the pietistic movement. Urlsperger was the court preacher in Stuttgart until 1781, when the sharpness of his sermons on penance led to his dismissal. After two years of unemployment, he landed a position in 1720 as Deacon in Herrenberg. In 1723, he left the principality of Württemberg for the imperial city of Augsburg, where he took on the important role of Senior Preacher. Roos was a deacon and popular author of devotional literature in Württemberg. 14 See also Katharina Ernst, Krankheit und Heiligung. Die medikale Kultur württembergischer Pietisten im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 61–84. 15 See, e.g., Carl Heinrich von Bogatzky, Tägliches=Hausbuch der Kinder Gottes, pt. 2, 5th ed. (Halle, 1842), 294.

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to be accepted in penitent humility and with the idea that the death of a loved one is punishment for one’s own sins.16 The deacon Magnus Friedrich Roos of Württemberg, a noted author of pietistic devotional literature, formulates in his popular Kreuzschule (School of the Cross) a detailed set of instructions for how to behave in suffering, or, in the diction of Pietism: “Von dem Nutzen des Kreuzes und von dem rechten Verhalten gegenüber demselben” (Of the Utility of the Cross and of the Correct Conduct in Relation to It).17 In chapter 6, “Von traurigen Todesfällen” (Concerning Sad Instances of Death), he develops a pietistic transformation of mourning: even the saints of the Hebrew Bible experienced grief at the deaths of loved ones, and this did not displease God.18 Nevertheless, one must guard against grieving like the heathens, who do not know the hope of resurrection. Accordingly, when a loved one dies, we must believe that God has ordained the passing. And should this person have died as a penitent, pious Christian, then no despair or grief is necessary, as such a person stands only to gain from death, as he or she is delivered from all evil. At the same time, death makes orphans of children, widowers of husbands, and widows of wives. In such cases, grief in moderation is not blameworthy, but it is crucial to remember that “in the end those left behind mourn not the dead, as long as they know that they died a blessed death, but rather themselves.”19 Thus it is a human responsibility to remember that the cross was sent by God and that every person should submit to it and allow him- or herself to be instructed by it. It might be the case, Roos points out, that one loved the deceased too much and that God accordingly took the person away so that one would stay closer to God.20 16 As concerns the so-called Hausbücher (housebooks), which offer prayers, observations, and songs for all of life’s most trying moments and which, according to Hans Medick, also belonged to the average rural household’s quota of books, see Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen 1650–1900. Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 498. 17 Magnus Friedrich Roos, Neue Kreuz=Schule oder Anweisung zu einem christlichen Verhalten unter dem Leiden welche in zwölf Abhandlungen in Auszügen aus erbaulichen Schriften, in Liedern und Gebeten besteht. Als ein Anhang sind Morgen= und Abend=Gebete, ein Wetter=Gebet, und kurze Gebete eines Sterbenden beygefügt (Tübingen, 1779), 9. 18 One example cited is Abraham’s grief at the death of Sarah (Gn 23:2); another, the widows’ grief at the death of Tabitha (Acts 9:37–39). 19 “. . . die Hinterbliebenen betrauern doch letztlich sich selbst, und nicht den Toten, wenn sie von ihm wissen, dass er selig gestorben sey.” Roos, Kreuzschule, 105. 20 Ibid., 97–117.

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And while this explanation does begin with a confession of anguish, that same confession is then methodically undermined, as the grief at the passing of an awakened person is superfluous and nothing more than self-pity. Thus in essence Pietism attempts to configure the affective structure of mortal life based on a religious idea of an afterlife: since life after death is the goal of human existence, all mortal affects must be subordinated to the logic of the hereafter. In other words, because daily life is to be fully spiritualized, the need arises to create an emotional connection between mortal and immortal life. As long as a child, husband, or wife dies a blessed death—an assumption in pietistic communities—then mourning is superfluous, as the loved one has attained the Kingdom of Heaven. All mortal dangers, such as succumbing to the power of evil and thus straying from the penitent path of the awakened [Erweckten], have been successfully overcome. Thus images that tend to disturb the modern reader—such as mortally ill children yearning not to recover but in fact to die—become stock components of pietistic biography, demonstrating to the pietistic readership an exemplary joy in death. For example, in a letter to his inlaws, the ducal physician Albrecht Richard Reuß (1712–80) portrays as follows the final hours of his firstborn son, Joseph, who was seven at the time of his death: Early yesterday between two and three o’clock our dear Joseph was taken from us and went to the dearest Savior. I was not granted the ability . . . to soothe . . . his shortness of breath; the feverish periods had become longer, and thus he fell gently into sleep without any further palsies or other violent movements. Throughout all this, the dear child remained unshakably composed and until his very last breath fully conscious; he took all medicine obediently even though he felt no improvement from any of them. When we asked him Monday if he would rather stay longer with us, he answered: as our dear Savior wishes it to be. On Tuesday evening we repeated the question, and he explained this time: he would rather go to the Savior. I asked him if he had no sins in his heart, if he had been willful or careless or vain, etc., and had not loved his Savior as he should have; he said yes; so I told him of the Savior’s heart and his suffering and how on this account he means to forgive [us our sins], and I prayed with him on this account. Sang many verses with him and about him. He folded his hands together right away and often wanted to sing, but he had no breath. . . .21

21 “Gestern früh zwischen 2 und 3 Uhr ist unser Lieber Joseph schon von uns genommen worden, und zum Liebsten Heyland gegangen. Es ist mir nicht macht

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In the process of dying, the child develops the desire to leave this life. The piety of the dying child should serve as an example to the readership. In addition to their primary function as models, however, pietistic reports from the deathbed serve yet another purpose in that they give evidence to the fact of an actual individual’s exemplary death, which is portrayed as humble, calm, joyful, and ever penitent. After the fact, in the description following the event, the perceptions of the witnesses blend with the demands of faith. The wine merchant and imperial Counselor of Esslingen, Christian Gottlieb Williardts (1712–79), lost his daughter, Maria Magdalena Groß, a widow of thirty, in 1768, and recorded the day of her burial in his diary as follows: “The body of this my bless. oldest & first daughter was consigned to the earth in certain hope of joyous resurrection, & Sen. Pastor Köstlin gave the memorial sermon. . . .”22 A few days later, the father makes an attempt to subordinate his unspeakable grief to the meaning given to death in Pietism: And now already since the bless. passing of my dear daughter eight more days of this life have passed. The Lord wanted to gladden and fortify her with his presence and will have done so with eternal and glorious joy that we can neither understand nor comprehend. Her bless. death and ascent to heaven is an honor to Him, and what we desired from the moment of her birth, & we rejoice over it, although the pain of her premature departure from this life penetrates us to our very core. Lord, you know what sort of new impression her passing has made on my heart. Heal my

gegeben worden den kurtzen athem . . . recht zu lindern . . . , die hitzen haben zugenommen, und so ist er sanft und ohne weitere gichterige oder andere heftige bewegungen eingeschlaffen. Das liebe Kind blieb darunter in unverrückter gelassener fassung und biß auf den letzten athem bey gutem Verstand; nahm auch gehorsam alless willig, ob er gleich keine Besserung davon spürte. Als er am Montag gefragt wurde ob er länger wollte bey uns bleiben, antwortete er: wie es der liebe Heiland haben wolte. Am Dienstag abend auf gleiche frage erklärte er sich: er wolte lieber zum Heyland gehen. Ich fragte ihn, ob er keine anklage in seinem Hertzen habe daß er auch eigenwillig, leichtsinnig, eitel etc gewesen und daß er den Heyland noch nicht so lieb gehabt habe wie er sollte: er sagte ja; ich stelte ihm des Heylands Herz vor und sein leyden und wie er deßwegen gern vergeben wolle und betete aus diesem Grund mit ihm. Sang manche verslein mit ihm und über ihm. Er legte gleich die Hände zusammen und wollte manchmal nachsingen, ob er gleich keinen athem gehabt. . . .” Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart (WLB), Cod. Hist. 1002 No. 42/II Familienkorrespondenz Bengel, letter of 27 April 1747. 22 “Wurde der Leichnam dieser meiner 1. seel. ältesten u. ersten Tochter auf gewisse Hoffnung froher Auferstehung der Erde übergeben, u. H. Sen. Köstlin that die Leichenpredigt. . . .” AFFL, 18 I Nr. 45/2 Tagebuch Christian Gottlieb Williardts 1768/69, 5 September 1768.

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Despite his certainty in his daughter’s blessed resurrection, the pain of loss weighs heavily on him in the following weeks. Nonetheless, he never expresses this pain explicitly, treating it instead as a kind of intimate secret shared only with God: “From you, Lord, I have no secrets.” And the grieving father maintains this self-imposed silence not only in his diary, but also with his wife, from whom he keeps all such thoughts; just days later in his diary he writes that his condition is “known only to God our Lord.”24 Here again, we see that neither the family nor the wife nor the Pietist community can provide a sounding board for the revelation of pain. Grief has become ineffable in their presence; in their place, however, God has become a sworn partner in communication. According to Alois Hahn, the defining characteristic of post-Reformation confessional culture consists of the separation of two activities previously understood as one: the exploration of the individual conscience and the external supervision of morality.25 In Pietism, internal and external controls are combined in a new way. Its conventions of writing pursue a dualistic principle: personal testimonies not only must satisfy the requirements of individual introspection, but are also supposed to provide the pious brothers and sisters with evidence of one’s personal sanctification. The spiritual diary documents the individual’s efforts to achieve penitence and his or her struggle for sanctification; the dialogic nature of the letter serves to communicate his or

23 “Nun sind schon 8 Tage dieses Lebens verflossen, seit dem seel. Übergang meiner lieben Grossin, die der Herr vor seinem Angesicht erquicken wolle und erquickt haben wird mit ewiger herrlicher Freude, die wir weder verstehen noch begreifen. Ihm sey Ehre für ihre seelige Vollendung, die wir ja von ihrer Geburt an gewünschet haben, u. uns auch jetzo darüber freuen, wenn schon der Schmerz über ihr frühes Scheiden unser Innerstes auch durchdringet. Herr, du wissest, was für einen neuen Eindruck dieser Heimgang in meinem Herz gemacht hat. Heile meine Wunden durch dein theures Blut, und laß auch dieses dein Werk an mir nicht ligen, noch mich ruhen, bis ich durch deine Gnade wisse, woran ich auch dißfalls seye. Weiter will ich da nicht schreiben. Dir, Herr, ist all mein Innerstes bekannt.” Ibid., 10 September 1768. 24 “. . . nur Gott dem Herrn allein bekannt.” Ibid., 14 September 1768. 25 Alois Hahn, “Zur Soziologie der Beichte und anderer Formen institutionalisierter Bekenntnisse: Selbstthematisierung und Zivilisationsprozess,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 34 (1982): 407–34; Alois Hahn, ed., Selbstthematisierung und Selbstzeugnis: Bekenntnis und Geständnis (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987).

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her efforts to overcome earthly temptation, while the personal history gives evidence of divine Providence. The point of pietistic writing is then to provide individual circumstances of life and emotional states with a pietistic meaning and to feed them into the model provided by the faith.26 These “technologies of the self ” do not promote the representation of individuality, but, quite to the contrary, demand of the writer a great feat of conformity: one’s very life must be adapted to the pious tradition of one’s faith.27 For all that, however, pietistic autobiography is in no sense unoriginal staging of the self. Rather, even as these authors interpret themselves through the eyes of the Pietist community, they develop a new consciousness of themselves. This mimetic process is not simple imitation, but instead a challenge that must be met individually.28 Thus expressing oneself in writing is an essential pietistic experience, because the very act of ordering one’s emotional life cognitively creates the opportunity to interpret and socialize oneself as a Pietist. In other words, it is through writing that the subject constitutes itself and experiences itself in a pietistic manner. At moments of crisis, it is particularly important that the individual Pietist give evidence of his or her complete resignation to divine Providence to both the family and the pietistic community. In this respect, Maria Barbara Burk’s written profession of faith in response to the death of her first child, a fourteen-day-old daughter, is exemplary. In 1745, in a letter to her family, she writes, “Accept now what you desire—the firstborn is Yours.”29 With this declaration of acceptance of divine will, she establishes a connection to a law of the Old Testament, namely, that the firstborn belongs to God.30 By so doing she not only proves herself a pious Pietist, but also and simultaneously enters the child and her own life into the history of the Chosen People.

26

See also Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. See also Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49. 28 On this dimension of imitation, see Jürgen H. Petersen, Mimesis—Imitatio— Nachahmung. Eine Geschichte der europäischen Poetik (Munich: Fink, 2000). 29 “So nimm nun hin, was du verlangst— die Erstgeburt ist Dein.” AFFL, 18 I 9/1–2 Charlotte Zeller, Lebensbeschreibung Maria Barbara Burk, geb. Bengel, Bl. 20. 30 Ex 13:12, 34:19; Nm 3:13. 27

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This written documentation of resignation to divine will in the face of the death of a child becomes a tradition in the family in which each female member must participate. Just two years later in 1747, Maria Barbara Burk’s sister, Sophie Elisabeth Reuß (1717–77), writes as follows in a letter to her father, Johann Albrecht Bengel, on the occasion of the death of her firstborn, a seven-year-old son: “Oh how it pains me to sacrifice my firstborn son. But praise God that we can believe that he is better cared for now than with us. . . . I borrowed the line from my older sister—accept now what you desire—the firstborn etc.”31 On the other hand, the experience of another sister, Johanne Rosine Williardts (1720–88), who was forced to come to terms with the loss of three infants in a row, was passed down in the family as a protracted test of faith.32 When her first infant died, her father, Johann Albrecht Bengel, wrote to her: “You must strive, dear daughter, to achieve peace in your soul—seek contentment in God.”33 Upon the death of the next baby, her future brother-in-law, Philipp David Burk, found fault in Rosine’s attitude, seeing it as insufficiently oriented toward God.34 Her sister, Sophie Elisabeth Reuß—herself experienced in the loss of a child—advised the grieving mother to bear her pain silently, since this suffering was for her own good.35 Ultimately, the ordeal was to last six years and cost three infants, but in accordance with the family tradition, Johanne Rosine at last gave up her quarrel with fate, accepted God’s “corrective punishment,” and learned to be humble. This biographical report gives voice to yet another dimension of the process of coming to terms with the emotions felt upon the loss of a

31 See also WLB, Cod. Hist. Fol. 1002 No. 42/I Familienkorrespondenz Bengel, letter of 27. April 1747, 274: “O wie schmertzt es mich meinen Ersten Sohn aufzuopfern. Doch gottlob daß wir glauben können, er ist besser versorgt als bey uns . . . Ich habe der 1. Burkin das Versle abgeborgt, So nimm nun hin was du verlangst, die Erstgeburt.” 32 Just 150 years later in the second half of the nineteenth century, Charlotte Zeller (née Geß) composed a biography of her great-grandmother, Rosine Williardts (née Bengel), which was passed down in handwritten form. This description of Williardts’s life consists of the patching together of quotations and excerpts from the subject’s own diaries as well as family letters. The author dedicates the manuscript in 1884 to her own daughter Charlotte, and on her namesake’s thirty-fourth birthday, gives it to her. See AFFL, 18 I 8/1 Charlotte Zeller, Lebensbeschreibung Johanne Rosine Williardts, geb. Bengel. 33 “Befleißige dich liebe Tochter! der Ruhe des Gemüths, suche deine Zufriedenheit in Gott.” Ibid., 13. 34 See also ibid., 29. 35 Ibid., 26.

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child: the male/patriarchal interpretation of the loss as punishment for the mother. In the context of a marital spat, for instance, such thinking allows a husband to argue that the death of the child has resulted from the wife’s disobedience to his authority. For example, the Pastor Philipp Matthäus Hahn, a charismatic leader in pietistic circles, repeats over the space of two years in his diary (1783 and 1785) that the deaths of his two children are “a judgment” upon the disobedience of his wife, Beata Regina.36 And Hahn came to the conclusion in his second marriage that willing, humble, and obedient wives do not exist and that he was thus condemned to bear the cross.37 Accordingly, in 1783 upon the death of their child after seven years of marriage, Hahn interpreted the sad event as a divine punishment of his wife: It is a judgment upon my wife, who does not make it her habit to be attentive to my will. And just two days ago she contradicted and so enraged me that I said: God will punish you eternally if you do not bend to my will and instead continue to embitter my life. And ever since I’ve had her, starting with the very first recording of expenditures, when she became annoyed and started crying when she couldn’t do the accounts, because she simply couldn’t bear to do them my way, insisting instead that the way they did the books at home in Munich was cleverer and better than what I ordered her to do. And just yesterday when I told her not to visit the body as it only leads to greater despair she interpreted my words unkindly and replied: The child is worth it, isn’t he?38

Here we see the patriarchal interpretation of the pietistic linkage of the mortal and immortal realms. Hahn’s anger results from his wife’s insistence on the superiority of the household bookkeeping system she had learned in her childhood home and her ensuing refusal to adopt the one that he recommends. His rage then leads him to interpret the

36 See Philipp Matthäus Hahn, Die Echterdinger Tagebücher 1780–1790, ed. Martin Brecht and Rudolf F. Paulus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 17 October 1783, 80, and 3 March 1785, 188. 37 See ibid., 451. 38 “Es sey ein Gericht über meine Frau, die nicht gewohnt ist, in allen Stücken auf meinen Willen zu mercken. Und erst vor zwei Tag widersprach sie mir so und erbitterte mich, das ich sagte: Gott wird dich ewig dafür strafen, wenn du mir nicht nachgibst, und mein Leben verbitterst. Von je her, das ich sie habe, schon beym ersten Aufschreiben der Außgaben ärgerte sie sich daran und fieng allmahl an zu weinen, wenn sie nicht Rechnung thun konnte, weil sie absolut nicht mit mir einverstanden war aufzuschreiben, sondern den Münchinger Gebrauch für weißer und besser als meinen Befehl ansahe. Erst gestern, da ich sagte, man sollte nicht zur Leiche, weil man sonst nur noch betrübter werde, legte sie es gleich übel aus und sagte: Das Kind werde doch auch so viel wehrt seyn.” Ibid., 17 October 1783, 80.

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child’s death as punishment for his wife’s disobedience. Seen in this light, his displacement comes across as childish revenge, but for his wife it has real implications, as he alone is entitled to interpret the situation. Thus the spiritualization of the everyday offers dissatisfied and disagreeable husbands, in particular, the possibility of interpreting the death of a child in a most worldly way, namely, as the wife’s punishment for both lack of obedience and insufficient religious devotion. And so, the search for religious meaning in all earthly events made it possible for diary-keeping pietistic husbands, solely entrusted with the power of interpretation, to link household arguments to the causality of their faith: affronts against the wifely duty to obey husbands received immediate sanction from God. Friederike Williardts (1756–1835) writes in a letter of consolation to her daughter, Charlotte Geß (1795–1835), who has just lost a days-old infant, that “One is happy to return the child to the Redeemer, but it is so painful.”39 This double entendre, suggestive of both the physical pain of birth so recently endured and the ongoing psychic pain of loss, makes it possible for the chosen formulation “it is so painful” to actualize the presence of pain in the text.40 At the same time, the careful wording of the maternal consolation demonstrates the pietistic framework through which the affect is to be regulated, as “One is happy to return the child to the Redeemer.” Thus despite the obligation to demonstrate an exemplary pietistic attitude, the conventions of the faith’s written language themselves are belied by self-contradiction, omissions, and textual subversion. Even given the possibility of textual subversion, however, it should be clear at this point that the pietistic tradition of the eighteenth century is characterized by a new severity concerning personal grief that was absent in the Lutheran tradition preceding it. The point of autobiographical writing in Pietism is to transform life’s sorrow in the manner prescribed by sermons, exemplary biographies, and the literature of consolation. In their writing, men and women both emphasize the spiritual lesson of mourning and never 39 “Man gibts dem Heiland gern zurück, aber es tut so weh.” AFFL, 18 I 3/1–2 Charlotte Zeller, Friederike Williardts, geb. Schütz, 139. 40 Miranda Chaytor has pointed out that in social contexts that do not allow women to articulate their experiences of violence and pain, the silenced emotions return subconsciously to their language in metaphors, contradictions, or gaps. She argues that texts should be decoded with this in mind. See her article “Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century,” Gender & History 7 (1995): 378–407.

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the pain itself. The faith demands that feelings of grief and loss be transformed into the bearing of the cross [Kreuzesannahme] without allowing for them to be articulated in words. Suffering is to be endured as a test of faith and a punishment ordained by God, an attitude that allows scant justification for mourning. However slight the difference between Lutheran and pietistic representations of grief and loss may be, this difference suffices to indicate a new cultural attitude toward them, namely one of silence and concealment. This self-disciplining transformation of grief arises in the eighteenth century and marks a new challenge for individual subjects, as it leaves them in times of utmost emotional distress with no one to turn to but themselves. This finding is made all the more surprising by the fact that Pietism is regarded as a catalyst in the development of a more emotional and inward-looking language. And in fact the faith cultivates a religious language that is essentially intended to produce religious affects.41 By reading, listening to, and singing devotional texts and songs, its adherents are encouraged to focus on the religious feelings constantly evoked. In accordance with this fact, the pastoral-theological directives of Pietism’s devotional authors demand of the faithful not the suppression of emotion, but rather its transformation. And the result is just that: not the suppression of the affect, but instead its regulation. In autobiographical writing, the topic of grief and loss is left unarticulated, and neither the religious community nor a potential readership witnesses the emotional distress; instead, mourning constitutes an emotionally intimate and wordless connection to God. Thus the insistence on the regulation of affect shifts the realm of intimate communication away from the religious community and toward God.

41

August Langen, Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954); Simon Grote, “Pietistische Aisthesis und moralische Erziehung bei Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten,” Aufklärung. Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch der Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts und seine Wirkungsgeschichte 20 (2008), 175–98.

CHAPTER NINE

BETWEEN THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW: SPIRITUAL LOSS IN REFORMATION GERMANY1 Christopher Ocker Most scholars, I think, will agree that the Reformation arose out of a particular emotional background. Fifteenth-century Europe was marked by a religious angst, which we see in the writings of the famously disaffected: Pierre d’Ailly, Jean Gerson, Matthew of Cracow, Bernardino of Siena, Vincent Ferrer, John of Capistrano, Christine de Pizan, Girolamo Savonarola, and so on. The striving for reform presupposes a perception of an unsettled moral and social order. Responding to this perceived disorder, reformers tried “to re-establish comforting boundaries between purity and danger, the sacred and the profane.”2 The anxieties of fifteenth-century reformers included the conviction— the feeling—of religious failure and the loss of a primitive ideal. There was, too, the recurrent sense of danger created by the identification of the pope as antichrist, which in turn gave evidence of the culmination of the world’s tired history just prior to a final outpouring of God’s ferocious, cleansing wrath. People seem to have expected an apocalypse sporadically, before, during, and especially after Luther and his controversy.3 In fact, as we have often been told, the Reformation seemed at times to intensify anxieties and increase their momentum.

1 My thanks go to Prof. John Hatcher, chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University, for receiving me as a visiting scholar to conduct a month’s research that contributed to this essay. Conversations with Miri Rubin, Thomas A. Brady, Greta Kroeker, James Noel, and Matthew Johnson, and the suggestions of Lynne Tatlock, helped me untangle my thoughts. The provocations of participants in the Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär did the same, especially those of Hans Medick, Erik Midelfort, and Ronald Rittgers. I’m grateful to all, but above all to Lynne Tatlock for her invitation to participate in the FNI. 2 Miri Rubin, “Europe Remade: Purity and Danger in Late Medieval Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (2001): 123. 3 For apocalyptic ideas and reform (in contrast to revolution) in the century before the Reformation, see Alexander Patschovsky, “Chiliasmus und Reformation im ausgehenden Mittelalter,” Ideologie und Herrschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Max Kerner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 169–90. For apocalyptic

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In the Reformation, the new preachers of the 1520s and 30s alleged all manner of religious failures. To allege corruption is to allege a qualitative loss, which the preachers did in the familiar Protestant ways. The evangelicals said apostolic ideals had been abandoned by a tyrannical, greedy clerical system. The apostolic standard had been lost. The system, they said, led by the pope and serviced by monks, dragged Christians into absurd and demonic superstitions. At the same time, the new preachers threatened to impose unprecedented losses on their Catholic peers. They meant to destroy the very practices, personnel, and material goods of the church that would have been most familiar in everyday life, for example, the cult of the saints; the offices of professional intercessors (monks, nuns, and other praying “poor”); relics and other sacred objects; the mass with its sacrifice and the line of moral credit created when Christ is offered on the altars of churches; traditional memorials of the dead; the bonds of affection and benevolence between the dead and the living; and, to a great extent, the possessions ideas and crisis before the Reformation, see Robert Lerner, “Medieval Prophecy and Religious Dissent,” Past and Present 72 (1976): 3–24; and Roberto Rusconi, L’Attesa della fine: crisi della società, profezia ed apocalisse in Italia al tempo del grande Scisma d’Occidente (1378–1417) (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1979). One bit of apocalyptic myth, the identification of Gog and Magog with a race of red Jews, declined in the sixteenth century. See Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). For Protestantism as an answer to “the demands and stresses of . . . apocalyptic expectations,” see Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19–91 (13, 43 for the quotations). For the apocalyptic and Luther’s outlook on the world (in contrast with Melanchthon and other humanists), as Heiko Oberman famously conceived it, see Scott Hendrix, “ ‘More Than a Prophet’: Martin Luther in the Work of Heiko Oberman,” in The Work of Heiko A. Oberman: Papers from the Symposium on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. T.A. Brady, K.G. Brady, S. Karant-Nunn, and J.D. Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 21–22, and Bernd Hamm, “An Opponent of the Devil and the Modern Age: Heiko Oberman’s View of Luther,” in The Work of Heiko A. Oberman, 38, 40. For the limited role of the apocalyptic among rebelling peasants in 1525, see Rainer Wohlfeil, “Bauernkrieg: Symbole der Endzeit,” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 20 (2001): 53–71. For the importance of an apocalyptic identification of pope with antichrist in Lutheran confessionalization, particularly among “bibliocentric” Gnesio-Lutheran thinkers (over against more humanistically and philosophically oriented Lutherans), see Volker Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag: Das Profil apokalyptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum 1548–1618 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999), 130–50, 169–205, 229–37, 285–89 (and for periods in which the amount of apocalyptic literature being printed swelled, see ibid., 289–91). For an overview of the apocalyptic in the Reformation, see Robin Barnes, “Images of Hope and Despair: Western Apocalypticism ca. 1500–1800,” The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, ed. Bernard J. McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 2003), 323–53.

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of the clerical, spiritual estate, from farms, houses, rents, and annuities to church plate and, at the least, the more sumptuous of liturgical vestments. Those who defended the old faith could complain that the new faith destroyed these things. But more abstractly, and more dangerously, the new preachers undermined an “imagined society,” the church as a spiritual communion existing both within and outside of the world; and within the world, it was believed, the church had been a particular, papal government for almost 1,500 years.4 Failure and loss could have been seen everywhere. The Reformation certainly seems to add up to cultural and material losses on an unprecedented scale. Scholars have often described the sum total of these things as a cataclysm, a revolution, the end of the Middle Ages, the dawning of a new, demystified age, and more. All of this might encourage a cultural historian of Early Modern Europe to search out, by way of confirmation, a sixteenth-century perception of historical change in feelings of loss. A generalized sense of loss would point to a widely shared awareness of social and cultural movement from one status or condition to another, a change of mentality, a Reformation. But for “Reformation” Germany, by which I mean Luther’s generation, the historian will be frustrated. In spite of the magnitude of religious changes threatened and in some places accomplished, spiritual loss was felt in ambivalent ways. We do not find, for example, what Sigmund Freud might have thought we should find as markers of a great crisis: a truly pathological mourning, a desperate longing to restore the past, monuments to that which was lost, hallucinations compensating for losses, a transformation of grief into self-loathing and melancholy, or ritualized Catholic responses that could measure up to the intensity and vividness of the average iconoclastic orgy.5 Nor was there an obvious, Robert Burton-like diagnosis

4

Christopher Ocker, “Ecclesiology and the Religious Controversy of the Sixteenth Century,” The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, ed. Gerard Mannion and Lewis S. Mudge (New York: Routledge, 2008), 63–84. 5 James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1957–1966), 14:239–58. Tammy Clewell, “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52 (2004): 43–67. By analogy to my argument in this essay, ritualized violence had the potential to effect change or at least release stress associated with change (as such one might take ritualized violence as an attempt to reestablish feelings of certainty in the face of loss), yet the outcomes of such rituals of inversion and religious riots in German society were, in fact, equivocal. Robert Scribner, “Reformation, Carnival, and the World Turned Upside-Down,”

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of social melancholy, choler, anger, hatred, or envy associated with the religious Reformation; not in Germany in this early Protestant generation.6 The religious controversy’s complex evolution can explain this absence of a generalized feeling of loss. In Luther’s Germany, confessional boundaries remained insufficiently clear to too many people to be used collectively as a measure of losses and gains. The magnitude of the controversy and its outcomes had only begun to emerge in the 1520s, and to bystanders, even interested bystanders, the new emergent boundaries must have remained unclear, if not bewildering, as the partisans clarified their positions at the conflict’s poles, organized for confrontation, and engaged. For example, one such interested bystander was Barbara Schweickart, widow of Sebastian von Fuchsstein, doctor of laws. Sebastian had been a mediator in the controversy over evangelical preaching at Kaufbeuren in early 1525, a debate overwhelmed by the Peasants’ War in April of that year. In a confusing turn of events, Sebastian and Barbara found themselves expelled from the city. The war ended, and in south Germany, after the war, frenzy for property followed, as princes and middling nobles tried to exploit the general disorder and recover losses or consolidate gains.7 Sebastian died. Barbara, now wid-

Social History 3 (1978): 234–64, reprinted in Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1988), 71–101. For the endurance of popular mentalities in the Reformation, see Robert Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the Disenchantment of the World,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–94, reprinted in Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 346–65. Consider also Michael D. Bailey, “The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 383–404. For both popular mentalities and the importance of social stratification as a context of religious culture, see Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4–15. 6 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45–49; Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung 10 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991), 31–108. Anger, hatred, and envy are passions provoked by the bad, and as such are reactions to perceptions of real or potential injury, a response to loss. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, prima secundae, questiones 25–48, Summa Theologica cura Fratrum eiusdem Ordinis, 5 vols. (Matriti: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962), 2:171–303. Juan Luis Vives, De anima et vita, iii.1, 13–15, The Passions of the Soul: the Third Book of De anima et vita, trans. Carlos G. Noreña (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 6–9, 66–83. 7 Thomas F. Sea, “Predatory Protectors? Conflict and Cooperation in the Suppression of the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1525,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39

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owed, soon found herself in a struggle to reclaim some country possessions occupied during the war by a kinsman and a knight of the abbot of Kempten, Ulrich Schweickart.8 Suspicions of Anabaptist heresy and rebellion had fallen on the couple, and Ulrich now tried to exploit these. He tried to undermine Barbara’s legal claims with accusations of Anabaptism. Eventually she fended him off in a long procedure that dragged on to 1536. Through it all, in spite of her association with the early Reformation, Barbara seems to have displayed no particular allegiance to any of the galvanizing religious parties, and she abjured Anabaptism. Clearly, her property interests dictated that she remain on the confessionally correct side of the law. She re-positioned herself as a bystander to the religious debate, resisting the polarizing effect of confessional argument. Or consider Anna Hirschvogel, who displays a similar stake in neutrality—that is, in simply remaining Catholic. A century after the Reformation, Anna was remembered as part of the Protestant vanguard, Nuremberg’s first nun to marry upon the city council’s declaration in 1524 that occupants of monasteries were free to return to the world.9 The facts suggest something less than conversion. Anna, whose

(2008): 110. Hillay Zmora, State and Nobility in Early Modern Germany: The Knightly Feud in Franconia, 1440–1567 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 105–7. Govind Sreenivasan, The Peasants of Ottobeuren, 1487–1726 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27–30. 8 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Reichskammergericht, 12 vols. to date, ed. B. Gebhardt, M. Horner, et al. (Munich: Generaldirektion der staatlichen Archive Bayerns, 1994– present), 9:432–33 no. 3698, hereafter cited as BHR. Ulrich had been expanding his holdings for some time before the war. Staatsarchiv Augsburg Fürststift Kempten Archiv, 2 vols., ed. Gerhard Immler, Bayerische Archivinventare, 51 (Munich: Staatliche Archive Bayerns, 2002), 1:376 no. 2298; 2:827 no. 5052. Some of his gains, however, were soon absorbed by the abbot of Kempten’s territorial consolidation. Peter Blickle, Kempten, Historischer Atlas von Bayern, 6 (Munich: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1968), 130. For Sebastian von Fuchstein, see Thomas Pfundner, “Das Memminger und Kaufbeurer Religionsgespräch von 1525,” Memminger Geschichtsblätter (1991–1992): 28–29, 43. Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 138; Franz Ludwig Bauman, Die zwölf Artikel der oberschwäbischen Bauern 1525 (Kempten: Joseph Kösel, 1896), 31 with footnote 2; and Wilhelm Vogt, Die bayerische Politik im Bauernkrieg und der Kanzler Dr. Leonhard von Eck (Nördlingen: C.H. Beck, 1883), 102–8. 9 Christa Schaper, Die Hirschvogel von Nürnberg und ihr Handelshaus (Nuremberg: Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1973), esp. 141–44. Barbara Steinke, Paradiesgarten oder Gefängnis? Das Nürnberger Katharinenkloster zwischen Klosterreform und Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 263–64.BHR, 10:124–26, no. 3998.

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family operated a prominent Nuremberg trading company, struggled for years to regain a share of the family inheritance. A sister disputed the claim by challenging the legitimacy of Anna’s violation of monastic vows. Anna’s right to leave the cloister and take a share of family property was unsurprisingly supported by Lutheran Nuremberg’s city court in 1527, but also by two papal commissions in 1530 and 1538—in spite of the testimony of Anna’s former abbess against her! Such was the environment of a person’s Reformation losses. Upon close inspection, the relevance of confessional lines recedes, even in what was, after all, a classic “Reformation” event—a nun’s abandonment of her cloister. An individual’s property interests could often dictate that one avoid being identified with the evangelical movement, even if the course of one’s life was forever changed when a city council began to champion its Lutheran preachers. If we approach the Reformation from the bystander’s vantage, the importance of showcase examples of conversion or resistance to evangelical preaching recedes. Lutheran converts, such as the Duchess Ursula von Münsterberg and Florentina von Oberweimar, and resistant Catholics, such as the humanist abbess Caritas Pirckheimer, were showcase examples in a debate that theologians worked hard to frame in sharp contrasts, in two faiths, old and new.10 Anna and Barbara by contrast point us to those countless people who were affected by the religious controversy but not committed to it. They lived in an undulating religious landscape that was nevertheless still Catholic by default. In Luther’s world, there were town councils that seem to have embraced Protestantism as an afterthought, having previously seen no conflict between Catholic faith and their efforts to control a

10 For the success or limitations of reform as a reflection of princely influence over a region’s aristocracy, see Antje Rüttgardt, Klosteraustritte in der frühen Reformation. Studien zu Flugschriften der Jahre 1522 bis 1524 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007), 49–57, 256–328, who notes the particular concern these women had to restore their honor, in response to defamation after leaving their cloisters; Caritas Pirckheimer: A Journal of the Reformation Years, 1524–1528, trans. Paul A. MacKenzie (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006); and Barbara Henze, “Orden und ihre Klöster in der Umbruchszeit der Konfessionalisierung,” in Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession 1500–1650, 7 vols., ed. Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler (Münster: Aschendorf, 1991–6), 4:97, with n41, and 91–92. For theologians shaping the religious controversy in polarized terms, see Thomas Fuchs, Konfession und Gespräch. Typologie und Funktion der Religionsgespräche in der Reformationszeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995).

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local preaching benefice (e.g., Schweinfurt).11 There were evangelical churches consolidated as much by opportunity as by plan, for example, the one created in Schwabach. When monks fled the Cistercian monastery of Ebrach during the Peasants’ War, some came to Schwabach, occupied monastery properties in town, and took wives. They and the town council successfully resisted the abbot of Ebrach’s attempts to reclaim town and parish.12 There were Cistercian monasteries that gradually slipped into Lutheranism, but still identified with the Order long after their technical “conversion” (e.g., Heilsbronn, Wienhausen).13 There were church buildings shared by Protestants and Catholics (in Thurgau villages, in Churwalden, Bielefeld, Herford, Minden, Möckmühl, Soest, Wetzlar, Wismar).14 In Reformation Germany’s most conclusive territorial conversion, the duchy of Württemberg, the process of reform had hardly begun, when the new preachers sank into sacramental and liturgical wrangling, because a significant party of south German preachers believed Lutherans remained disastrously 11 Monika Meißner, “Valentin Engelhardt und seine Spitalstiftung in Geldersheim,” Mainfränkisches Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kunst 20 (1968): 1–190, esp. 38–42, 150–51. BHR, 10:71–72 no. 3949. BHR, 8:80–81 no. 2762; 8:80–81 no. 2767. 12 Adelhard Kaspar, Chronik der Abtei Ebrach (Münsterschwarzach: Vier-TürmeVerlag, 1971), 109–42. Hans Zeiss, “Reichsunmittelbarkeit und Schutzverhältnisse der Zisterzienserabtei Ebrach vom 12. bis 16. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., Munich, LudwigMaximillians-Universität, 1926), 83–86. Hildegard Weiss, Die Zisterzienserabtei Ebrach. Eine Untersuchung zur Grundherrschaft, Gerichtsherrschaft und Dorfgemeinde im fränkischen Raum (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1962), 11, 12, 20, 84–85. Lutheran preachers had been active in the town since autumn 1523, and the Schwabach council had already created a common chest from parish incomes. C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–13. 13 Manfred Sitzmann, Mönchtum und Reformation. Zur Geschichte monastischer Institutionen in protestantischen Territorien (Brandenburg-Ansbach/Kulmbach, Magdeburg) (Neustadt a.d. Aisch: Degener, 1999), 80–170. Wolgang Brandis, “Quellen zur Reformationsgeschichte der Lüneburger Frauenklöster,” Studien und Texte zur literarischen und materiellen Kultur der Frauenklöster im späten Mittelalter, ed. Falk Eisermann, Eva Schlotheuber, and Volker Honemann (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 357–98. 14 Randolph C. Head, “Fragmented Dominion, Fragmented Churches: the Institutionalization of the Landfrieden in the Thurgau, 1531–1610,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 96 (2005): 126–34; Tom Scott, Town, Country, and Regions in Reformation Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 62–63; Alfred Wendehorst and Stefan Benz, Verzeichnis der Säkularkanonikerstifte der Reichskirche (Neudstadt an der Aisch: Degener, 1997), s.v. Bielefeld, Herford, Minden, Möckmühl, Soest, Wetzlar; and Ingo Ulpts, Die Bettelorden in Mecklenburg. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Franziskaner, Klarissen, Dominikaner und Augustiner-Eremiten im Mittelalter (Werl: Dietrich-Coelde-Verlag, 1995), 340–45. Additional examples can be found in Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 204–7.

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close to the Catholic past, and their proximity to the old liturgy cast an uncertain pallor over this, the best of territorial Reformations.15 Others worried that Duke Ulrich’s confiscations set precedents that would deprive evangelical churches of material resources.16 Theologians of the new faith defended their reforms and the losses imposed on priests and monasteries by Protestant reallocations of Catholic assets in traditional terms, as the protection of true religion rather than as a departure from traditional norms.17 While many monasteries endured devastating losses, it was still possible at this time for another monastery’s assets to grow.18 A territory’s response to the new preaching was sometimes stymied by the competition of confessionally opposed co-regents (e.g., Mecklenburg).19 Furthermore, most Protestant city councils failed to gain complete control over all the churches in their territories, hindered as they were by social networks of Catholic patrons, ecclesiastical princes, and the many compromises to sovereignty with which every type of ruler lived.20 If space permitted, it would be easy 15 Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambrosius und Thomas Blauerer 1509–1548, ed. Traugott Schieß, 3 vols. (Freiburg: Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld, 1908–12), 1:655 no. 535, 1:280 no. 227 with note 1. Hermann Ehmer, “Jacob Otter,” Bibliographisch-Biographisches Kirchenlexikon (Herzberg: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 1993) 6:1344–45. http://www.bautz .de/bbkl/o/otter_j.shtml (accessed December 2, 2009). Brecht and Ehmer, Südwestdeutsche Reformationsgeschichte, 206–8, and for Otter and Geiler, ibid., 94. 16 Consider the appeal of clergy to the estates of the Protestant League meeting at Schmalkalden in February 1537, Melanchthons Briefwechsel, 12 vols. of registers and 9 vols. of texts published to date (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977–2008), 2:297–98 no. 1853. The clergy’s concern was repeated at several of the League’s meetings over the next years, leading to a common policy statement on church property, which in turn influenced the position taken by the League and its theologians in the imperial negotiations that culminated in a suspension of the Imperial Chamber Court in 1543/1544. Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525– 1547 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 183, 203, 204, 213–37. 17 Ocker, Church Robbers, 173–257. 18 Gudrun Gleba, “ ‘Wy’ und ‘yck’. Monastisches Selbstverständnis zwischen kollektiver und individueller Identität. Beispiele aus westfälischem Schriftgut des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Kommunikation mit dem Ich. Signaturen der Selbstzeugnisforschung an europäischen Beispielen des 12. bis 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann and Pierre Monnet (Bochum: Dieter Winckler, 2004), 152, 159–60. 19 Ulpts, Die Bettelorden in Mecklenburg, 340–50. 20 For example, Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Main, Ulm, Augsburg, Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Hamburg, Miltenberg, Würzburg, Bamberg, Salzburg, Trier, Freising, Passau. Die Territorien des Reichs, 1:37, 40. Gunter Zimmermann, Prediger der Freiheit. Andreas Osiander und der Nürnberger Rat 1522–1548 (Mannheim: Palatium, 1999), 146–47. Henze, “Orden und ihre Klöster in der Umbruchszeit der Konfessionalisierung,” Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation, 4:43–46, 7:91, 94, 106–9; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 242–43; Eike Wolgast, “Die Unterdrückung der reformatorischen

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to expand upon the grounds for religious uncertainty. The new faith could easily look tenuous. This condition required partisans to stress the absolute terms of their theological convictions. In short, in the 1530s, the religious controversy was clearly unresolved, and the evangelical movements, if considered as a whole by a bystander, simply had no sure future. The dynamics of conflict, the uncertainties of this changing cultural landscape, rather than particular Protestant triumphs and particular Catholic losses, may offer the best evidence for an experience of loss in Luther’s Germany. Those who took refuge in the certainties of emerging Catholic and Protestant orthodoxies saw the controversy in terms of their own spiritual gains. But those who resisted the controversy’s polarizing effect found themselves in an increasingly unstable ideological position. Consider the case of the following Passau canon. Third Germans Ruprecht von Mosheim was an Austrian nobleman and a counselor of Archduke Ferdinand who lived at court in Vienna for the first five years of the religious controversy (1517–22). He was a canon of Passau’s cathedral, became the cathedral’s dean (1522–39), and was a humanist. An acquaintance of Erasmus and Willibald Pirckheimer, he published the first translation of Phemon’s manual of canine husbandry, the Kynosophion, which included his own “Encomium canis,” “In Praise of the Dog,” in defense of his own beloved kennel (his hounds followed him everywhere in Passau, including to church, to the disgust of his peers).21 He, furthermore, wrote a preface for the humanist Bewegung in der kurmainzischen Amtsstadt Miltenberg,” Zwischen Konflikt und Kooperation. Religiöse Gemeinschaften in Stadt und Erzstift Mainz in Spätmittelalter und Neuzeit, ed. Irene Dingel and Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2006), 123–40; Franz Schrader, Reformation und katholische Klöster: Beiträge zur Reformation und zur Geschichte der klösterlichen Restbestände in den ehemaligen Bistümern Magdeburg und Halberstadt (Leipzig: St. Benno-Verlag, 1973), 85–138, 164–222; Rainer Postel, Die Reformation in Hamburg 1517–1528 (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1986), 89–122, 251–317; Ziegler, “Klosteraufhebung und Reformation,” 605–6. Hans-Christoph Rublack, Gescheiterte Reformation (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978); and Paul Roth, Durchbruch und Festsetzung der Reformation in Basel (Basel: Helbing and Lichtenhah, 1942), 71–79. 21 Kynosophion ac opusculum Phemonis, de cura et conservatione canum, per nobilem et excellentissimum virum. D. Rudbertum a Mosham . . . Canis encomium: seu de canum laudibus per eundem declamatio. 2 parts (Vienna: Johannes Singrenium,

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Johannes Philonius Dugo’s Christian Institutes (1538), published two years after John Calvin first published his Institutio religionis christianae.22 Thanks to Ferdinand’s nominations (they continued until 1537), Mosheim enjoyed, or tried to enjoy, incomes from a half-dozen or so Austrian benefices.23 He was part of Ferdinand’s entourage at the coronation of Charles V at Aachen in 1519 and part of Ferdinand’s entourage at the imperial diets of Augsburg and Regensburg in 1530 and 1532.24 He was with Ferdinand again in Vienna and Bohemia in 1537, along with the papal nuncio, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, bishop of Modena, and Johannes Fabri, bishop of Vienna, where he witnessed negotiations with Bohemian Utraquists in preparation for the general church council summoned for Mantua.25 Mosheim was, in short, an important man, with direct experience of complex religious negotiation at an extremely high level, and he had far better access to the stratosphere of imperial society than most if not all Protestant theologians. Back in 1532, after the Diet of Regensburg, Mosheim had pondered the troubles of Christendom. He came to realize “what the chief matter really was, that we as Christians and believers are split and divided in the Christian churches in so many kinds of sects, whereby we, who should be one corpus as though in one big body, are pitifully and

1535). Max Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim, Domdekan zu Passau,” Riezler Festschrift, ed. Karl Alexander von Müller (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1913), 116–21. Iohannes Christophorus Harenbergius, “Rupertus de Mosham, ambitiosus ecclesiae Christianae seculo xvi. infelix tamen, Reformator, descriptus et delineatus,” Symbolae Litterariae Haganae ad incrementum scientiarum omne genus, ed. Nicolaus Barkey (Hagae-Comitum: I.H. Munnikhuizen et C. Plaat, 1778), classis primae, fasciculus secundus, no. 4, 383–457. Athina Lexutt, “Ruprecht von Mosheim—Der Domdechant von der traurigen Gestalt. Ein Beitrag zur Ökumene im Jahr der ‘Kölner Reformation,’ ” in Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 64 (1993), 105–18. 22 Johannes Philonius Dugo, Libri christianarum institutionum quatuor, in quibus ad mores Christi et homine Christiano dignos, pacemque, et unitatem ecclesiae eleganter . . . vocantur summi et infimi (Augsburg: Alexander Weissenhorn, 1538). For Calvin in these years, see Christopher Ocker, “Calvin in Germany,” Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations. Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., ed. Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 313–44. 23 Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 122–23, 126. 24 Ibid., 118. 25 Ibid., 124. Winfried Eberhard, Monarchie und Widerstand. Zur ständischen Oppositionsbildung im Herrschaftssystem Ferdinands I. in Böhmen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985), 218–33.

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wretchedly fallen apart, broken, and torn. . . .”26 He then chose the part of physician, to heal “the land and people of both majesties of the Holy Roman Empire [Ferdinand and Charles V], indeed, the entire German nation,” by finding “the medicine against such a malady . . . in holy scripture, the books of heavenly divine medicine.” He studied the books of Moses, the prophets, four books of Kings, the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the epistles, praying that he might learn the truth about Christianity and then put it to good use for Ferdinand and Charles. And, he said, “at last my prayer was heard, praise be to God!”27 It happened that in this year of 1532 Duke Ernst of Bavaria, administrator of the see of Passau, briefly considered appointing a coadjutor alongside himself, and the cathedral chapter named Mosheim as its top candidate. Had Ernst not abandoned this plan, Mosheim would likely have fallen in line to become prince-bishop. That never happened, but, in anticipation, the dean did get ordained as deacon, then priest, and he worked for five years as cathedral preacher (1534–39).28 He became, by his own reckoning, a much more spiritual man. Soon,

26 “Ich hab von der zeit des jungsten gehaltenen reichstag zu Regensburg . . . offt vnd vil gedacht, woher doch das hoch verderblich vbel khome vnd was doch die recht haubt vrsach sey, das wir als die Christen vnd glaubigen . . . in souil manigerley secten, zerspaltung und zwitracht in der Christenlichen kirchen, darinnen wir, als wie in ainem grossen Leib, ain Corpus sein solten, dermassen erbärmcklich vnd jamerlich von einander zerfallen, zerthailt vnd zertrent sein, vnd wiewol aines ainigen vbels oder guten, aines ainigen dings alzeit meer vrsachen sein vnd angetzeigt werden mögen, so hat doch alzeit ain iedlichs vbel oder guts ain ainig ding, ain ainige haubtvrsach, daran vnd dauon die andern alle hangen vnd herkomen. Derhalben hab ich nicht anderst, sondern gleich wie ain geschickter vnd fleissiger artzt, im faal ainer hochgefärlichen aines grossen herrn vnd khünigs kranckhait zethun pflegt, gethon, die recht haubt vrsach diser allerhöchsten, verderblichsten, schedlichsten kranckhait vnd vbels meines herrn vnd khünigs vnd zuuor der Röm. Kay. Maiestät vnd irer baider Maiestat land vnd leut, des heiligen Römischen Reichs, ia der gantzen teutschen nation als meines geliebten Vatterlands mit hohem grossem vleis gesucht, ingedenck vnd wol wissend, wo die recht haubt vrsach sambt dem rechten namen diser aller geferlichsten kranckhait ergründet vnd gefunden wurde, das alssdann die ertzney wider solches vbel leichtlich aus der heilig geschrifft gleich als den büchern der himlischen göttlichen ertzney zu finden were.” Ruprecht von Mosheim, Microsynodus Moguntina: Das klain Particular Meyntzisch Concili, so mit dem . . . Churfürsten . . . von Meyntz . . . in der Religion und glaubens sachen . . . gehalten . . . worden, zu Aschaffenburg, Anno 1539 (1539), preface to the reader, and cited from Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 126–27. 27 “Also bin ich doch zuletzt, Gott sey hochgelobt, erhört worden.” Ruprecht von Mosheim, Microsynodus, preface to the reader, cited from Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 127. 28 Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 128.

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the canons noticed unusual doctrines in Mosheim’s sermons, and they observed the pulpiteer’s growing popularity. Mosheim had been studying the Bible. He considered himself an impartial judge of the papal, Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Anabaptist debates of the last twenty years.29 Like other better-known scholars offering fresh perspectives on scripture in this remarkable decade, scholars who self-consciously positioned themselves between Rome and Wittenberg (such as Michael Servetus, Sebastian Franck, and Caspar Schwenckfeld), Mosheim arrived at an original doctrine.30 He was even-handedly critical. He faulted Lutherans for their distinction between law and gospel, for their renunciation of obedience to commandments, and for denying the conditions intrinsic to the covenant of grace. He faulted the Roman church for its corrupt clergy, for withholding the cup from the laity in communion, and for the market of masses, anniversaries, relics, and other pollutions of the Lord’s Supper. In place of both Lutheran and Catholic alternatives, he offered a somewhat esoteric concept of faith, involving coordinated divine and human trinities, which he called “unitrinities,” and a twelve-step process to full belief.31 Declaring Martin Luther and the papacy to be antichrists, while emphasizing the threat posed by the Turks to Christendom’s survival, his doctrine had a certain prophetic and apocalyptic glow.32 He wrote it all down in two books and began looking for a publisher.

29

Ibid., 153, presumably quoting the preface to Microsynodus Moguntina. To adapt Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Geneve. Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVI e siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 1997). 31 Faith, Mosheim argued, involves a trinity that parallels the Trinity in heaven, namely a trinity of faith, word, and love, to which there corresponds a three-fold knowledge of God: through nature, through the law of Moses and the prophets, and through revelation of the gospels. Through these three sources of faith, a person passes through twelve stages of awareness, such that one sees that (1) a person is unable to come to faith by nature, (2) but the power of faith comes from God through Christ, (3) which can only be obtained through the word of the law, (4) so the main purpose of the law is that there should only be one faith. One may then attain (5) knowledge of God’s omnipotence, (6) righteousness, (7) truth, (8) mercy; (9) through fear, (10) through love, (11) through imitation, and (12) through consolation. This, Mosheim believed, is the sum total of faith. Unbelief is the original sin. He thought this doctrine should be accepted by a general council, a megasynodus, or at least by a microsynodus, and, he explained, each and every individual should accept the doctrine on his or her own three altars (which exist as a kind of bodily trinity in a person as ratio, intellectus, and voluntas), and thereby bring a pure offering to the divine Trinity (Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 50–53). 32 For example, Martin Frecht wrote to Ulm, 13 October 1539, with a report of Ruprecht von Mosheim that he received from Venatorius in Nuremberg. This report 30

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In 1537, Mosheim presented his reform plans to Ferdinand for the first time, in three audiences at Vienna and Prague. In the last audience, the dean attacked Luther’s doctrine, which was fine with Ferdinand, but then he turned to the pope.33 Ferdinand abruptly silenced and dismissed him. But Mosheim remained at court, and in Vienna he discussed his reform plan with the papal nuncio, Cardinal Morone. In these encounters, Morone quickly formed a favorable opinion of the dean, recommending to the pope that Mosheim, “learned man and good preacher thought worthy of a favorable answer,” receive a vacant benefice.34 By fall, after returning to Vienna from Prague and after dialogue with the dean over an eight-day period, Morone forwarded letters from Mosheim to the pope and to Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, in which Mosheim now asked to contribute to the papal resolution of the religious controversy.35 The nuncio had suspected that Mosheim might be “somewhat Lutheran” (alquanto Lutherano), but he recommended Mosheim to the pope as a participant in the council. The pope even issued Mosheim an invitation to Rome, but Mosheim lacked the money to travel there.36 Many prince-bishops were relatively neutral about the religious controversy in the 1530s, and other princes, for example, of the Palatinate, Electoral Brandenburg, Cleves-Jülich-Berg, and Cologne, explored reforms that skirted the unresolved Luther affair.37 This was, after all, a time of both conciliatory ideas and galvanized opinions. A general church council was summoned for Mantua, and Contarini’s commission published its Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (Advice for Correcting the Church), while a flurry of pamphlets rebutted and

included Mosheim’s allegation that the pope and Luther are two antichrists, who, if they would accept Mosheim as a divine prophet, could be reunited. Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambrosius und Thomas Blauerer, 2:37–38, no. 853. 33 By Mosheim’s account in his Microsynodus Norinbergensis (Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 133–34). 34 “. . . huomo dotto et bono predicatore et riputato degno d’essere gratificato.” In May, Morone forwarded to Rome (together with the printed version of the Protestants’ answer to the summons of a general council to convene at Mantua) a petition from Ferdinand asking the pope to give a vacant benefice to Mosheim, making the quoted observation. Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst ergänzenden Actenstücken, (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1892–2004), 1/2:155–59 no. 38, here 158. 35 Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland, 1/2:229–230 no. 66 with note 1. 36 Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 135; by Mosheim’s own account in the Microsynodus Norimbergensis. 37 Albrecht Pius Luttenberger, Glaubenseinheit und Reichsfriede. Konzeptionen und Wege konfessionsneutraler Reichspolitik 1530–1552 (Kurpfalz, Jülich, Kurbrandenburg) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1982), 140 and passim.

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defended this work and the authority of papal councils.38 Mosheim had reason to believe his time had come. Johannes Eck later marveled that Mosheim, “this new Lutheran,” dared to write to the pope, and he warned the papal nuncio Girolamo Aleander against him.39 But the council of Mantua never took place. In 1538, Duke Ernst, administrator of Passau, entrusted Mosheim with an important commission. He was to preach to sixty Anabaptists— men, women, and children—who were languishing in the bishop’s Passau prison. Refugees from persecution in southwest Germany in 1527, they had found asylum in Moravia but were uprooted again in 1535.40 They migrated west and drifted into Habsburg territory on the Danubian border of Bavaria, where they were captured in five small migrating groups and imprisoned in the bishop of Passau’s castle.41 These exiles were Anabaptists in the strictest, simplest sense: well before torture was applied, most admitted they had been re-baptized before they ever fled Germany.42 In prison, they comforted each other by composing and singing hymns, including at least one hymn written collectively by multiple authors.43 A hymn by Michael Schneider, one of the prisoners’ leaders, pleads for God’s help against the seductive dean of Passau, who lured the prisoners with promises to restore them to their families and their properties if they would recant.44 Mosheim converted another of the leaders, Michel Yetelhauser, a tailor from

38

Friedrich Lauchert, Die italienischen literarischen Gegner Luthers (1912; repr. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1972), 400–403. 39 Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland, 1/4:588–89. 40 For this and the following, see Rudolf Wolkan, Die Lieder der Wiedertäufer. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen und niederländischen Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903), 27–33. 41 The arrests took place on 14 August, 23 August, 14 September (two incidents), and 24 September. Wolkan, Die Lieder, 28–32. 42 They are often referred to as Philippites, because several confessed to having been baptized by Philip Plener of Strasbourg, leader of Anabaptist refugees at Auspitz in Moravia. 43 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 210–11. The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund: Some Beautiful Christian Songs Composed and Sung in the Prison at Passau, Published in 1564, trans. Robert A. Riall, ed. Galen A. Peters (Kitchener: Pandora Press, 2003), 179–85 for the hymn, and 19–20 for the imprisonment. John S. Oyer, “Michael Schneider: Anabaptist Leader, Hymnist, Recanter,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 65 (1991): 256–86 (with note 70 for this particular hymn). 44 John S. Oyer, “Nicodemites among Württemberg Anabaptists”, Mennonite Quarterly Review 71 (1997): 487–514; The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund, 144–50.

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Weil in Württemberg, and two brothers, Dietrich and Hans Beck.45 All three became Mosheim’s disciples. But Mosheim’s cathedral canons turned against him. So, too, did Duke Ernst of Bavaria, who silenced the cathedral preacher in early 1539. That summer, the Ingolstadt professor Johannes Eck spread word of Mosheim, “who destroyed the Passau chapter” (qui capitulum destruit Pataviense), and of the danger he posed to Bavaria.46 Eck worried that the Passau dean would help the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse establish a Protestant beachhead deep in Bavarian territory.47 As the pressure mounted against him, Mosheim fled in early September 1539. His condemnation soon followed. Eck, acting as papal inquisitor, felled “that grand Goliath von Mosheim,” as he later called him, with ecclesiastical censure, deposing him, in absentia, from the dean’s office on October 30, 1539.48 But Mosheim was then beginning the most remarkable phase of his career. Over the next two-and-a-half years, he, and for most of it, his converted Anabaptists, two other disciples, and their five horses traveled: first to Nuremberg (September–October 1539), then Heidelberg (late October), Aschaffenburg (residence of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, November-December), Trier (December–January 1540), Cologne (January–June), Hagenau (June–July, during the religious colloquy), and possibly Strasbourg (anytime from August to October);49

45

Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 137. Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland 1/4:588–89 no. 70 with note 3. 47 Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 130, 138–47. 48 Eck to Johann Fabri, 4 December 1539, calling Ruprecht “Goliath illum superbum a Moshaim,” and reporting Mosheim’s disputations in Nuremberg and visits to the Palatine Elector and the archbishop of Mainz. Walter Friedensburg, “Beiträge zum Briefwechsel der katholischen Gelehrten Deutschlands im Reformationszeitalter, 5. Dr. Johannes Eck,“ Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 19(1899): 211–64, here 237–39. The same letter (at Friedensburg, “Beiträge,” 238) corrects Heuwieser, noting that Mosheim had an audience with the Palatine Elector. 49 Jean Sturm, Quarti antipappi tres partes priores (Neustadt: Matthaeus Harnisch, 1580), 20–21 suggest a Strasbourg sojourn at this time and a disputation with John Calvin. See Ocker in note 22 above. The Strasbourg council, in response to information from Jakob Sturm at the religious colloquy of Hagenau in summer 1540, ordered Mosheim’s views to be investigated by theologians in the city before considering his request to publish his writings there. Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 173–74, citing Stardtarchiv Strasbourg, Ratsprotokoll xii, f. 266a, 12 July 1540. The archbishop of Mainz similarly gave Mosheim’s writings to Julius Pflug to be examined. Jacques V. Pollet, Martin Bucer. Études sur les relations de Bucer avec les Pays-Bas, l’Electorat de Cologne et l’Allemagne du Nord, avec de nombreux textes inédits, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 2:58n1, 61n2. 46

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Worms (November 1540–February 1541, during the religious colloquy), Pforzheim, Weil, Basel, Bern, and possibly Luzern; Zurich, Constance, Strasbourg (early July–early November at the latest), Speyer (early March 1542), and, finally, Vienna. In all but two of these places (Pforzheim and Weil), Mosheim approached princes and city councils with the same reform plan, reading from his manuscripts, asking for permission to publish, and insisting that “microsynods” be convened.50 The responses to his appeal ranged from savage rebuttal (e.g., Nuremberg) 51 to polite indulgence (the electoral archbishops, the rector and four deans of the University of Cologne).52 When Cardinal Morone’s secretary passed through Cologne on his way to the Habsburg 50

For Mosheim’s concept of a microsynod, see note 31 above. Andreas Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols. ed. G. Müller and G. Seebaß (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1975–88), 7:73–74 no. 252; 7:185–211 no. 255. 52 He was in Aschaffenburg with Albrecht of Brandenburg for seven weeks (November and early December 1539), then Trier with Johann III von Metzenhausen (late December to early January), then Brühl with Hermann von Wied (mid-January to March), after which he settled in Cologne until mid-June. By then, his two disciples Pangraz Braun and Johann Frey appear to have learned printing (they were the printers of 1541 and 1542 editions of Mosheim), and Mosheim’s reform and polemical writings first came into print (with only the year 1540 on their title pages) (Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 172). These included his response to the Nuremberg preachers, Monarchia atque monachismus fidei: quo Osiandrismus Norimbergensis et Antichristianismus in Lutherismo revelatur . . ., et unitrini verbi maiestas et unitas atque nomen Christi contra Antichristum defenditur. . . . (Cologne 1540); his version of the dialogue at Mainz, which he now presented as a microsynod, Microsynodus Moguntina: das klain Particular Meyntzisch Concili, so mit dem Hochwirdigsten Durchleuchtigsten Hochgebornen Churfürsten meinem gnedigsten Herren von Meyntz . . . unnd irer Churfürstlichen Genaden verordneten Rethen in der Religion und Glaubens Sachen durch die Leer und ettlich hochwichtig fürtrefflich Puncten und Artickl des ersten unnd letzten Buchs von der Monarchey unnd Widergeburt des christlichen Glaubens zugleich wider das Babstisch und Lutherisch Antichristenthumb beschriben (Cologne: Cervicornus, 1540); his main theological work, completed before leaving Passau, Hierusalem nova (1540); and a German translation of the same, Das neuw Hierusalem, So durch den Monarcheyschen microsynodunt von denn syben Chůrfürsten des heiligen Römischen Reichs, mit dem Wort der ainigkait, vnd der leere von der Monarchey vnnd widergeburt des Christlichen glaubens auffzubauwen vnnd widerzubringen ist (Cologne: Cervicornus, 1540). Before leaving Passau, he also wrote an Axiomata secundae disputationis Martini Luther that was published in his Microsynodus Norinbergensis (Cologne: Eleutherius 1541). Another text was attributed to Mosheim by Harenberg: Ware Abconterfeyung unnd vergleichung des Bapstumbs, mit andern grössesten, quoted by I. Chr. Harenbergii, “Apomnemoneuta de Ruperto a Mosheim.” Harenberg printed this “Apomnemeneuta” after the Epistola theologorum Norimbergensium ad D. Rupertum Mosham by Linck, Osiander, Vitus Theodorus, and Thomas Venator, in Museum Haganum Historico-Philologico-Theologicum, ed. Nicolaus Barkey, T. 2, Pars 1 (n.p.: I.H. Munnikhuizen et C. Plaat, 1777), 555–57. Heuwieser says that the Ware Abconterfeyung was written against the Council of Trent and must be dated after Mosheim’s death (Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 191). A copy of the 1509 edition (Venice) of Priscian’s works with Mosheim’s autograph notes can be 51

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court in early 1540, which was at the moment in Brussels, Mosheim handed him a petition for an audience with the Roman king and the emperor: “I am a middle man,” Mosheim said, “neither highest nor lowest, but mediating and middle. Through the middle, extremes are conjoined. . . . It’s fine for me to have a middle and mediating doctrine, which is not really mine, but Christ’s, who is the mediator between God and human beings.” He was, he said, “a third German,” sent by God to fix the damage Germans made in Germany and to restore religious peace.53 His mission was, in short, to repair Germany’s spiritual loss. Mosheim made his appeal to the most significant participants in the religious negotiations of the late 1530s and early 40s: Ferdinand of Austria, Albrecht von Brandenburg, Hermann von Wied, Friedrich Nausea, Johannes Cochlaeus, Johannes Eck, Jakob Sturm, Andreas Osiander, Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, possibly John Calvin, Ambrosius Blaurer, Martin Frecht, and more. No one embraced his doctrine. The Protestants circulated letters of warning, scorn, and condemnation. At Constance, Ambrosius Blaurer scolded Mosheim for causing doctrinal uncertainty and for defaming the pope and Luther, even though, Blaurer noted, he himself also disagreed with Luther— but that did not mean Luther ceased to be a man of God! Blaurer later wrote, “We pity the man [Mosheim] a lot and we pray as we are able that the Lord give him a good mind, when we consider the devout feeling in this man [pium in hoc viro pectus] and the not vulgar erudition conjoined to linguistic skill,” alluding to Mosheim’s Greek scholarship.54 By summer 1541, Mosheim was in Strasbourg, where he left the following impression on Bucer:

found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (call No.: Rosenthal 123). 53 “Sum persona media, neque summa neque infima, sed mediocris et media. Per media autem coniunguntur extrema . . . Me habere medium et mediatricem doctrinam, quae non mea, sed Christi, qui est mediator dei atque hominum, esse solet. Discordiarum in religione malum . . . plantavit Erasmus Roterodamus, rigavit Martinus Lutherus et princeps huius mundi satanas incrementum dedit.” He printed the letter of 24 February 1540 in the addendum to the Microsynodus Treverina, Kivr, quoted by Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 167. He makes a similar point in at least one of several letters to Ferdinand of Austria included in the same addendum, this one of 4 May 1540, Microsynodus Treverina Jivr. 54 Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambrosius und Thomas Blauerer, 2:83–85 no. 912: “Miseramur hominem valde et bonam illi mentem a domino quam possumus precamur, quando pium in hoc viro pectus et non vulgarem eruditionem cum linguarum peritia coniunctam animadvertimus.” Osiander’s judgment was much harsher: writing to

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christopher ocker Surely that Mosheim . . . is now taken unawares by Satan. For what is more grave and the very proper work of Satan than so horribly to blaspheme the true doctrine of Christ? But he does not lack the fear of the Lord, and I hope the Lord is about to rule over Satan, that [the devil] might leave him. At Nuremberg, Ulm, Worms with Philip [Melanchthon], and wherever he went in the last year—here, to Basel, and to Bern—he traveled and was known. How greatly I marvel that the brothers at Zurich wrote to him [claiming] that he agrees with them especially on the Eucharist, on which topic I heard him speak ferociously about Zwingli. I fear much, lest, while blasphemies against Luther may not displease them [at Zurich], he [Mosheim] might bring back blasphemies against Zwingli and them.55

In this manner, Mosheim’s more reluctant Protestant opponents traced his neutrality in the religious controversy to spiritual defect and the devil. He was, according to Bucer, Frecht, Blaurer, and Osiander, spiritually diseased. Moreover, the Swiss and south Germans knew that naming Luther as an antichrist alongside the pope threatened to undermine their efforts to neutralize Luther’s hostility to Zurich and its theological sympathizers. He complicated their efforts to consolidate the evangelical pole of Protestant-Catholic debate. The next imperial diet was to take place at Speyer. Albrecht von Brandenburg arranged for a meeting between Mosheim and Martin Bucer. Hermann von Wied, the archbishop of Cologne, with whom Bucer was negotiating a territorial Reformation, also called on Bucer

Spalatin, Osiander said Mosheim was deluded by Satan: “Jamdudum cogitas hominem insanire. Ego vero puto eum a Satana agitari, sed sic, ut tamen non morbo aliquot delyret, sed potius sicut Judas. Est enim satis loquax et facundus, etiam latina et graeca gustavit, sed praeter linguas nihil bonarum atrium tenet, et si non caveatur posset magnum excitare incendium” (Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 160). Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, 7:73–74 no. 252. 55 In a letter of 24 October 1541 sent with a translation of the Acta of the Regensburg colloquy, Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambrosius und Thomas, 2:89 no. 914, Bucer fears that Mosheim might encourage Luther to continue to attack Zwinglians: “Mosshaim ille certe, ut pie iudicas, a Satana nunc insciens detinetur. Quid enim gravius et magis proprium opus Satanae quam sic horrende blasphemare doctrinam Christi veram? Sed timore domini non vacat, et spero Satanae imperaturum dominum, ut eum relinquat. Eadem Nurenbergae, Ulmae, Wormatiae apud Philippum, et quotquot ibi errant, superior anno, hic, Basileae et Bernae egit et conatus est. Quo magis mirror Tigurinos fratres scribere eum ipsis recte consensisse et maxime de eucharistia, de qua re ego audivi illum admodum seve in Zvinglium loqui. Multum vereor, ne, cum illis blasphemiae in Lutherum non nimis displicuerint, ille aliquid remiserit de blasphemiis in Zvinglium et ipsos. Sed quicquid sit, qualem tu deprehendisti, talem se adhuc ubique praestitit, ut nobis fraters testate sunt, quicquid in eo mutationis Tiguri evenerit.”

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to meet with the dean, which Bucer did on March 7, 1542.56 Another imperial diet was announced for Nuremberg, and Mosheim rushed to Vienna to present yet another appeal to King Ferdinand. Suddenly his luck ran out. When he departed Vienna, Mosheim was captured by the Duke of Bavaria’s officer, brought to Passau, and put in the bishop’s prison. In April or May 1542, he died in the same prison where he had preached to Anabaptists four years earlier.57 So it was that a learned nobleman and middle-high cleric on the evangelical fringe campaigned for a different Reformation, against Lutheran and papal antichrists. He responded to a perceived spiritual loss created by the religious controversy. His doctrine was supposed to help the spiritual middle ground coalesce as its own movement and overwhelm the poles of religious debate. His career shows how unstable the ground between the poles of confessional debate had become. Greatly to Be Presumed Like other similarly inclined, learned men—Sebastian Franck, Michael Servetus, and the count Caspar von Schwenckfeld—Mosheim articulated a response to spiritual loss. One notices his access to city councils, the ecclesiastical electors, Ferdinand, urban and court theologians, and Cardinal Morone, and one notices that some theologians wanted to sympathize with him. But was Mosheim unique? Can a similar response to spiritual dilemmas created by the controversy over Luther and the papacy be found among less exceptional people? We usually think of Anabaptists as the evangelical fringe of the 1530s. But what was a German Anabaptist in this crucial decade?58 A Dutch member of a conventicle of re-baptized people, a German refugee living in Bohemia or Moravia, a migrant who escaped the debacle at Münster, or anyone suspected of similar sentiments and views? On the Catholic side, which had far more efficiently persecuted Anabaptists,

56 Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 186. Pollet, Martin Bucer, 2:58 no. 13, 2:60–62 no. 14. 57 Ibid., 189–90. 58 In 1540, they were calling Mosheim an Anabaptist at the imperial court. Mosheim sent a copy of the Nuremberg affidavit mentioned above to Ferdinand and Charles, together with one of his several requests to present his plan at the planned religious colloquy. From his Microsynodus Treverensa, addendum, cited by Heuwieser, “Ruprecht von Mosheim,” 168–69.

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the re-baptized were only more evidence of Protestant heresy.59 The Protestant clergy, following the example of Martin Luther, famously drew a connection between Anabaptists and rebellion. The connection was encouraged by the case of Thomas Müntzer in 1525 and confirmed by the revolution in Münster from 1534 to 1535. The allegation of rebellion allowed Protestant clergy to pressure temporal rulers to impose their new orthodoxy and to present themselves as “catholic” reformers, as opponents of rebellion, as mere supporters of church reform. Even Johannes Eck acknowledged at Hagenau in 1540 that both parties to the religious controversy agreed on the danger of Anabaptism.60 Accordingly, Anabaptists were by definition people who resisted the magnetic repulsion produced by the poles of religious controversy and its two emerging confessions. That is not the same thing as a radical vanguard.61 They were, like Ruprecht von Mosheim, “third Germans.” Consider this: In Hesse, a certain smith named Hen, who had been baptized as an adult in 1530 (he technically was an Anabaptist) and who had also participated in the Peasants’ War, considered himself in August 1533 neither Lutheran nor Anabaptist nor Catholic, but merely someone who wanted to hear true sermons.62 One can take him at his word. A certain Gerlach, pastor in the village of Wieseck next to Giessen, was seized fleeing from the home of Johann von Beilstein, a suspected Anabaptist. What did Gerlach know about the suspect? When questioned, Gerlach conceded that Beilstein could have been re-baptized, “because he had some doubts about scripture,” but the 59

G.R. Elton, “The Age of the Reformation,” The New Cambridge Modern History, ed. G.R. Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 130; Claus-Peter Clasen, The Anabaptists in South and Central Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Their Names, Occupations, Places of Residence and Dates of Conversion, 1525–1618 (Scotsdale, PA: Mennonite Quarterly Review, 1978), 5–11; Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 370–74. 60 Akten der deutschen Reichsreligionsgespräche im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Klaus Ganzer and Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000–), 1/2:1141 no. 399. 61 In the sense of John T. McNeill, Roland Bainton, or George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 1–21. 62 “Schmidt Hen sagt ja, er sei getauft vor dreien jarn, er ire sich aber weder Luterer noch teufer noch bepstler, sonder was er erken, das di warheit gepredigt wirdet, dahin woll er geen.” Franz, Urkundliche Quellen zur Hessischen Reformationsgeschichte 4:68 no. 28. See also the fine dissertation of Ellen Yutzy Glebe, “Anabaptists in their Hearts?: Religious Dissidence and the Reformation in the Landgraviate of Hesse,” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2008), 107–79, for this and the other intriguing cases I am about to discuss.

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interrogation revealed nothing insurgent about Gerlach himself, no knowledge of Anabaptist refugees from Münster, and awareness of just one definite Anabaptist sympathizer who, however, had not actually been re-baptized.63 Gerlach’s criticism of the church focused on its failure to withhold the sacrament from sinners and thus to exercise adequate church discipline. Similarly, Hermann Hundt, a dyer’s assistant captured in the same raid, was under suspicion because he was a recent émigré who had come a year earlier to Wieseck from Cologne where his Catholic wife and child remained. In fact, Hundt had endured a fifteen-week imprisonment in Cologne for his evangelical beliefs, but he had no connection with Anabaptists. In this particular investigation, the only explicitly unorthodox opinion came from a castellan named Matthis Lotz, who considered infant baptism, church, and sermons unessential.64 But Lotz had no connection, the investigation determined, with Münster or an organized underground. He was a free-thinker. Hermann Bastian, an Anabaptist teacher, admired “those whom one now calls ‘Anabaptists’ ” while intending “to avoid all people (be they Anabaptist, Lutheran, or Catholic) who behave contrary to the glory of God and brotherly love, against the secular authorities and the common peace.”65 The fear of insurrection seems to have produced Anabaptists more imagined than real. The Landgrave Philip in 1539, in instructions to a Hessian governor, noted that when his subjects in Dreihausen missed church frequently, it was “greatly to be presumed” (das sich starck zuvermuthen) that they were Anabaptist!66 However low the numbers of re-baptized sectarians may have been, there was “the potentially much wider appeal of their message.”67 The appeal was not the sect (or the putative sect) but the message of an “extreme piety,” in the sensible formulation of

63 “muge wol sein, das er etlichen zweivel in der schrift hab.” Franz, Urkundliche Quellen zur Hessischen Reformationsgeschichte 4:80–82 no. 35. 64 Ibid. 4:80–82 no. 35, here pages 81–82. 65 “. . . ich finde in dieser zeit kein volk, die der schrift, der liebe und der warheit gemessiger leben und nachvolgen dan eczliche, die man iczt widerteufer nent. . . . Aber das wil ich freiwillig geloben und halden: Ich will mich aller mentschen (sie sein widerteufersch, lautersch ader bäbstisch) meiden, die wider die ehre gottes und die liebe des nechsten, wider die oberkeit und einen gemeinen friede handeln und tun wulden.” Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 4:199 no. 67; Glebe, “Anabaptists in their Hearts?” 172–73 (Glebe’s translation). 66 Glebe, “Anabaptists in their Hearts?” 194, quoting Marburg, Hessische Staatsarchiv, Bestand 22a 1 no. 11. 67 Glebe, “Anabaptists in their Hearts?” 27 (see also 107–225).

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Ellen Yutzy Glebe’s recent dissertation that closely examines the prosecutions of Hessian Anabaptists in the 1530s.68 Accordingly, the many “Anabaptists” who, on the advice of Martin Bucer, were reintegrated into the Hessian church in 1538 could have been either putative or real. Their assimilation also helped to lay the groundwork for what David Mayes has called the “aconfessional” religion that characterized Hesse in the mid-sixteenth century and lingered on in Upper Hesse, if not elsewhere, to the middle of the seventeenth century.69 Assimilation was, in other words, less a product of the Landgrave’s unique brand of tolerance than a product of other things: the rhetorical nature of the charge of Anabaptism in the first place, the pious intentions of the accused, an absence of confessional identity among such religiously interested people, and the Landgrave’s pragmatic approach to religious peace among his subjects.70 The possibility of assimilation could be attributed to the relative confessional indifference of third Germans. Anabaptists were “ordinary” third Germans. Harmony Mosheim was a kind of humanist. Sebastian Franck, another humanist and exile, was an Erasmian reformer operating upon the Reformation’s stressed middle ground. Like Mosheim, Franck ranked Luther and the papacy together among the world’s antichrists and was condemned by theologians of the Schmalkald League in 1540.71 His was a “double-

68

Ibid., 27. David Mayes, Communal Christianity: The Life and Loss of a Peasant Vision in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 70–74, 207–68. 70 For social peace as an explanation for both the Landgrave’s persecution of Anabaptists and the tolerance displayed in 1538, see Ellen Yutzy Glebe, “Landgrave Philipp’s Dilemma: The Roots of Tolerance and the Desire for Protestant Unity,” Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations, 293–312 (see note 22 above). 71 R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Spiritualism: Schwenckfeld and Franck and their Early Modern Resonances,” in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 119–61, esp. 124–40. Patrick Hayden-Roy, The Inner Word and the Outer World: A Biography of Sebastian Franck (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 168–71. Patrick Hayden-Roy, “Sebastian Franck and the Reformation in Ulm: Heterodoxy, Tolerance and the Struggle for Reform,” Beiträge zum 500. Geburtstag von Sebastian Franck (1499–1542), ed. Siegfried Wollgast (Berlin: Weidler, 1999), 127–58. Corpus Reformatorum, 88 vols., ed. C.G. Bretschneider et al. (Halle: Schwetschke, 1835–1906), 3:983–86 no. 1945. Melanchthons Briefwechsel 3:41 no. 2396. Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften, ed. Cornelis Augustijn (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995), 9.1:80. Sebastian Franck, Chronica zeitbuch und Geschichtbibell von angebyn bis in dis gegen69

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world” where human warfare signified a far more damaging warfare in the soul and historical narrative gave evidence of spiritual loss.72 To dismiss people like Mosheim and Franck, as historians of theology often have, assumes a perspective from one or another confessional pole. But in fact these people stood closer to an uncertain middle ground, where many Christian humanists felt, and some resisted, the pressures of confessional polarization. The range of humanistic responses to the religious controversy in Germany has been documented by Erika Rummel. Some scholars tried to avoid the debate, for example, Willibald Pirckheimer and Beatus Rhenanus. Other scholars accommodated themselves to one party or the other, for example, Boniface Amerbach, Georg Witzel, or Urbanus Rhegius. Still other scholars were caught in between, for example, Sebastian Castellio and Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.73 Witzel, the former Lutheran who antagonized theologians on both sides of the religious controversy, and the Cologne theologian Joris Cassander would become leading advocates of religious peace in the 1550s and 60s.74 A number of “mediating” Catholic theologians stood in close proximity to these intellectuals, for example, the Franciscan cathedral preacher in Mainz, Johannes Wild; the contested bishop-elect of Naumburg, Julius Pflug; the Catholic teacher of the gymnasium illustrum in Protestant Dortmund, Jacob Schoepper; and the professor of

wertig MDXXXVI. iar verlengt, bound in two volumes (Ulm: J. Varnier, 1536). The third part comprises Franck’s Ketzerchronik, or Die drit Chronica der Bapst unnd Geystlichen Hae ndel von Petro biß auf Clementem den sibenden, des glaubens und allerley geystlichen, Kae tzereyen, oe rden Concilien und Bae psten, betreffende, and he discusses antichrists at Aa iij. For Franck’s conception of history, see Jean-Claude Colbus, La Chronique de Sébastien Franck (1499–1542): Vision de l’histoire et image de l’homme (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 89–91. Melchior Rinck, the Hessian Anabaptist, had already called Luther an antichrist in 1528. Günther Franz, Urkundliche Quellen zur Hessichen Reformationsgeschichte, 4 vols. (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1951–57), 4:4 no. 5. I am grateful to Ellen Yutzy Glebe for this reference. 72 McLaughlin, “Spiritualism,” 129–30. See Sebastian Franck, Das Kriegbüchlin des Friedes, trans. Siegfried Wollgast, Zur Friedensidee in der Reformationszeit. Texte von Erasmus, Paracelsus, Franck (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968), 63–272, esp. 101, for the natural human condition of peace. Sebastian Franck, Chronica zeitbuch und Geschichtbibell, Aa iiv–Aa iiir. 73 Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61–67, 95–101, 105–11. 74 Ibid., 138–49; Fuchs, Confession und Gespräch, 399–400. For Witzel’s career, humanism, and mediating views, see Barbara Henze, Aus Liebe zur Kirche Reform: Die Bemühungen Georg Witzels (1501–1573) um die Kircheneinheit (Münster: Aschendorff, 1995).

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the Benedictine cloister school at Zwiefalten, Bernhard Otto.75 Isidoro Chiari wrote An Exhortation to Harmony, to Those Who Dissent from the Common Sense of the Church, which circulated in Germany in 1538, and he praised Melanchthon’s Loci communes as doctrine easily acceptable to Catholics—a reminder to his German contemporaries that this “mediating theology” could be also found in Rome.76 Mediating Catholics like Chiari, Pflug, Witzel, Wild, and Otto accepted, very selectively, certain Protestant viewpoints, which suggests their doubts about the absolute juxtaposition of Catholic and Protestant doctrines, tacitly conceding, at least in some small part, a claim enshrined by Melanchthon in the Augsburg Confession that Protestants merely sought an evangelical reform of the Catholic Church.77 The pressures of confessional polarization were felt on the Catholic side, too, where religious losses should have been the most tangible. For example, Nikolaus Ellenbog, the son of a Memmingen physician, student of Hebrew and Greek, correspondent with Johannes Reuchlin and Willibald Pirckheimer, and master of novices in the Benedictine monastery at Ottobeuren, spoke admiringly of the mediatory Georg Witzel for his eloquence and writing against Luther, “a steel-hard and really untamable hammer of our day’s heretics.”78 But Johannes

75 For Wild, Pflug, and Schoepper, see the articles by Heribert Smolinsky, Thomas Berger, and Ursula Olschewski in Katholische Theologen der Reformationszeit, 6 vols., ed. Irwin Iserloh, Heribert Smolinsky, and Peter Walter (Münster: Aschendorf, 1984– 2004), 6: 12–32, 110–47. For Otto, see Auge, Stiftsbiographien, 303–7 no. 53. Christoph Nollau, “Theologie in Zwiefalten zwischen 1540 und 1551,” Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 90 (1990): 169–92. 76 Isidoro Chiari, Adhortatio ad concordiam, ed., trans., and commented by Marco Cavarzere, preface by Adriano Prosperi (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2008), 24; Lauchert, Die italienischen literarischen Gegner Luthers, 445–46, 449–50; Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 102–10; Elisabeth A. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 140–57 and 264–65. 77 Confessio Augustana, articles 7–8. Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche, 6th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), 61–62. 78 Ellenbog wrote an apocalyptic treatise against Martin Luther in 1539. Nikolaus Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, ed. Andreas Bigelmair and Friedrich Zoepfl (Münster: Aschendorf, 1938), lxxxvii–lxxxviii. He and Eck had corresponded with one another since 1515, when they shared reports about the New World and its inhabitants; they had known each other longer than that. Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, book ii, letter 93, 136–37 (22 October 1515). For the Eck-Ellenbog relationship, see also Sreenivasan, Peasants of Ottobeuren, 10–11, 14, 53. For Ellenbog’s praise of Witzel, Briefwechsel, book viii, letter 12, 397, to Kaspar Summer (1 May 1539). Witzel had married in 1523. Summer responded with his own praise of Witzel, noting that he had heard that Witzel did not celebrate mass while living with his wife (“in errore hoc factum [i.e.,

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Eck set him straight. Witzel, Eck in effect said, is spiritual junk.79 Ellenbog read Eck’s reply and then conceded, “you’ve painted the man in proper colors” (hominem tu propriis coloribus depinxisti), but surely, he added, Witzel’s writing against Luther was still good.80 This Benedictine was a somewhat casual Catholic. He knew his positions, but chose not to press them too far. So, too, he had a testy exchange with a Protestant friend, a young student in Strasbourg, Bartholomeus Wolfhard, between August 1540 and May 1541, about the religious colloquies. Bartholomeus lamented the disappointed expectations of Protestants for peace at the Colloquy of Hagenau (1540). Ellenbog complained about Lutheran evasions of restitution suits before the Imperial Chamber Court. But he also groped for points of agreement with his friend, and found none—until his last letter on this topic.81 Insisting on the rightness of the Catholic defense of church property (but Bartholomeus insisted too that Protestant confiscations defended church property better), Ellenbog turned and concluded, “the matter is loathsome. Let us take up another happier and more useful discussion, with which we might amuse ourselves by exchanged letters. It is not ours to settle such controversies. I love you for the gifts of your intelligence and again, I don’t doubt that I am dear to you. . . .”82 Bartholomeus agreed. On February 26, 1541, he wrote back; the matter was put aside. He asked how the building of Ellenbog’s bathhouse progressed.83 There were Protestants, like the French exile John Calvin, one of Bartholomeus Wolfhard’s teachers in Strasbourg, who worried that

married] neque, ut audio, celebrat missas, cum eam habeat”). Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, book viii, letter 13, 397 (5 May 1539). Writing to Eck to ask why Witzel had not mentioned the Dominican in his list of the day’s great theologians, Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, book viii, letter 14, 398 (10 June 1539). 79 Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, book viii, letter 22, 401–3: Eck enumerated ten points of error, which included Witzel’s arguments for reducing the numbers of benefices, masses, and degrees of ordination. 80 Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, book viii, letter 24, 403, Ellenbog’s answer to Eck (6 July 1539) and, for Eck’s reply (18 August 1539), book viii, letter 38, 422–23. 81 Harald Müller, Habit und Habitus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 244–93, and 264, 266, 275. Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, viii, letter 64, 421 (Wolfhard to Ellenbog), Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, book viii, letter 66, 422–423 (Ellenbog to Wolfhard). 82 Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, viii, letter 77, 430: “Materia est odiosa. Sumamus aliud argumentum iucundius et utilius, quo alternis nos literis oblectemus. Nostrum non est tantas componere lites. Amo te propter ingenii tui dotes et rursum me tibi esse charum non dubito. . . .” 83 Ellenbog, Briefwechsel, viii, letter 91, 436 (26 February 1541).

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Martin Bucer, evidently conciliatory before and during the religious colloquies, would lead Protestants into an evangelically murky middle ground.84 The same worry can be found among Catholics, like Johannes Eck or Cochlaeus, who were deeply suspicious of “mediating Catholic” theologians such as Wild or Witzel. Johann Menzinger, cathedral preacher in Mainz from 1536 to 1538, confronted a skeptical cathedral public and felt surrounded by enemies of the true faith. In Mainz, he explained, they don’t appreciate an eloquent and honest preacher, and evil neighbors are close at hand.85 Just up the Main, said Menzinger, Protestant Frankfurt is “entirely insane”; across the Rhine, the Protestant Landgrave is “raving mad”; and upriver Worms is “little by little falling rather short.” Menzinger was a partisan. They are easy to find. It was the job of theologians on both sides of the controversy to consign those on the middle ground into a heretical oblivion, to reestablish certainties around the poles of confessional debate, and to extinguish uncertainty. In so doing, they avoided feelings of loss. Evangelism In the absence of a clear sense of spiritual loss, one could ask whether people really perceived the world of the Reformation to be changing at all. If only some did, one should consider who felt the world to be changing, how, and why. I argued above that it would have been difficult in Luther’s generation to experience the religious controversy as a movement of conclusive religious change. The inevitable effects of the religious controversy—the complexity of church property disputes, the serendipity of conversion, and Protestant disagreements over rites— impeded a feeling of spiritual gain or loss in the broad, generalized terms that would indicate a particular consciousness of historical change. It was much easier to articulate the ideological poles of the religious controversy than to assess the losses and gains experienced on each side. For this reason, one may find examples of Catholic anxiety over Protestant disruptions in Luther’s Germany,86 but not evidence 84

Ocker, “Calvin in Germany,” 332, 338. Kilian Leibs Briefwechsel und Diarien, 27 (19 October 1537). 86 An eloquent example is provided by a more or less ordinary Catholic named Brother Göbel, a lay brother and steward of Böddeken, a cloister of Augustinian canons near Paderborn. Göbel traveled almost constantly, and his notebooks for 1502–43 provide an intimate, subjective view of the religious controversy as it swept through 85

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of feelings of loss. Still, most people affected by the religious controversy—first and foremost, clergy, then those laity especially interested in the affairs and properties of the church—are likely to have been uncommitted, or relatively uncommitted, to one or another side of it. From their vantage, the controversy itself created loss. The sermons and treatises of Protestant and Catholic preachers could have been the alembic that separated mixed feelings among these people into clear, confessional distillates, and no doubt they sometimes did. Confronted by the polarizing momentum of the controversy, religiously interested people occupying the middle ground were the most vulnerable. The success of the controversy came at their loss. This middle ground is perhaps best known as an “Erasmian” position. But at its widest, it included Mosheim’s “third Germans,” Spiritualists” like Sebastian Franck, advocates of extreme piety (those accused of Anabaptism), humanists, and/or mediating Catholics—in short, anyone affected by the religious controversy who did not “buy into” designations reflecting a growing Catholic-Protestant polarization. The state of affairs may perhaps best be described by the term Lucien Febvre used for a concurrent religious flux among humanists in France: an “evangelism,” which in Germany, as in France, was destined to succumb to the dynamics of conflict, or what Erika Rummel has more recently described as the “confessionalization of humanism” in Germany.87 This was not simply a matter of oppressing skeptics who pursued the studia humaniora. It was a broader effect of escalating religious conflict and the growing solidarity of partisans who worked to mobilize opinion to a group’s advantage, while eliminating neutrality and the possibility of mediation. To these partisan theologians the parameters of debate in the religious controversy were firm by the conclusion of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. Parameters were defined by the specific doctrines in dispute, by the princely expectation that a national venue could resolve the controversy, and by the intractability

central Germany from 1524 to 1543. Die Chronik Bruder Göbels. Aufzeichnungen eines Laienbruders aus dem Kloster Böddeken 1502 bis 1543 (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2006), 217–18, 225–26, 231, 233, 234, 235, 242–43, 246, 251–52, 260, 267, 271–72, 277, 284, 287, 291–92, 304, 321–22, 327, 346–47, 369–73, 276–77, 382–403, 454, 456. 87 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 307–33. For the beginning of this process in the 1520s, see Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism, 75–149.

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of disagreements over the definition and resolution of “religious abuses.”88 Once the parameters had been set, it was time for each party to try to win. In Germany, neither side ever did. It has become common to think of the German Reformation as a construction project, whereby Catholic and Protestant churches, states, and cultural identities were built-up out of fifteenth-century trends, boosted by the religious controversy, eventually completed in confessional states; or built-up out of the matrix of anti-clerical resentments and the taming, domesticating reactions provoked by popular unrest.89 To think of the Reformation in this way allows the protagonists of the religious controversy to define something much broader than the debate over Luther and the papacy, namely, religious experience as such. But religious experience and belief had long been—and remained—far more dynamic, far less predictable, and not necessarily destined to be controlled. The ambivalence of spiritual loss during the religious controversy points us to a broad region of flux between the hardening poles of debate, where an escalating conflict threatened a large, unknown number of people trying to continue to live a spiritual status quo.

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Fuchs, Konfession und Gespräch, 363–88. In the senses of Heinz Schilling and Hans-Jürgen Goertz, respectively.

CHAPTER TEN

LOSS AND GAIN IN A SALZBURG CONVENT: TRIDENTINE REFORM, PRINCELY ABSOLUTISM, AND THE NUNS OF NONNBERG (1620 TO 1696) Barbara Lawatsch Melton In 1620, the Benedictine nuns of Nonnberg Abbey were confronted with a fresh initiative by Salzburg’s prince-archbishop urging them to complete the implementation of reforms based on provisions of the Council of Trent (1545–63).1 The abbey’s delay in fully complying with instructions communicated forty years earlier by the papal nuncio illustrates the convent’s resistance, a posture it shared with many others. But Nonnberg, like other convents, eventually complied and carried out the requisite measures, including the architectural changes necessitated by them. Scholars have extensively documented the restrictive impact of Tridentine reform on early-modern convents, especially the effects associated with strict enclosure. They point to the reduced personal freedom of nuns, decreased autonomy and visibility of convents, expenses of construction necessitated by strict enclosure, disruption of customary forms of worship, and burdensome conflicts with church authorities.2 Nearly all of these effects occurred to some degree at

1 Franz Esterl, Chronik des adeligen Benediktiner-Frauen-Stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg. Vom Entstehen desselben bis zum Jahre 1840 aus den Quellen bearbeitet (Salzburg: Franz Xaver Duyle, 1841), 110–11. 2 Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30. 4 (1999): 1010; Silvia Evangelisti, “ ‘We do not have it, and we do not want it’: Women, Power, and Convent Reform in Florence,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34.3 (2003): 689–91 and throughout; Mary Laven, “Cast Out and Shut In: The Experience of Nuns in Counter-Reformation Venice,” in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Pre-Modern Italy, ed. Steven Milner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 93–110; Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 74–83; Ulrike Strasser, “Bones of Contention: Cloistered Nuns, Decorated Relics, and the Contest over Women’s Place in the Public Sphere of Counter-Reformation Munich,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Archive for Reformation History 90 (1999): 261–67.

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Nonnberg. However, the difficulties and hardships were at least partially offset by effects that were experienced as positive by some nuns, if not the entire convent. Among the beneficiaries were former domestic servants accepted as lay sisters and musically talented nuns, while the entire convent profited from the innovations resulting, sometimes indirectly, from reform measures, which were also reflected in the architectural transformation of the convent. Moreover, Tridentine impulses, particularly as reflected in Nonnberg’s musical culture and new forms of venerating its sainted first abbess, allowed the entire convent to reassert its significance within the community. Reform measures thus helped lay the groundwork for Nonnberg’s continued survival and connected the convent to some of the modernizing trends associated with confessionalization. The Council of Trent, initiated by Pope Paul III in 1545 to counteract some of the effects of the Protestant Reformation and bring about a renewal of the Catholic Church, published a number of decrees aimed at the reform of Holy Orders, primarily reaffirming regulations already proclaimed before or contained in Benedict’s sixth-century rule. Among the most far-reaching of these reforms was a range of measures designed to enforce clausura, or strict enclosure, which severely restricted nuns’ contacts with the outside world. The provision for strict enclosure of nuns is explicitly identified as an affirmation of the constitution Periculoso, which had been published by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298.3 Formulated during the twenty-fifth session of the Council, the decree sets forth that no professed nun will be allowed to leave the convent, except for a lawful reason to be approved by the bishop. Similarly, no one will be allowed to enter the enclosure without written permission of the bishop or the superior. While in principle nuns had long been enclosed, in practice the requirement had not always been strictly enforced. The Council, however, urged bishops to call upon the aid of the “secular arm” to enforce the preservation of enclosure, and Christian princes and civil magistrates were obliged to provide this assistance under penalty of excommunication.4 Although some voiced strong reservations, eventually clausura was widely enforced, and at many convents this enforcement did represent a radical change involving resistance and sacrifice. Since the Council

3 H.J. Schroeder, ed. and trans., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Original Text with English Translation (St. Louis, MO: Herder Books, 1955), 220. 4 Schroeder, Canons and Decrees, 220–21.

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placed the authority and obligation to supervise convents’ compliance squarely on bishops and other prelates, many sought to exercise their oversight by more frequent and thorough visitations, thereby severely curtailing convents’ autonomy. Similarly, convents had to obtain bishops’ permission for various exceptions, which also constituted an erosion of the authority of abbesses and prioresses. Tridentine reform is therefore often described as restrictive and usually in terms of an assertion of the male hierarchy at the expense of convents’ autonomy.5 When Papal Nuncio Felician Ninguarda had first urged Trentinspired reforms on Nonnberg in 1581, the convent, like many others, responded with a combination of several time-honored strategies that nuns had at their disposal.6 These ranged from selective implementation and delay to protestations of the community’s poverty. A visitation protocol of 1594 indicates that the abbess had not set forth clear guidelines for permissible access of outsiders and that it was not as restricted as the episcopal visitor deemed appropriate. Also contrary to regulations, most nuns continued to bring property into the convent and relied for their clothing on their own dowry or gifts from friends and relatives, a problem that in 1594 the abbess ascribed to the convent’s poverty.7 By 1613, enclosure was not a primary issue any more, and there is no indication that the nuns of Nonnberg engaged in a lavish or scandalous lifestyle. Sleeping quarters consisted of unremarkable cells whose windows had bars and views of the convent gardens.8 The deaconess guarded the keys of doors leading outside the enclosure, and letters from and to the outside were routinely submitted to the abbess (though the Reverend Mother apparently did not actually read them). The nuns went to confession several times a year and listened to scripture readings during meals. Most importantly, the nuns of Nonnberg were apparently exemplary in attending daily offices in the nuns’ choir.9

5 Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Women and Religious Change,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6, Reform and Expansion 1500–1660, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 465–82. See also note 2 above. 6 Esterl, Chronik, 110. 7 Konsistorialarchiv Salzburg (hereafter KAS), 11/24 Benediktinen Nonnberg, visitation protocol (1594). 8 Protocol of 1613 describing the convent and convent church, cited after Hans Tietze and Regintrudis von Reichlin-Meldegg, Österreichische Kunsttopographie, vol. 7, Die Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1911), XL. 9 KAS, 11/24 Benediktinen Nonnberg, visitation protocol (1613).

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Even so, the archbishop’s initiative of 1620 demonstrates that in the view of reform-minded prelates, much remained to be done. Although the nuns of Nonnberg assured him that they were in fact already observing clausura, they were reluctant to agree to additional measures that, they believed, would infringe on ancient customs and privileges and inhibit the efficient administration of the convent. But Prince-Archbishop Paris Lodron, a man of considerable political skill, had chosen his timing carefully. The recently elected abbess had not yet been confirmed when Paris Lodron had his reform requests forwarded to the nuns. In the end, despite strenuous protests, Nonnberg had to comply.10 Most new requirements were designed to ensure the rigorous observation of enclosure. The abbess herself, formerly exempt, was now forced to observe clausura and lost much of her ability to supervise directly the convent’s economic activities.11 The convent had to undertake costly architectural changes or new projects, such as the obstruction of gates and the construction or re-arrangement of separate buildings outside the cloister for the convent’s confessors and employees, such as the sexton.12 The nuns’ spiritual regimen was disrupted and their ability to share their devotional life with the public sharply reduced, since they were required to discontinue all processions outside the cloister, including funeral processions. The convent also had to accept lay sisters (conversae), who, in contrast with the domestics they replaced, could not be dismissed on disciplinary grounds.13 Compliance with the reform, along with monastic discipline in general, was monitored through thorough visitations by abbots of the archbishopric. At this point, one must add that despite these intrusions by outside authorities, Nonnberg was in a vastly better position than other seventeenth-century convents in the empire. Many that had survived the Reformation would experience the destructive impact of the Thirty Years’ War, while Salzburg, and by extension Nonnberg, was spared devastation. Salzburg owed its good fortune partly to luck and circumstance, but also to the skillful leadership of Prince Archbishop 10

Esterl, Chronik, 110–12. Irmgard Schmidt-Sommer and Theresia Bolschwing, “Salzburg, Nonnberg,” in Germania Benedictina, vol. 3, Die benediktinischen Mönchs- und Nonnenklöster in Österreich und Südtirol, vol. 3, ed. Ulrich Faust and Waltraud Krassnig (St. Ottilien: Eos Verlag, 2002), 222–23. 12 Tietze and Reichlin-Meldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XL–XLI. 13 Esterl, Chronik, 110–13. 11

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Paris Lodron (1619–53)—ironically the very ruler who had insisted on vigorous implementation of the Tridentine reforms. The nuns clearly regarded the renewed reform efforts as hardships and sought to avert those precepts. However, once they gave up resistance, they found ways to adopt them creatively and to carve out considerable areas of agency within the framework of Tridentine spirituality. Although there is no denying the hardships caused by some measures, Tridentine reform also brought new opportunities and fresh impulses that turned out to be beneficial to some women and to the convent as a whole, while contributing in sometimes unintended ways to the convent’s modernization. This can best be demonstrated in three areas representing offshoots of reform, or at least inspired by Tridentine priorities, namely the new institute of lay sisters, the flourishing musical culture of Nonnberg, and new forms of veneration of the convent’s first abbess, St. Erentrudis. The abbess, and to some degree the office-holding nuns, saw their governance infringed upon through strict enclosure and more rigorous visitations. Yet another group of women in the convent gained a more respected position and a greater say in convent life. These were former domestic servants whom the convent now began to accept as lay sisters, or conversae. Although the institution as such was not new and other convents had long accepted lay sisters to carry out menial tasks within the convent, the choir nuns of Nonnberg clearly preferred to rely on domestic servants, at least in part because they could be dismissed in case of disciplinary problems.14 In principle there were clear distinctions between the choir nuns, who were largely recruited from patrician and noble families, and the lay sisters, who came from lower social strata.15 Most lay sisters continued to be responsible for menial chores like cooking and cleaning, while also having to fulfill some obligations of religious life. Lay sisters had no vote in the election of a new abbess, did not assume such governing positions in the convent as abbess, prioress, or mistress of the novices, and lived for the most part segregated from the choir nuns. Even so, their acceptance into the convent meant a rise in status and material well-being. 14

Silvia Evangelisti, “To Find God in Work? Female Social Stratification in Early Modern Italian Convents,” European History Quarterly 38 (2008): 401, http://ehq .sagepub.com (accessed November 10, 2009); Esterl, Chronik, 111–12. 15 Strasser, State of Virginity, 124–25; Evangelisti, “To Find God in Work,” 408.

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Nonnberg’s lay sisters, like choir nuns, had the opportunity to voice their opinions confidentially during visitations. Each sister was asked about her office or tasks and whether she and others observed the spiritual regimen. But the visitors also made sure that each sister was satisfied with her food, clothing, and lodging. Surprisingly, a number of lay sisters were not as strictly separated from the choir nuns as one might assume. In 1655, for instance, at least four lay sisters reported that they were eating together with the choir nuns or with the abbess, one of them serving as an apothecary and another as a musician.16 Nonnberg’s musical culture and lay sisters’ involvement will be discussed below. The sources further document that Nonnberg extended privileges especially to commoners who were skilled in music or pharmacology. Chunegund Höller, for instance, the daughter of an apothecary in Straubing, served as the convent’s apothecary in the 1630s and was considered a choir nun even though she lacked a noble pedigree.17 Constantia Reischnigg, also the daughter of an apothecary, was ennobled because of her skill before taking the veil at Nonnberg.18 Hence the convent began to appreciate skill evermore and concomitantly to place somewhat less importance on noble birth. This important innovation pointed to the future and helped Nonnberg to continue to flourish. Thanks to a continuous line of trained and certified apothecaries, the convent was able to dispense medication to the public, especially the indigent, until the nineteenth century.19 Lay sisters generally attested to the convent’s faithfulness to regulations, including the observance of their own rights and privileges. Yet they could also suggest improvements and occasionally they lodged complaints, though usually of a mundane nature. Sister Anna Dorffschmid, serving as a nurse, complained that the secular girl assigned to help with preparing medication was not up to the task. Some complaints targeted other lay sisters, for example, Sister Susanna’s claim that some drank too much beer or wine.20 Sister Maria 16

KAS, 11/24 Benediktinen Nonnberg, visitation protocol (1655). Nonnberg Archiv (hereafter NA), V 89 B Wappenbuch, note on Maria Chunegund Höllerin inserted between pp. 14 and 15. 18 K. Ganzinger, “Die Hausapotheke des Benediktiner-Frauenstiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg,” Österreichische Apotheker-Zeitung (1950): 460. 19 Stift Nonnberg zu Salzburg im Wandel der Zeiten. Nach Aufzeichnungen der langjährigen Archivarin Frau Regintrudis Reichlin von Meldegg (Salzburg: BenediktinenFrauenstift Nonnberg, 1953), 56. 20 KAS, 11/24 Benediktinen Nonnberg, visitation protocol (1655). 17

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Magdalena declared during a visitation that everything was fine except for the fact that she had to share a cell with Sister Maria Erentrudis, who in turn voiced the exact same sentiment.21 Efforts were made to avoid such sources of discord. Archbishop Paris Lodron himself, for instance, subsidized the costs of adding more space for sleeping quarters.22 Choir nuns were admittedly freer to voice serious complaints, sometimes even against a well-connected prioress. While this greater freedom points to the social distinction between choir nuns and lay sisters, it also shows that visitations need not be seen only as infringements on the nuns’ governance. They were also opportunities for nuns to express approval and satisfaction as well as disapproval and discontent. Since the reports were kept outside the convent and only a letter with recommendations was sent back to the abbess, the nuns were able to voice their opinions in confidence. That lay sisters were relatively well provided for is evident from the fact that many reached a surprisingly advanced age. It was not unusual for seventeenth-century lay sisters at Nonnberg to reach their seventies, and some even lived into their eighties. Convent life also had health benefits during epidemic outbreaks. When the plague took the lives of many Salzburgers in 1625, the nuns resolved to discontinue all contacts with the outside world, and not a single conventual was lost.23 Nuns often did endure physical sufferings, of course, as a result of injuries and incurable diseases. But lay sisters as well as choir nuns who were too sick to work or had disabilities had the comfort of being cared for and assured that their misery was not without purpose. Taking care of ailing nuns was a priority, as is evident from the attention given to the convent’s infirmary, the apothecary, and the collection of books on pharmaceutics.24 Lay sisters were assigned to the infirmary, but aristocratic choir nuns also helped care for the sick.25 Abbess Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg (1625–38), for example, not only refurbished the infirmary but also tended to the sick even 21

Ibid. Fragment of the diary of Abbess Maria Magdalena Schneeweiss, quoted after Tietze and Reichlin-Meldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XLI. 23 A. Bolschwing, “Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg, geb. Rettinger, Äbtissin des Benediktinerinnenstiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg.” (PhD diss., Vienna University, 1946), 23–24. 24 Ganzinger, “Hausapotheke des Benediktiner-Frauenstiftes,” 466. 25 Cf. the discussion of lay sisters and care for the sick in Evangelisti, “To Find God in Work,” 409. 22

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after her election.26 A similar dedication to caring for the infirm was reported of M. Benedicta Erentraud von Lodron, even though her family was among the most distinguished connected to Nonnberg.27 Although illness was not to be sought or joyfully embraced, enduring it with patience was considered an inspiration to the entire convent. As a vehicle for the spiritual growth of an ailing nun, her sickness was sometimes expressed in images evoking her name or her occupation in the convent. An account describing the final illness of Sister Maria Antonia Erdl, who had spent several years as a cook, recounts, for example, that . . . at that time she began to be ripe as a spiritual potato (Erdäpffel) and the Creator began to take her down from the tree of temporal life . . . in order that through patience and resignation she might be even more ripe and mature.28

Cooking and cleaning were indeed tasks assigned to lay sisters, as suggested by Silvia Evangelisti’s analysis of the normative literature addressing the subject.29 But lay sisters’ occupations at Nonnberg were more varied and sometimes involved a fair amount of responsibility, including keeping the gate of the entire convent. Similarly, some of them were charged with preparing medicines, playing musical instruments during liturgies, and even teaching music. Lay sisters were often required to assist a choir nun in tending to a specific area, such as the sacristy or the gardens, and in practice the hierarchical relationship could be blurred. In 1661, for instance, the abbess reports that a choir nun and Sister Elisabeth Katharina were working together on a crown, presumably a wreath of flowers, for the Marian sculpture of a Salzburg church.30 The deaths of both lay sisters and choir nuns at Nonnberg were recorded in circular letters (Roteln) sent to numerous monasteries

26

Bolschwing, “Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg,” 101. NA, 6, 105 I Rotln 1635–1738, obituary (1682). 28 NA, 6, 105 I Rotln 1635–1738, obituary (1686): “. . . da fangte sie an als ein geistlicher Erdäpffel reiff zu werden und beginnte der Schöpffer mitler Zeit ihne vom Baum des zeitlichen Lebens abzunehmen und . . . auff das Stroh zu legen . . . damit sie durch Geduld und Resignation noch mehr sollte reuff und zeitig werden.” All translations of archival material are my own. 29 Evangelisti, “To Find God in Work,” 406. 30 NA, V 87 Ad, Fragment of the diary of Abbess M. Johanna Franziska von Rehling (1661), 29. 27

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affiliated with the Salzburg convent. These obituaries, in addition to requesting prayers on behalf of the deceased, included information about the nuns’ lives and usually a detailed account of their deaths. They also shed light on aspects of convent life shared by choir nuns and lay sisters, particularly the regular attendance of mass in the nuns’ choir and their elevated standing as brides of Christ. Thus we learn that Sister Maria Kunigunda Josepha Wagner died without previous illness at eighty-five years of age, shortly after she had collapsed on her way to mass in the choir, “or rather to her heavenly groom.”31 In a spiritually intense age, it must have been comforting to know that one would be remembered, prayed for, and honored in this way through widely circulated obituaries. By conferring significant privileges on women of humble background and involving them, if less intensely, in the spiritual regimen of the convent, Nonnberg took first steps toward the eventual removal of class distinctions and participated in the movement among leading post-Tridentine reformers to extend the appeal of Catholic doctrine and practices to every stratum of society.32 Although lay sisters could venture outside the enclosure when running errands for the convent, this was not an option for choir nuns. Following the reform initiative of 1620, Nonnberg was architecturally transformed, like so many other convents, in a way designed to ensure complete enclosure of the nuns and the abbess. Major projects were supervised by Santino Solari, the architect of the cathedral and court architect of Archbishop Lodron. Under Abbess Maria Magdalena von Schneeweiss (1620–25), higher garden walls were built, and a parlatorium was provided where nuns could converse with visitors through a grate under supervision. In addition, the abbess had burial chapels built inside the church so that the nuns would not form a funeral procession outside the church and enclosure. Renovations and new construction did not exclusively serve enforcement of enclosure, and the convent also profited from its cooperation with the archbishop. Paris Lodron himself paid for a new dining hall and kitchen, a step toward promoting communal life, as well as the addition of another

31

NA, 6, 105 I Rotln 1635–1738, obituary (1695). Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor. Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32. 32

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floor for sleeping quarters, with a double row of cells to accommodate the rising number of choir nuns and lay sisters.33 Other renovations were designed to refurbish frequently used areas within the confines of enclosure. Of central significance was the renovation of the nuns’ choir at the west end of the church, where the nuns remained invisible but could be heard in the nave of the church below (a practice, incidentally, that is still in use today). The nuns’ choir became particularly important after Trent, since nuns were not allowed in the convent church any more, with few exceptions, to ensure complete enclosure. They could follow a public mass celebrated in the church while the arrangement of the choir loft prevented eye contact with the congregation below. However, the Divine Office and masses for the nuns usually took place in the choir, and presence in the choir was considered a privilege as well as a sign of devotion.34 Nuns’ choirs received much attention from architects during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in Naples, where they experimented with the design and position of new choirs.35 At Nonnberg, great care was taken and considerable funds were spent to have the existing choir furnished with new pews and its floor paved in marble. Although the work order was again signed by court architect Solari, it stated repeatedly that the particulars were to be executed according to the specific wishes of the nuns. Significantly, these included provisions related to the head reliquary of the convent’s first abbess, St. Erentrudis, for the nuns probably the most valuable item in Nonnberg’s possession.36 But the most intriguing part of the renovations were the paintings commissioned by the nuns. The ceiling was to be decorated with angels playing musical instruments, an order that the painter Matthäus Ostendorfer duly fulfilled by painting angels singing, conducting, and playing the harp as well as string and wind instruments.37 Alongside the angels, Ostendorfer portrayed sev-

33 Bolschwing, “Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg,” 86; Tietze and ReichlinMeldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XL–XLIV. 34 Helen Hills, Invisible City. The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 147–48. 35 Hills, Invisible City, 153. 36 Work order (1625), quoted after Tietze and Reichlin-Meldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XLIV. 37 Ibid.

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Figure 28: Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg. Ceiling fresco of the nuns’ choir by Matthäus Ostendorfer, 1625. Photo by Ulrich Gezzi (Oberalm). Reprinted with permission of the Salzburger Barockmuseum.

eral nuns playing, singing, and conducting in holy concord with the angels (see fig. 28).38 Innovations also served the convent’s musical culture, including a new vaulted ceiling in the sacristy designed to improve acoustics. It should be noted that under Solari, who was a native of Verna near Lugano, the Salzburg cathedral had been equipped with elaborate structures designed to facilitate spectacular musical productions, with

38 Peter Husty, “Keine Zeit für Kunst. Anmerkungen zur Malerei,” in Erzbischof Paris Lodron (1619–1653). Staatsmann zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed. Peter Keller and Johannes Neuhardt (Salzburg: Dommuseum zu Salzburg, 2003), 97.

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four choir lofts and four organs. Promoting rich liturgical music was clearly a priority for Solari and the archbishops who employed him. Paris Lodron, while preoccupied with other matters, benefited from the musical culture his predecessors had created to rival other residential cities, such as Munich and Vienna.39 Within this cultural climate, Nonnberg’s musical culture could blossom as well. At a time when the enforcement of strict enclosure imposed painful restrictions on individual nuns and could also limit the social relevance and visibility of the convent community, the nuns of Nonnberg and those of other convents found in music a channel of communication and means of maintaining their presence in the city. Tridentine decrees, though famously vague regarding music, did have an impact.40 In Salzburg, one of the measures imposed by Archbishop Paris Lodron stipulated that regular access of the organist and music teacher should be discontinued. The hiring of other outside musicians was discouraged in an effort to reduce outsiders’ access and ensure strict enclosure.41 Surprisingly, these measures paved the way for an astounding musical renaissance in the convent. On New Year’s Day, 1622, for the first time in the convent’s history, the nuns themselves provided the organ music during Mass. The organist appears to have been Frau Helena Pozham, who had entered the convent in 1620 and thus before the new restrictions regarding outside musicians had taken effect. Three years earlier, the woman deemed to be the “cause and beginning of music” (Ursach und Anfängerin der Musik) at Nonnberg, Scholastica Mörmann, had made her profession.42 Frau Scholastica, the daughter of an official at the Bavarian court, also had acquired musical training before she first entered the convent. As Kapellmeisterin, she supervised all aspects of the abbey’s musical culture. Her beautiful solo voice earned her admiration, while her duties as Chorregentin required her to intone chants and ensure appropriate, dignified, and musically impeccable singing during services.43 For the next two decades, at least a third of the professing nuns

39 Ernst Hintermaier, “Es kundt im Himmel nit scheener oder lustiger sein. Geistliche Musikpflege am Salzburger Fürstenhof,” in Erzbischof Paris Lodron (as cited in note 38), 121–27. 40 Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 59. 41 Esterl, Chronik, 113. 42 NA, V 89 C, Register, 265. 43 NA, V 87 Ca, Biographische Skizzen Nonnbergischer Conventualinnen vom Jahre

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were noted for their musicianship, usually for playing the organ or a string instrument.44 Also indicative of how musical ability was valued is the fact that three lay sisters with musical training were accepted during the same twenty-year period. Anna Maria Pfisterer in particular, who was not only an organist but also a music teacher still active in 1658, exemplified the convent’s efforts to recruit women of every station to render the convent independent of outside musical help.45 By the same token Nonnberg offered musically talented women of both noble and common background an outlet for their abilities, not to mention economic security and a sense of community. As in various Italian cities, such as Milan and Siena, nobles and burghers in and around Salzburg considered musical training for their daughters highly desirable; a flourishing music culture in the convent would have been a source of civic pride. For the nuns themselves, music linked the convent to the broader community.46 This aspect is attested by special liturgical celebrations, like the consecration of Abbess Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg in 1631, when the archbishop was the celebrant and the nuns themselves provided much of the music.47 By displaying their talents and rich liturgical life, they were able to make their presence known to a wider public and, in particular, to the noble and aristocratic circles so vital to the convent’s continued flourishing. When Elisabeth of Bavaria, the consort of the Bavarian Elector, visited Nonnberg during a sojourn in Salzburg in 1632, she was not only served dinner but also, after prayers in the choir loft, the nuns provided music in her honor in the Abbess’s quarters.48 Similarly, at the archbishop’s request, the nuns sang and played instrumental music during a 1661 visit by the Elector of Cologne.49 1620 bis 1699. Zusammengetragen aus der Haus-Chronik, den noch vorhandenen Roteln, zerstreuten schriftlichen Notizen und mündlichen Traditionen (handwritten, no date), 1–3; NA, 8, 184 III Reformations Puncten, 3rd part: “Von der Besetzung der Offizialen und ihren Verrichtungen.” 44 NA, V 89 C, Register, 265. 45 Ibid.; KAS, 11/24 Benediktinen Nonnberg, visitation protocol (1658). 46 Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, esp. 56, 114; Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls. Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 46–48. 47 NA, Haus-Chronik, 34, quoted after Bolschwing, “Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg,” 49. 48 Bolschwing, “Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg,” 54; Esterl, Chronik, 123–24. 49 NA, V 87 Ad, Fragment of the diary of Abbess M. Johanna Franziska von Rehling (1660, 1661), 33.

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While several of these examples demonstrate what an asset the musically accomplished convent was to the archbishop as a secular ruler and to the services he expected, evidence also shows that early modern nuns considered music a privilege rather than a burden. Apart from chant, ecclesiastical authorities did not always encourage musicmaking in convents and sometimes severely restricted it, as is evident from Carlo Borromeo’s tenure in Milan.50 The tenacity with which Milanese nuns defended their musical culture, often at the risk of severe censure and punishment, speaks for itself.51 The enjoyment that the Salzburg nuns derived from singing and playing music is touched upon in biographical sketches culled from written materials and oral traditions. Thus we learn the following about Frau Scholastica: “Music was the life of this heavenly dove, but she did not love and practice it as pleasure of the senses, but to uplift the soul to the heavenly harmonies. [In music] she found heavenly nourishment. . . .”52 At a time when strict enclosure had narrowed other opportunities for activity and communication with the outside world, an intense musical life gave the nuns of Nonnberg a creative outlet. The importance of music was even expressed in ceiling paintings commissioned for the nuns’ choir in 1625 (see fig. 28). The nuns saw their musicianship as an integral part of the convent’s mission, one that transcended the walls of the cloister as well as the boundaries of worldly existence. The nuns’ decision to make music a priority was not challenged by the archbishop, but neither was it forced on the nuns by the hierarchy. A detailed catalogue of required reform measures specifies repeatedly that the convent was allowed, though not required, to provide vocalinstrumental or polyphonic music at particular times during certain liturgies.53 Nonnberg continued to encourage musical accomplishment, and its musical culture became ever more elaborate. Indeed, the nuns’ bold policies designed to achieve self-sufficiency in music-making continued throughout the seventeenth century and had far-reach-

50

Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, 58–71. Ibid., 64–66. 52 NA, V 87 Ca, Biographische Skizzen Nonnbergischer Conventualinnen, 1: “Musik war das Leben dieser Himmelstaube Scholastika, aber sie liebte und übte sie nicht als eine Ergötzung der Sinne, sondern als Gebet, als Erhebung der Seele zu den himmlischen Harmonien. Darum war es ihr auch gleich, ob sie auf dem Figuratchor ihren reinen Diskant sang, oder im Choralchor die ernsten kirchlichen Töne; sie fand überall himmlische Nahrung. . . .” 53 NA, 8, 184 III Reformations Puncten, chap. 5. “Von der Orgel und Music,” 3. 51

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ing effects. Most significantly, the convent became home to numerous women of exceeding musical talent and skill, including the daughters of several distinguished composers of the age. In 1650, Barbara, the daughter of Johann Stadlmayr, Hofkapellmeister in Innsbruck, entered Nonnberg. Two years later, Franziska von Meichl followed; she was not only an excellent musician and Chorregentin for thirty years, but also a woman of letters and author of a book of prayers. In 1678, the convent opened its gates to the two daughters of Benjamin Ludwig Ramhaufski, originally from Prague and subsequently organist of Lambach Abbey (Stift Lambach) near Linz. Anna Kunigund and Eleanora Ramhaufski were both noted for their exceptional musical ability, with Eleanora being proficient on four instruments, including the violin and the tromba marina.54 But Nonnberg forged perhaps its most significant musical alliance toward the end of the seventeenth century, when Anna Magdalena, daughter of the composer and Salzburg Hofkapellmeister Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern, entered the convent and took the name Maria Rosa Henrica. Her father as well as the convent had to go to great lengths to overcome an earlier directive following a visitation in 1685, which stated that Nonnberg should not accept any more nuns unless a postulant brought extraordinary funds to the convent. The composer beseeched the archbishop to waive the directive, primarily on the grounds that the abbess and convent of Nonnberg had given their unanimous consent on the basis of his daughter’s musical accomplishment. Abbot Edmund of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg fully supported the request, also citing the young woman’s skill in singing and playing the violin. His letter further suggests that Nonnberg had expressed the need to supplement the musical talent within its walls, after it had not been allowed to add to its numbers for ten years. Edmund explicitly states that Biber’s daughter made up for her modest dowry with her extraordinary musical talent. The archbishop apparently gave his permission. When Maria Rosa Henrica received the habit at Nonnberg on July 15, 1696, the feast of the sainted Emperor Heinrich II, Biber

54 Ernst Hintermaier, “Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern (1644–1704) und das Benediktinen-Frauenstift Nonnberg. Musikpflege und Musikkultur eines adeligen Frauenstiftes im hoch- und spätbarocken Salzburg,” in Deus Caritas—Jakob Mayr: Festgabe—25 Jahre Weihbischof von Salzburg, ed. Hans Paarhammer (Thaur: Verlagshaus Thaur, 1996), 209, 211.

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brought court musicians to Nonnberg to celebrate the occasion and may even have composed the Missa Sancti Henrici for the event.55 Nonnberg continued to attract accomplished musicians, including a granddaughter of Biber and a daughter of his successor as Hofkapellmeister, Matthias Siegmund Biechteler. One can only speculate whether some of the anonymous compositions in the convent archives are the work of musically trained nuns or not, but clearly Nonnberg prized accomplished musicians.56 Conversely, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Nonnberg was highly sought after as a monastic home for musically skilled women. Music provided access to a venerable monastic institution for women of every station and a creative outlet for nuns in a time of strict enclosure, while allowing the convent to reaffirm its presence and relevance in the Salzburg archbishopric. Another important mission of Nonnberg, its role as central location for the veneration of its first abbess, St. Erentrudis, had a long history, reflected in recorded pilgrimages, accounts of miracles, and donations.57 But the tradition gained new impetus through postTridentine spirituality and priorities. This impetus was not only a result of the Council’s validation of the invocation of saints and the veneration of relics, but also reflected the post-Tridentine emphasis on the Catholic Church’s unbroken tradition with the early church.58 Salzburg’s founding bishop, Rupert, had established the convent in the early eighth century, roughly at the same time as the monastery of St. Peter, and installed his relative Erentrudis as Nonnberg’s first abbess, while Bavarian dukes endowed the convent with substantial land holdings.59 Monastic life had since then never been interrupted at Nonnberg, rendering the convent a model of continuity. Moreover, Nonnberg remained in undisputed possession of St. Erentrudis’s relics. Post-Tridentine Catholicism assigned great significance to possessing

55

Hintermaier, “Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber,” 211–14. Hintermaier, “Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber,” 218. 57 Georg Stadler, “Kreuzvölker und Wallfahrten im Laufe der Jahrhunderte,” in Salzburger Wallfahrten in Kult und Brauch, ed. Johannes Neuhardt (Salzburg: Dommuseum zu Salzburg, 1986), 31–33; Christine Edith Janotta, “Vitalis und Erentrud,” in Salzburger Wallfahrten, 95–98. 58 Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 273, 283. 59 Stift Nonnberg im Wandel der Zeiten, 10–11. 56

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a saint’s relics. As Ulrike Strasser’s examination of a Munich convent’s strenuous attempts to acquire relics and the equally forceful efforts of male prelates to prevent such transactions demonstrates, relics played a significant role in bolstering a convent’s visibility and importance.60 Nonnberg was fortunate to possess its relics already and, apparently with the support of the archbishop, proceeded to renew veneration of St. Erentrudis with a range of measures at the convent’s disposal. Following the example of numerous dioceses in Italy and elsewhere, the nuns had the tomb of St. Erentrudis opened in 1624 for the first time in six-hundred years. This apparently occurred upon the convent’s own initiative, since the archbishop’s advisory council was informed of the event after the fact, more precisely, after the women had administered their own procedures and carried the body in their own procession. The archbishop nonetheless made every effort to mark and celebrate the occasion. He himself made a ceremonial visit to Nonnberg, accompanied by the cathedral canons and Salzburg’s various religious orders, brotherhoods, and guilds. The transparent coffin of the saint was then carried in solemn procession through several triumphal arches, accompanied by the archbishop’s court musicians, to the city’s central parish church for veneration. After the coffin’s return to Nonnberg the next day, the abbot of Chiemsee celebrated Vespers in the presence of the archbishop, and finally the sarcophagus was placed in its new marble tomb in the crypt and secured by an iron grate.61 Henceforth the memory of this translation was celebrated every year on September 4, in addition to the existing feast day of June 30, thus offering Nonnberg another occasion to remind the public of its historic role in Salzburg’s founding.62 Nonnberg and its first abbess participated in similar fashion in the jubilee of 1682, celebrating what was then believed to be 1,100 years since the founding of Salzburg.63 Post-Tridentine spirituality, with its emphatic celebration of the saints, the sacraments, and the demarcation of the sacred, allowed numerous opportunities for Nonnberg to renew or introduce internal or public liturgies. These included the abovementioned translations and processions but also the renewal of

60 61 62 63

Strasser, “Bones of Contention,” 273–85. Esterl, Chronik, 115–16. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 136–37.

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vows on New Year’s Day or the newly devised consecration of the nuns to the Holy Virgin.64 The central aspects of Nonnberg’s post-Tridentine spirituality also found expression in a new high altar with a dramatization of the convent’s historic role in the archbishopric. In view of the Tridentine emphasis on the Eucharist, the tabernacle, and the high altar, at whose center the tabernacle was placed, it is not surprising that the altar also received special attention during the general renovation of the convent church. A description of the existing high altar in 1613 complained that the view of it was obscured by another altar and reported that the sacrament was placed in a small alcove on the side, not in a tabernacle at the center.65 Any number of minor changes could have corrected these problems, but the nuns were able to rectify them in a more dramatic fashion. On June 30, 1625, Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg (née Rettinger), the widow of an imperial administrator of seven Hungarian mining cities, took her final vows at Nonnberg. One month before the ceremony Eva Maria signed her testament, as required, and Nonnberg received the bulk of her considerable fortune. Along with numerous other beneficiaries and a more general bequest to the convent, Frau Eva Maria also specified that between twelve- and thirteen-hundred guilders should be used for a new high altar at Nonnberg. At the center, stated her testament, was to be an image of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God.66 Frau Eva Maria’s generous bequest enabled the convent to commission Hans Waldburger, the most distinguished sculptor working in Salzburg at the time. Waldburger also executed high altars for St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, the Franciscan church in Passau, and monasteries in Schlägl and Mondsee.67 The altar was commissioned in 1628, when Eva Maria herself had become abbess of the convent. Like the altar it replaced, it was dedicated primarily to the Holy Virgin and St. Erentrudis, the convent’s first abbess. However, while the images on the old altar included a depiction of St. Margareta and seem to have

64

Ibid., 114, 134–35. Tietze and Reichlin-Meldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XXXVII. 66 Bolschwing, “Eva Maria Fleisch von Lerchenberg,” 19. 67 Johannes Ramharter, “Die Skulptur,” in Erzbischof Paris Lodron (1619–1653): Staatsmann zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed. Peter Keller and Johannes Neuhardt (Salzburg: Dommuseum zu Salzburg, 2003), 101. 65

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been painted, the new altar was designed to create a much more dramatic impact. Waldburger received detailed instructions to create and place at the center a sculpture of the Holy Virgin with the Christ child, with angels on either side and two more above her holding a crown.68 To the right of the Holy Virgin, Waldburger was to place a sculpture of St. Rupert, the founding saint of Salzburg, mostly gilded, and to her left, a sculpture of St. Erentrudis, without veil, thoroughly gilded and apparently of the same size. Smaller sculptures of St. Benedict and the sainted emperor Heinrich II, a benefactor of Nonnberg, were to be placed on the sides of the upper corpus of the altar, with a depiction of God the Father and of the Holy Spirit at the center.69 Thus Nonnberg’s high altar was not only crafted in the dramatic style current in south German lands, but it also displayed to the public a vision in which St. Rupert and St. Erentrudis appeared on an equal footing on both sides of the Holy Virgin. This placement visually affirmed Nonnberg’s role in the eighth-century founding of Salzburg and by extension its continuing significance as a constituent part of the archbishopric. That the nuns themselves saw their role in the archbishopric as significant and sought to reinforce this notion with distinguished visitors and the public in general is documented in the artwork they commissioned throughout the seventeenth century. In addition to the high altar, perhaps the most striking illustration of the convent’s self-image is a piece commissioned by Johanna von Wolkenstein-Lodron, who was abbess from 1638 to 1657. Born of a prominent family and widowed as the archbishop’s stepmother, Johanna was well connected and had considerable resources at her disposal that allowed her to act as an art patron on behalf of the convent. In 1652, Abbess Johanna commissioned a goldsmith in Augsburg, which boasted many of the best goldsmiths of the age, to create a crown for the medieval head reliquary of St. Erentrudis. Some of Johanna’s own jewelry was worked into this marvel of silver, gold, pearls, gems, and fine enamel (see fig. 29).70 The message it conveyed is hard to miss: both abbess and convent were

68 Tietze and Reichlin-Meldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XXXVII; XLV– XLVI. 69 Ibid., XLVI. The altar was later exchanged for the altar of St. Ulrich’s Church at Scheffau near Golling, Austria. Cf. Tietze and Reichlin-Meldegg, Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg, XLVI, note 1. 70 Annette Schommers, “Krone der Erentrudisbüste,” in Erzbischof Paris Lodron (1619–1653): Staatsmann zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed. Peter Keller and Johannes Neuhardt (Salzburg: Dommuseum zu Salzburg, 2003), 178–79.

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Figure 29: Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg. Head reliquary of St. Erentrudis (1316) with crown commissioned by Abbess Johanna von Wolkenstein in 1652. Photo by Hans Tietze or Hans Makart, from Hans Tietze and Regintrudis von Reichlin-Meldegg, Österreichische Kunsttopographie, Vol. 7, Die Denkmale des Stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1911), 87.

appropriating the imperial imagery employed by absolutist regimes of the day for their spiritual ancestor, thereby underscoring their own standing within the archbishopric. In venerating a saint of the early church and affirming her continued ties to the Church, the crown was also fully in line with Tridentine goals. *

*

*

As in many other convents, the nuns of Nonnberg were reluctant to adopt Tridentine reforms wholesale and managed to stave off their full implementation for some forty years. Although the conventuals did not indulge in a lavish or excessive lifestyle and were willing to

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implement some of the reform requirements, only a determined effort by Prince-Archbishop Paris Lodron in 1620 persuaded the nuns to adopt additional measures they considered unnecessary or a threat to the convent’s autonomy and economic well-being. While Tridentine reforms, particularly the enforcement of strict enclosure, doubtless brought hardships and restrictions to convents, the nuns of Nonnberg do not seem to have been preoccupied with these measures once they had accepted them. Having shed their initial misgivings, they threw themselves with fervor into a program of spiritual renewal and appropriated impulses inspired by Trent to forge their own unique contribution to the Tridentine project. They began to accept lay sisters, to whom they accorded considerable privileges. Women from lowly backgrounds saw their material well-being ensured, their options for self-expression increased, and their voices heard beyond what they could have hoped for before the reform. The convent’s policy to extend privileges on the basis of certain skills and talents, particularly in music as well as in pharmacology, lessened the importance of noble birth to some extent and represented an innovation that contributed to the unprecedented blossoming of Nonnberg’s musical culture. This musical renaissance in turn offered a creative outlet to nuns of all backgrounds and enhanced Nonnberg’s presence in the community. The foundations for Nonnberg’s musical flowering were laid in the 1620s, when the nuns, forced in part by strict enclosure but also determined to draw on their own resources, began themselves to supply increasingly elaborate liturgical music, and musical skill became a highly prized asset at Nonnberg. The policies derived from this decision and its consequences reached far into the eighteenth century, adding an important facet to Salzburg as an environment hospitable to talented musicians. Another characteristic of post-Tridentine Catholic spirituality, the renewed emphasis on the veneration of saints, particularly those of the early church, inspired the nuns to develop new, public forms of veneration of its sainted first abbess. In addition to liturgies and processions, the specific ways in which art commissions were employed in this context allowed the convent of Nonnberg to reassert its historic and continuing role in the Salzburg archbishopric. At a time when Trent-inspired reforms decreased the convent’s autonomy, placed greater restrictions on conventuals, and reduced traditional options of communicating its mission, Nonnberg’s nuns also benefited from reforms and seized on Tridentine impulses to

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compensate for their losses. By creatively adopting reform measures and transforming the convent in a manner appropriate for their institution, the nuns of Nonnberg, with the consent of pragmatic archbishops, managed to minimize the negative consequences of reform and launch significant innovations. In the process, they laid the foundations for the continued flourishing of the venerable convent.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THEMES OF EXILE AND (RE-)ENCLOSURE IN MUSIC FOR THE FRANCISCAN CONVENTS OF COUNTER-REFORMATION MUNICH DURING THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR Alexander J. Fisher In recent years we have learned much about musical culture behind the walls of early modern enclosed convents, spaces in which liturgical and devotional music attracted both popular interest and ecclesiastical censure in the patriarchal atmosphere of Tridentine reform. In contrast to wealthier and better-studied Italian foundations, Catholic German convents pose considerable challenges for a comparable study of music.1 Religious war, epidemics, and inflation disrupted vital musical and cultural traditions. The rigorous enforcement of strict enclosure, especially from the early seventeenth century onward, led to a high degree of isolation. Finally, secularization in the early nineteenth century meant the uneven preservation of records from religious institutions, especially female convents. Munich’s three houses of Franciscan tertiary nuns—the Pütrich house of St. Christophorus, the Ridler house of St. Johannes auf der Stiege, and the Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger—had been founded in the late thirteenth century and survived into the early modern era as relatively open communities with a charitable focus. While the Poor Clares of the Angerkloster had been enclosed since the 1480s, the Ridler and Pütrich houses were involuntarily claustrated in the early 1620s by reformed Franciscans invited to Bavaria by Duke Maximilian I

1 Prominent recent studies of Italian convent music may be found in Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1996); Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Kimberlyn Montford, “Music in the Convents of Counter-Reformation Rome” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1999). See also Barbara Lawatsch Melton’s essay in this volume, which singles out music as a positive outlet for female expression in the Nonnberg convent of Salzburg.

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(r. 1598–1651). The following decade saw the Swedish incursions into Bavaria and the flight of most of the nuns from their houses. Their exile was short but no less traumatic for its brevity, and the process of re-enclosure upon their return was hardly smooth. We can observe aspects of this period of enclosure, exile, and re-enclosure first in a pair of manuscript songs whose texts are preserved in the Bavarian State Archives, songs that vividly narrate the women’s struggles during the months of exile; and second in a large, locally published repertory of vernacular songs by Johannes Khuen, a Munich priest and beneficiary who appears to have designed his songbooks as a propagandistic apologia for the cloistered life as well as a vehicle for the spiritual comfort of newly claustrated nuns. Collectively, these songs articulate an acute sense of loss—first, the loss of accustomed freedom within Munich’s public spaces, and, later, the loss of the stability and security provided by these convents as the women fled in the face of invasion. Munich’s Convents and Post-Tridentine Claustration I cannot offer a comprehensive history of Munich’s female houses here, but will refer the reader to Ulrike Strasser’s fine recent work on these institutions (see table 1 for an overview of some key events).2 All three houses had their origins in the vita apostolica movement of the thirteenth century, the Poor Clares occupying a former house of the Friars Minor in 1284 and the Ridler and Pütrich houses (the names are those of their patrician founders) developing out of “soul houses” (Seelhäuser) devoted to works of public charity. Discipline was tightened after the houses’ institution as Third Orders under Franciscan rule, and in fact the Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger were enclosed in the 1480s. However, the Ridler and Pütrich convents survived into the sixteenth century as semi-open houses that welcomed women both rich and poor, widows as well as virgins. The Tridentine decrees on enclosure (extended to all female tertiaries in 1566) marked a turning point, of course, aiming at the submission of women to patriarchal authority either through secular marriage or through the symbolic marriage to Christ behind convent walls—aut murus aut maritus, in

2 Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

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Table 1: Some Key Dates in the History of Munich’s Franciscan Tertiary Convents: the Pütrich House of St. Christophorus, the Ridler House of St. Johannes auf der Stiege, and the Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger 1284 1284 1295 1480s 1566 1581–83

1603–20 1620 1622 1626 1627 1628 1632 1632–34 1634 1655 1663 1695

Foundation of Pütrich house and placement under the supervision of the Friars Minor. Establishment of Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger from an existing Friar Minors house. Foundation of Ridler house. Enclosure and strict observance introduced at St. Jakob am Anger. Tridentine mandate of claustration extended to female Third Orders. Papal nuncio Feliciano Ninguarda demands immediate claustration of Munich’s Franciscan tertiaries, but is stymied due to local resistance and lack of appropriate convent architecture. Restrictions on free movement within the city are introduced. Installation of an organ at the Pütrich house under mother Apollonia Ostermayerin. Arrival of Reformed Franciscans under Antonio Galbiato in Munich, reform and enclosure of the Ridler and Pütrich houses begins with architectural modifications. Introduction of the Latin Breviary; local reprinting of Leo X’s statutes governing Franciscan Third Orders, which explicitly allow for devotional singing. Maria Maximiliana von Wartenberg appointed mother superior at the Ridler convent. Lay sisters introduced for the execution of menial tasks. Introduction of polyphonic music at the Ridler house (according to Hueber’s 1695 chronicle). Most of Munich’s nuns in exile April–August due to the Swedish invasion of Bavaria. Several dozen nuns from other south German convents take refuge in Munich’s female convents. Deposition of Maria Maximiliana von Wartenberg as mother superior at the Ridler convent. Imitation of Rome’s Holy Stairs installed in the Pütrich house, allowing for internal “pilgrimages.” Translation of the relics of St. Dorothea to the Pütrich house. Publication of Fortunatus Hueber’s Lob-Danck- vnd Ehren-reiche Gedächtnuß, Von dem [. . .] Jungfrau-Closter deß III. Ordens S. FRANCISCI [. . .] Auff der Stiegen (deren Ridler genamset) zu München [. . . .] (Munich, 1695), a chronicle of the Ridler house.

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Table 1 (cont.) 1701

1721

1802–03

Publication of Barnaba Kirchhuber‘s Der Gnaden- und Tugendreiche Anger, Das ist: Die sonderbare grosse Gnaden, tugendsame Leben, vnd andere denck- vnd lob-würdige Begebenheiten, So In dem Uhr-alten vnd Hoch-berühmten Gotts-Hauß, vnd Jungfräulichen Closter S. CLARÆ Ordens in München bey S. JACOB am ANGER biß in die 480. Jahr verschlossen, vnd verborgen gelegen, nunmehr angemerckt und eröffnet (Munich, 1701), a chronicle of the Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger. Publication of Bittrich Voll Deß Himmlischen Manna. Süssen Morgen-Thau. Das ist: Historischer Discurs, Von Dem Ursprung, Fundation, Auffnamb, glücklichen Fortgang, Tugend-Wandel, vnd andern denckwürdigen Sachen Deß Löbl. Frauen-Closters, Ordens der dritten Regul deß Heil. Francisci, Bey Sanct Christophen im Bittrich genannt, In der Chur-Fürstlichen Residentz-Stadt München. Mit Erlaubnis der Obern (Munich, 1721), a chronicle of the Pütrich house. Final dissolution and secularization of Munich’s convents.

Strasser’s formulation.3 In Counter-Reformation Bavaria, virginal nuns came to be seen as guarantors and symbols of God’s favor toward an ideal Catholic state; their potency in this role depended on their very removal from the public sphere. The lack of appropriate convent architecture and local resistance from the communities themselves quashed early attempts under the papal nuncio Felix Ninguarda to enclose the women during the 1580s, but the necessary architectural changes were approved by Duke Wilhelm V and finally carried out under his successor Maximilian I. As part of a far-reaching program to establish a Franciscan province with boundaries coterminous with those of the duchy, in May 1620 the duke welcomed male reformed Franciscans under Antonio Galbiato, who set about reforming the city’s Franciscan convents, placing them under strict enclosure, forbidding resistant nuns to leave the convents and deposing and replacing mothers superior at will.4

3

Strasser, State of Virginity, 65. The Bavarian Franciscan Province, under the leadership of the Reformati, was formally established in 1625 by Urban VIII. Existing cloisters in Munich, Landshut, Kelheim, Freising, Ingolstadt, Amberg, Tölz, and Hedingen (Württemberg) now fell under the jurisdiction of the new province, and the Reformed Franciscans soon established new houses in Stadtamhof (1630), Cham (1631), Weilheim (1639), Dingolfing (1642), Schrobenhausen (1644), Eggenfelden (1649), and Altötting (1653). See Dieter Albrecht, “Die kirchlich-religiöse Entwicklung. Zweiter Teil: 1500–1745,” in Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte. II: Das alte Bayern. Der Territorialstaat vom Ausgang des 4

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The profound changes in the spiritual and ritual lives of Munich’s nuns as a consequence of claustration cannot be recounted in detail here, but it should be emphasized that the measures were not imposed without conflict.5 Many of the older nuns from the Pütrich house, for example, refused to pray the new Latin Breviary that had been imposed in 1622 and resisted the more demanding discipline of the Roman daily offices.6 At the Ridler convent, Galbiato’s appointment of the zealous reformer Maria Maximiliana von Wartenberg as mother superior in 1626 also met with controversy. With respect to the new Breviary, manuscript and printed chronicles report that she had had much toil and labor until she was able to institute the Breviary and the choral services. At that time ‘Her Dignity’ had to tolerate some [resistance] until she convinced the sisters with clear, good words that they should accept the Breviary. She taught the Breviary, praying, reading, and singing to the novices, and also to twelve more sisters. Afterward, on Pentecost in 1624, the sisters began to pray the Breviary in the choir, and the divine service was established anew. This cost not a little difficulty and labor, and Her Dignity had to endure much trouble and persecution.7

The Breviary was but one of several radical innovations introduced by Maria Maximiliana. Having come into contact with the locally influential Carmelite father Dominicus à Jesu Maria and embracing the example of St. Teresa of Avila, she instituted a regime of early-morning spiritual exercises and confiscated all of the nuns’ private property. Rumors circulated, in fact, that opponents of enclosure within the convents desired her assassination.8

12. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Max Spindler (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1969), 646. 5 See especially Strasser, State of Virginity, chap. 4. 6 Strasser, State of Virginity, 127–28. 7 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München (hereafter BayHStA), KL 423/5, 6–7; see also Fortunatus Hueber, Lob-Danck- vnd Ehren-reiche Gedächtnuß, Von dem Geistund Löblichen Jungfrau-Closter deß III. Ordens S. FRANCISCI. Bey den zweyen Heiligen Joannes, dem Tauffer, vnd dem Evangelisten. Auff der Stiegen (deren Ridler genamset) zu München in Bayern an der Chur-Fürstlichen Residentz. Jn seinem Vierhundertjährigen Sæculo, oder Welt-Lauff, mit Freuden erneuert, vnd auffgericht den 1. May, im Jahr 1695 (Munich: Sebastian Rauch, 1695), 58: “But the praying of the Breviary in the choir was entirely due to the inexhaustible efforts of Sister Maria Maximiliana von Wartenberg, who was then mistress of the novices, counselor, and convent scribe, and who also studied the Latin language; however, [it was] taught with difficulty and begun in 1624, on the day of Pentecost.” All translations are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. 8 Strasser, State of Virginity, 129–30.

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The crises and disruptions of the war years would only compound the problems associated with enclosure. Having fled in the face of Swedish military conquest in April 1632, many of Munich’s nuns faced a new round of enclosure upon their return in August, a process made more problematic by the presence of numerous refugees from various convents in the southern German region. At the Ridler house, Maria Maximiliana would be ousted in 1634 due not only to resistance within the convent, but also to the opposition of Franciscan male superiors who had originally supported her internal reform efforts but now endured her criticism for their alleged laxity in enforcing discipline among the women.9 As for music, archival sources allow only a limited picture.10 Rudimentary plainchant, at least, was already cultivated by the time that new statutes were issued during Galbiato’s reforms. A series of manuscript statutes from the 1620s disallows music generally, but the “exceptions” in fact allowed sung Offices and Masses on a majority of Sundays and feast days.11 The introduction of so-called “lay sisters” to handle menial tasks allowed the professed nuns more time to master the chant and to perform the Offices. More elaborate polyphonic music soon followed at the Ridler house by 1628, evidently with the accompaniment of string and wind instruments.12 This is a significant shift, given the

9

Strasser, State of Virginity, 130. More specific details on musical culture survive for the Nonnberg convent in Salzburg; see Barbara Lawatsch Melton’s essay in the present volume. 11 “The divine service should not be confused or disorderly, nor should it be rushed; rather it should be conducted in a god-fearing, pious, and judicious manner, with the appropriate pauses and without music [mit gebihrender Pauß ohne Gsang], except for the principal feasts of the year: the most Holy Trinity, Purification, Annunciation of Our Lady, Birth and Conception, the feasts of our Order and of the Third Orders. In these [feasts] the first hymn at Matins can be sung, and after the final reading, the Te Deum laudamus and Benedictus [Dominus Deus], which can take place also on some major feasts. Prime, Terce, and Compline can [be sung] in the principal feasts that are called duplex of the first class and in the previously mentioned feasts of Our Lady. Vespers, however, can be sung on all feast days of the first and second classes; on Sundays of other duplex feasts, Vespers can also be sung. Further, according to the judgment of the Mother, they can sing the Mass in feasts of the first class and those of Our Lady indicated above, as well as on feasts of the Third Orders, with the approval of the father Guardian. The sisters are forbidden to adopt any newly donated services or commemorations, which would be contrary to this [arrangement], and [in case of violation] they shall be punished at the discretion of the superiors.” BayHStA, KL Riedler-Regelhaus 9. 12 “From 1624 to 1628 the sisters sang their Masses in simple chant. Then, since more and more virgins entered the cloister, they gradually elevated the chant into figural music at certain times. For the first time in 1628 they held the Kirchweych 10

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oft-documented reluctance of post-Tridentine clerical authorities elsewhere in Europe to allow polyphony in cloistered convents, but specific injunctions against the practice by the bishop of Freising have yet to come to light.13 In any case, the same musical talents and resources deployed in the convent churches were likely exploited outside the liturgy. A set of locally printed statutes for the Third Orders of 1622, in fact, allows space for devotional music in the evenings, which was actually seen as preferable to idle chat.14 The statutes aside, the peculiar social hierarchies that came to dominate enclosed convents may also have created space for music outside the liturgy. As purified communities of virgins presumably unsullied by earthly corruption, the convents exuded a spiritual prestige that attracted women of higher social standing and perhaps greater musical ambitions. Relieved of taxing menial duties by the lay sisters, nuns were free to concentrate on liturgy, devotion, and perhaps music as well. Song and Themes of Exile Whatever music was being cultivated by female religious in Munich must have been severely curtailed as the troops of Gustavus Adolphus

with a musical [i.e., polyphonic] Mass. With the growing numbers of young [women] the choral music increased, so that a quite orderly and established choir with singing, winds, and strings made a suitable harmony for the praise of God, and it seemed as if they had learned it from angels.” Hueber, Lob-Danck, 59. 13 Clerical objections to nuns’ polyphony were especially strong in early seventeenth-century Bologna, for example, although the women of Santa Cristina della Fondazza were well able to circumvent these restrictions, as Craig Monson argues in Disembodied Voices (op. cit.). 14 “To prevent [any idle chatter] the mothers should first have a religious book read aloud, followed by a religious discussion; it would be useful to teach something from the reading, then have questions. And then, thirdly, to avert any unpleasantness, the sisters may sing pleasant sacred songs or litanies [hüpsche Geistliche Gesäng oder Letaneyen], or whatever may elevate the spirit to God, with humility and without screeching [geschrey]: and this shall be done as much as possible at other times too to avoid any idle prattle [vnnütz geschwetz]. The Mother is obligated to punish this [speech] according to what is deserved: but she can relax the [rule of ] silence with good reason.” Regel vnd Leben Der büssern, oder deß dritten Ordens, deß Seraphischen Vatters S. Francisci, so in versam[m]lung der dreyen wesentlichen Ordens gelübden lebend, Durch Bapst Leonem den zehenden bestettiget. Sampt einer Vorred von deß Ordens vrsprung, von beygetruckten Statuten, von zweyen Bäpstlichen nach einander gewesnen Nuncijs, mit gwalt eines Legati de latere vnd visitatorn den 22. Aprilis im 1599. vnd den 12. Februarij im 1607. Jahr zu Lucern bestettiget (Munich: Nikolaus Heinrich, 1622), 76–77.

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invaded the region in the spring of 1632. April 10th and 11th saw the hasty departure of about three-quarters of Munich’s nuns, over a hundred from all three houses. Their destination was the Habsburgcontrolled city of Hall in Tyrol, which lies in the valley of the Inn River amid rugged Alpine terrain. Those remaining behind had already been joined by refugees from convents in Kühbach, Niederschönenfeld, and Altomünster.15 The period of exile lasted until the month of August. For the most part, we can only speculate about the physical and psychological trials endured by these women, but one can imagine the disruption and disorientation of this experience after as many as twelve years of isolation behind convent walls. In this part of the essay, I would like briefly to discuss two song texts concerning this period that have been preserved in the archives of the Bavarian Franciscan Province, now held at the Bavarian State Archives, and that may have stemmed from the hand of one of nuns.16 The sixty-nine-stanza “Ain trauriges klag Lied von d[er] ellenndten flucht vnnsers Conuentes” (A lament on the unhappy flight of our convent) and a thirty-eight-stanza “schönes Liedt” (fine song) are inscribed in a single seventeenth-century hand and lack any indication of appropriate melodies. They are preserved in a fascicle once belonging to the Angerkloster and have been inserted into a folder of more recent provenance, together with an inlaid slip (also of later provenance) outlining the itinerary. Unfortunately, the anonymous author does not indicate a tune, and none can be inferred from the opening line, “Mörckh auff, seit alle still,” a generic and common formula reflective of the oral tradition of calling a group of assembled listeners to attention. The verse structure, furthermore, is highly irregular, with little consistency from stanza to stanza. This fact, together with the lack of explicit or implicit reference to an existing melody, raises the possibility that the text was not meant exclusively to be sung. The opening stanzas illustrate the impending danger of the Swedish invasion and the nuns’ resolution to flee:

15

Helmuth Stahleder, Belastungen und Bedrückungen. Die Jahre 1506–1705, Chronik der Stadt München 2 (Ebenhausen: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 2005), 450. 16 BayHStA, KL Fasz. 356 1 1/2. For assistance with translations, I gratefully acknowledge B. Ann Tlusty and Helmut Graser.

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1. | Mörckh auff, seit alle still, hert zue was Ich sagen will, von grosser anngst vnnd nott, betriebnus bis in dott, desgleichen nie erhertt, weill das anng[er] Closter steth.

Hearken, be still, and hear what I have to say of the great fear and misery, grief until death, the likes of which are unheard since the Anger cloister has stood.

2. | Ain tausent sechshund[er]t, zwaÿvndreisig Jar, kam d[er] Schwedt Ins baÿrlandt, wier waren in groser gfar, dise gfar namb überhandt, miesen in ain annd[er]s lanndt.

In the year one-thousand-sixhundred-and thirty-two, the Swede came into Bavaria. We were in great danger, and this danger grew such That we had to go to another land.

3. | An dem heilligen osterabent feÿr heten wier khain bleiben hie, miesten das Closster lassen, der schwedt treib vns auf gassen,

On the evening of the Easter vigil

Ach gott das war ain schmertz mecht zerspringen ainer jeden hertz. 4. | Als wier durchs Closster auss In dwelt waren khumen rauss, waren wier in anngst vnnd nott, betriebt bis in den dott. wier thettens gleich verstöhn, wie es vnns wurdt ergöhn.

We could stay here no longer, we had to leave the cloister. The Swede would drive us into the streets. O God, that was a pain that would burst any heart. As we left the cloister and came out into the world, we were in great fear and need, Grieved unto death. We would soon understand what was in store for us.

If we can take the narrative at face value, the nuns feared their forcible expulsion had they stayed in Munich, and the burning down of their house, remembering perhaps the utter destruction of the city of Magdeburg by Catholic troops in 1631.17 The poem continues to narrate the nuns’ journey in the company of their Franciscan confessor, father Bonaventura Briefer, tracing their route southward through Tölz, Tegernsee, and Benediktbeuern. In the Alpine town of Mittenwald, the nuns were forced to sleep on the floor of the town hall and were subjected to miseries so severe that the narrator cannot bring herself[?] to describe them:

17 Stanza 42 reads: “In dem maÿen den Zwaintzigisten tag,/ mörckht auf wass Ich euch sag,/ ist vnns neuezeitung khumen,/ die statt münichen seÿ eingenumen/ wier sprachen all behenndt,/ ach vnnser Closter wierdt verprendt.”

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alexander j. fisher 20. | disen tag khamen wier balt, auffs Rathauss gehn Mitenwalt, was für vnglegnhait darauff. Ist nit zuspröchen auss, die andern sagens auch, die gwössen sein darauff.

On this day we soon came to the Rathaus in Mittenwald. Of the troubles we faced there nothing must be said. The others who were there will say the same.

21. | wier waren gar lieb vnnd wert, zwaÿnzig assen auf der erdt,

We were dear to one another, twenty [of us] eating on the floor. We had but a single spoon, four of us together drank out of the bucket. If we only had enough we would have been happy to enjoy it.

ainen löfel heten wier aus dem gölten drunnkhen Wiers fier wan wier gnueg heten ghabt heten vnns gern damit gelabt. 22. | das Rathauss war so wertt wier schliefen auf der erdt, vnnd war vnns anngst vnnd Panng, es lust vnns nit vill gsanng, ainer Jeden war es freÿ, zumachen Melanngoleÿ.

So it was at the Rathaus that we slept on the floor, and fear and pain were upon us. Song could not console us, each was free to suffer melancholy.

23. | Vom Rathaus muess Ich schweigen, das übrig lassen bleiben. wie es vnns erganngen ist, das ist vnns allain bewist, kain mensch kan daruon sagen, dan die es haben erfarn.

Of the Rathaus I must fall silent and leave the rest out. What happened to us is known to us alone. No one can speak of it apart from those who lived through it.

Concerning what actually happened at Mittenwald, we can only speculate. Other unpleasantness includes the mocking of the women by locals in Gmünd in the early stage of the journey and the sickening of Father Briefer, who succumbs, significantly, on the eve of St. Clare’s day, the 12th of August. The women’s experience is not described as uniformly negative: In the midst of these cares the women are given the rare opportunity to visit the miraculous sacrament of the St. Oswald church in Seefeld in Tyrol: 25. | Wier farn auf sefeldt zue, wier heten noch leidens gnueg, es hat gerenngt das Patzt, wier sein im Cott vmbplatzt, doch kham es vnns zu guet, man zaigt vns das h: bluett.

We came to Seefeld and had suffered quite enough. A muddy rain came down, we were surrounded by muck, but some good came to us when we were shown the Holy Blood.

themes of exile and (re-)enclosure in music 26. | wier herten dortt ain mess, ain Jede bett auffs böst, als die heillig mes war aus, gienngen wier in das Wiertzhauss, nach dem essen geschwindt, Raissen wier im Reng vnd windt.

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There we heard a Mass, each prayed the best she could. When the Mass was done, we went into the tavern. After a quick meal, we left in the rain and wind.

The narrator describes the return journey to Munich via Rosenheim, concluding with the happy reunion of the sisters at their cloister. The song remains focused on the nuns’ immediate experience, and does not pause to comment on the broader military or political context. This cannot be said of the second song in the fascicle, a thirtyeight-stanza narrative concerning the Swedish invasion of Bavaria and occupation of Munich. The opening line, “Wo kommt es her, das zeitlich Ehren,” is a direct play on a popular religious song condemning worldly honors and pleasures, “Wo kompt es here, das eytel Ehre,” found in numerous Catholic songbooks of the early seventeenth century (see musical example 1). However, we cannot be certain that the new text is simply a contrafactum sung to the existing tune, for the verse structure of the new poem varies unpredictably from stanza to stanza and rarely resembles that of the original song. However, as is the case with “Mörckh auff, seit alle still,” we cannot discount the possibility that the general contour of the melody was flexibly adapted to a greater or lesser number of syllables. As in the model for “Wo kommt es her,” the transience of earthly pleasure is the initial conceit of the new poem, but the latter quickly moves toward the charge that many virgins have been violated by enemy soldiers, others having to flee their homes to escape:

Example 1

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alexander j. fisher 6. | Es ist nit zuerzöllen wie man gehausset hat. mit brenen merden vnd stellen, vnd auch mit viehischer that. vill Junkhfrauen wurden geschendet. das zuerbarmen ist an allen orthen vnd ennden. das dich vnwistlich ist. 7. | Wass vill Jungfrauen versprochen, die in Closter ganngen sein, hat miesen werden zerbrochen, es khundt nit annderst sein. Ir Junkhfrauschafft zuhieten, war allain Ir getrendt, vor dem grausamen wieden vnd vor der khötzer henndt. 8. | mit wainen vnd grossen schmertze flieche maniche Ir Vatterlanndt, es gienng in auch zu hertzen, das Clesterliche banndt, wolten sÿ annd[er]st weichen miesten in frembdte lanndt, miesten wölter vnnd berg durchstreichen gott helf in wid[er] zu lanndt.

It can hardly be told how they carried on, with burning, murder, and theft, and with bestial deeds. Many virgins were violated, which is to be pitied in all places, far and wide, unbeknownst to you. What many virgins promised, who went into the cloister, had to be broken; It could not have been otherwise. their virginity to preserve, This alone was taken from them, facing the horrid noose and the hands of the heretics. With tears and great sorrow many fled their fatherland. It pained them in their hearts, their exile from the cloister. If they were to depart, they had to go to a foreign land; they had to pass through forests and hills; God help them to return to their land.

We hear strong echoes here of a broader discourse on the powerful symbolism of virginity as a sign of God’s grace on the polity and as a state that required a most vigorous defense against both internal and external threats. “In times of war,” Strasser writes, “the defense of the body politic was subsequently likened to the defense of an inviolate and intact female body, its conquest compared to the dishonoring ravishing of a virgin.”18 The rhetoric of virginity flowed most readily from anxieties surrounding female sexuality and was expressed by male elites, especially in the reinforcement of the patriarchal household and in the enclosure of formerly open female convents, henceforth to be governed strictly by male superiors and compliant mothers and abbesses. As we read further in the song, however, additional references to the fate of Munich’s convents are completely absent, and we are left with a 18

Strasser, State of Virginity, 5.

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narrative of regional military encounters and events in Munich’s public, civic space. A significant portion of the poem recounts the pivotal battle at Rain on the Lech River on April 15, 1632, and the wounding and death of Field Marshal Johann von Tilly, with an extended tribute to his services to the Catholic cause and his devotion to the Virgin: 10. | aines mals deth er sich tragen, thet sich erzaigen frech, Thet mit dem Tillÿ schlagen, vnnd kam über den lech, die schlacht habn wier verlohren, allhie zu diser frist, graff tillÿ war selbst geschossen, das gott zuklagen ist. 11. | Auf Ingolstadt thet man In fieren, mit grossem hertzenlaidt, wie es ainem hölden gefiret, mit villen soltaden beglaidt, mit schmertzen wurdt er Empfanngen, mit wainen von Jung vnnd alt, d[er] Paÿrfirst wardt mit verlanngen auf disen hölden Alt. 12. | Graf dillÿ hochgeboren, d[er] ist Jetzund dott. sein löben hat ehr verloren, gnadt im d[er] ewig gott, seine Riterliche datten, die sein gott wollbekanndt, die helfen im jetzt zu gnaden, Im ewigen Vatterlanndt. 13. | Graff dillÿ der wirde helte, stridt nit vmb grosses guett, nit vmb Reichtumb vnnd gelte, er setzt allain sein bluett, für gott vnnd Catholischen glauben, das war sein fundament, zu maria gottes muetter vertrauen,

Once [Gustavus Adolphus] thought to show his brashness, and went into battle with Tilly, coming over the Lech. The battle we lost at that time, Count Tilly himself was shot, which is to be lamented to God. They brought him to Ingolstadt with heavy hearts, bearing him as a hero, accompanied by many soldiers. He was received with sorrow, with the tears of young and old. The prince of Bavaria mourned this hero strong. The high-born count Tilly, he is now dead. He lost his life, the eternal God grants him his grace. His knightly deeds are well known to God. They help him now gain grace in the eternal fatherland.

hatt ehr sein löben geendt.

Count Tilly, the worthy hero, did not strive for property, wealth, or money. He offered his blood alone for God and the Catholic faith; that was his foundation. Trusting in Mary, the Mother of God, he ended his life.

14. | den klagen arm vnd Reiche den waren Ritters man wierts nit balt ain helt erreichen

He is mourned by poor and rich, the true knight. No hero will soon achieve

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alexander j. fisher was graff tillÿ hat gethan, seine Ritterliche thaten, breicht man durch alle lanndt, beÿ fürsten vnnd botentaten, Ist sein lob wollbekanndt.

what count Tilly has done. His knightly deeds are reported in every land. Among princes and potentates, his praise is manifest.

We read of Gustavus Adolphus’s arrival and stay at Munich, and the taking of forty-four hostages to Augsburg when the impoverished citizenry failed to produce the ransom demanded. The narrative cuts off here, during the summer months of 1632. The song concludes with these words: 38. | Der disses Liedt gesungen von newen hat gemacht, den hat darzue gedrungen der schlaf woll auf d[er] wacht, den namen will ehr nit nemen, man gibt sunst auf in acht, vill leidt wurden mich khenen, alda zu guetter nacht.

He who sang this song and made it new was moved to do so by sleep, on the watch. He will not tell the name; otherwise he will be noticed; much sorrow would visit me, Therefore, good night.

Is this, then, a song by a cloistered woman of the Anger convent, as suggested by the inlaid information? Perhaps, if the “ehr” (er) in the final stanza refers generically to “der Mensch,” but the content of the poem, concerned mainly with external political and military events and not at all with the fate of the Angerkloster, raises questions. Assuming that the song’s provenance is secure, it is plausible that it was brought into the convent from the outside and served, like so many broadsides of this period, as a convenient and tuneful means for reporting and remembering the events of the day. Johannes Khuen’s Lieder and the Aftermath of Enclosure After the trials of 1632, life in Munich’s convents gradually stabilized, although the women certainly would have suffered from the economic privations and epidemics that plagued the city over the next few years. We are not well informed about their musical culture during this time, but beginning in 1636 we begin to encounter imprints of vernacular songs that appear to have been intended, at least in part, for the women of these houses. The author of these songs was Johannes Khuen (1606–75), private chaplain to Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg (1593–1661), a nephew of the elector who would obtain the bishop’s miter in the dioceses of Osnabrück, Verden, Minden, and Regensburg

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and who was a zealous Catholic reformer.19 Khuen may have personally known Franz Wilhelm’s four sisters, all of whom became nuns, including the aforementioned Maria Maximiliana.20 Khuen’s songbooks segregate the strophic poetry from the music, which appears early on as a separate engraved page or later as an integrated appendix set in movable type (see fig. 30). In the earlier songbooks, the single engraved page presents six or seven melodies, each scored for a single voice with a simple bass accompaniment and usually assigned to two different poems.21 The unpretentious melodies are brief, tuneful, and easily memorized. Khuen’s songbooks are consistently organized into sets of twelve songs; beginning with the Geistlich Turteltaub (1639), he divides each song into precisely twelve stanzas, and his later songbooks even make use of twelve-syllable alexandrines.22 These vernacular lieder represent a relatively poorly studied 19 Khuen would have been based at the so-called Wartenberg Chapel, established by Duke Wilhelm V’s brother, Ferdinand von Wittelsbach, whose progeny took the title of count/countess of Wartenberg. The dedicatee of Khuen’s Mausoleum Salomonis (Munich: Melchior Segen, 1641), Wartenberg held the post of president of the Geistlicher Rat (1614–42) but was absent from Munich for much of this period, holding several bishoprics partly concurrently until his death in 1661: Osnabrück from 1625, Verden from 1630, Minden from 1633, and Regensburg from 1649. It is unknown whether Khuen accompanied Wartenberg to his northwestern bishoprics or remained continually in Munich; in any case all of his known songbooks were printed in the Bavarian capital. On Wartenberg’s biography, see Bernhard A. Goldschmidt, Lebensgeschichte des Kardinal-Priesters Franz Wilhelm, Grafen von Wartenberg, Fürstbischofs von Osnabrück und Regensburg, Minden und Verden (Osnabrück: F.W. Richard, 1866); see also Georg Schwaiger, Kardinal Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg als Bischof von Regensburg (1649–1661) (Munich: K. Zink, 1954). 20 See Ulrike Strasser, “ ‘Aut Murus Aut Maritus?’ Women’s Lives in CounterReformation Munich” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1997), 231–33. The teenage Maria Maximiliana and her sister Maria Magdalena (1590–1620), the eldest children of Duke Ferdinand von Wittelsbach and Maria von Pettenbeck, both joined the Ridler convent in 1605. Their religious zeal led them in different directions, as Maria Magdalena abandoned the Ridler house for the fully enclosed Poor Clares convent of St. Jakob am Anger, while Maria Maximiliana remained at the Ridler cloister. She would eventually be appointed mother superior by Antonio Galbiato in 1626 and thereafter would institute the radical reforms described briefly above. Their younger sisters, Maria Anna (1594–1629) and Maria Renata (1600–43), joined convents in Kühbach and Graz, respectively. 21 Beginning with the 1644 edition of Epithalamium Marianum, the melodies appear as an integrated appendix at the end of the print; each melody refers to page numbers in the songbook where appropriate poems may be found. 22 The dedication to the Convivium Marianum of 1637 provides one explanation for the prominence of the number twelve in Khuen’s work. As he explains in his dedication, the twelve musical modes (or thoni) and “legitimate properties” of the voice are mapped onto the qualities of the twelve female saints that are portrayed in this songbook; in the heavenly court these various qualities mingle harmoniously, not only those reflecting virtue (the Virgin Mary, St. Anne), but also vice that has

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Figure 30: Melodies for Johannes Khuen, Convivium Marianum (1637). Photo courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Res/ P.o.germ. 314#Beibd. 2).

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tradition of amateur devotional song with simple instrumental accompaniment, occupying a middle ground between elite polyphonic music and popular monophonic song. The confraternities and cloisters of Counter-Reformation Bavaria, peopled with literate individuals with at least modest musical training, were ideal contexts for this style of music. Five of Khuen’s songbooks printed between 1636 and 1640 are relevant here and are listed in table 2. With the exception of the Cor contritum—presenting a series of penitent biblical males—they exclusively present holy women as models for emulation drawn from both Testaments and from the ranks of martyrs, mystics, and founders of religious orders. Although only a few of Khuen’s songs are properly Marian, the modifier “Marianum” found on his title pages would have broadened their appeal in an atmosphere of fervent Marian devotion both at the popular and official levels.23 Female role models are ubiquitous, but so is Khuen’s insistence on the language of spiritual wedding to Christ, typically accompanied by calls to reject earthly pleasures and, at times, earthly suitors as well. Khuen heightens the appeal to female spirituality through dedications to prominent courtly and religious women. Dynastic politics shapes the dedication of the Epithalamium Marianum to the Bavarian electress Maria Anna, who was married in 1635 to the elector Maximilian and upon whom the hopes for an orderly succession rested. Maria Anna’s court mistress (or Hofmaisterin) Renate, countess of Törring auf Seefeld, received the dedication of the Convivium Marianum in 1637. Beginning in 1638, the next three songbooks were dedicated to local mothers superior: the Florilegium Marianum (1638) to Anna Maria Gerold of the Pütrich house, the Geistlich Turteltaub (1639) to Susanna Blanck of the Poor been expiated (Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt). See the discussion below of “Ihr Zungen manigfalt” from the Convivium. The prominence of the number twelve may also have had significance in the context of Marian devotion as the number of stars in the crown of the Apocalyptic Woman from the Book of Revelation (12:1–2), an image surely familiar to the local populace: in Munich the two most visible public monuments to the Virgin, the sculpture by Hans Krumper on the façade of the Residenz (the Patrona Boioriæ) and that by Hubert Gerhard crowning the Mariensäule on the Schrannenplatz, both make reference to this image. 23 Marian pilgrimages—especially that to Altötting—and confraternities, of course, were crucial landmarks in the Bavarian religious landscape for men and women alike. An indicator of the popular zeal for Mary may also be found in the devotions focused on the so-called Mariensäule, a pillar crowned with a statue of the “apocalyptic” Mary with the Christ child, erected in the city’s principal square in 1638. See Michael Schattenhofer, Die Mariensäule in München (Munich: Schnell & Steiner, 1970), esp. 31–36; and Friedrich Wilhelm Bruckbräu, Geschichte der Mariensäule in München 1638–1855 (Munich: J.G. Weiss, 1855).

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Table 2: Five Songbooks by Johannes Khuen (1606–75) with Connections to Munich’s Houses of Franciscan Tertiary Nuns Epithalamium MARIANVM Oder Tafel Music, Deß him[m]lischen Frawenzimmers, mit newen geistlichen Gesänglein gezieret, vnd allen Liebhabern der Erbaren, vnd Verfolgern der vnerbaren, schändlichen Liedern zu Nutz vnd Trost in Truck verfertigt (Munich, 1636, 2/1638, 3/1639, 4/1644, 5/1659). Dedicated to Electress Maria Anna of Bavaria. Subject matter: St. Anne (1), the Virgin Mary (2–4), Jesus the Bridegroom (5, 9), the Bride’s wedding bath (6), dowry of the soul (7), the angelic bridal escort (8), wedding celebration (10), asceticism (11), divorce of the body from the soul (12). Convivium Marianum. Freudenfest Deß Him[m]lischen Frawenzimmers, mit zwölff newwen Gesänglein geziert, vnd in truck verfertigt (Munich, 1637). Dedicated to Renate, countess of Törring auf Seefeld, court mistress to Electress Maria Anna of Bavaria. Subject matter: the Virgin Mary (1), St. Anne (2), St. Cecilia (3), St. Veronica (4), St. Catherine (5), St. Barbara (6), St. Mary Magdalene (7), St. Dorothea (8), St. Pelagia (9), St. Ursula (10), St. Helena (11), St. Mary of Egypt (12). Florilegium Marianum. Der brinnendt Dornbusch. Mit zwölff Geistlichen Gesänglein, meniglich zu gutem, sonderlich den Ordenspersonen zu trost in Truck verfertigt (Munich, 1638). Dedicated to mother superior Anna Maria Gerold of the Pütrich convent. Subject matter: the Virgin Mary (1), Anne, widow and prophetess in the Temple [Luke 2:36–7] (2), St. Martha (3), St. Teresa of Avila (4), St. Clare (5), St. Monica (6), St. Catherine of Siena (7), St. Scholastica (8), St. Walburga (9), St. Elizabeth of Hungary (10), St. Bridget (11), St. Genovesa (12). Die Geistlich Turteltaub. Mit zwölf newen Gesänglein vnd anmütigen Melodeyen CHRISTO IESV Dem Bräutigam der Seelen zu Ehren Dann auch allen Gottliebenden Herzten zu trost, in Truck verfertigt (Munich, 1639). Dedicated to abbess Susanna Blanck of the Poor Clares of St. Jakob am Anger. Subject matter: Eve (1), Dinah (2), Jepthe (3), Sarah (4), Susanna (5), the Virgin Mary (6), Jesus the Bridegroom (7), A woman afflicted with hemorrhaging (8), Samaritan woman [John 4:20] (9), woman of Cana [Mt. 15:22–28] (10), an adultress (11), St. Mary Magdalene (12). Cor contritum et humiliatum. Engelfrewd oder Bußseufftzer, Zwölff zerknirschter vnnd gedemütiger Hertzen, auff Sechs Chör angestimbt. Allen Bueßfertigen Seelen zu Trost, in Truck verfertigt (Munich, 1640). Dedicated to mother superior Anna Regina Schrenck of the Ridler convent. Subject matter: Adam (1), David (2), Jonah (Nineveh) (3), Nebuchadnezzar (4), John the Baptist (5), St. Peter (6), soldier who wounded Christ’s side (7), Zacchaeus (8), Nicodemus (9), murderer on the Cross (10), sinner in the Temple (11), St. Paul (12).

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Clares, and the Cor contritum (1640) to Anna Regina Schrenck of the Ridler house. Space permits only the barest summary of the imagery that prevails in this group of some sixty songs. Mary, not surprisingly, emerges as a model for emulation and as a vehicle for identification with the spiritual concerns of the Bavarian electoral house, upon whom the three convents’ economic fate now rested. Symbolized explicitly as the burning thornbush in the Florilegium Marianum of 1638, Mary’s sacred virginity unfolds historically in dozens of songs honoring virgin saints and martyrs scattered throughout these books. A second notable tendency correlates with the increasing social hierarchies of these enclosed convents: this is the appeal to the sensibilities of noble women in particular. One frequently encountered device is that of the Frauenzimmer, denoting not simply women’s space, but more specifically courtly space, those rooms in which the princess, her court mistress, and her entourage held sway. The title page of the Convivium, for example, presents the Virgin Mary as the princess, her mother, Saint Anne, as the Hofmaisterin. While the dedications directly praise the women of the earthly Wittelsbach Frauenzimmer, the discourse of spiritual marriage allows us to see Frauenzimmer as denoting enclosed convent space as well, the mother superior as a princess presiding over a hierarchical and socially exclusive society, analogous to the electoral court and the heavenly kingdom.24 Not least we find the call to spiritual marriage and asceticism, a call that not only encouraged a characteristic form of post-Tridentine female spirituality, but also reinforced the sacral boundary of the convent wall. We cannot be certain of how this repertory was received within Munich’s convents, but its authorship by a member of Munich’s male clerical elite, one who trained with local Jesuits and enjoyed close ties with the Wittelsbach house, suggests that this music forms a part of a larger literary program that promoted the virtues of claustration, not least for those women who were involuntarily confined behind convent walls in the early 1620s and again after their return from exile in August 1632. One representative song honoring St. Cecilia and drawn from the Convivium Marianum will illustrate some of these themes. 24 The term Frauenzimmer also came to denote a female individual—compare Weibsbild, Frauenbild, or even Mannsbild denoting a male—although this usage appears to have been uncommon before the mid-seventeenth century. The Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch ([Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–60], 4:86) cites an early example in the Schäfferey von der Nimfen Hercinie (1622) of Martin Opitz.

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alexander j. fisher Convivium Marianum (1637): “Ihr Zungen manigfalt”

Of all of Khuen’s songbooks, the Convivium Marianum most explicitly concerns itself with female role models, and despite the dedication to a laywoman—countess Renate of Törring auf Seefeld—suggests that convent women were a primary audience. The book begins with Mary and St. Anne and continues with a group consisting of virgin martyrs (Cecilia, Catherine, Barbara, Dorothea, and Ursula) and other women prominent mainly for their rejection of previously sinful lives (Mary Magdalene, Pelagia, and Mary of Egypt). As in the case of his other songbooks, Khuen provides seven melodies on a separate engraved page, six of which are to be used for two poems. Saint Cecilia, of course, was considered the patroness of music, but her more direct significance here is her status as virgin martyr. The song “Ihr Zungen manigfalt” (shown in example 2) carries Latin and

Example 2

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German superscripts that give the poetry different inflections: Das geistlich Hofrecht plays on the image of heavenly celebration or feasting; but the phrase MEDIA NOCTE CLAMOR factus est, ecce sponsus venit (“A voice is heard in the middle of the night: behold, the bridegroom comes”), drawn from the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, underlines the topos of spiritual marriage.25 The nine stanzas can be divided into three equal sections: Cecilia’s introductory invocation, her impassioned love song to the bridegroom, and her rejection of earthly pleasures and mores. 1. | JHr Zungen manigfalt/ Jhr stim[m]en jung vnd alt/ Jhr Burger in dem Wald/ Jhr Discantisten hell vnd rein Helfft mir/ ich fing dem liebsten mein Solt euch schwingen Herzu schweben/ Vnd zu singen Euch begeben/ Ziert meinen Chor/ Jch sing euch vor Amor den Tact soll geben.

25

You many tongues, You voices young and old, You dwellers in the forest, You discantists, bright and pure, Help me: To my beloved I begin [to sing]. Let yourselves float and flutter here, And get ready to sing, Join my choir, I sing to you; Love shall give the beat.

2. | Nun stim[m]et ewr Gesang Zu meiner Orgel klang Pausieret nit zu lang Vnd colorieret ohn suspir Dem Bräutigam vor seiner Thür/ Ach/ jhr Steren/ Mon vnd Sonnen/ Wolt mein Herren Mir vergunnen/ Verkündet jhm/ Der liebsten Stim[m]/ Die schier der Welt entrunnen.

Now tune your song To the sound of my organ, Pause not too long, And embellish breathlessly To the Bridegroom before his door. Oh, you stars, moon, and sun,

3. | Jhr Felsen/ Berg/ vnd Thal/ Schickt ewren Widerhall Jn runden Himmel Saal Vnd referieret meine Wort/ Dann mein geliebter wohnt alldort/ Mein begehren/ Sich zwar schwinget/

You rocks, hills, and valleys, Send your echoing sounds Into the round halls of heaven And carry my words. For my beloved is there,

Grant to me my Lord, Proclaim to Him, voice of the beloved, All but escaped from the world.

My desire Leaps thereto,

The parable occurs in Mt 25:6: not knowing the hour of the bridegroom’s arrival, five maidens bring oil for their lamps, while five do not; “Watch therefore,” Jesus admonishes his disciples, “for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Mt 25:13).

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alexander j. fisher Doch von ferren/ Nit durchtringet Verricht jhr diß/ Ein Recepiß/ Ein Antwort herab bringet.

But from afar Cannot penetrate. Show me my message’s receipt, Bring me an answer.

4. | O JEsu mein gestalt Setz ich in dein gewalt/ Darumb du mich erhalt/ Dir bin ich gäntzlich anuerdraut O JEsu defendier dein Braut/ Wollst mich führen/ Vnd erhalten/ Dirigieren Dergestalten/ Jch will allein Dein aigen seyn/ Wollst mich/ O Gott erhalten.

O Jesus, my body I place in your hands That you may embrace me. I am wholly entrusted to you. O Jesus, defend your bride, If you wish to lead me, And sustain me, Guide me In this way; I will be yours alone, O God, would you sustain me.

5. | Jch lieb dich innigklich Jch lieb dich hertzigklich/ Tausent mal mehr als mich

I love you inwardly, I love you heartily, A thousand times more than myself, I love you over all things. Oh, be opened, my heart leaps,

Jch lieb dich vber alle ding Ach thue dich auff/ mein Hertz erspring/ Daß man sehe Die Gedancken Wie geschehe/ So sehr krancken/ Sehr kranck ich bin/ Vor lieb ich brinn Ach weh! wie gschicht mir Krancken!

That one may see The thoughts As they occur. So very sick, So sick am I, I burn with love,

6. | Jch lieb dich ohn ein end/ Dein bleib ich vnuerwendt Durch keinen todt zertrennt/ Nichts sterblichs hat zu mir kein fueg/ O Jesu mein/ hast noch nit gnueg? Was mein eigen/ Muß dein werden/ Würds bezeugen/ Himmel/ Erden/ Jst alles dein/ Vnd wer es mein Müsts noch dein eygen werden.

I love you without end, I remain completely yours, Separated not by death; Nothing mortal has meaning for me. O my Jesus, do you not have enough? What is mine Must become yours; Heaven and earth Will witness it. All is yours, and what is mine Must become your own.

Ah, woe! How sick I am!

themes of exile and (re-)enclosure in music 7. | Es soll mich Menschen zier/ Nach diser Welt manier/ Der schönste Cavalier/ Selbst Absolon nit wenden ab/ Von dem/ den ich erwöhlet hab/ Habs betrachtet/ Wol erwogen/ Sey verachtet/ Was betrogen/ All zeitlich Ehr/ Jetzt hin/ jetzt her/ Jst als/ ist als betrogen. 8. | Raicht zwar offt Cræsi Gunst/ Apellis Mahlerkunst/ Mit Bracht ein schnöden dunst/ Ein Mähelring zur Morgengab/ Zum Heuratgut ein todten Grab/ Wann dann sterben/ So bald schaidet Jst mir werben/ Gantz erlaidet/ Sey weit hindan/ Valerian Dein Lieb ist mir erlaidet. 9. | Das weltlich Freudenfest/ Macht anfangs frölich Gäst/ Spart trawren auff die läst/ Das Hochzeitklaid/ der Ehrentag/ Verkehrt sich bald in todes klag/ Heut in freuden/ Morgen klagen/ Schwartz beklaiden/ Schwartz antragen/ Spar ich mein Freud Zu rechter zeit Fang Hochzeit an vom klagen.

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The adornment of mankind In the way of this world, The most beautiful cavalier, Absalom, himself, could not turn me Away from Him I have chosen, For I have considered, And well pondered it. Be scorned, What is deceitful. All temporal honor, here then gone, Is nothing but deceit. Indeed Croesus’ favor And Apelles’ painting oft suffice, But to me they are an empty haze. A wedding ring as my morning gift, A grave as my dowry I’ll have. If I must die, leave so soon, All striving to me is painful. Be gone, Valerian, Your love is painful to me. An earthly celebration Makes for good company, Sparing the burden of grieving. The wedding dress, the day of honor Soon turns into death’s lament. Joy today, grief tomorrow, Clothed in black, wearing black, I reserve my joy for the proper time, My wedding begins from weeping.

The first three stanzas draw on the musical imagery with which Cecilia was traditionally associated. Stanza 4 begins her direct address to Christ the bridegroom, calling on the latter to defend and preserve her and suggesting the circumstances of her martyrdom. The high point of the song is reached in the fifth stanza, an unbridled expression of love

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that verges on sickness (“Sehr kranck ich bin/ Vor lieb ich brinn”).26 Stanzas 7 to 9 turn in an ascetic direction that reads as a defense of the cloistered life. Cecilia refers in stanza 7 to Absalom, described here as “der schönste Cavalier” (the most beautiful soldier); he is but another unworthy earthly suitor for the bride. In stanza 8 Cecilia dismisses the wealth and talent of Croesus and Apelles, respectively, as an “empty haze” (schnöden dunst); this may presume a degree of cultural literacy in its references to the wealthy king of Lydia (sixth century BCE) and the famed Greek painter (fourth century BCE), although it is possible that some notion of these figures had penetrated popular culture. Despite the total loss of his works, Apelles had become something of a model to some Renaissance artists like Botticelli and Raphael.27 Instead of embracing these men, Cecilia receives a wedding ring as the “morning gift” (Morgengab), the traditional gift of the bridegroom to the bride on the morning following the wedding; a grave, not money, will be her dowry. Even Cecilia’s earthly love of her husband and fellow martyr Valerian is painful to her. Worldly joys are fleeting, the wedding dress and festivities soon give way to death, and Cecilia concludes by reserving her joy for her own heavenly wedding. Although we likely will never know whether Khuen’s songs were truly used for spiritual recreation in Munich’s convents, we can at least be certain that these women were foremost in Khuen’s mind in assembling this group of songbooks. Almost certainly he was aware of the recent, disruptive process of claustration in the early 1620s and the need to re-enclose the women who had fled into exile during the summer of 1632. Not merely devotional songs, this music partook of a broader literary movement in Counter-Reformation Munich that made plain official anxieties about women’s roles and interpreted claustrated, virginal nuns as guarantors of divine favor toward the state. These songs take their place, for example, alongside the moralist writings of Johann Nass (1534–90), a Franciscan preacher and polemicist who defended the cloistered life in his sermons, or Aegidius Albertinus (1560–1620), secretary to Duke Maximilian I from 1597 and court librarian from 1601, whose Haußpolizey (Munich, 1602) argued for the central importance of the virginal estate to the well26

Bernd Genz, “Johannes Kuen. Eine Untersuchung zur süddeutschen geistlichen Lieddichtung im 17. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1957), 29–30. 27 E.H. Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976).

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being of the community and, conversely, against the dangers of allowing unmarried women freedom of action in the public sphere.28 In many respects, then, Khuen’s songs function as propaganda, reinforcing the need and desirability of claustration; but the poetry also reflects beliefs that nuns internalized, as the memory of traffic with the outside world was gradually displaced by a new spiritual economy emphasizing the potency of the virginal state, the cult of relics, and the efficacy of prayer for souls in purgatory. In sum, the available evidence for music in Munich’s convents is sketchy, but these modest examples of song and verse show varied responses to the traumas of enclosure and exile. Although their authorship remains unclear, wartime narratives in verse could express lived experience and could be easily transmitted through the medium of song. Texts such as that of “Mörckh auff, seit alle still” play directly on the real anxieties of women facing hostile occupation and exile, mentioning temporary pleasures as well as trials too traumatic to recount explicitly. The songbooks of Johannes Khuen, by contrast, address the spiritual preoccupations of the cloistered nun, celebrating an ascetic renunciation of the world and the embrace of the holy Bridegroom. It is tantalizing to imagine that both kinds of music were heard behind cloister walls, but certain features of these sources should caution us against viewing them as unmediated evidence for musical culture in Munich’s convents. We have seen how closely the song “Wo kommt es her” hews to the style of confessionalist propaganda well known from Counter-Reformation polemic, while Khuen’s poems can easily be read as retrospective apologiae for the forcible enclosure of Munich’s nuns in the early 1620s. It is to be hoped that further evidence for convent music in Munich will emerge from archival research, but in the meantime these songs shed some light—however indirect—on the cultural response to a period of loss and deprivation.

28 See Nass, Sechs wohlgegründter Haußpredig von der Ehe vom Klosterleben (Ingolstadt, 1571). On Albertinus in particular, see Strasser, State of Virginity, 5, 82, 100. Albertinus was also active as a translator of Spanish religious literature, including Juan de la Cerda, Weiblicher Lustgarten (Munich, 1605), and Alonso de Orozco, Das Buch der Geistlichen Vermählung. Allen Closterjungkfrawen vnd andern Religiosen vast annemblich vnd nutzlich zulesen (Munich, 1605).

Figure 31: Augsburg Cathedral Floorplan (1926) Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5: Mappe 1, Nr. 3.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LOCATING THE SACRED IN BICONFESSIONAL AUGSBURG Lee Palmer Wandel Locus, in quo missa est celebranda, debet esse sanctificatus, ut est Ecclesia regulariter, nisi ocurrererit casus necessitatis. De consecra.dist.I.Nullus. —Otto Truchsess von Waldburg. TRACTATVS// DE ADMINISTRA-// TIONE SACRAMENTI EVCHA=// ristiæ, & de celebratione Missæ,// ex Canonibus & probatis// authoribus (Dillingen: Sebaldus Mayer, 1558)

In 1547, when he re-entered the city of Augsburg, Bishop Otto Truchsess von Waldburg reconsecrated the Cathedral. For him, “the Restoration of Religion,” as the Emperor had called it, encompassed a particular understanding of space and the formal reinscription of different meanings in different places. “The site where the Mass was to be celebrated,” he wrote eleven years later, “should be consecrated”: in a church and on an altar, which a bishop had formally, according to the formula stipulated in the episcopal Liber ceremonialis, consecrated. That he held it necessary to reconsecrate both speaks directly to a chasm dividing Catholics and evangelicals, and points toward a loss this essay considers. As scholars, we have attended to re-formation—of soteriology, of ecclesiology, of liturgy—but have accorded surprisingly little attention to the word’s spatial connotations. In the years before Bishop Truchsess von Waldburg’s formal act of reclaiming, European Christians had divided on every possible dimension of Christian life, from questions of salvation to questions of the organization of the personnel of their churches, to a plethora of questions about worship. While each of these questions led to debate, sometimes bitter and increasingly polarizing, few were as frightening to contemporaries as divisions over the space of churches. Those divisions have largely been obscured in the ways that contemporaries and then modern scholars have characterized them: contemporaries viewed those who entered churches and desecrated them as “the mob,” violent, mindlessly acting from inchoate

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rage that was social or political or alcoholic in origin.1 Villages and towns across Europe witnessed what we have broadly labeled “iconoclasm,” in which individuals or groups entered churches, whitewashed walls or shattered altarpieces, smashed sculpture, or broke up altars.2 In accepting characterizations of irrationality, thoughtlessness, or wantonness, we have overlooked one of the most pervasive divisions among European Christians: whether a boundary exists between the mundane world and the space of churches, whether a place can be “sanctificatus” in Bishop Truchsess von Waldburg’s formulation, and what the relationship of the physical world to God ought to be. Beginning around 1520, as individual Christians took it upon themselves to “purify” their spaces of worship, Christians across Europe discovered they did not agree on the meaning they accorded the place and the space where they worshipped.3 That is the first loss—the loss of a sense that Christians shared the same map, in which certain places were accorded collectively greater intensity of meaning, “the sacred” in modern parlance, and distinguished from other places, which were “mundane,” in the words of late medieval Christians. That terrain had been imposed both through a process medieval historians have called “Christianization”—the extension of claims of jurisdiction over all of western Europe and the implantation of a range of cultural practices4—and through the expulsion of religious minorities from within the kingdoms of England, France, and Spain, and from Free Imperial Cities. By the 1520s, European Christians imagined a “Christian Europe,” which they contrasted with an Ottoman Empire

1 See, for example, Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1993). Even Olivier Christin, Une révolution symbolique: L’iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris: Minuit, 1991), and Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990), who approach the violence as itself coherent, still treat iconoclasts as something analogous to the “mobs” of the French Revolution. 2 Bob Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden; Harrassowitz, 1990); Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter Blickle, ed., Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder: Reformatorischer Bildersturm im Kontext der europäischen Geschichte (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002). 3 On the difference between “place” and “space,” see Robert D. Sack, A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good (New York: Routledge, 2003), chap. 2. 4 See, foremost, John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as a Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91(1986): 519–52.

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to the east and the pagan lands to the west. In the rhythms of their lives, moreover, the boundaries demarcating consecrated space from mundane were familiar. Whether a person crossed that boundary only once, at baptism; or once a year, to remain in good standing with the Church, to confess, do penance, and take communion; or, as the most devout might do, every single day—for each of these Christians, the boundary was commonly acknowledged, not only among one’s neighbors but also from one region to the next. Or so those who were shocked by the acts of their neighbors suggested in their testimonies before the courts. In their testimonies, they offered ways of considering that space which I am only now beginning to hear. In contrast to the sensitivities of modern consumer society, they did not speak of the “loss” of things: inexpressively beautiful images produced by exceptionally gifted hands. For them, the beauty was secondary. The loss for them, as they spoke about it, was of familiar objects in specific places in a three-dimensional space of worship.5 For them, iconoclasm constituted a loss, not of discrete objects, but of something else entirely. The objects, chosen, I think, precisely for these reasons, marked, or perhaps more accurately participated in, sites of especially intense meaning. The objects might be understood better as the stars within a constellation, within which individual Christians could locate themselves as they worshipped. In smashing those objects—altarpieces, candlesticks, altars—into their component materiality, iconoclasts did not destroy the material, but the form. In removing either the shattered pieces or intact objects, town councils altered the space itself, its configuration of meaning, its layers of representation of sacred lives and of Incarnation. One of the least studied dimensions of the Reformation is the significance of place.6 While scholars have long recognized the significance of the particular configuration of temporal jurisdiction—Freie Reichstädte (Free Imperial Cities)—only a handful, largely working on Francophone and Dutch Reformed churches, have called attention to the ways in which religion, and then its division, qualitatively

5

For some of those testimonies, see Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands, passim. 6 See, most recently, Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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differentiated the places in which Christians worked and worshiped in a number of ways. As Bishop Truchsess von Waldburg showed so dramatically, the Reformation had to do with spatial boundaries—not only or even foremost political boundaries, but with entirely different conceptions of space. Bishop Truchsess von Waldburg’s act formally differentiated that of the evangelicals, who had occupied the Cathedral and, following his reasoning, erased its ancient consecration—whether explicitly by some act or implicitly by their false worship he did not elaborate. His, which was the Catholic conception of space, explicitly, publicly, and formally dividing between clerical and lay, between sanctified and profane, between consecrated and unconsecrated. As he acknowledged, urban and rural places had long been mapped, not according to “power,” but according to categories that traversed and intersected in ways we are only beginning to understand: “life” and “death”; “clergy” and “laity”; “sacred” and “temporal.” The division of religion had immediately to do not only with how men and women would construe the inner space of churches, not only with how they would experience God’s immediacy, God’s abiding presence, “presence”—corporeal or spiritual—but also with how different human beings experienced space itself. For many, the Reformation was also a conflict over what the relationship between religion and both space and place was to be: both what the spatial dimensions of religion were to be and how religion was to give specific places their meaning. The following is a preliminary sketch of a geography of religion within the city of Augsburg during the sixteenth century: both the ways in which religion might be said to inscribe itself into the urban landscape—cloisters and jurisdictions—and the ways in which Christians divided in the sixteenth century over questions of religion and space.7 What is consecration? Does it alter the nature of a space? Such an approach lifts us out of current spatial foci, whether the free imperial cities or the modern state, and suggests other ways of conceiving space—such as “diocese”—that enable us to discern spatial connections that political and national narratives did not chart. In seeking 7 For a succinct introduction to the field of the geography of religion, see John D. Gay, The Geography of Religion in England (London: Duckworth, 1971), chap. 1. For a sense of the development of the field, see Martin Schwind, ed., Religionsgeographie, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975). For two quite different approaches to the geography of religion, see Pierre Deffontaines, Géographie et religions, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); and Gastone Imbrighi, Lineamenti di geografia religiosa (Rome: Universale Studium, 1961).

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to argue the importance of space and place for any understanding of religion, it also invites consideration of “loss” in spatial terms—not simply the loss of the myth of “universal Christendom,” but the loss of a sense, held by the ever more dominant majority in Europe, that they all shared the same way of thinking about space, about the significance of specific places, and their place within the space of Christendom. “Universal Christendom” organized space, designated places, and situated people within three dimensions in a number of ways. In order to chart both the loss and the fundamental transformation, it is useful to review what was held to be shared by the beginning of the sixteenth century in that religious map of Europe. The most familiar and studied level is the division of space into jurisdictional areas. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the papacy in Rome had inscribed upon the fields, river valleys, mountains, and forests of Europe three sets of boundaries that corresponded to three levels of ecclesiastical administration: archdiocese, diocese, and parish. For the medieval period, from the perspective of Rome, the diocesan level of administration was the most important. The bishop ordained priests, set the liturgy more or less for the priests in his diocese, adjudicated conflicts between clergy and their parishioners, and disciplined the clergy within the boundaries of the diocese. The inscription of diocesan boundaries was the most ancient, arising as it did along the lines of Roman imperial administration. Many episcopal sees were situated, following Roman military practice, strategically near mouths of lakes or at intersections of rivers.8 Augsburg, too, had been a Roman outpost; and indeed, Romans had probably been the first Christians in Augsburg. By the time of Bishop Christoph von Stadion, the boundaries of episcopal jurisdiction—both geographical and legal—had been delineated with considerable precision, through a history of expansion, conflict, and resolution. The geographic boundaries would remain largely the same; the character of the jurisdiction those boundaries marked would change dramatically from the sixteenth century onward. By the time of Saint Ulrich in the tenth century, Augsburg was still oriented toward Rome as its administrative capital, but now toward

8 On the interplay of geography and human place-making, see foremost Robert D. Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

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St. Peter’s, not the imperial city to its east. So, too, over generations, bishops altered the city as a place, architecturally giving expression to their function as lord and administrator. Even in the tenth century, the cathedral dominated the rise—signaling in its scale the preeminent resident of the town, competing with the Benedictine abbey in size and scale. As technology and engineering knowledge allowed, each— cathedral and abbey—increased in height, length, and width. Over the course of centuries, bishops also constructed buildings to house their expanding administrative staff, culminating in “The Bishop’s City” (Fronhof ) at the eastern end of the town, a hub of economic, ecclesiastical, diplomatic, and social administration. From the perspective of the laity in many places, the parish was the most important administrative unit. The parish priest not only celebrated the Mass and offered Communion to parishioners in good standing, but he presided over those rituals marking the major events in the life of a Christian: baptism, confirmation, marriage, and last rites. So, too, the parish priest heard confession, determined penance, and provided absolution. Among the informal duties might number adjudicating marital conflict and domestic tensions of other kinds, such as those between generations, and providing such education as a rural parish, for instance, might offer. In Augsburg, parishes were far less clearly demarcated than in some of the other free imperial cities, such as Strasbourg and Zurich. The geography of the town was marked far less by parish churches—most of which were built at the bishop’s will—than by the houses of the many different kinds of religious: the mendicant orders, Benedictine men and women, tertiaries, Beguines, as well as canons. By the sixteenth century, many of the laity from the artisanal quarter listened to sermons in halls the Franciscans and Dominicans had built for that purpose, halls whose scale did not match the cathedral or abbey, but exceeded in height all the buildings that surrounded them. When one looks at Seld’s map of 1521 (see fig. 32), all of the largest structures are religious. As Seld suggested, when one approached the town from any angle, the first visible buildings were the towers of the cathedral or the abbey. The medieval church’s engagements with agricultural and commercial economies also had implications for space and place. Not only did the bishop, the abbey, and specific religious houses own land, some of which was let to tenants—which by the end of the Middle Ages was a substantial agrarian and artisanal economy in its own right—but pious

Figure 32: Georg Seld, Map of Augsburg, 1521, Stadtarchiv Augsburg.

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bequests and endowments typically involved place. In 1485, for example, a childless and heirless citizen of Augsburg bequeathed all his possessions, house, and holdings to the Cathedral and its canons.9 While the gift was far larger than most, the formulaic wording of the bequest suggests the normalcy of bequests of fixed property, which work on pious bequests elsewhere has confirmed.10 Such pious gifts transferred property from lay individuals to religious houses, increasing the landed wealth of those houses, at once providing a source of income and extending the sheer expanse of space that was “religious,” that is, “owned” by a religious order or house. In the Reformation, evangelicals rejected the claims—not only of the papacy in Rome but of the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy—to judge any of the affairs of humankind or to set how the faithful should honor their God. They rejected, in other words, that map of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Lutherans and Reformed Christians would divide, among other things, over how “the Church” should be organized administratively, but for both, the older division of the landscape into dioceses was erased. Indeed, for both Lutherans and Reformed Christians, their respective “Confessions” united local congregations into “Churches” which were spatially scattered, isolated in an expanse of space that was mapped politically and linguistically along boundaries that differed from the boundaries of those Churches. For each, in the sixteenth century, “the Church” was not laid over the older map of the Roman Empire, as the medieval Church had been, but conceived as small islands in a sea of hostile forces—geographically and spatially fragmented. For Reformed Christians, the model was the world of the Pauline Epistles: “where two or three are gathered in my name,” a persecuted minority on a map, in a space, of hostile jurisdictions. In Augsburg, with the City Council’s legislated Reformation, the Council assumed jurisdiction over “the Church,” even as it implicitly defined the geographic boundary of that Church as coinciding with its own jurisdictional boundary. After 1555, with the institution of a policy of biconfessionality, no one Church was coterminous with

9 Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Katholisches Wesensarchiv [hereafter KWA] L551, dated 1485. 10 On pious bequests, see Samuel Klein Cohn, Death and Property in Siena, 1205– 1800: Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) and The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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any political or administrative territory. Lutherans and Catholics alike lived within the walls of a city that was ecclesiastically divided. The bishop could no longer claim lordship of the same extent or character over the lands now held by congregations who adopted the Augsburg Confession; and they, in their turn, had no administrative, economic, or social jurisdiction over the lands that Catholic houses owned. Anabaptists, too, as a persecuted minority, may have shared Huguenot and Belgian Reformed Christians’ sense of placelessness. Within the Empire, after 1555, Lutherans and Catholics each had places in which they might worship, confess a creed they held as true, be baptized, marry, and be buried. All other Christians—Anabaptists, Schwenckfeldians, Mennonites, Socinians, even Reformed Christians until 1648—were placeless. In Augsburg, the map of religious jurisdiction changed three times in the sixteenth century: 1534–37, 1547–48, and 1555. With each change, places—individual structures that functioned as a place of worship—were ascribed to one Church or another and thereby allocated to one religion or another. As jurisdictional boundaries moved, the meaning of individual places changed. In 1534, as the City Council was extending its jurisdiction over religion, the religious of St. Anna transferred “their cloister and all the goods belonging to it” (ir Closter und alle ander darzur gehöriger Güter) to the Spital.11 In 1538, following the abolition of the Mass and the institution of an evangelical liturgy in Augsburg, the Convent of St. Margaretha donated the cloister to the Spital as well.12 Both cloisters dissolved their meaning as enclosed space for the practice of “religion” in the sense of an order and transferred their property—the land and its buildings—both to a different jurisdiction and to a new meaning and use. In 1547, when Charles V and his armies were camped outside the walls of Augsburg, he called for the restoration of all ecclesiastical property to their respective religious orders. In 1548, with his formal “Restoration of Religion,” Charles V affirmed the restoration of all the property that had been transferred, and stipulated as well the return or reconstruction of altars and gravestones.13 In that edict, Charles affirmed not only a hierarchy of jurisdiction—he claimed the legal authority to allocate 11

Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Evangelisches Wesensarchiv [hereafter EWA] Akten 16, dated 1534. 12 EWA Akten 16, dated 1538. 13 EWA Akten 14, dated 1548.

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churches and their property and to restore to their positions of governance the clergy of Augsburg—but also a hierarchy of meaning for various places within his domain: altars and gravestones distinguished the places in which they were located and brought connotations of meaning to those places. In 1555, the institution of a policy of biconfessionality effectively divided the urban landscape between Catholic and Lutheran jurisdictions: no one Church was spatially coterminous with the City Council’s jurisdiction. Both were to be spatially fragmented over the land of the Empire. Within the city of Augsburg, each was to have places to which its members, its faithful, could go: foremost, of course, specific church structures, such as the Cathedral or St. Anna’s; for Catholics, the spaces of cloisters; and for all, cemeteries. If the two legal Churches inscribed their jurisdictions into the urban landscape of Augsburg in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth, during the Thirty Years’ War, armies sought to erase those inscriptions. Most visible to modern eyes was the destruction of churches, buildings which were increasingly visually differentiated, as congregations moved to bring their places of worship into harmony with their sense of Christ’s presence. In Augsburg, the Lutheran church of Holy Cross burned down during the Thirty Years’ War.14 If surviving records are any indication, however, contemporaries feared far more the erasure of graveyards: from 1633 to 1634, the City Council moved to fortify cemeteries that lay outside the Wertachbrucker Gate;15 in 1707, the Protestant cemetery of St. Stephan was “utterly torn down, shattered, ruined, and then used for building the citadel” (gantz niedergerissen, überschüttet, ruinert, und in den Citadell-Bau mit-eingezogen) by French troops.16 As the armies and their targets understood, cemeteries were integral to the Christian economy of salvation, whether one was Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, or Reformed. For many religions, as Pierre Deffontaines argued some fifty years ago, places of burial are central sites of meaning.17 For Christians, cemeteries are the place where the 14 On the destruction and rebuilding of Heilig Kreuz, see EWA Akten 26, 28–29; and Emily Fisher Gray, “Good Neighbors: Architecture and Confession in Augsburg’s Lutheran Church of Holy Cross, 1525–1661,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003). 15 EWA Akten 617. 16 Stadtarchiv Augsburg: 226a: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5: Mappe 3, No. 110. 17 On the “Habitation des Morts” more generally, see Deffontaines, Géographie et religions, Parts I and II.

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dead await Judgment; where “matter” is temporarily separated from “spirit” even as it is preserved for the reunification that resurrection entails; and where the living confront the inversion of “life” and “death” at the center of the doctrine of resurrection. For Christians, cemeteries are the site of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body—at once the product of that doctrine and the materialization of its core tenets. The desecration of cemeteries put at risk the eternal salvation of every body residing in them. It did not simply disturb the material remains of dead Christians, but, in dislocating, even smashing, those remains, it put at risk the necessary reunification of body and soul that must precede Judgment. So, too, it disrupted lineages, sites where the living and the dead were linked, where the living honored the dead, and where, for Catholics, the dead were asked to pray for the living in an ancient exchange of obligations of kinship.18 The importance of cemeteries as place is underlined in a handful of petitions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, addressed to either individual churches or the City Council. In Augsburg, cemeteries were attached to individual churches: the Cathedral and the churches of St. Anna, St. Stephan, and St. Georg are particularly documented.19 As individual churches were, in the shifting jurisdictional boundaries of the sixteenth century, located under Catholic or evangelical jurisdiction, individual Christians petitioned to move graves, either their own future gravesites or those of deceased family, to cemeteries of the Church to which they now belonged.20 For them, at least, cemeteries were also implicated in the division of religious jurisdictions; for them, cemeteries, perhaps very much like churches, belonged to a geography that was now confessionally divided. Charles V’s request for the restoration of gravestones intimates that Catholic and Lutheran cemeteries, even in the sixteenth century, were visually different. “Place” in English has both a spatial and a social connotation. Surviving fragments of information suggest that place in both senses was particularly important to the members of St. Anna. In the Evangelischen Kirchenwesensarchiv is a register of all the graves within the church and cloister of St. Anna and its graveyard, providing both

18 Cf. Sharon Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 19 The bishop had petitioned the City Council repeatedly at the end of the fifteenth century for more space for graves for the cathedral chapter, EWA Akten 14, dated 1494 (2), 1497, 1498, and 1508. 20 EWA Akten 616.

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descriptions of the precise location of each tomb and grave and lists of the dead, organized by patronym and providing the date of burial (not death).21 A second book of graves [Grabbüchlein] provides a list, alphabetically organized according to patronym, of all those who had been buried within the “church”—the cloister is no longer differentiated—between 1655 and 1694.22 If the first of these documents suggests the concern to know where precisely the dead members of this community of the faithful are to be located, the second document suggests a hierarchy of place, the greater importance of being buried not simply within a Lutheran space, but in a place precisely located within that space—closer to the altar, closer to the active praxis of worship. The city archive also contains two different sorts of sources situating individual living members within the space of worship: lists, with place numbers lined up with names; and maps, two-dimensional representations of spatial location. In St. Anna’s, where one sat during worship mattered: both registers of individual seats and maps of seating not only attest to the fixing of each individual in a two-dimensional plan of the congregation [Gemeinde], but also suggest a hierarchy of place: within the place of collective worship were designated personal places for individuals and families of the congregation of St. Anna’s, which, if conflicts are any indication, were also hierarchically significant.23 One literally knew one’s place in worship in St. Anna’s—a place spatially relative to every other place. Religion did not simply define certain kinds of territoriality: areas of jurisdiction, sites for the dead.24 It also mapped Europe with itineraries and sites of pilgrimage.25 On Seld’s map of 1521 are clearly marked the

21 EWA Akten 696, e.g., “Gründliches Verzeichniz aller Begräbnisse bei St. Anna auf den Kirchhof, im Kreuzgang, in der Kirche und im Gottesäckerlein 1596 bis 1714.” 22 EWA Akten 697. 23 For pew registers, see EWA Akten 667 and 692. For representations of the seating, see 226a: Karten und Pläne: Kirchen und Klöster 4, Nos. 103 and 104. 24 On the much larger question of territoriality, see in particular Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); on the territoriality of the Church, chap. 4. 25 On the geography of pilgrimage in general, see Robert H. Stoddard and Alan Morinis, eds., Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces: The Geography of Pilgrimages, [Geoscience and Man, vol. 34] (Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, Louisiana State University, 1997); and R.L. Singh and Rana P.B. Singh, eds., Trends in the Geography of Pilgrimages, ed. (Varanasi: The National Geographical Society of India, 1987). On Christian pilgrimage and geography, see Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces, sec. 2; and Mary Lee Nolan, “Christian Pilgrimage Shrines in Western Europe and India: A Preliminary Comparison,” in Trends in the Geography of Pilgrimages, chap. 2, 18–26.

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St. James Gate on the eastern wall of the city and within the wall the St. James Church. The two were points on the great pilgrimage route to Santiago Compostela in Spain—two points on a line linking Augsburg to Spain in the west, Rome over the Alps to the south, Prague and Salzburg and other points east and north. Even though the great pilgrimages were over by the sixteenth century, the architecture that had marked those routes remained, a physical artifact of piety in motion. That piety, moreover, had served to link villages, towns, and cities, often following trade routes, but also inscribing the map of Europe with loci of greater and lesser sanctity: sites of particularly efficacious relics or of Christian martyrdom, such as that of St. Afra, whose stories were attached to places. St. Afra was a patron saint of the city of Augsburg, as pilgrims would learn when they visited her relics as part of their penitential act. In Augsburg, as elsewhere, sixteenth-century evangelicals rejected all aspects of the cult of relics: the ways in which relics were held to bring a certain kind of sanctity to the site where they were located, the movement of Christians from one such site to the next, and the premise that such movement had any significance whatsoever for an individual’s salvation. In many places, though not in Augsburg, relics were attacked in the 1520s and 1530s; in Strasbourg, for instance, Martin Bucer characterized them as “just bones.”26 In rejecting pilgrimage, evangelicals also rejected a particular way of conceiving of space, as something to be traversed, following a line of points, for the sake of salvation. For them, one might cross space to get to communities of the faithful, but that space was not marked by places of greater and lesser sanctity—loci for the agency of those who were somehow closer to God. For them, the physical landscape held no itinerary of penance and salvation, no markers, no roads specifically designated, no places where God was more palpable. With biconfessionality, Augsburg therefore divided between those who continued to view the city as located on a map marked by relics—even as pilgrimage itself waned until the nineteenth century— and those who saw the city linked by confession, the formal, public creedal statement, recognized with the Peace of Augsburg as legal. Biconfessionality meant the coexistence of two different senses of the

26

Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands, 116–18.

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city in relationship to the map of pilgrimage routes—as situated on such a map or removed through Reformation from such depictions of a false economy of worship; two different senses of the nature of sanctity and its physical presence in specific places; two different senses of the relationship of “place” to human sanctity. That division is captured graphically in a series of floor plans commissioned in the eighteenth century. In floor plans of the cloisters of St. Catharina, St. Georg, St. Ursula, and the Jesuits, altars, in the plural, are marked with red crosses—on a field of black lines on white, the red stands out, captures the eye, directs it.27 On the floor plan of the “former” Carmelite Cloister, St. Anna’s, the altars are not distinguished by color or mark: these places are not differentiated from any other places represented on the plane—all belong to a representation of space in which walls and altars are rendered in the same visual terms.28 The site of the Eucharist for Catholics and Lutherans alike, the altar was not the same place for all Christians. As Bishop Truchsess von Waldburg dramatically signaled, for Catholics, the altar was a sacred place: a place “sanctificatus”—made sanctified—not by the celebration of the Mass, but prior to that celebration, in order to give the Mass a place appropriate to its significance in the lives of the faithful. Since at least the sixth century, Christians had held altars to be singularly significant places. More than to any other single place, Christians directed their patrimonies, their collective and individual wealth, to the construction and endowment of altars, explicitly holding such acts to be expressions of pious devotion. They linked themselves, severally and individually, publicly and explicitly, to altars as sites, places that were carefully situated in the bequests and endowments drafted by secretaries and notaries and signed by the donors. In the sixteenth century, albeit less than other “images,” altars were targets of violence, a signal of their central significance in collective worship. Great families built altars in chapels: the Fuggers, in chapels in the churches of St. Anna, St. Moritz, and St. Ulrich. So, too, wealthy corporations built altars in chapels: the goldsmith guild in their chapel in St. Anna’s. Those corporations “owned” the chapel, insofar as they could install a wrought-iron fence across it and lock the door, and commission panel paintings and carved altarpieces for the space—even as the

27 28

226a: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5, Nos. 51, 67, 90, 140. 226a: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5, No. 168.

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actual structure of each chapel was a part of the architectural whole of the church. Natural and professional corporations were attached, individually and corporately, in a legally stipulated formulation not to the whole structure of the church—within which they were “members” of the congregation—but to a precise locus within that church. The altars in those chapels—explicitly physically cut off from the nave by those fences—“belonged” to those corporations: they purchased the marble, commissioned the carving, and reserved access to those altars. The altars were designated as situated within “the Fugger Chapel” or “the Goldsmiths’ Chapel,” within a map of human piety, patronage, publicly articulated devotion, and collective worship. Even if they could not commission or build a chapel or an altar, less powerful and wealthy families “endowed” altars. In 1463, for example, the widow and citizen of Augsburg, Anna Faichinger endowed the St. Lawrence Altar in the Cathedral with funds to support the celebration of a Mass.29 She carefully specified the site in her bequest. The endowment of Masses—which were “celebrated,” performed—attached to a specific place.30 In the surviving bequests in Augsburg, the funds supporting the regular performance of a Mass—at once repeated for eternity and in each instance transient—attached not to the person of a priest or to the office, but to a physical site: these private Masses were to be performed in a place that the benefactor designated as the location for his or her pious bequest. It mattered to them where those private Masses were to be said, and not simply within this or that church, within the church of his or her parish, but at a specific altar in that church. And those Masses would be said at that site long after the death of the benefactor. The altar was the locus of the bequest, the site for Masses in perpetuity. With Reformation, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Reformed Christians, Schwenckfeldians, and other evangelicals stopped endowing altars with Masses. They condemned private Masses. For all kinds of evangelicals, private Masses had no foundation in scripture. For Luther and Calvin, Christ had instituted the Supper in order to bring Christians together. Private Masses served to divide. They functioned to oppose the very purpose for which Jesus had first celebrated the Eucharist.31 Thus, 29

KWA B241, dated 1463. See also, KWA 632, folder HK, dated 1445. 31 Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 3 and 4. 30

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there ought to be only one altar, one site, for the liturgy. Protestant churches would no longer have multiple sites for the celebration of the Eucharist. Public and collective worship was to have a single focus, in the nave, where, as Calvin stipulated explicitly, all the faithful could see the actions of the minister as well as hear the text of Institution. In the economy of religion, Protestants divided. While Reformed Christians closely restricted what could be put within their place of worship—“idolatry” encompassed most representative art—those who followed the Augsburg Confession could still direct funds to their place of worship.32 They could still commission works of art: panel paintings, sculpture, even altarpieces. Those works of art, however, were to exist in a different relationship to worship: their function was to be more didactic than incarnational. For Lutherans, their place of worship could still be beautiful and educational, but it was no longer a site where they might attach funds to ensure any act of worship. Altars were no longer to be sites to which funds supporting acts of worship attached. Indeed, for evangelicals, even though the one remaining altar remained the site for worship, it was not the same kind of site. Another floor plan of St. Anna’s, dated 1769, drawn by an engineer (fig. 33), delineates—black on once-white paper—where each of the faithful was to sit, the altar, and before that altar, an object labeled “Communion Table” (Comonion tisch). Luther, along with all evangelicals, rejected the meaning of the Mass as a sacrifice. They rejected, therefore, the medieval and Catholic connotation of “altars,” as a site for sacrifice, which had long been visually linked explicitly to the Crucifixion— through smaller crucifixes and painted and carved altarpieces representing the Crucifixion—and through both verbal and visual allusions to the story of Abraham and Isaac, a link reinforced through the symbolism of lambs.33 As the Augsburg floor plans make visible, evangelicals retained the site, but the place was no longer the same.34

32 Lee Palmer Wandel, “Reformation and the Visual Arts,” in Reform and Expansion, ed. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, vol. 6 of The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 345–70. 33 On altars and their meaning, see foremost Joseph Braun, Der christliche Altar in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, 2 vols. (Munich: Alte Meister Guenther Koch & Co., 1924); and Cyril Pocknee, The Christian Altar: In History and Today (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1963). 34 This change in meaning of altars is developed more fully in Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation (2006).

Figure 33: Floorplan, St. Anna’s Church (1769), Stadtarchiv Augsburg: Karten und Pläne, Kirchen und Klöster 5: Mappe 1, Nr. 13.

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In 1547, Bishop Truchsess von Waldburg acknowledged an essential difference in conceptions of space between Catholics and Lutherans when he re-consecrated a place that had been consecrated centuries earlier and whose consecration, at that time, had been for all time— had the church and the altars been used by the same religion for the intervening years, the space would have remained the same in valence and meaning. In consecrating, Bishop Truchsess ritually differentiated the interior space of the church from the space outside its doors, and then again, the place of the altar from the remaining interior space of the church.35 It was, moreover, the site where the miracle of transubstantiation would take place, each and every time Communion was celebrated. After 1555, Catholics inhabited a world in which cloisters’ walls divided “the religious” from “the laity”; in which roads still led to Rome, but perhaps across hostile terrain; and in which some spaces would be designated with red crosses. After 1555, Lutherans in Augsburg inhabited a world of faithful undifferentiated by ecclesiastical office, which looked to Wittenberg for guidance but not administration, and in which all space might be rendered in black lines on blank paper. For Lutherans, altars would no longer be designated by red crosses— specific sites were no longer “sanctified.” But for them, where one sat during worship and where one was buried were powerfully meaningful: God might no longer be anchored to any one geographically mappable place, but place still mattered. The division of religion did not simply divide jurisdictions between Catholic and Lutheran. Nor does it suffice to say Catholics and Lutherans lived in different places. The “places” within which they lived were dramatically different. Catholics lived in a world layered in hierarchies of administration—archdiocese, diocese, parish—and in sacrality: altars, church interiors, cloisters, “the world”; pilgrimage sites and the places “in between.” Protestants lived in a world in which churches were no longer differentiated spatially from everything else—no human action could make a place more sacred than another place. Churches, the structure, for Protestants, thus became more or less interchangeable: certainly one’s own church was familiar, might even be beloved, but it was no more sacred than any other

35 Prior to the Council of Trent, both Libri episcopalis and Missals contained the text for consecrating a church or an altar.

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Lutheran church anywhere else. There was for Protestants no hierarchy of sacrality—no place was more sacred than another, all places were generic in this way. And in their experience as a persecuted minority, Protestants may also have come to a particular understanding both of interstices—betweenness—and emptiness, the land in which one traveled isolated from one’s Church. For all, the myth of shared space was irrevocably lost. The world was divided, not simply according to whether one held good works to be efficacious or not, not simply if one acknowledged the Pope as the head of all Christendom or not, but in the very walking of the spaces of one’s native town or village, between those who lived in a world in which human beings could inscribe greater or lesser proximity to sacredness and those for whom God’s presence might best be understood as islands in an uncharted archipelago.

Figure 34: St. Ulrichskirche, also known as the Predigthaus, after the completion of the 2002–2007 restoration (bottom right) with the larger Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra (background). Photograph reproduced with the permission of Angelika Prem.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LOSING ONE’S PLACE: MEMORY, HISTORY, AND SPACE IN POST-REFORMATION GERMANY Duane J. Corpis In Augsburg, May 6, 2007, the Lutheran Church of St. Ulrich celebrated its re-opening after five years of renovations.1 At the event, Augsburg’s Oberbürgermeister Paul Wengert extolled the significance of this particular church in Augsburg’s history since the Peace of Westphalia: “The St. Ulrichs-Kirche became a symbol of the new system of co-existence between Protestant and Catholic Christians in our city, a symbol of the famous Augsburger parity. Over the generations, co-existence [Nebeneinander] developed into a fruitful and productive cooperation [Miteinander].”2 Wengert drew a direct connection from Augsburg’s early modern system of religious parity to the ecumenical experiments of Augsburg’s Catholics and Lutherans in more recent years. Furthermore, he depicted St. Ulrich as a microcosm of the city’s unity, cohesion, and harmony. The renovations were achieved, he noted, through the interconfessional “collaborative work [Zusammenwirken] of community, church administration, state and city.” For instance, he noted that during construction, Lutheran parishioners were able “to enjoy the hospitality” of the Catholic church next door. The festivities at which he was speaking he described as a “symbol of neighborly relations [Verbundenheit] and Christian kindredship [Geschwisterlichkeit],” and he called for Augsburg’s continued expression of “Christian solidarity and civil unity [christliche Solidarität und zivile Verbundenheit].”3 1 I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Lee Palmer Wandel, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Alex J. Fisher, and Patricio del Real for offering comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. 2 Paul Wengert, “Grußwort zur Wiedereinweihung von St. Ulrich,” speech delivered May 6, 2007, Stadt Augsburg, http://www2.augsburg.de/index.php?id=10441 (accessed March 28, 2008). All translations from the German are my own. I supply German words when the English translation was unable to convey the full sense of the original or when the German phrasing itself highlights a text’s rhetorical argument and structure. 3 Paul Wengert, “Grußwort zur Wiedereinweihung.”

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What was so special about the Lutheran Church of St. Ulrich that it warranted the Oberbürgermeister’s considerable praise? To answer this question, let us look at a photograph of the church after its most recent round of renovations (see fig. 34). In the background of this photograph of St. Ulrich rises a second, significantly larger and taller church: the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra. The two churches—the humble Lutheran Church of St. Ulrich and the grand Catholic Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra—are not simply neighbors. They are physically conjoined.4 Once we realize this fact, we might be even more struck by the visual effect of the restoration. The single, major change in the external appearance of the church was its paint job. Prior to 2002, the color contrast distinguished sharply between the Lutheran and Catholic buildings, while the renovated church now blends with the more neutral color palette of the Catholic basilica. The aesthetic harmony and visual unity produced by the compatible color scheme plays off of the current ecumenical spirit in Augsburg, much like the Oberbürgermeister’s speech. But this re-imagining of space and place, this remembering and forgetting of the long history of intense confessional conflict in the city, is both literally and figuratively a whitewashed version of Augsburg’s early modern religious past.5

4 I am not the first to review the history of the Predigthaus in Augsburg. The architectural historian Eckhard von Knorre published an excellent overview of the early modern confessional disputes concerning the Predigthaus in “Material zur Geschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche in Augsburg,” Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben 69 (1975): 31–60, which was later re-printed as a pamphlet “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche in Augsburg vom Mittelalter bis zum Barock,” Sonderdruck aus der Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben, Band 69, 1975 (Augsburg: Hieronymus Mühlberger, 1985), 1–30. I cite from the latter, more recent publication. My findings about the intricacies of confessional conflict parallel and confirm Knorre’s, although I aim to draw my conclusions further and in different directions than he did. 5 In 2005, the city council of Augsburg issued the following statement: “The city of Augsburg respects the efforts of the [city’s] different religious communities to build their own religious centers on the basis of democratic and constitutional principles. The city is able to provide assistance in this matter in an advisory capacity.” (Die Stadt Augsburg erkennt Bemühungen der verschiedenen Religionsgemeinschaften an, eigene Glaubenszentren auf der Basis demokratischer und rechtsstaatlicher Grundsätze zu errichten. Sie ist dabei beratend behilflich.) Such a gesture certainly reflects a spirit of tolerance matching the ecumenical spirit of Paul Wengert’s speech. But ultimately, Wengert’s language, as inclusive as it seems, also produces its own exclusions. Where do the over 25,000 Muslims of Augsburg fit into Wengert’s vision of “Christian kindredship” (christliche[r] Geschisterlichkeit) and “Christian solidarity” (christliche[r] Solidarität)? Significantly, the question of Christian ecumenicism’s inclusions and exclusions has been raised in Augsburg regarding proposals for the construction of a

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The introduction of the Reformation, the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years’ War caused tremendous friction between Lutherans and Catholics over various religious spaces in the city of Augsburg. In the century after the Peace of Westphalia, Augsburg’s legal system of parity produced a political and social order that simultaneously institutionalized formal toleration between Catholics and Lutherans, on the one hand, and intense social, political, and religious competition between the two confessional parties, on the other. This essay focuses upon the most significant and sustained confessional conflicts between the evangelical church of St. Ulrich, more commonly called the “Predigthaus” (preaching hall ) in the sources, and its Benedictine neighbor in the Abbey and Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra, especially in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I seek to describe how space became a reservoir of memory and simultaneously a site of forgetting. How did the conversion of Catholic sacred spaces during and after the Protestant Reformation result in competing civic identities and memories among Catholics and Lutherans in Augsburg? More specifically, how did the transfer of the St. Ulrich Predigthaus and its subsequent architectural preservation and alterations allow Protestants to lay claim to Catholic space and, in the process, erase important physical and visible symbols of the city’s pre-Reformation past. And what was the Catholic response to this loss? Finally, how did the materiality of space resist or reinforce this dual process of remembering and forgetting? This essay thus examines confessional conflict in Augsburg through two intersecting forms of loss—the relinquishing of Catholic space in the civic landscape and the distortions of confessional memory as both religious communities attempted to forge their own distinct identities.6

Turkish cultural center in 2003 and a Muslim mosque in 2009. Ute Krogull, “Muslime wollen in einer großen Moschee beten,” Augsburger Allgemeine (March 10, 2009), http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/Home/Lokales/Augsburg-Stadt/Lokalnews/ Artikel,-Muslime-wollen-in-einer-grossen-Moschee-beten-_arid,1514072_regid,2_ puid,2_pageid,4490.html?et_cid=4&et_lid=5 (accessed October 23, 2009). 6 Recently, several historians have begun to use a spatial lens to discuss confessional interaction in early modern Augsburg. See, for example, Emily Fisher Gray, “Good Neighbors: Architecture and Confession in Augsburg’s Lutheran Church of Holy Cross, 1525–1661” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004); C. Scott Dixon, “Urban Order and Religious Coexistence in the German Imperial City: Augsburg and Donauwörth, 1548–1608,” Central European History 40 (2007): 1–33; and Duane J. Corpis, “Mapping the Boundaries of Confession: Space and Urban Religious Life in the Diocese of Augsburg, 1648–1750” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe,

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To tell this story, I must give a general sketch of the architectural history of the location in question. It is nearly impossible for the historian to reconstruct an accurate history of the St. Ulrich Predigthaus and the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra, for most of the surviving evidence about the medieval history of these buildings is an act of memory work. The early modern monastic chronicles recording the history of this complex of buildings are themselves memorializations, written to aggrandize the Catholic Church. Likewise, the archival evidence documenting discrepant Catholic and Protestant histories of the Predigthaus reflect competing agendas. Both Catholics and Protestants mobilized supposedly objective historical claims in order to bolster their diametrically opposed legal arguments about jurisdiction and property rights.7 But some historical background, as contaminated as it might be, is necessary to understand exactly how the seventeenthand eighteenth-century debates between the Benedictine basilica and the Lutheran Predigthaus used the past in order to constitute competing memories of the city’s confessional landscape. In the Catholic sources, which offer the only sustained discussions of the earliest history of this location, the place where the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra and the Predigthaus of St. Ulrich would eventually be built becomes the setting for a story about the steady expansion of Catholicism in the region. It had been the home and gravesite of St. Afra, an early fourth-century convert to Christianity, a martyr, and later one of the patron saints of the Diocese of Augsburg. According to legend, shortly after the Romans executed Afra, locals built a church on the spot where her remains were buried. Much later, Bishop Ulrich (890–973) initiated a project to expand the church. In 1012, years after ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Etienne François focuses more upon the social boundaries that divided biconfessional Augsburg, but he also offers evidence regarding the spatial configuration of the Lutheran and Catholic communities in the city in Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1991). 7 According to Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, such difficulty is typical of memory work: “If the impulse to organize the past is the basis for the construction of identity, then this impulse achieves intelligibility as a compelling story or narrative. These stories have authority precisely because they are organized in a way that effaces the contingent, discontinuous, and indeed dangerous (because multivocal) quality of the past. . . . Narratives provide storied claims for entitlement and they thus generate historical subjectivity that has proven notoriously difficult to deconstruct by a critical scholarship.” “Introduction: Noises of the Past,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 8.

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his death and canonization, Ulrich’s body was interred in the church he helped rebuild, which was rededicated as the Church of SS. Ulrich and Afra. That same year, the Benedictines arrived in Augsburg, and with the blessing of the local bishop, laid claim to SS. Ulrich and Afra, which became the heart of their new monastery.8 Leaping ahead, we know that in 1458 construction ended on a building attached to the Benedictine church. That building, called St. Ulrich’s Church, would serve as the preaching hall for SS. Ulrich and Afra, hence its more common name, “das Predigthaus.” The exact context in which the Predigthaus came into being is unclear. Catholics believed that the Benedictines had converted a pre-existing structure immediately adjacent to SS. Ulrich and Afra, formerly used as a market hall for traveling pilgrims, into the Ulrichskirche so preachers could minister to the pilgrims’ spiritual rather than worldly needs.9 Lutherans typically responded by denying that there had been a preexisting market hall where the Predigthaus now stood and emphasized the fact that the city council of Augsburg had funded the construction of St. Ulrich, assertions that undercut Benedictine jurisdictional claims.10 Despite these competing narratives, we can assume that the Predigt– haus opened for business in 1458, since one of the stones in the building’s façade had that very year carved into it to commemorate the founding of the new church.11 It seems most likely that, in the decades after its construction, the preaching hall fell under the jurisdiction of 8 Bernardus Hertfelder, Basilica. daß ist Herrliche Kirchen des Freÿ-Reichs Klosters St. Ulrich und Afra in Augspurg. Sambt den Heiligthumber Altar, und Silbern Bildnussen, so in selber noch aufbehalten werden, in kupffer vorgestellt, beschriben auß latein in teutsch, ubersetzt und vermehrt von P. Romano Kistler O:S:B: p:t: Custode des vorberürten Reichsgottshauß St. Ulrich und Afra Anno Jubilaeo, trans. Romanus Kistler (Augsburg: Johan Michael Labhart, 1712). 9 Whatever the pre-history of the Predigthaus, it is clear that the monks’ decision to add this preaching hall was part of a larger, contemporary reforming movement taking place among regional Benedictine monasteries to bolster their religious mission. On this late-medieval monastic reform movement, see Wilhelm Liebhart, Die Reichsabtei Sankt Ulrich und Afra zu Augsburg: Studien zu Besitz und Herrschaft (1006–1803) (Munich: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1982). 10 These conflicting claims are discussed later in the essay. 11 Based in part on later excavations at the site, Knorre tentatively suggests that the Predigthaus occupied a space that previously had served as an atrium (Vorhalle) and entrance into the Church of SS. Ulrich and Afra. He argues persuasively, however, that the current state of research can make no definitive claims about the pre-history of the Predigthaus. Knorre, “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche in Augsburg,” 2–4.

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both the Benedictine monastery and the city council. The Predigthaus sat on Benedictine property, but because St. Ulrich grew to function as the central parish church for the immediate surrounding part of town, its finances and upkeep were administered by a Zechpfleger (church caretaker), who received his salary from the city council.12 Even before the Reformation, this overlap of jurisdictional claims between the monastery and the city council produced disagreements, though the Reformation would intensify these tensions into outright conflict.13 Figures 35 and 36 show images of the Predigthaus, which offer us a rough sense of what the church looked like from 1458 through 1709. Both the copper print, produced by Daniel Manasser in 1626 and published in a 1627 chronicle of SS. Ulrich and Afra, and the watercolor, produced in 1710, vividly depict the Catholic iconography on the Lutheran church’s façade, although the two representations do not correspond perfectly. Both include the images of Ulrich and Afra.14 The 1627 copper print shows two additional images in the niches of the gable, and although neither is particularly recognizable, both appear to be female figures. In the 1710 watercolor, the upper-right, arched niche in the church’s gable more clearly contains a painting of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, flanked on the left by Ulrich and on the right by Afra. The left niche, however, is empty. 1458, the year of the church’s founding, appears in the watercolor between the two arched niches in the gable and immediately below the clock, but the date is absent from the earlier print. Where the year ought to be located, Manasser simply renders instead the peeling and cracking church façade. Also noticeably absent from the 1627 copper print yet visible in the 1710 watercolor are two shields flanking the right and left sides of the niches in the gable, which would have contained the monastery’s official insignia. Regardless of their exact placement, appear-

12

On the development of the “Zechpflegschaft” (church maintenance undertaken by lay citizens and the city council ) and the office of the Zechpfleger in Augsburg, see Rolf Kießling, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Kirche in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter (Augsburg: Verlag H. Mühlberger, 1971), 102–7. 13 Liebhart’s Die Reichsabtei Sankt Ulrich und Afra zu Augsburg and Kießling’s Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Kirche both describe the ongoing tensions between the City Council of Augsburg and ecclesiastical authorities in the city, including the Benedictines of SS. Ulrich and Afra. 14 The 1627 reproduction of Manasser’s copper print places the two saints on the far left (Ulrich) and far right (Afra) of the building, just under the gable. The 1710 watercolor places St. Ulrich between the two ground-level arches on the left and St. Afra on the far right of the building.

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ance, and actual existence on the façade, each of these architectural and artistic elements would later play a critical role in the debates between Augsburg’s Lutheran and Catholic factions. In the same year that the Predigthaus opened, an ambitious abbot named Melchior von Stamheim took charge of the monastery and nine years later began a major renovation project to turn the existing Church of SS. Ulrich and Afra into a grand, late-Gothic basilica. But the financially strapped monastery had to slow its construction plans considerably, with the last bits of the building finally completed in 1612. Indeed, the church took so long to complete that its architectural style shifted over time, as we see in three copper prints published in 1626, 1627, and 1712 (see figs. 37–39). The baroque onion-domed tower, one of the final additions to the church, rises majestically in each print above the basilica’s main gothic structure. While construction on the basilica was still in its early stages, the controversial, new religious teachings of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and other reformers began filtering into Augsburg. Although the Bishop of Augsburg and the various clerical elites of the city rejected these new ideas as dangerous and heretical innovations, many in the city looked favorably upon the reform movement, and after much political debate and deliberation, the council banned Catholic services and clergy from the city in 1537. Years before this date, however, the Predigthaus had splintered away from Catholicism in 1526 to become the evangelical parish church for the surrounding community under the auspices of the city council, and in 1529 the parish appointed new clerics explicitly sympathetic to Protestant theology, despite the Benedictines’ distraught objections. The physical juxtaposition and historical connection of the Predigt– haus and the basilica generated non-stop jurisdictional conflicts during and after the Reformation between the Catholic abbot and monastery, on the one hand, and the Lutheran Zechpfleger and city magistrates, on the other. Of great concern to Catholics was St. Jacob’s Chapel, itself built on the side of the Predigthaus. As a matter of tradition dating from before the Reformation, the Benedictines had used this chapel to baptize infants. A passage between the basilica and the Predigthaus gave the monks direct access to the chapel. Although the Predigthaus essentially became Lutheran by 1529, the Benedictines possessed a long-held right of use over St. Jacob’s Chapel, which the city council could not simply cancel or contravene. As a compromise, the Lutherans permitted the Benedictines continued access to the

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Figure 35: Close-up of Predigthaus (F) as depicted in Daniel Manasser’s “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627). Reproduced courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (BX 2618.S32 H57+).

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Figure 36: Façade of Predigthaus depicted in a watercolor from 1710. Reproduced with the permission of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Vienna (HHStA RHR Decisa Kart. 176).

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Figure 37: Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” (1626). Reproduced with the permission of the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg (Graph 28–78).

Figure 38: Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627). Reproduced courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library (BX 2618.S32 H57+).

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Figure 39: “Basilica St. Ulrich u[nd] Afrae mit dem Kloster,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder, Basilica. daß ist Herrliche Kirchen des Freÿ-Reichs Klosters St. Ulrich und Afra in Augspurg (1712). Reproduced with the permission of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Bancroft fNA5586.A84.H35 1712).

chapel. This settlement would form the basis of ongoing struggles over space and memory between the monks and Lutheran authorities of Augsburg for the next two centuries. Other issues became flashpoints of conflict as well in the period from the Reformation to the Thirty Years’ War. The Protestant city council closed the monastery in 1537, and the monks fled to Bavaria until the imperial Edict of Restitution allowed them to return in 1548. Almost immediately tensions over how to share the space of the two conjoined churches erupted again, first with disputes over which party would have access to the church bells in the belfry of the Predigthaus to call parishioners to church services.15 Then, in 1550, several Catholic monks and officials associated with the cloister instigated a group of 15

Paul Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt: Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), 231.

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visiting Spanish soldiers to occupy and vandalize the interior of the Predigthaus, enraging the Lutheran community. In the 1580s, the interior renovations of the basilica sparked Lutheran protests, because the proposed architectural changes would directly affect the infrastructure of the wall joining the two churches. The Lutherans felt that the abbot should not have the right to make such changes without first consulting the caretakers of the Predigthaus and city council. In addition, conflicts over competing Catholic and Lutheran jurisdictions spilled out into the adjoining churchyard, which both the Catholic abbot and Lutheran church caretaker claimed as their property. The caretaker of the Predigthaus complained that the abbot had arrogated the chore of cutting the grass in the churchyard, thus encroaching upon his customary duties and privileges. Both the abbot and the Zechpfleger understood the mowing of the grass as a chore that implied their mutually exclusive customary control over the churchyard. As a further affront, the Zechpfleger complained that the abbot had permitted a Catholic parishioner to graze her hens in the churchyard, which disrupted church services in the Predigthaus.16 In 1608, the abbot and the Zechpfleger once again found themselves at odds, this time over a damaged wall in St. Jacob’s Chapel. Both parties upheld their jurisdictional rights over the chapel, and so both insisted they ought to pay for the necessary repairs out of their own respective budgets. In addition, the abbot simultaneously proposed a plan to re-paint a faded image of St. Jacob on the exterior wall of the chapel. The Lutherans objected strenuously, although in the end, the city council authorized a painter to touch up the image. After all, if the Lutherans had possession over the Predigthaus, the Catholics certainly did have at least partial jurisdiction over St. Jacob’s Chapel based upon prior custom and compromises. Just one year later in 1609, however, the Lutherans decided to repair some structural damage to one of the walls in the Predigthaus, but the construction inadvertently damaged the image of Afra hanging on the church’s exterior façade. Infuriated, Abbot Johann Merk insisted that the Lutherans fix the image.17 As part of his legal argument, Merk marshaled his understanding of the preaching hall’s pre-history. Prior 16

Ibid., 235. The details of this incident are drawn largely from Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt, 230–38; and Knorre, “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche,” 6–7. 17

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to 1458, Merk notes, the site had purportedly functioned as a market hall once a week, in order to serve the large crowds that gathered at SS. Ulrich and Afra on Monday mornings following the weekly religious procession led by the Benedictines. Both the procession and the market fell under the auspices of the monks, which the abbot implied when he claimed that, in 1457, they decided to close the market hall because it had supposedly degenerated into a den of deceit [List] and fraud [Betrug]. The Lutheran church authorities countered by forcefully asserting that there had never been a market or shopping hall [Kaufhaus] where the Predigthaus now stood.18 The Lutherans also emphasized that, in any case, the Predigthaus itself fell under the jurisdiction of the city council as a civic property, because it was built with city funds. Because the relevant medieval sources have not survived, we cannot intervene in this debate in any definitive way. What we do know is that the Lutherans ultimately agreed to pay for the repairs to the image they had damaged. In the final analysis, the costs were not the problem for the Lutherans; rather, they realized the need to counter the historical argument articulated in the abbot’s protests. What mattered was how memories of the past might be mobilized as future precedents. At the height of the Thirty Years’ War, the Imperial Restitution Edict of 1629 returned the Predigthaus to the Benedictines. This decision was temporarily reversed during the Swedish occupation of Augsburg (1632–35).19 But with the military gains of the Emperor and the Catholic League, and the resurgence of Catholic power in the city, the re-Catholicized city council closed the Predigthaus in 1635. It remained closed until the Peace of Westphalia remapped the spatial and territorial configuration of the Empire as a whole and the city of Augsburg in particular. In sum, the Peace of Westphalia dictated that in biconfessional cities like Augsburg all properties and buildings— such as churches, cloisters, hospitals, and schools—would be restored to both Catholics and Protestants based upon whichever confession had owned them in 1624. The two dates associated with the Peace of 18

Knorre, “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche,” 6–7. Interestingly, the only Catholic Church permitted to remain in operation during the Swedish occupation was the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra, since the Benedictine monks had sworn an oath of obedience to King Gustavus Adolphus. Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit und Parität, Zweiter Teilband (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 725. 19

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Westphalia—1648, when the Peace was concluded, and 1624, the year used by the Peace to resolve competing jurisdictional claims among the confessions—became two of the central moments on the timeline of historical memories repeatedly recalled and deployed by Catholics and Lutherans as they reconstructed their confessional identities after the Thirty Years’ War.20 Both Lutherans and Catholics in Augsburg would, for the next one-hundred-fifty years, appeal to 1624 and 1648 in order to defend their jurisdictional rights over a range of places and spaces—cemeteries, orphanages, chapels, and churches. This process of enshrining 1624/1648 as temporal points of political and confessional remembrance can be seen in a small booklet published in 1649 titled Warhaffter Verlauff/ Was sich bey der Restitution der Stadt Augsburg in geistlichen vnd Weltlichen Sachen/ Zu Vollziehung deß Osnabruckischen Friedenschlusses/ begeben (True Account of What Resulted during the Execution of the Osnabrück Peace Treaty with the Restitution of the City of Augsburg). The short publication lays out the specific guidelines for implementing the Peace of Westphalia in the city of Augsburg. Although only twenty-four pages long, the text fully outlines the organization of confessional parity with regard to Augsburg’s civic political offices as well as the jurisdictional division of civic space in terms of churches, cemeteries, and other contested sites in the city.21 The year 1624 was either enumerated or spelled out twenty-four times in twenty-two pages of the booklet’s main text (not counting its appendices). And in the eleven-page section dealing solely

20 Confino and Fritzsche note, “Cultural memory becomes increasingly important when the past is recognized as cut off and different from the present.” Although they associate this with modernity and the project of nation-state building, I would argue that, in the minds of many Germans living in either the second half of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth century, the Peace of Westphalia drew a distinct conceptual boundary between the pre-Thirty Years’ War past and their post-1648 present. Confino and Fritzsche, “Introduction: Noises of the Past,” in The Work of Memory, 8. Of course, as Craig Koslofsky’s contribution to this same volume suggests, the development of early modern memory had multiple sources. Koslofsky, “From Presence to Remembrance: The Transformation of Memory in the German Reformation,” in The Work of Memory, 25–38. 21 Warhaffter Verlauff/ Was sich bey der Restitution der Stadt Augsburg in geistlichen vnd Weltlichen Sachen/ Zu Vollziehung deß Osnabruckischen Friedenschlusses/ begeben (1649), 30. Specifically, the booklet describes the political arrangement imposed upon Augsburg’s government, which would consist of one Catholic and one Lutheran Stadtpfleger, three Catholic and three Lutheran burgomasters, and twentytwo Lutheran and twenty-three Catholic city councilors.

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with church buildings and other contested, religiously affiliated spaces (4–14), 1624 appears eighteen times. This constant repetition, on the one hand, reflects the typical redundancy of legalese, for this text basically distilled the implementation of the legal provisions in the Peace of Westphalia, itself referred to rarely by date but repeatedly as either das Instrumentum Pacis (the Instrument of Peace), den Osnabrückischen Friedenschluss (the Peace of Osnabrück), or simply den Friedenschluss (the peace treaty) for short. On the other hand, the repetition of 1624 created an almost mantra-like evocation of a particular moment in time, which would become central to future confessional disputes until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.22 With regard specifically to the Predigthaus, the booklet outlined four issues that the Benedictines and the Lutheran authorities had to settle after 1648. First, the Lutherans demanded the return of the keys to the Predigthaus, which the abbot had kept in his possession since 1635. The abbot willingly returned the keys. However, on a second matter, the abbot did not back down: he laid claim to a clock formerly housed in the Predigthaus, which he moved into the tower

22 The year 1648 became central not only in legal disputation during interconfessional conflicts. It also functioned as a key historical moment in the production of Lutheran and Catholic post-war confessional identities. The clearest example of this is the celebration of the Friedensfest, a holiday invented and observed by the Lutherans of Augsburg to honor the peace treaties that guaranteed the existence and preservation of Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire. The holiday first began in 1650. The Lutheran authorities set the date for August 8, the day when, twenty-two years prior at the height of the Thirty Years’ War, the forcefully re-Catholicized city expelled all Protestant clergy from their positions. The 1650 festivities lasted for an entire week and included a procession of children wearing white shirts and dresses and crown-like circlets around their heads. In 1806, when the city of Augsburg became assimilated into Bavaria, the Bavarian authorities re-named the holiday the Toleranz- und Friedensfest, redefining the significance of the holiday in terms set by the Enlightenment. But this redefinition belies the fact that the Friedensfest was an act of Lutheran confessional self-assertion rather than tolerance. It should not surprise us, therefore, that Catholics in the city refused to recognize the Friedensfest as a legitimate holiday. In turn, Catholics re-invented the saint’s day Hilariatag, celebrated on the August 17, in opposition to the Friedensfest, to commemorate the date when the Catholic clergy were readmitted to the city after the Swedish Occupation ended in 1635. On Hilariatag, the Catholic preachers of the cathedral, SS. Ulrich and Afra, and St. Moritz delivered their infamous “Kontroverspredigten,” sermons that explicitly challenged and condemned Lutheran dogma. On the Friedensfest, see 350 Jahre Augsburger Hohes Friedensfest: Ausstellung der Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, 22. Juli bis 22. Oktober 2000, ed. Helmut Gier (Augsburg: Hoffman-Druck, 2002), 10–11; and Johannes Burkhardt and Stephanie Haberer, eds., Das Friedensfest: Augsburg und die Entwicklung einer neuzeitlichen Toleranz-, Friedens- und Festkultur (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). On Hilariatag, see François, Die unsichtbare Grenze, 144.

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of the basilica. The Lutheran Zechpfleger objected, stating that his predecessors had traditionally been the ones to maintain the clock. The issue of the church clock, which does not seem to have played any major role in future disputes between the Benedictines and the caretaker of St. Ulrich’s, was resolved by allowing the Benedictines to keep the old clock and granting the Zechpfleger permission to obtain a new one for the Predigthaus at some future date. The third issue at stake struck a familiar chord. The abbot of course insisted that the Benedictines must retain their right to have access to St. Jacob’s Chapel via the Predigthaus. The Lutherans responded positively, declaring “that things would remain in all ways just as they had been in the year 1624, and that the [Catholic] baptismal processions would not be obstructed.”23 The fourth and final matter to be resolved involved possession of the rectory. The abbot suggested an exchange, whereby the Lutherans would cede the old rectory to the monastery in exchange for a “corner house” [Eckhaus] across the churchyard. On this point, the Lutherans would not budge, and instead insisted on the restitution of their former rectory. They did, however, agree to a special request from the abbot to let the church organist live in the rectory for a short period of time.24 Although the Benedictines had made significant concessions from 1648 to 1649 as the Augsburg magistrates began to implement the reconfigured biconfessional political order dictated by the Peace of Westphalia, they also struggled against parity. The dissatisfaction of Abbot Bernard can be seen, for example, in a letter he composed in 1653, in which he listed a number of arguments why the Predigthaus still belonged under his jurisdiction.25 For example, Bernard claimed that the site of the Predigthaus had originally contained some of the monastery’s burial crypts [ein Grett oder Grebel], while the land upon which the Lutheran pastor of the church planted his personal garden had been a Catholic cemetery. Indeed, Bernard asserted that the garden still had visible, vestigial traces of its former usage. He even named some of the dead interred on or near the grounds of the Predigthaus,

23

Warhaffter Verlauff, 7. Ibid. 25 Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien (hereafter HHStA), RHR Decisa Karton 172, Faszikel 272 (215 + 216) A 84, Konvolut 1–17, letter from Abbot Bernard to Emperor Ferdinand III, 15 January 1653. The document lists seventeen arguments in total, but I focus upon those that recurred in future debates. 24

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including the knight Johann Karupfen and his wife, for whom the monks had continuously conducted memorial masses since his death in 1338. Thus, the church and grounds claimed by Lutherans had been built upon Catholic bodies laid to rest long before the Reformation. While this was an argument in favor of the cloister’s proprietary claims, it also mobilized Catholic memory, embodied in the cult of the dead. Burial sites were sacred, consecrated spaces according to Catholicism and, indeed, it was the presence of the relics of Afra and Ulrich along with numerous other saints that gave the basilica its initial claim to sacrality.26 The bodies of other pious Catholic men and women, such as Karupfen, created a chain of historical links from the founding of the Catholic Church in Augsburg to the present. Bernard’s strategic recollection of the past continued with his discussion of several of his predecessors, Abbots Adalbero (1107–09), Marquard (1316–34), and Johannes von Hochenstein (1439–58), whose use and transformation of the land and the former structures where the Predigthaus now stood reinforced the Benedictines’ property claims. To claim secular as well as ecclesiastical authority in this matter, Bernard also noted that Emperor Charles V had confirmed the monastery’s jurisdictional privileges over the Predigthaus. But of all of Bernard’s arguments, those centered upon the physical appearance of the Predigthaus itself would most successfully shape the contours of conflict for years to come. Specifically, Bernard pointed to the paintings and the monastic insignia that adorned the façade of the Predigthaus. These were irrefutable signs of Catholic origins and Benedictine jurisdiction, evidence that constituted “such a famous, visibly undeniable fact that further proof is unnecessary.”27 For Bernard, the visible markings on the church evoked an irrefutable Catholic past literally etched in stone. Bernard premised his arguments upon a historical memory that recalled a variety of moments reaching as far back as the twelfth century, thus predating and superseding both the introduction of the Reformation in the 1520s and the Peace of Westphalia’s reorientation

26 According to Koslofsky, the continuing presence of the deceased in the hereand-now for Catholics marks one of the ruptures between Catholic and Protestant forms of memory. Koslofsky, “From Presence to Remembrance: The Transformation of Memory in the German Reformation,” in The Work of Memory, 25–38. 27 HHStA, RHR Decisa Karton 172, Faszikel 272 (215 + 216) A 84, Konvolut 1–17, letter from Abbot Bernard to Emperor Ferdinand, 15 January 1653.

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of the city’s history around the dates 1624 and 1648.28 But despite his protests, the abbot could not deny that the Peace of Westphalia served as contemporary imperial law, and so the unstable compromise permitting Benedictine access to St. Jacob’s chapel but granting primary jurisdiction over the Predigthaus to the Lutheran community remained intact. Starting in the 1680s, the Benedictine monks and the Lutheran Zechpfleger entered another series of legal conflicts over their overlapping property and jurisdictional claims. The Lutherans complained that Catholic clergy and laymen had abused their privileged access to St. Jacob’s Chapel. At first, the city council tried to serve as a mediator between the two institutions.29 But what began as a series of formal legal arguments and negotiations over uncertain spatial and jurisdictional boundaries grew to include direct and indirect confessional confrontations staged in the Predigthaus itself. In other words, a turf war erupted between the competing confessions. Not since the unfortunate incident with the Spanish soldiers in 1550 had outright confrontation and vandalism become a tactic in the micro-territorial dispute between the Catholic monastery and the Lutheran Predigthaus. According to Lutheran complaints in 1681, Catholics allegedly vandalized the Predigthaus by sneaking in and throwing broken glass on the pews, cutting holes in the altar cloths, and damaging the family crests and emblems attached to the seats in the church.30 These acts were destructive, but others seem more like childish practical jokes. For instance, the Lutheran caretaker reported that “One can’t count the times that the seats have been shuffled about here and there, since it happens almost daily.”31 The caretaker’s tone of exasperation suggests that he must have felt as if he had lost control over even the simplest aspects of his church’s spatial configuration.

28

Ibid. Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Evangelisches Wesensarchiv (hereafter StAAug, EWA) 941, T. III. 30 StAAug, EWA 941 T.II, letter to the Lutheran Stadtpfleger and Privy Council, from the Zechpfleger of St. Ulrich, dated 1681; StAAug, EWA 941 T.I, “Verschidene Turbationes, so die Ulricaner Mönch und Papistin unter währendem Gottesdienst der Evangelischen, und sonsten ausserhalb dem selben in der Pfarr Kirch zu St. Ulrich verübet.” For an in-depth treatment of the symbolic and social significance of church seating, see Tanya Kevorkian, Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 53–74. 31 StAAug, EWA 941 T.II, letter to the Lutheran Stadtpfleger and Privy Council, from the Zechpfleger of St. Ulrich, dated 1681. 29

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In 1684, the church caretakers of St. Ulrich reported to the city council that a disruptive and disrespectful group of Benedictines and Jesuits had entered the Predigthaus from the basilica one afternoon. The Lutheran sexton overheard one of the Catholics ironically saying, “It’s quite a nice pigsty,” to which the sexton responded, “It is quite a disgrace and mockery to speak of a church so. You should be ashamed of yourself, for this is still a house of God.”32 The sexton and one “frembde Jesuit” (foreign Jesuit) in particular exchanged more heated words, until someone from the basilica came to fetch the Jesuit, and the Catholics finally hurried out of the church.33 In 1685, the Zechpfleger Carl Friederich Vincens, Peter Neust, and Emanuel Jacob Schwartz together signed a letter detailing how one Catholic priest in particular—Gregorius Scheffler—had a serious confrontation with the Lutheran sexton of the Predigthaus while he was leading a baptismal procession into St. Jacob’s Chapel. According to the Lutheran version of events, the Catholic priest seemed to feel that the sexton was in his way and shouted, “Listen, what kind of behavior is this, that he [the sexton] would lay an obstacle in my way into my own property. I’ll show him. He did the same thing to me on St. Jacob’s Day and refused to let the people pass. But I’ll show him. Indeed! In my property! He is just a peasant [Flegel], a big, crass peasant.”34 To this provocation, the sexton supposedly responded calmly: “Mein Herr Pfarrer, you are the subordinate [subordinatus]; over you is your Lord Prelate. We have agreements [with each other]. I will refer this matter to my superior.”35 Scheffler wrote a lengthy response to this Lutheran account: “So long as the current sexton has been in office (since nothing other than kind and good things can be said of his two predecessors) I have constantly had to listen to complaints about his rudeness [Grobheiten], which he practices against the Catholics.”36 According to Scheffler, the sexton

32 StAAug, EWA 941 T.I, letter from Jacob Schorer, Johannes Drevel and Antoni Weid, the Zechpflegers of St. Ulrich, to the Lutheran Stadtpfleger and Privy Council A.C., dated August 1684. 33 Ibid. 34 According to Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch, Flegel can either be a pejorative term for a peasant or penis. 35 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Katholisches Wesensarchiv (hereafter StAAug, KWA) B 16 2 , dated 18 September 1685. 36 StAAug, KWA B 216, letter from Gregorius Scheffler, priest, dated 17 November 1685.

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had uttered curses [Schmähworten] against Catholics, dumped water into the church entrance when Catholic baptisms were scheduled to take place, and placed boards [Latten] and a broom in the doorway so that the Catholic baptismal procession “had to climb over them.” He denied ever calling the sexton a Flegel, though he admitted to uttering the following heated words to him: “If we are to speak about [property] rights, then I will not dispute them with a sexton, and even less will I let a sexton interfere with my property rights [Eigenthums Recht]. Don’t you dare approach my parishioners as they pass through here [bei dem Durchgang] and harass them any longer, or I’ll show you!”37 When the conflicting testimonies are pieced together, what seems at stake here in addition to outright religious hostility is the ambiguous relationship between competing Catholic and Lutheran authorities occupying and working within the same shared spaces, based upon their differing views of property rights, jurisdictional spheres, and their institutional rank and status. According to the Lutheran testimony, the sexton implicitly acknowledges that Catholics have some rights to use the Predigthaus, but he also refuses to submit to the authority of the Catholic priest, referring instead to his subordinate position under the abbot. It was the abbot with whom the Lutheran church authorities would deal directly in order to determine rightful usage of the Predigthaus and St. Jacob’s Chapel, not his underlings. The priest, in turn, boldly asserts the Catholic Church’s proprietary claims in this situation, while positioning his status above that of the Lutheran sexton by refusing to discuss weighty matters of “rights” with such an insignificant person. These tensions remained unresolved and, in the following year, the abbot accused the Zechpfleger of barring the passage between the basilica and the Predigthaus, arguing that an iron bar [Eÿsenen Stangen] blockading the entrance between the two churches violated the Peace of Westphalia by preventing the Benedictines from using St. Jacob’s Chapel. The reason for blocking the door, responded the Lutheran church officials, was the constant disruption of their sermons and services by Catholic interlopers who misused their right of access to the chapel. For the Zechpfleger, it was the Benedictines who had violated the Peace of Westphalia by interfering with the Lutheran community’s free exercise of religion.

37

Ibid.

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Even as the on-site turf war heated up, both sides appealed to formal legal institutions, both civic and imperial, to resolve the jurisdictional dispute. On June 14, 1686, an imperial decree decided in favor of the monastery, ordering the Zechpfleger to end their blockade and not to obstruct the monastery’s rights.38 But this decision did not put an end to the squabbling. In 1688, an imperial commission recorded the testimony of one Lutheran parishioner, who noted that the “Catholics walk through [the church] in procession on Easter- and Pentecost-Saturday. He had heard from his parents that they didn’t used to go through during church services, but now they come in the middle of services in order to baptize their children.”39 Thus, Lutheran church authorities not only constructed an institutional memory of the church’s history; they also utilized the personal memories of parishioners. Of course, such personal memories did not necessarily follow a rigid script, as the testimony of Jörg Groß shows: “I have often seen the [Catholic] baptismal procession in the middle of [the Lutheran] confession, communion and sermon, but I don’t know anything else about it, except that it awoke resentment and angry talk on both sides.”40 But even if, as Groß suggests, neither party was completely innocent, his testimony added to a growing stack of accusations against the Benedictines. In 1698, the Lutheran caretakers of St. Ulrich accused the Catholic monks of violating the Peace of Westphalia on Green Thursday (Maundy Thursday) by conducting a mass in St. Jacob’s Chapel at the same time that the Lutherans were holding Bible lessons for children. There were so many Catholics attending the mass that the chapel couldn’t contain them, and they spilled into St. Ulrich.41 Such complaints that the Catholics’ access to and use of St. Jacob had gotten larger, bolder, and more disruptive continued into the first decade of the eighteenth century.42

38

StAAug, KWA B 216, Imperial Mandate, dated 14 June 1686. Witness statement from Hans Leser, dated 1688. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereafter BayHSA), RKG 14623, ROTULUS sive RELATION EXAMINIS TESTIUM ex parte Herren Pflegers und Gehaimer Räthe der Stadt Augsburg Augsp[urgischer] Conf[ession] contra Herrn Praelaten zu St. Ulrich daselbsten denominatorum et productum; Die Beschliessung der Durchgangsthür zwischen beederleÿ Kirchen zu St. Ulrich allda betreffend, 91–92. 40 Witness statement from Jörg Groß, dated 1688. BayHSA, RKG 14623, ROTULUS sive RELATION EXAMINIS TESTIUM, 92. Emphasis added. 41 StAAug, EWA 941 T.I, letter from Lutheran Stadtpfleger and City Council to Jeremiah Seitzen, City Secretary, dated 9 May 1698. 42 StAAug, EWA 941 T.I, Verschidene Turbationes, so die Ulricaner Mönch und Papistin unter währendem Gottesdienst der Evangelischen, und sonsten ausserhalb dem selben in der Pfarr Kirch zu St. Ulrich verübet (no date). 39

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After nearly three decades of what they felt were unlawful Catholic misappropriations of and encroachments into the Church of St. Ulrich, the Lutherans began to take the counter-offensive. In 1707, the Lutherans announced a plan for massive renovations to the Predigthaus, which they closed due to the dangerous state of the church’s interior. First, they wanted to tear down the crumbling façade of the church and then rebuild the walls ten to twelve feet higher with taller and wider windows. They also wanted to add a bigger, taller bell tower.43 In order to rebuild the façade, however, they would need to tear down the wall’s old fresco of the Virgin Mary and images of the patron saints Ulrich and Afra, as well as the stone that had the year 1458 hewn into it to commemorate the construction of the Predigthaus. The Benedictine Abbot Willibald vehemently protested, for these were important reminders to their community of the time before Luther, when all sacred spaces in the city belonged to the Catholic Church. He responded that the façade could be repaired, but it had to be restored to look exactly as before, including the images of Mary, Ulrich, and Afra, which had to be painted “with lasting, good quality paint.” The tower had to be wood, not stone, and the same height as before. The year 1458 had to be carved back into the stone, and the walls should not be “one foot higher, since such would be not only contrary to the Peace of 1648 . . . but would also be more prejudicial” to the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra due to snow that could collect in the corners of the roof “and other difficulties.” Finally, the windows should be reinstalled precisely as they earlier appeared, in accordance with the Peace of Westphalia [ fridenschlussesmässig].44 Despite these charges, the Lutherans proceeded with their plans, issuing a circular letter in 1709 to several Protestant cities—including Ulm, Esslingen, Schwäbisch Hall, and Nürnberg—asking for charitable contributions to defray the costs of the renovations.45 The Zechpfleger, backed by the Lutheran city council members, argued that the Peace of Westphalia granted the abbot “solely and alone” [einig und allein] the right to access St. Jacob’s Chapel for the celebration of baptisms 43 Staatsarchiv Augsburg (hereafter SAA), Klosterakten, Augsburg SS. Ulrich und Afra, Nr. 34, Lit. A of letter from Willibald, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra to Bishop Alexander Sigmund, dated November 15, 1707. 44 SAA, Klosterakten, Augsburg, St. Ulrich und Afra, Nr. 34, Lit. B dated 31 August 1707 attached to a letter from Willibald, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, to Bishop Alexander Sigmund, dated November 15, 1707. 45 StAAug, EWA 936.

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based upon past precedent. Consequently, neither the abbot nor the broader Catholic community could claim the right “to exercise any additional religious act [Actum Religionis] either inside or outside of said Predig Haus [sic], nor do they have or can they pretend to have the right to any further co-possession, claim, or religious co-practice [Compossession, Causum, or Coexercitium religionis] over the church.”46 The Lutherans resented the monks for acting as if they were the “lords and owners” (Domini und Eigenthumbs-Herren) of St. Ulrich.47 The Lutheran magistrates and church officials repeatedly refused to recognize the abbot’s demands to restore the Catholic images of the Virgin Mary, Ulrich, and Afra to the exterior façade of the Predigthaus. First, they argued that the images had long faded away due to erosion from weather and the passage of time. More importantly, they noted that the Peace of Westphalia did not force Lutheran householders to violate their religious beliefs by demanding that they maintain Catholic religious images adorning their homes before 1624. Likewise, the transition of the Predigthaus from Catholic to Lutheran hands meant that the current property owners had the freedom to remove the various images on the church’s façade if they so choose.48 The Peace of Westphalia had, after all, settled confessional disputes simply by clarifying abstract property and jurisdictional boundaries and claims, rather than by insisting that the physical appearance of the confessional landscape be indelibly frozen based upon the date January 1, 1624. According to this logic, the transfer of civic spaces from one confession’s jurisdiction to another in 1648 meant that they had the prerogative to alter that space physically within the normal rules and regulations stipulated by local building codes, without interference from the other confessional party.

46

StAAug, KWA B222, copy of letter from the Lutheran Stadtpfleger, Bürgermeister, and City Council of Augsburg to the Emperor, dated 31 October 1709. 47 StAAug, KWA B222, Beylage zum Augspurgischen Gravamine sub Num. I. Specification derer Actuum, so viel enen damahligen Zech-Pflegern zu St. Ulrich und Afra bewust / womit die Herren Benedictiner dem Vergelich / den ihnen durch das Gotteshauß limitatè concedirten Durchgang betreffend / binnen Jahr und Tag contraveniret haben. The Lutherans listed eleven occasions when the Benedictines or other Catholics disrupted the space of the church from September 1707 through October 1708. The complaint stated, “These are only the incidents of one year, but if we were to add previous years to the list, then such inconveniences would seem a good deal bigger.” 48 Ibid.

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But if Catholics argued that Lutherans had to restore the Predigthaus to the precise physical appearance that it would have had in 1624, Lutherans, too, used a similar line of reasoning when it suited their goals. This happened when the abbot raised concerns about an insignia or crest representing the Benedictine monastery that supposedly hung on the outer wall of the Predigthaus and reflected the original jurisdictional authority claimed by the Benedictines over its fifteenth-century satellite church. According to the Lutheran city magistrates, however, the insignia “is just not visible” (nicht nunmahl ersichtlich geweßen) on the building, and even in Manasser’s copper engraving published in the 1627 edition of Abbot Bernard Hertfelder’s Benedictine history of the basilica, “not the slightest indication [of an insignia] is present” (see fig. 35). The Lutherans even suggested that the Benedictines themselves had removed the insignia some time in the distant past. Referring explicitly to Article V, Section 25, of the Peace of Osnabrück, which dealt with the application of the date January 1, 1624, to decide interconfessional conflicts over ecclesiastical jurisdictions, the Lutherans argued that they did not need to restore the Benedictine insignia on the Predigthaus, especially if that image had either already become imperceptible or even been previously removed.49 In this instance, the Lutherans appealed not to their abstract jurisdictional right to renovate their property in any way they saw fit. Instead, much like the Catholics, they resorted to constructing a memory of what the building physically looked like in the early-seventeenth century, using as evidence a Catholic image of the basilica to argue against the Catholics. Even if the copper print was published several years after 1624, the implication was that the Benedictine insignia had long been absent from the façade of the Lutheran Predigthaus and for that reason did not need replacing. Amid these disputes, the Lutherans began to tear down the façade of the Predigthaus in April 1709. The renovated building, which was completed in 1710, is depicted in figure 40.50 Though construction had

49

Ibid. The Lutherans appointed Max Loeser to design the new façade, which he modeled on Augsburg’s Church of the Holy Cross (Heiligkreuz). Undoubtedly, Heiligkreuz was not simply a source of aesthetic inspiration. The choice to mirror the architectural elements of Heiligkreuz most certainly would have recalled memories of the serious conflicts aroused between Catholics and Lutherans at the time of its construction (1651–52), as well as the ultimate success of that earlier Lutheran project. Emily Fisher Gray shows that the Heiligkreuz project was not an absolute victory for the Lutherans, 50

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finally ended, the controversy over the changes made to the church raged for almost two more decades.51 The two sides repeatedly sent appeals to the imperial authorities, both the Imperial Aulic Council [Reichshofrat] and the Imperial Diet in Regensburg.52 The Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna seems to have consistently sided with the Benedictines, but the Corpus Evangelicorum in Regensburg supported the Lutherans, creating an official stalemate on the imperial level and providing the Lutheran church and civic authorities with just the cover they needed to move forward with the planned renovations. With the construction on St. Ulrich already long completed, the Benedictines and their Catholic supporters in the city and diocese eventually and begrudgingly gave up their legal claims against the church renovations. The stalemate regarding the renovations to the Predigthaus did not, however, end other conflicts between the Benedictines and the Lutheran administrators of the Predigthaus. As late as the 1730s, the Lutherans felt once again compelled to mobilize their memory of the church’s history as a foundation for their legal jurisdiction. For example, one letter written in 1731 by a group of Lutheran church and civic authorities affirms the Predigthaus as “a former city property” (ein gewestes Stadt Guth), which the city had transferred to the Lutheran community during the Reformation.53 Once again, they marshaled a memory of the past inscribed within the Peace of Westphalia that, according to the 1731 letter, never gave the Benedictines any “appurtenance rights or rights of co-possession” over St. Ulrich’s. The Peace of 1648 had mandated that the Benedictines restore the Predigthaus to the Lutherans, that the abbot surrender the keys to the building, and that the Benedictines should retain access to St. Jacob’s Chapel to celebrate baptisms “as in the year 1624.” The letter’s authors resolutely insisted, however, that the Benedictines by no means could claim a “presumptuously free and unlimited access and passage into St. Jacob’s Chapel.”

for they did compromise on several salient issues. Nevertheless, the church became a central component of Lutheran civic identity. See “Good Neighbors,” 142–189. 51 Knorre, “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche,” 12. 52 StAAug, KWA B222. 53 HHStA, RHR Decisa Karton 176, Faszikel RHR Decisa 280 (222 + 223) A 87, letter from Lutheran Stadtpfleger, Burgermeister and City Council in Augspurg, 13 August 1731.

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Figure 40: Lutheran design for the Predigthaus renovations c. 1710. Reproduced with the permission of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Vienna (HHStA RHR Decisa Kart. 176).

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Although the Catholics failed to prevent the physical alterations to the Predigthaus, they still had other ways to construct and preserve a memory of the past that challenged the Lutheran strategy of erasing St. Ulrich’s origins through architectural demolition and renovation. In 1712, to commemorate both the foundation of the Benedictine monastery in 1012 and the completion of the basilica in 1612, the Benedictine monk Romanus Kistler published a German translation of an earlier, seventeenth-century history of the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra, written in Latin by Bernardus Hertfelder.54 The title of the German text is Basilica, daß ist Herrliche Kirchen des Freÿ-Reichs Klosters St. Ulrich und Afra in Augspurg (Basilica. That is the Glorious Church of the Free Imperial Abbey of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg) and includes an introduction by Kistler and his translation of the original Latin text. Published amid the confessional conflicts over the renovations of the Predigthaus, the newly revised edition of 1712 positioned the basilica as an alternative site of memory by encouraging its readers to remember a different version of Augsburg’s Christian past from the one constructed by Lutherans. The book opens with Kistler’s explanation of the significance of the basilica and its history, which emanates “from the church’s stones and walls themselves” (die Stein und Gebäu selbsten).55 Kistler describes the basilica’s magnificent altars, paintings, church ornaments, and reliquaries, and he states that, at the end of its construction in 1612, the church “had been brought to absolute perfection and flawlessness” (zu rechter Perfection und Vollkommenheit).56 Indeed, much of the book provides specific details (including illustrations) of the abundant pieces of art, altars, and relics housed in the basilica. As a chronicle, the 1712 edition of Basilica brought a Benedictine version of SS. Ulrich and Afra’s history to the German-reading public. The principal historical rhetoric of the text argues for the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church in Augsburg across time. It was published, as Kistler’s introduction makes clear, to mark the 700th anniversary of the Benedictine monastery and the 100th anniversary of the basilica since its completion. But the text stretches into an even more distant past, suggesting that Christianity had come to Augsburg perhaps as 54

Hertfelder, BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627 edition). 55 Hertfelder, Basilica (1712 edition), Bv. 56 Ibid.

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early as St. Lucius in the second century after Christ’s birth and noting that a Catholic church had occupied this particular place in the city ever since the year 304, when St. Afra was executed. The basilica was thus not a new building, but the end result of ongoing improvements made on the same sacred site: a “small church” originally dedicated to Afra “eventually became over time this grand, eminent basilica, this glorious church, as it still can be seen right up to the present day, despite being destroyed and rebuilt through a series of misfortunes and incidents.”57 Historical anecdotes of miracles performed on and even by the sanctified grounds of SS. Ulrich and Afra appear throughout the book. For example, the text reports an old legend that the “holy earth” from Ulrich’s tomb had the miraculous power to ward off rats and that, for over six centuries “in the entire bishopric of Augsburg, there is not one rat to be found . . . and even outside of the bishopric in other foreign provinces and lands, even among non-Catholics, wherever one such particle of St Ulrich’s earth is venerated, the rats will run away.”58 The very ground upon which the basilica stood was thus sanctified. In addition, even the inevitable accidents arising from the construction of the basilica were interpreted as miracles. On Assumption Day in 1467, a large crowd gathered to watch Peter von Schaumberg, Cardinal and Bishop of Augsburg, lay the first stone in the foundation of the new basilica. Two children climbed to a higher spot in order to see better, but they fell. In the end, however, they lived. Later, a worker dropped a plank, which hit one of his fellow carpenters in the head, but he too survived. Yet another time, an enormous stone came lose from a wall and fell to the ground but, through divine fate [aus Göttlicher Schikung], none of the workers standing below was hurt.59 Such miraculous anecdotes weave a narrative of the sacred into the textual representations of the church’s history and its physical space. The text also forged a strong historical link between SS. Ulrich and Afra and high ecclesiastical and secular authorities. It reports, for instance, that Pope Alexander VI (1492–1502) had granted the Bene– dictines jurisdiction over the church and its surrounding parish, which included the right to appoint the parish priest from among its own

57 58 59

Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 24.

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ranks or from among the secular clergy.60 Such a historical claim challenged the city council’s appropriation of the Predigthaus during the Reformation, when the parish began to lean toward Protestantism. In addition to papal concessions, the text also highlights the Benedictines’ imperial patronage. Kistler’s introduction claims that Emperor Sigismund twice issued documents confirming the rights, privileges, and property of the Benedictine monastery over SS. Ulrich and Afra and supposedly granting Abbot Johannes Küssinger the title of an imperial prince-abbot.61 Then, in 1500, Emperor Maximilian I laid a stone in the basilica’s foundation while visiting Augsburg. The text even records in both Latin and German the words that were hewn into this stone to commemorate Maximilian’s presence: “In honor of Jesus Christ. On the 13th Day of the Month of July in the Year of our Lord 1500, the Roman Emperor Maximilian laid this stone in the foundation.”62 Thus the 1712 edition of Basilica gives priority to the basilica as the most important building at this location. At the same time, the text shifts between reclaiming and deemphasizing the Predigthaus, a rhetorical strategy that both reinvented historical memory and promoted forgetting. The construction of St. Ulrich, for example, is attributed solely to the monastery, not the city: “right next to our church . . . was yet another church, called the Predigthaus, which was built and extended under Abbot Johannes von Hochenstein, where some time ago . . . sermons were delivered after mass, and which was also used to bury the dead when necessary, but where today the members of the Augsburg Confession hold their gatherings.”63 Furthermore, the text refocuses the reader’s attention on St. Jacob’s Chapel: “Not far from our church is a small . . . chapel dedicated to the veneration of St. Jacob, . . . where children are baptized. Although one must go through the evangelical Predigthaus to get there, we possess according to ancient right the key and have the freedom to enter and leave the Predigthaus for all

60

Ibid., 14. Ibid., Br. 62 Ibid., 26. The inscription reads “JESU CHRISTO Sacrum. D. Maximilianus roman. Caesar Augustus ad III.Idus Julias e fundamentis lapidem hunc primum posuit Anno M.D.” which the author translates into German as “JESU Christo zu Ehren. Maximilian Römischer Kayser hat den 13. Tag deß Monats Julii von dem Fundament disen ersten Stein gelegt im Jahr Christi 1500.” 63 Ibid., 43. 61

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times.”64 Significantly, the text here attributes the Benedictines’ right to use St. Jacob’s Chapel to “ancient right” rather than to any specific mandate from the Peace of Westphalia. The 1712 copper print of the basilica, monastery, and surrounding structures published in Basilica possesses its own visual rhetoric both to reclaim and marginalize the Predigthaus. To highlight this visual rhetoric, let us compare the 1712 print (fig. 39) with two Daniel Manasser prints, one produced as a single-sheet image in 1626 (fig. 37) and another published in the 1627 Latin edition of Hertfelder’s chronicle (fig. 38).65 The first major difference worth noting is that the 1627 print lacks the shields containing the monastery’s insignia, which supposedly had hung on the exterior wall of the Predigthaus. Those shields appear, however, on the 1712 print. This change can be seen more clearly if we magnify the images (see figs. 41, 42, and 43). The 1712 print thus participates explicitly in the monks’ argument that the Benedictines possessed some lingering authority over the Predigthaus and that the physical imprint of that authority on the building itself— whether truly present or merely a historical fantasy on the part of the eighteenth-century monastery—ought to be preserved according to the dictates of the Peace of Westphalia. Similarly, neither the 1626 nor the 1627 print includes the engraving of the year 1458, while the year is visible under the clock in the 1712 version. Again, reinserting the year 1458 into the image emphasized the longstanding, continuing Benedictine influence over the Predigthaus.

64

Ibid., 43. The print in the 1627 edition of Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM is itself dated 1626. However, as Knorre points out, the 1626 and 1627 Manasser prints possess minor but significant differences. The 1626 print depicts neither the sculpture of Ulrich nor of Afra, and the images in the two niches are barely recognizable, while the 1627 image more clearly depicts each of these elements on the church’s façade. There appears to be one error in Knorre’s description of the 1627 print, which he claims included the monastic insignia. Unfortunately, he did not reproduce his version of the 1627 print in his article. In my research, I examined three editions of Hertfelder’s 1627 chronicle, housed in Kroch Library at Cornell University, Watson Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Avery Library at Columbia University. All three editions contain the same version of Manasser’s print, none of which include the monastic insignia. Nevertheless, the apparent differences between Knorre’s description of the 1627 print and the three prints I used do not counter my claims regarding how the 1712 edition of Basilica specifically mobilized a visual rhetoric to both deemphasize and reclaim the Predigthaus. Knorre, “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche in Augsburg,” 13–16. 65

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Figure 41: Close-up of Predigthaus (F) and St. Jacob’s Chapel (G). Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” (1626). Reproduced with the permission of Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg (Graph 28–78).

Figure 42: Close-up of Predigthaus (F) and St. Jacob’s Chapel (G). Daniel Manasser, “Basilica SS. Udal[rici] & Afrae cum coenebis,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder’s BASILICA SS. VDALRICI ET AFRAE AUGUSTAE VINDELICORUM (1627). Reproduced with the permission of Kroch Library, Cornell University (BX 2618.S32 H57+).

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Figure 43: Close-up of Predigthaus (F) and St. Jacob’s Chapel (G). “Basilica St. Ulrich u[nd] Afrae mit dem Kloster,” published in Bernardus Hertfelder, Basilica. daß ist Herrliche Kirchen des Freÿ-Reichs Klosters St. Ulrich und Afra in Augspurg (1712). Note that the letter F appears on the roof of the church at a skewed angle. Reproduced with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Bancroft fNA5586.A84.H35 1712).

Even though the two earlier prints lacked the engraving of the year 1458, they still emphasized the age of the building—its façade is cracked and peeling. In contrast, the 1712 print, produced in the wake of the actual Lutheran renovations of 1709–1710, appears as if it were an imaginary Catholic renovation project, taking the poor condition of the 1626 and 1627 façades and transforming them along the lines demanded by the abbot. The form of the church remains the same— not one foot higher, as the abbot had insisted. For example, the simple bell tower remained unchanged, in contrast to the architecturally more complex tower the Lutherans had actually built. The only substantive architectural change noted in the 1712 image would be the addition of the four gothic arches along the first floor of the church. The differences between the three prints thus iterate, once again, the legal arguments made by the abbot in his case against the Lutheran plans

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for renovation. The restoration of the structure was permissible, but not the enlargement of the Lutheran church nor the complete erasure of the church’s traditional Catholic artistic elements. By foregrounding the four gothic arches and making even the niches in the gable appear more gothic in shape in contrast to the rounded niches of the 1626 and 1627 prints, the visual effect produced in the 1712 print is the absorption of the Predigthaus into the late-gothic (and baroque) architectural elements of the basilica in the background. Thus, the 1712 print simultaneously recalled an older version of the Predigthaus, with its traditional Catholic iconography, and produced an imaginary alternative renovation that denied and refused to recognize the radical changes the Lutherans had recently made to the church (compare figs. 40 and 43).66 An even subtler argument is made within the 1712 image. In the upper right-hand corner of the print is a key to the various buildings in the image. The letter F is “das alte Predig-Haus [sic]” while the letter G is St. Jacob’s Chapel. On the magnified image, we can see how these letters are positioned on the actual buildings. All the letters on the print, except for F, stand upright on the buildings they represent, while the F lies askew almost on its side, almost hidden from view. This strange positioning of the preaching hall’s identifying marker sends a visual cue that both recognizes the Lutheran church, even if as different and “other,” while simultaneously obscuring its visual identity (if not its visual existence) in the image. The effect is to render the Lutheran Predigthaus less readily legible and identifiable (if not less visible) and hence less disruptive or even less significant in the image in relation to the Catholic spaces. This strategy of memorializing the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra in printed publications in order to reinvent and retain a memory of Catholicism’s continuous and continuing physical presence in the 66 Knorre persuasively argues that the eighteenth-century Catholic images of the Predigthaus, including the 1712 print in Hertfelder’s Basilica, intentionally created a historically composite assemblage. They did not mean to represent the church as it looked at some particular moment in the early eighteenth century, but rather pulled together all of the church’s changing architectural and artistic elements, which had existed over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and which demonstrated St. Ulrich’s material, jurisdictional, and historical connection to the Benedictine monastery. Such images also had the effect of deemphasizing both the deliberate changes made over time to the church façade and the wear and tear from the natural elements. Knorre, “Zur Baugeschichte der evangelischen Ulrichskirche in Augsburg,” 15.

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city of Augsburg persisted into the early nineteenth century. Placidus Braun, monk and former head librarian at the Benedictine monastery in Augsburg, published his History of the Church and Monastery of Saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg in 1817, fifteen years after the monastery had been formerly dissolved in the state-sponsored process of secularization. Braun’s narrative is one of valiant triumph even in defeat, and he opens with a long list of the Benedictine monastery’s historical achievements. The monks “inspired and promoted through their example and their spiritual exercises a noble sense for religion and the godly drive toward virtue.” They attacked the “corrupt monster” of simony and the scandal of concubinage. They “steered through the dangerous storms of the Reformation by sacrificing their lives.” They provided education to the youth of the city, work and food to the poor. And, he emphasizes, “They built the still-standing, majestic temple [SS. Ulrich and Afra], adorning it with magnificent monuments and enriching it with the most precious treasures and paraments, funded out of their own means or with the contributions of benefactors.”67 Braun seems consciously aware that his book both relies upon the work of memory to reconstruct its historical narrative of the Abbey and Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra and that it is itself a memorial, an act of remembrance in a defensive struggle against the secularizing policies of the state (and still, though to a lesser extent, the ongoing threat of Protestantism). Thus, he notes, “there still are a few former members of this famous house of God alive. . . . These ones hold the Church of SS. Ulrich and Afra in such high esteem that they feel obligated, in the last days of their lives, to hand down through the press whatever they know about this house of God, rather than taking it to the grave with them, in order if possible to immortalize [the church].” Braun explained that forgetfulness was an inevitable danger: strangers will come after the monks pass away, “who, as experience already teaches, will have no knowledge of the dignity, the precedence, the holiness, and the remarkableness of this temple, and even less will they feel any interest [in it]; and so by and by the church would lose all respect and veneration, and finally will be eliminated from human memory [aus dem Andenken der Menschen vertilgt werden].”68 Braun’s book seeks to prevent such forgetfulness.

67 Placidus Braun, Geschichte der Kirche und des Stiftes der Heiligen Ulrich und Afra in Augsburg (Augsburg, 1817), vii–viii. 68 Ibid., viii–ix.

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Like Kistler, Braun places the Church of SS. Ulrich and Afra at the center of his narrative. Bishop Ulrich himself heroically rebuilt the original church from its “ruins”—his “first endeavor” upon arriving in Augsburg. “He himself led the construction,” according to Braun. But then came a horde of Hungarian barbarians in 955, who burnt down the Church of St. Afra. Although “full of pain over the annihilation of his beloved work,” Ulrich simply focused his energies on building a “new temple.”69 During construction, he received a vision telling him not to tarry with his current project. For inspiration, he undertook intense prayer sessions and fasts and often visited the resting place of St. Afra. Afra appeared to him in a vision, directing him to the exact place of her grave, but ordering him not to build a crypt there for her, “since on this spot so many other saints were resting and waiting for the day of their resurrection.”70 With this supernatural intervention, Ulrich could finally complete his designs for the new church, which nevertheless took almost a century to complete. Braun also discusses the later construction begun by Melchior von Stamheim in the fifteenth century, which would eventually result in the final version of the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra in the early seventeenth century: he describes the basilica as a “resplendent and massive temple, built completely in late Gothic style, [which] rises majestically to the highest heights of the city.”71 Braun’s text expends perhaps a bit more space discussing the Predigt– haus than Kistler’s chronicle but, even so, his coverage is minimal. Early in the text, the Predigthaus is mentioned in passing as a possession of the abbey.72 Much later, Braun mentions the Predigthaus again in the context of the early Reformation, claiming that the Lutherans acquired the church through stealth and secrecy: “In the year 1529, the Zechpfleger built a house for the preacher on the cemetery, secretly stole the keys to the Predigthaus, opened up the church, led their new preacher Wolfgang [Haug] to the pulpit, and installed him in his new office.”73 Braun also complains about the absorption of other formerly Benedictine properties—such as the graveyard, St. Agnes’s Chapel,

69 70 71 72 73

Ibid., vii. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 438–39.

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and the All Saints Chapel—into the Predigthaus during the sixteenth century.74 In his final references to the Predigthaus, he discusses the various rights that the Benedictines claimed to exercise over the Predigthaus after 1648. Naturally, he reaffirmed the Benedictines’ right to baptize Catholic babies in St. Jacob’s Chapel. He also briefly relates the 1709 crisis, mentioning in particular the Benedictines’ insistence that the Predigthaus restore the images of the Virgin Mary, Ulrich, and Afra, and the monastery’s insignia on the church’s exterior wall. Although the Benedictines brought a legal case against the Predigthaus to the Reichstag in Regensburg, “the case remained undecided because of the court’s dissolution.”75 Braun implies here that the Benedictines did not lose their case against the Lutherans; rather, they did not have a chance to win it. Braun then describes a few other conflicts between the monastery and the Predigthaus, concluding with a remarkable case where the two parties managed to settle one of their disagreements. Specifically, in 1749, the abbot and the Zechpfleger finally agreed to share the chore of cutting the grass in the churchyard by alternating the work between them.76 Braun configured the historical narrative of the relationship between the Benedictines and the Predigthaus by emphasizing some facts while distorting and ignoring others. But the overall message was similar to

74

Ibid., 440. Ibid., 441. Braun’s historical memory here seems particularly distorted, since the Reichstag (known as the Immerwährender Reichstag because it met continuously for over one-hundred-forty years) was dissolved in 1806, long after the Benedictines had given up on their specific complaints about the 1709 renovations. His narrative also oddly ignores the positive rulings the Benedictines received from the Imperial Aulic Council. Untangling the rhetorical logic employed by Braun helps explain the problems with his historical timeline. Early in his book, Braun blames the closure of the monastery in 1802 on a “raging, ruinous Zeitgeist that came here from the West” (viii). Although he does not name or describe this Zeitgeist, it swept into Germany in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasion. Undoubtedly, this statement reflects Braun’s Catholic conservatism in the face of revolutionary, secularizing forces, which not only brought an end to his cherished monastery but also to the Holy Roman Empire itself. Bishop Ulrich faced a similar foreign threat in the form of the Hungarian hordes, which I discussed above. The secular tide of the early-nineteenth century destroyed the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra, just as the tenth-century barbarians had destroyed Ulrich’s church. If we see Braun’s narrative in this light, then blaming the failure of the Benedictines’ legal case against the Predigthaus on the dissolution of the Reichstag in 1806 becomes yet another opportunity for Braun to criticize what he sees as a pattern of destructive changes from foreign sources. 76 Ibid., 442. 75

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Kistler’s 1712 edition of Hertfelder’s Basilica. The basilica historically trumped the Predigthaus, in terms of the length of its existence and the splendor of its architecture, and the Benedictines proved worthier than the Lutherans through the reasonableness of their positions and the righteousness of their actions. If the Lutherans claimed victory in their struggle to renovate St. Ulrich’s according to their own wishes, which resulted in the iconoclastic stripping of important and meaningful Catholic signifiers from the church’s exterior face, the Benedictines of Augsburg strategically deployed the printed word to remember, memorialize, and reclaim that which they had lost in 1526/1529, 1648, and again in 1709. The spatial conflicts over these conjoined Lutheran and Catholic churches highlight some of the ways that early modern confessional antagonisms played out in biconfessional Augsburg. The civic landscape was subdivided, bounded, carved up, and hewn with religious meaning. A building like the Predigthaus was significant because, as an architectural artifact, it conveyed in wood, stone, and mortar competing confessional memories. When Catholics saw the Lutheran Predigthaus—a church decorated with images of saints, the Virgin Mary, and an inscription of the year 1458—they recalled a pre-Reformation past that was literally and figuratively carved in stone. In turn, the decision of the Lutherans to renovate their church afforded them an opportunity to erase some of the sedimented memories of a Catholic past that clung like residue to the walls of the Predigthaus. The Lutherans seem to have understood full well that turning the façade of the church into a tabula rasa was not only a tactic in a struggle for control of a building that they felt was rightfully theirs in their present, but also a struggle for control over how Augsburgers should construct memories of the city’s religious past. Catholics reacted so vehemently against changing the church’s appearance, because effacing the physical signs of an already lost past quite literally materialized other overlapping forms of loss. The Lutheran renovations reenacted the erosion of physical spaces that were once all Catholic before the Reformation and produced the possibility of forgetting by iconoclastically erasing the Catholic historical memory tied to this space in particular. The reconstruction of the church counted as a Catholic defeat and Lutheran victory in the ongoing tallies of everyday confessional battles between the two confessions in Augsburg. For the Catholics, the 1709–10 renovation of the Lutheran church was a spatial, historical,

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symbolic, and political loss, despite the fact that they succeeded in protecting their right to enter the space of the Predigthaus in order to use St. Jacob’s Chapel. As Emily Fisher Gray’s work on the Lutheran Church of Holy Cross demonstrates, the Predigthaus of St. Ulrich was not the only contested space in Augsburg, in which competing confessional memories adhered.77 Such memories were further constructed, deconstructed, and re-constructed with every legal document written about a contested church, chapel, or cemetery. Lutherans and Catholics shared some memories of their collective civic past, including the significance of 1624 and 1648. The historical memory constructed around 1624/1648 organized the framework within which Augsburgers could think and act in a context of confessional coexistence, competition, and conflict. During the legal appeals to the civic and imperial authorities, both confessional parties repeated these dates over and over, even if they mobilized them to contradictory ends. Catholics and Lutherans interpreted the meaning and implications of 1624/1648 differently, but they both knew that these dates from the past cast a long shadow over their present circumstances. This complex relationship between confessional memory, urban space, and civic politics was not unique to Augsburg. Historian Wolf– gang Petz describes the city of Kempten as a Doppelstadt because it geographically consisted of two distinct cities butting up against each other—a Lutheran Reichsstadt that was separately incorporated from the city, which grew up around the local Benedictine monastery, also known as the Stiftstadt.78 In 1595, a Lutheran citizen of the Reichsstadt named Christoph Schwarz produced a manuscript chronicling the history of his hometown. Schwarz found it impossible to purge all historically significant Catholic references from his text. Thus, for example, he makes obligatory mention of the historical figure St. Mang, after whom the Lutheran parish church had been named long before the city became Protestant. Schwarz writes that starting in the year 645 the “holy saint Mang . . . preached the Gospel [Evangelium] of Christ in these parts.”79 But while recognizing Mang as a saint, Schwarz also

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Gray, “Good Neighbors.” Wolfgang Petz, Zweimal Kempten: Geschichte einer Doppelstadt (1694–1836) (Stamsried: Verlag Ernst Vögel, 1998). 79 Stadtarchiv Kempten (hereafter StAKem), B 31, manuscript titled “Städtische Chronik von Christoph Schwarz, Prediger zu St. Mang” (1595). 78

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employed a Lutheran theological logic by crediting the preaching of the Gospel, and hence the Word of God itself, with the conversion of the local pagans. Although Schwarz could not write Catholicism out of the city’s pre-Reformation history, he did carefully dismiss the historical basis of the Catholic bishop’s involvement in Christianizing the region. It was but a “monkish fable or story” that Viterpius (also known as Widprecht, Wikterp, or Wigbert), the first historically verifiable bishop of the Diocese of Augsburg, had helped in 695 to build the first church in what would become the Reichsstadt Kempten, for “Bishop Viterpius . . . first lived in the year 775.”80 Schwarz’s attempt to minimize the significance of the Catholic Church’s formal institutions and bureaucratic hierarchy is echoed in his discussion of the founding of the Benedictine monastery in Kempten. According to Schwarz, the monastery appointed its first abbot roughly a decade before the new monastic community received papal confirmation. Such historical claims help Schwarz sever the early history of Christianity in Kempten from the history of the bishops and the papacy, and hence from the Catholic Church as a whole. Schwarz’s historical criticism subtly challenged Benedictine claims about the long and continuous existence of the monastery and the Catholic Church in the region. The Benedictine perspective is recorded in a handwritten, anonymous, and undated early modern monastic chronicle. According to this chronicle, the monastic order had first arrived in the area around 769 or earlier for, already “around this time, the cloistered life of the Benedictine order in Kempten certainly had begun.” Furthermore, “as the Christian religion broke out even more brightly, the nobles here and elsewhere, out of special devotion, not only helped fund the foundation of the cloister, but themselves entered the order and, for the fear of God, gave their property in perpetuity to sanctify their souls.”81 The monastery may have been founded by Benedictine outsiders, but it rapidly anchored itself in Kempten through the patronage and support of local elites. In contrast to this description, Schwarz’s Lutheran history possesses none of the same Catholic ecclesiastical triumphalism. In fact, Schwarz de-emphasizes the centrality of the monastery in the city’s history one more time, 80

StAKem, B 31, manuscript titled “Städtische Chronik von Christoph Schwarz, Prediger zu St. Mang” (1595), fol. 16r. 81 StAKem, B 31, manuscript of a monastic chronicle attached to “Städtische Chronik von Christoph Schwarz, Prediger zu St. Mang” (1595), fol. 206r.

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by arguing that the place name “Kempten” had existed some eighthundred years prior to the founding of the cloister, so, naturally, the monastery derived its name from the town rather than vice versa.82 Other cases certainly existed elsewhere throughout the Empire of confessional rivalries expressed in physical space and historical memory, though Augsburg was most certainly a hotbed of such interconfessional conflict long after the Thirty Years’ War. Sharp disagreements over how Catholics and Lutherans ought to divide or share civic space served as a constant reminder to the magistrates that Augsburg’s biconfessional landscape was in fact riddled with religious tensions. As one German traveler colorfully (though perhaps hyperbolically) wrote in his travel narrative published in 1778, “In Augsburg, one can see the dragon of parity life size. . . . This parity is in its true character so distant from a spirit of tolerance, for every member of the two religious parties would be ready to break the other’s neck, if the magistrates did not remain ever vigilant.”83 Augsburg’s parity claimed to protect religious freedom, but in its historical context, religious freedom did not mean the complete and unfettered freedom to exercise one’s private conscience. Instead, religious freedom meant the right for confessional communities to exercise public authority to define and govern their own communities, their own religious practices, and the spaces in which those communities lived and worshipped. In the language of the Peace of Westphalia, the religious freedom afforded by parity in biconfessional Augsburg meant the “freyes öffentliches Exercitium” (free public practice) of the two religious communities more than the radical liberty of individual conscience. Defined as the two confessions’ right to exercise equal but divided public authority over their own religious communities, religious freedom had the pragmatic goal of maintaining the peace. In these terms, parity did not necessarily translate into tolerance, since the very institutional structures produced by parity presumed a state of constant confessional competition. Augsburg’s religious freedom was an act of establishing clear and rigid boundaries to protect communal

82 StAKem, B 31, manuscript titled “Städtische Chronik von Christoph Schwarz, Prediger zu St. Mang” (1595), fol. 18r. 83 Anselmus Rabiousus’ Reise durch Ober-Deutschland, 1. Teil, (Salzburg, 1778), quoted in Wolfgang Wüst, “Konfession, Kanzel und Kontroverse in einer paritätischen Reichsstadt. Augsburg 1555–1805,” Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben 91 (1998): 121–22.

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domains and self-government, to guarantee the collective autonomy of the two competing religious communities. Parity was a political resolution that seemed obvious to the prevailing mentality of the times, and it typically even worked to maintain a general peace. However, as the case of the Predigthaus of St. Ulrich demonstrates, the rigid institutional and spatial lines that parity drew between the communities also seemed to clarify and intensify the very loci of confessional conflict and contestation.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MIGRATION AND THE LOSS OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY: THE CASE OF DANIEL FALCKNER AND ANNA MARIA SCHUCHART Rosalind J. Beiler In early December 1691, Anna Maria Schuchart, the single daughter of a mason, began to have visions in which she could discern whether city officials were good or evil and going to heaven or hell. Schuchart was one of several young women and men in the cities of Erfurt, Halberstadt, and Quedlinburg to have ecstatic religious experiences in the early 1690s. Civil and religious leaders questioned whether the young people’s visions were from God, the devil, or the result of medical conditions. Several, including Schuchart, were incarcerated and questioned at length.1 Within two years, Schuchart had joined a group of people who believed the kingdom of God on earth was imminent and who set out for Pennsylvania to usher in the new millennium. Among the immigrants was Daniel Falckner, the son of a Lutheran minister from Saxony who also had experienced ecstatic revelations. While a student at the university in Erfurt, he had participated in small study groups that grew into a series of religious revivals. He and Schuchart married after they arrived in the British colonies. They and their fellow immigrants hoped to create a new kind of spiritual community in Pennsylvania’s “wilderness.”2 By piecing together the fragmentary story of Anna Maria Schuchart and Daniel Falckner, this essay examines the connections between migration, loss of spiritual community, and regeneration for early modern German Pietists at the turn of the seventeenth century to

1 Judd Stitziel, “God, the Devil, Medicine and the Word: A Controversy over Ecstatic Women in Protestant Middle Germany 1691–1693,” Central European History, 29 (1996): 309–37; Ulrike Witt, Bekehrung, Bildung und Biographie: Frauen im Umkreis des Halleschen Pietismus (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996), 33–64. 2 Elizabeth Fisher, “ ‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 3 (1985): 299–334.

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the eighteenth. The extant records for the couple are uneven at best. Evidence for Schuchart’s story is strongest in Europe prior to their emigration whereas documentation for Falckner’s activities is more dominant after their first move. Nevertheless, by recovering the snippets of both stories and weaving them into their contexts on both sides of the Atlantic, we can examine the couple as a case study for understanding the meaning of loss and regeneration in the early modern world. Historians of early America maintain that the immigration of Europeans was a continuation of internal movements extended across the Atlantic. They paint vivid pictures of how early modern people lived in swirling worlds of motion.3 While scholars point to the hopes of immigrants as they moved from place to place, the case of Schuchart and Falckner demonstrates the role of loss—especially of spiritual community—in repeat migration. Schuchart’s and Falckner’s highly emotional religious experiences connected them to a community that transcended gender, class, and religious identities. But those same experiences threatened to marginalize them in early modern German society. While the emigrants left voluntarily, they were, in some respects, exiles, forced to flee all that was known. At the same time, migration offered an opportunity to create a new spiritual community in a place known for its religious toleration and diversity. The couple, however, ultimately was ostracized in their new home. After their arrival, Falckner and Schuchart married and lived apart from the rest of their fellow immigrants, some of whom chose to live together communally. As a whole, group members struggled to find their place in the pluralism of Pennsylvania’s religious environment. Migration, therefore, failed to provide the spiritual community the couple hoped to find. Nevertheless, several subsequent moves to Germany, Pennsylvania, and Raritan, New Jersey, suggest that they continued to perceive migration as a strategy for coping with loss and providing opportunities for creating religious community.

3 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Georg Fertig, Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt: Die Entscheidung zur Auswanderung vom Rhein nach Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2000).

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First Migration The story of their first move begins in Erfurt in early December 1691, when Schuchart, an illiterate servant girl, recited two hundred Bible verses she did not know previously and claimed she could discern God’s judgment of city officials. For the next two years, Schuchart continued to recite verses, sing songs, prophesy, and sweat blood while in trances. She was one of a small group of young people in Thuringia and Saxony to have ecstatic religious experiences in the early 1690s. Civil and religious leaders questioned whether their physical manifestations were the result of medical conditions, divine inspiration, or demonic control.4 Schuchart and her friends participated in religious renewal movements sweeping through central Europe in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Because of their emphasis on individual piety and devotional life, their opponents called them “Pietists.”5 In Erfurt, Pietism emerged in the years after 1687 when Joachim Justus Breithaupt and August Hermann Francke became clergy in the city. Francke had been a student in Leipzig, where he had played a key role in a movement among university students who met in collegia or small Bible study groups modeled on Philipp Jakob Spener’s plan for improving the university theological training of future clergy.6 When Leipzig officials banned the meetings, many of Francke’s fellow students followed him to Erfurt, where they took jobs as tutors to the children of wealthy citizens.

4 Stitziel, “God, the Devil, Medicine,” 313; Friedrich de Boor, “Anna Maria Schuchart als Endzeit-Prophetin in Erfurt 1691/92,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 21 (1995): 148–83. 5 Historians have written extensively on Pietism and its definition. For recent summaries, see Martin Brecht, ed., Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 1–9; Jonathan Strom, “Problems and Promises of Pietism Research,” Church History 71 (2002): 536–54; Hartmut Lehmann, “Erledigte und nicht erledigte Aufgaben der Pietismusforschung. Eine nochmalige Antwort an Johannes Wallmann,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 31 (2005): 13–20. When I use the term, I am including participants in the “Frömmigkeitsbewegungen” of the seventeenth century as well as Halle Pietism in the 1690s and early 1700s, especially before its integration into the Prussian Lutheran church. 6 Martin Brecht, “Philipp Jakob Spener, sein Programm und dessen Auswirkungen,” in Der Pietisumus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (see note 5), 291–99; 302–6; 333–38. For a brief summary of the extensive literature on Francke, see Martin Brecht, “August Hermann Francke und der Hallische Pietismus,” in Der Pietismus, 439–539.

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Daniel Falckner was one of the students caught up in the revivals. He participated in Francke’s collegia while studying theology at the university in Erfurt. By late September 1691, however, Pietists in Erfurt created such a stir that officials not only banned meetings in homes for Bible study but also relieved Francke of his duties and banished him.7 Nevertheless, Erfurt Pietists continued to gather in homes. These small groups (as well as those in neighboring cities) included people of all ages and different social classes—from artisans to students to clergy to merchants.8 They set into motion what historian Ryoko Mori has called the “second wave” of Pietism. The collegia that began as a program of reforms within universities and churches led by theologians and clergy evolved into a renewal movement outside of institutionalized leadership.9 When young people, servants, and women appeared to convey messages of God’s judgment against religious and civil authorities, tensions mounted. It was in this context that Schuchart began to have visions. The initial response of witnesses and key Pietist leaders was that God was speaking to them through Schuchart and several other young women who also experienced trances and prophecies. Georg Heinrich Brückner, a law professor in Erfurt whose home was a gathering place for Pietists in that city, wrote to Francke that Schuchart recited hundreds of Bible verses and sang “glorious melodies” that were “exquisite and wonderful” to hear.10 At first, Francke and his mentor, Spener, viewed Schuchart’s visions as revelations from God. In October 1692, Francke wrote that Schuchart, who was visiting him in Halle, fell into “her ecstasies” as they prayed and “in this state, spoke many lovely verses in

7 Johannes Wallmann, “Erfurt und der Pietismus im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Erfurt 742–1992: Stadtgeschichte, Universitätsgeschichte, ed. Ulman Weiß (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1992), 411–17. When the authorities prohibited the groups from meeting, Falckner went to Lüneburg to visit other Pietists. Markus Matthias, Johann Wilhelm und Johanna Eleonora Petersen: Eine Biographie bis zur Amtsenthebung Petersens im Jahr 1692 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 269. 8 Wallmann, “Erfurt und der Pietismus,” 417–19; de Boor, “Anna Maria Schuchart,” 148–83. 9 See Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit: Pietistische Selbst- und Weltwahrnehmung im ausgehenden 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 1–8. 10 Georg Heinrich Brückner, Erfurt, to August Hermann Francke, Halle, 21 March 1692, in Theodor Wotschke, “Der Pietismus in Thüringen,” Thüringische-Sächsische Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kunst 18 (1929): 4. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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stanzas with a regular rhythm and a very graceful motion of her hands, which moved me more than anything I have heard before.”11 Within a very short time, however, the ecstatic experiences threatened not only religious and civil authorities but also Pietist leaders who struggled for legitimacy. Both Spener and Francke had recently obtained new positions and were working hard to convince religious and government officials of their orthodoxy. Spener had moved to Berlin in the summer of 1691 to become the provost at St. Nikolai Church.12 Francke, after being banished from Erfurt in September 1691, had managed to obtain positions as a pastor in Glaucha and a professor of oriental languages at the new university in Halle. He immediately faced questions from Lutheran religious leaders in Halle about his collegia. As both men sought to convince others that they had no intention of founding a new religious “sect,” a steady stream of students and other Pietists visited Francke in Halle. By April 1693, both Francke and his colleague Breithaupt were being pressured by Brandenburg officials to denounce publicly the more radical elements of the renewal movement.13 As they sought to convince Protestant officials of their own orthodoxy, Pietist leaders distanced themselves publicly from those having visions and prophesying. In April 1693, Spener wrote to his protégé that those things he had heard about Schuchart concerned him gravely. He was particularly disturbed by the news that members of one collegium had celebrated communion privately.14 By the following month, he reported with concern that Schuchart’s behavior seemed inappropriate for a Christian. He also was relieved that Heinrich Bernard Köster, one of their acquaintances, had persuaded Falckner to control his ecstatic experiences. Falckner had explained to Köster how he could “awaken” them through intense concentration on “godly things.” However, Spener reported, Falckner “intended to act differently and sought a better way.” Since then, “he was quieter.”15

11 August Hermann Francke, Glaucha, to Philipp Jakob Spener, Berlin, 25 October 1692, in Johannes Wallmann and Udo Sträter, eds., Philipp Jakob Spener, Briefwechsel mit August Hermann Francke, 1689–1704 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 212. 12 Brecht, “Philipp Jakob Spener,” 332, 352. 13 Mori, Begeisterung, 204–16, 237–41. 14 Philipp Jakob Spener, Berlin, to August Herman Francke, Halle, April 11, 1693, in Wallmann and Sträter, eds., Philipp Jakob Spener, 295. 15 Philipp Jakob Spener, Berlin, to August Hermann Francke, Halle, 6 May 1693, Hauptarchiv A 125: 34, Archiv der Franckesche Stiftung, Halle, Germany (hereafter

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Köster was one of the Pietists who soon determined, along with Falckner, Schuchart, and roughly forty other people, to migrate to Pennsylvania. Their leader was Johann Jakob Zimmermann, a Lutheran minister and mathematician from Württemberg, who lost his position in the church because of his millennialist views. Based on his interpretation of the book of Revelation and a series of natural signs and catastrophes, he believed the kingdom of Christ on earth was going to begin in 1693.16 Zimmermann and the immigrants sought therefore to establish a chapter of perfection—the true Christian church—in a new location. Before the group embarked in Rotterdam, however, Zimmermann died. Nevertheless, with the help of Benjamin Furly, a prominent Quaker and one of William Penn’s agents, they secured funding for their transportation and the promise of inexpensive land when they arrived in Pennsylvania.17 After a lengthy stop in London, the immigrants arrived in Philadelphia in June 1694 and settled nearby in Germantown, which had been founded by other German-speaking immigrants a decade earlier (see fig. 44).18 On the one hand, Falckner and Schuchart and their fellow immigrants were exiles, forced to travel in their attempts to find religious toleration.19 After his dismissal, Zimmermann had lived in

AFSt). For a published transcription of the letter, see Wallmann and Sträter, eds., Philipp Jakob Spener, 297–300, here 299. 16 Andreas Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 322–27, 381–84; Fisher, “‘Prophesies and Revelations’,” 318–20; Klaus Deppermann, “Pennsylvanien als Asyl des frühen deutschen Pietismus,” in Pietismus und Neuzeit 10 (1984), 205–9. 17 Gerardus Croese, The general history of the Quakers containing the lives, tenents, sufferings, tryals, speeches and letters of the most eminent Quakers, both men and women: from the first rise of that sect down to this present time (London, 1696), book 3, 262–64. 18 Johannes Kelpius, entry for June 17, 1694, “Original Journal,” 1694–1708, AM 0880, 16, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter HSP). Kelpius’s journal is translated in Julius F. Sachse, ed., “The Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius,” in Pennsylvania: The German Influence in its Settlement and Development (Lancaster, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1917). Sachse’s translations should be used with care. [Johannes Seelig], “Copia Eines Send-Schreibens auβ der neuen Welt,” 7 August 1694, 5 (printed 1695), Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter LCP). For details on the authorship of this letter and the identification of Falckner and Schuchart, see the manuscript article by Julius F. Sachse, “The Brothers Falckner, Daniel and Justus,” Germantown Historical Society Library, Germantown, PA. I am grateful to James Duffin for sharing this information with me. 19 Mori, Begeisterung, 294–96, illustrates the movement of Pietists from Leipzig to other places between 1693 and 1695 on account of banishment.

Figure 44: Lewis Evans, “A general map of the middle British Colonies, in America,” 1755. Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and Hamburg before setting out for Pennsylvania.20 Falckner, after leaving Erfurt in 1691, had traveled to Leipzig, Lüneburg, Lübeck, and Hamburg before crossing the Atlantic.21 Johannes Kelpius, one of the group members, opened his travel journal with a lengthy quotation that he attributed to Seneca.22 The text is a dialogue between “a Sensualyte” and “Reason” in which “Reason” argues that a wise man cannot be banished: There is a common way for every man, beyond which no man can go. . . . My country is not forbidden me, but the place into what land so ever I come, I find it my own; there is no land exile, but a second country. . . . My country is in every place where it is well. . . . If he be a wise man, he shall but take his voyage into a strange country, but if he be a fool, he shall be a banished man.23

Kelpius’s choice of text demonstrates his attempts to mitigate his sense of exile. As their movements and his quotation suggest, the immigrants faced a forced loss of home. On the other hand, migration to Pennsylvania offered the promise of regeneration—a chance to re-establish what the Pietists viewed as the remnant of the historical Christian church. The group became known as the “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness” because of their belief that before the return of Christ, the true church, the bride of Christ, would be persecuted and scattered in the “wilderness.”

20 Matthias Wolfes, “Johann Jakob Zimmermann,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon Kirchenlexikon, vol. 19, in Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm Bautz and Traugott Bautz (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2001) 19:1587–97. 21 Harald Schieckel, “Das Stammbuch von Wilhelm Ludwig Spener aus den Jahren 1689 bis 1696,” in Pietismus-Forschung zu Philipp Jacob Spener und zum spiritualistischradikalpietistischen Umfeld, ed. Dietrich Blaufuss (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), 142; Daniel Falckner, Lübeck, to August Hermann Francke, Halle, 26 August 1691, Francke Nachlaß, 32/11:3 [10902]; Daniel Falckner, Lüneburg, to August Hermann Francke, Halle, 8 February 1692, Francke Nachlaß 32/11:4 [10903]; Daniel Falckner, Hamburg, to August Hermann Francke, Halle, 27 January 1693, Francke Nachlaß 32/11:5 [10904], Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (hereafter SBPK). 22 For a translation, see Robert Whyttynton, trans. Lucii Annei Senecae ad Gallioneni de remediis fortuitorum. The remedyes against all casuall chaunces. Dialogus inter sensum et rationem. A dialogue between sensualyte and Reason (London, 1547), 2Br. For a recent discussion about the authorship of this text, see Robert J. Newman, “Rediscovering the De Remediis Fortuitorum,” The American Journal of Philology 109 (1998): 92–107. 23 Kelpius, “Original Journal,” inside cover. The quotation is from Whyttynton, trans. Lucii Annei Senecae, 2Br. I have modernized his English.

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Believing that Christ’s return was imminent, they strove for perfection in preparation for his arrival. Pennsylvania offered the “wilderness” of a newly formed colony that was still relatively unknown in Europe and the promise of religious toleration. Migration, therefore, also signified the potential for a better life, or regeneration.24 Failed Attempts at Regeneration Schuchart and Falckner, however, failed to participate fully in the creation of this new spiritual community. In fact, it is not clear to what extent the other members of the group succeeded either. While the group was still on board the ship, Köster excommunicated the couple, perhaps because Schuchart was pregnant with Falckner’s child or because of their inappropriate ecstatic revelations.25 Although one of their fellow travelers wrote shortly after their arrival that many of the group determined to remain celibate and share their possessions in common, he noted that Falckner lived “apart” with Schuchart whom he had taken as his wife.26 By January 1695, Falckner reported to the Germantown court that he and one of the other immigrants had decided not to remain in Germantown.27 The relationship Schuchart and Falckner maintained with their fellow immigrants after their arrival in Germantown is difficult to determine. One of the reasons they and the other members of their group failed to create a new spiritual community had to do with the strong personalities and the volatile nature of the group. Köster, who excommunicated Falckner and Schuchart on the ship, seems to have become at least one of the Pietists’ spiritual leaders. According to his

24 Fisher, “ ‘Prophesies and Revelations,’ ” 299–333; Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600–1760,” American Historical Review 84 (1979), 317–46; Bailyn, Peopling, 123–25; Julius F. Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1895; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1979), 11–27, 43–48; 219–50; Wallmann, Erfurt, 420. 25 Kelpius, “Original Journal,” 16. For her purported pregnancy, see Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, New York, to Johann Friedrich Winckler, Hamburg, 24 September 1731, in Lutheran Church in New York and New Jersey, 1722–1760, trans. Simon Hart and Harry Kreider (New York: United Lutheran Synod of New York and New England, 1962), 16. 26 [Seelig], “Send-Schreiben,” 5. 27 James Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis: Records of the Corporation of Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1691–1707 (Philadelphia, PA: The Colonial Society of Pennsylvania, 2008), 190.

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eighteenth-century biographer, his grasp of languages as well as of the Bible made him the logical teacher on their journey. This observation is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Köster was the only one of six friends (including Falckner) traveling together who was not a student of theology. In fact, he had studied law but had learned languages while tutoring the sons of a nobleman from Brandenburg.28 Historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries maintained that Kelpius, the author of the travel journal describing the group’s migration, became the leader of the group.29 Kelpius did claim to have handled the financial aspects of the journey, but he was also the one who noted that Köster excommunicated Falckner and Schuchart. He also remarked several times that Köster and the others were in prayer or studying the Bible.30 Kelpius’s apparent acceptance of Köster’s role as a spiritual leader suggests that his eighteenth-century biographer may have been correct or that leadership roles shifted over time. Whether a single or several leaders replaced Zimmermann, the immigrants certainly experienced dissention. One contemporary, who admittedly was biased against the group, claimed that four or five of them decided to live communally and settled on a tract of land they called “IRENIA” or “The House of Peace.” He maintained that before long, the commune became “Erinnia, the House of raging Contention.”31 The couple and their fellow immigrants also faced difficulties as they struggled to find their place within the tumultuous conflicts wracking Pennsylvania’s religious communities. In the years shortly before they arrived, George Keith, a prominent Scottish Quaker minister who had moved to the colony in 1688, had begun to question the authority of the Society of Friends’ religious leaders. What began with his calls for reform evolved into a full-fledged rupture in which Keith set up his own congregation outside of the Quakers’ institutions. By September 1692, Philadelphia Quaker leaders condemned Keith’s behavior and teachings; in February 1694, just a few months before the Pietists

28 Ernst Ludewig Rathlef, Geschichte Jeztlebender Gelehrten als eine Fortsetzung des Jeztlebenden Gelehrten Europa, Sechster Theil, (Zelle, 1743), 479–90. 29 Sachse, “Diarium,” 5; Butler, “Into Pennsylvania’s Spiritual Abyss,” 159; Fisher, “ ‘Prophesies and Revelations,’ ” 299. 30 Sachse, “Diarium,” 11, 14, 15, 26. 31 Francis Daniel Pastorius, Henry Bernhard Koster, William Davis, Thomas Rutter & Thomas Bowyer, four boasting disputers of this world briefly rebuked, and answered according to their folly which they themselves have manifested in a late pamphlet, entituled, Advice for all professors and writers (New York: Wm. Bradford, 1697), 3.

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arrived, he returned to London where he tried unsuccessfully to salvage his reputation.32 In his absence, several others continued to lead the congregation he formed and set up additional churches.33 The German Pietists quickly became embroiled in the Keithian schism. Almost immediately, Köster began preaching regularly in the home of a Germantown resident. At the time, the colony faced a shortage of German-speaking clergy—especially from the Lutheran or Reformed churches. Köster’s audiences included German immigrants beyond his fellow Pietists. He soon realized that there was also a large number of English-speakers in his audiences who did not understand German. Consequently, he began preaching in English as well. At first Köster believed the non-Germans among his listeners were Quakers, come to point out the errors of his teachings. He discovered, however, that they were followers of Keith, who were particularly receptive to his teachings about “the humanity of Christ, his death, his merits, his ascension, his return, the use of the word, communion and baptism.”34 Köster soon joined with Keithian leaders to speak out against “the errors” of the Quakers’ beliefs. In September 1696, he went with several Keithians to the Quaker Yearly Meeting at Burlington, New Jersey, to preach publicly against them.35 Köster’s close connections to Keith’s followers created animosity between him and Francis Daniel Pastorius, an early Pietist leader in Germantown. Pastorius had arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683 as the attorney for the Frankfurt Company, a group of Pietist investors connected to Spener from his ministry in Frankfurt in the 1670s. He quickly became a spokesman for other German-speaking immigrants who settled in the newly formed town. By 1694, when Köster, Kelpius, Falckner, Schuchart, and their fellow Pietists arrived, Pastorius had joined the Society of Friends. He aligned himself against Keith’s

32 Jon Butler, “ ‘Gospel Order Improved’: The Keithian Schism and the Exercise of Quaker Ministerial Authority in Pennsylvania,” William and Mary Quarterly 31 (1974): 431–52; Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 55–57; Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993; 2nd ed.), 144–61. 33 Jon Butler, “Into Pennsylvania’s Spiritual Abyss: The Rise and Fall of the Later Keithians, 1693–1703,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101, no. 2 (1977): 156–60. 34 Rathlef, Geschichte, 494. 35 Rathlef, Geschichte, 494–99; Butler, “Into Pennsylvania’s Spiritual Abyss,” 161.

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followers and particularly against Köster.36 In early 1697, Pastorius published two pamphlets in response to Köster’s sermon at the Burlington Yearly Meeting and to refute a pamphlet Köster had published in Germany. In them, he defended the Quakers as true Christians.37 Thus, within a short time of their arrival, Falckner, Schuchart, and their fellow Pietists were drawn into the religious conflicts threatening both colonial leaders and the German immigrant community. Pennsylvania’s toleration—one of the factors that drew them there— created tensions as they sought to find their place in the competitive religious environment of the colony. The absence of German Lutheran institutions and the strong personalities of leading immigrants also created difficulties as they struggled to build their version of an ideal Christian community. Falckner and Schuchart left no direct written evidence about what they thought of the conflicts tearing apart the Pennsylvania German Pietist community. However, their actions suggest that they likely sided with Köster, who wanted a more traditional Lutheran liturgy and structure, rather than Pastorius and the Quakers. Return Migration Late in 1698, Falckner persuaded Köster to travel with him and Schuchart back to Europe. According to Köster’s biographer, they went first to Virginia in order to cross to England with a tobacco ship. Köster claimed that Falckner “was a headstrong man, who followed no reason but whatever ideas suddenly occurred to him.”38 Evidently, the ship Falckner rented for the three of them was old and overloaded and the winter weather was foul. To make matters worse, a “malicious Scotsman” swindled Falckner out of their money. In spite of warnings

36 The classic biography for Pastorius is Marion Dexter Learned, The Life of Francis Daniel Pastorius, the Founder of Germantown (Philadelphia, PA: William J. Campbell, 1908). For a discussion of Pastorius’s role in founding Germantown and in the Keithian schism, see Learned, Pastorius, 116–55; Craig Horle, et al., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 1, 1682–1709 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 586–89; and Butler, “Into Pennsylvania’s Spiritual Abyss,” 160. 37 Pastorius, Henry Bernhard Koster; Francis Daniel Pastorius, Ein Send=Brief Offenhertziger Liebsbezeugung an die so genannte Pietisten in Hoch=Teutschland (Amsterdam, 1697). 38 Rathlef, Geschichte, 502.

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that they should wait until spring to travel, Falckner convinced Köster to leave with them in December.39 Once again, the couple crossed the Atlantic—this time to collect money for a church, solicit a pastor for German Lutherans in Pennsylvania, and recruit additional immigrants. In this case, Falckner and Schuchart used return migration as a means for creating religious institutions and community similar to the ones they knew from Europe. News of Falckner’s and Schuchart’s mission to raise money and find a minister for the German immigrants in Pennsylvania preceded them wherever they went. When the three Pietists reached London in January, Falckner visited with two teachers who had just arrived from Halle, where Francke had recently established several educational institutions based on his pedagogical philosophy. The teachers sent news to Francke that Falckner had returned to collect money to build a church. They also warned Francke that he should investigate Falckner’s plans carefully before assisting him since other Pietists in London were skeptical of his designs because of the immigrants’ questionable behavior when they had traveled through London in 1693 en route to Pennsylvania.40 Falckner traveled to Halle, where he personally sought Francke’s support for a Lutheran minister and teachers to instruct the colony’s German-speaking community. Francke did, indeed, investigate the immigrant’s plans closely. He posed a series of ninety-five questions to Falckner about conditions in Pennsylvania, to which Falckner responded in detail.41 His responses were published in

39 Ibid., 502–3. Rathlef does not name Falckner and claims they traveled in December 1699 and arrived in London in January 1700. He is also the only source that suggests Schuchart accompanied Falckner on the transatlantic journey. However, evidence from numerous German sources confirms that Köster and Falckner returned to London together and that they were there by January 1699. See Jacob Bruno Wigers, London, to Henry July Elers, Halle, 3 May 1699, Hauptarchiv, B71a, 69–74, AFSt; microfilmed documents from the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden, 1706, #2249, 7–9, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and Sachse, German Pietists, 97, 143, 289–90. 40 Jacob Bruno Wigers, London, to Henry July Elers, Halle, 3 May 1699, Hauptarchiv, B71a, 69–74, AFSt; Sachse, German Pietists, 93–99. 41 One copy of Falckner’s original manuscript is in Hauptarchiv D 85, 469–597, AFSt. Julius F. Sachse, ed. and trans., Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania: The Book That Stimulated the Great German Emigration to Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Germany Society, 1905), contains a combination of a transcription of Falckner’s 1702 publication and pieces from the manuscript that were not published. Sachse carefully distinguishes between the printed and manuscript source and he provides a translation of everything he included. Because Sachse sometimes translates

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Figure 45: Title page, Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht von Pennsylvania in Norden-America . . ., 1702. Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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1702 as Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania in Norden=America (see fig. 45). In addition to soliciting clergy, Falckner intended to recruit more settlers. He told acquaintances in Jena that the only thing lacking in Pennsylvania was people.42 The answers he provided to Francke’s questions demonstrate Falckner’s continued interest in creating a Pietist community. Falckner supplied practical information about the climate and geography, Native Americans, and the logistics of migration. His first twelve answers concerned preparations and appropriate behavior for those wishing to migrate to Pennsylvania or Virginia. But he also mentioned the possibilities of “pious salt-workers” establishing a profitable salt works from the saline springs near Philadelphia and the opportunities for miners.43 In response to Francke’s question “if new colonies come over, must they join the old ones or can they build a new town for themselves,” Falckner recommended relying on the wisdom of those who were already there. He noted that there was still plenty of room to join existing colonies but immigrants also had the freedom to found new towns.44 His advice to those wishing to start a new colony was to seek the consent and advice of the governors in the land, who needed to grant permission to settle and who knew the shortcomings of the “old world.”45 Perhaps the most telling indication that Falckner was interested in colonization efforts, however, was his inclusion in the original manuscript of a plan for funding an immigrant community in the colonies. Key to this community was the support of clergy and teachers. Falckner’s proposal was based on investing four-thousand reichsthalers in trade goods (which he appended in a list); providing the necessary tools, household implements, and financial support for eight people for two years; purchasing one-thousand acres of land; and buying a specified number of farm animals. This investment, Falckner promised, would yield enough profits to support three preceptors or professors so that each would have fifty acres of land, thirty reichsthalers a year, one cow and calf, and a specified amount of beer, meat, and corn. rather loosely, I have cited his translations when summarizing but have relied on my own translations when quoting directly from Falckner’s words. 42 Extract from n.n., Jena, to [A.H. Francke?], Halle, Jan. 1, 1700, Hauptarchiv D, 84, 194–5, AFSt. 43 Sachse, Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht, 46–63. 44 Ibid., 182–83. 45 Ibid., 184–85.

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The instructors would be responsible for teaching young people four to five hours a day. When not learning languages and liberal arts, the students would be engaged in gardening and farm work or in learning a skill from artisans who would be a part of the colony. Artisans would be granted ten acres of land each (with the possibility for purchasing additional acreage), and their children would have an equal opportunity to an education along with the other children. In addition to support for the instructors, the original investment would yield enough returns to pay for two male and two female servants and a pastor. Falckner’s plan specified the kind of pastor who should be hired, how the governance of the church community should be structured, and how the pastor should be supported. And, finally, he proposed that the organizers could deal with poor relief by relegating extra cattle to assist those in need.46 Clearly Falckner intended to establish a Pietist community that incorporated some of the new pedagogical ideas Francke was experimenting with at Halle.47 His plan also laid out a concrete investment strategy based on first-hand knowledge of the colony. Falckner’s attempts to secure a pastor and additional immigrants were also closely connected to the Frankfurt Company—a group of Pietist investors connected to Spener who had purchased over 20,000 acres of Pennsylvania land in 1683. By the time Falckner, Schuchart, and Köster returned to Europe in 1699, the Frankfurt investors were no longer supporting the company or recruiting additional settlers.48 Falckner intended to help rejuvenate the company’s efforts—a logical step given his and the original investors’ connections to Spener and Francke. From Halle, he traveled to Frankfurt in January 1700, where he was granted a power of attorney to act in place of Pastorius as the company’s agent, along with Johann Jawert and Kelpius.49 In April Falckner visited Benjamin Furly, William Penn’s agent in Rotterdam, who had originally recruited the investors in the Frankfurt Company and who had assisted the Pietists with whom Falckner and Schuchart had traveled in 1693. Furly also granted Falckner and his brother Justus a power of attorney to act on his behalf in his Pennsylvania 46

Ibid., 230–45. For a brief summary of Francke’s educational institutions at Halle, see Brecht, “August Hermann Francke,” 473–96. 48 A. Deppermann, Schütz, 327–35. 49 Sachse, German Pietists, 145; Power of Attorney from the Frankfurt Company, 24 January 1700, Logan Papers, vol. 3, p. 7, HSP. Johann Jawert was the son of Balthasar Jawert, one of the investors in the Frankfurt Company who lived in Lübeck. 47

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affairs.50 By the time the couple returned to Pennsylvania in August 1700, Falckner had laid the groundwork for creating his own version of a Christian community.51 He and Schuchart were prepared once more for regeneration. Repeated Failure For a brief period in the first decade of the eighteenth century, it appeared as though Falckner and Schuchart might succeed in finding a secure place for themselves within Pennsylvania’s German-speaking community. Falckner managed to recruit immigrants from among the Pietists in Lübeck, Friedrichstadt, Holstein, and Duisburg. Köster, who by now was in Amsterdam, reported to a correspondent that nearly two-hundred families from Friedrichstadt and Holstein were en route from London to the colonies.52 Katharina Elisabeth Schütz, the widow of one of the original investors in the Frankfurt Company, also gave Falckner and Arnold Storch power of attorney to dispose of her share of the company’s investments in Pennsylvania land, which she claimed to be four-thousand acres. Her intent was to give it as a gift to “some pious families and Persons who are already in Pennsilvania, or Intend to go thither this year, as likewise unto such that shall follow them in time to Come.”53 And Furly referred to several people who were migrating to the colony in the power of attorney he gave to the Falckner brothers.54 Falckner and Schuchart returned to Pennsylvania with renewed support from investors and religious leaders and with the immigrants needed to establish a community of Pietists.

50 Benjamin Furly to Daniel and Justus Falckner, Power of Attorney, 23 April 1700, “Minute Book G,” in Minutes of the Board of Property of the Province of Pennsylvania, ed. Wm. H. Egle, vol. 19 of Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd ser., (Harrisburg, PA, 1890), 243–44. 51 Johann Jawert, Germantown, to Balthasar Jawert, Lübeck, 17 November 1700, Auswandererbriefsammlung, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Gotha, Germany. 52 Bernard Heinrich Köster, Amsterdam, to Friederich Breckling, the Hague, August 1700, A-310, 69–71, Universitäts- und Forschungsbibliothek Erfurt/Gotha, Gotha. 53 Catharin Elizabeth Schützin, Widow, to Daniel Falckner and Arnold Storch, 1 March 1703, power of attorney, Francis Daniel Pastorius papers, HSP. The date on Pastorius’s translation of this document is 1 March 1708. However, the document was presented in the Germantown Court on 16 February 1703 and found to be an exact copy. See James Duffin, Acta Germanopolis, 317. 54 Duffin, Acta Germanopolis, 26.

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The couple wasted no time in putting their plan into action. Shortly after they returned to Germantown, Falckner petitioned the legislature for naturalization. For several years, he was elected bailiff for the Germantown court and in 1703 he was appointed as a justice in the town. When its status became questionable because of political events in the colony in October 1703, the court ordered Falckner and Pastorius to wait on the governor and council to determine whether the court could continue to conduct business.55 At the same time, Falckner and Jawert began working on the business affairs of the Frankfurt Company. Between April 1701 and May 1704, the two men regularly transacted land sales on behalf of the company.56 He and his brother Justus also acted to secure Furly’s interests in the colony, appearing numerous times before the Commissioners of Property.57 Falckner seemed to be settling into his role as a company factor and leader in Germantown. The success of his efforts to build a religious community, however, is less clear. One part of his plan was to begin a school. In line with the proposal he presented to Francke, Falckner had convinced the Frankfurt Company to grant fifty acres of land for that purpose.58 Most likely he hoped to establish the kind of pedagogical institution he had outlined in which students helped to grow food and crops to sustain them and their educators. Johannes Seelig and Kelpius had proposed a similar arrangement when they first arrived in the colony in 1694 and had, at least for a while, taught children. By 1702, however, Falckner complained to Francke that his plan had come to nothing because some of the money promised for that purpose had never materialized and some had been given to the poor before he returned from Europe. Nevertheless, he maintained, there were very good opportunities for a capable teacher, should Francke send one, because several “private

55 Daniel Falckner, Naturalization record, 12 December 1700, Pennsylvania Land Records, Patent Book A., No. 2, p. 8, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA; Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis, 213, 225, 272, 309–10, 317. 56 Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis, 217, 311, 315, 317, 320, 573, 575, 602–06, 625; “Minute Book G,” 218–19, 249–50. 57 “Minute Book G,” 243–44, 274–75, 365, 379, 396, 465. 58 Falckner, Germantown, to August Herman Francke, Halle, 16 April 1702, Francke-Nachlass, 32/11:2 [10901], SBPK; reproduced in PA Germ Soc Proceedings 18 (1907): 4–13.

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people” were interested in having their children taught the “liberal arts.”59 The success of Falckner’s plan for religious leadership also seemed to falter. In the proposal he presented to Francke, Falckner suggested that the head of the congregation would be a “preacher, who taught not as a man of the people but rather as a servant of Jesus Christ” and who would lead in partnership with four “pious” elders.60 All did not go as planned, however. We catch only glimpses of the couple’s religious activities. Evidently, Schuchart continued her prophetic admonitions. A friend in London reported in 1702 that “the ‘Ecstatica Germanica’ in Germantown Pennsylvania . . . declared very thoughtful things against the Quakers there.” He also claimed that she “testified strongly that the kingdom of Christ and the redemption and gathering of his scattered children were very near.”61 The couple also reportedly attended the Swedish Lutheran church, even though they did not understand the language, because the colony had no German Lutheran services.62 But tension and frustration lurked just beneath the surface. In 1702, Falckner wrote at length to Francke apologizing for not keeping his promises where the Christian community was concerned. He claimed that the opposition and secret maneuvering of his opponents made his work ten times more difficult. They hindered his “good intentions to further the work of God and his kingdom” by either ignoring or misrepresenting infant baptism, communion, and the preaching of God’s word. Falckner’s complaints suggest that the debates between Keithians and Quakers continued to divide those in Germantown.

59 [Seelig], “Send-Schreiben,” 5; Falckner wrote to Francke that “there is no teacher here because Kelpius and Seelig have withdrawn themselves from all such service.” Falckner, Germantown, to August Herman Francke, Halle, 16 April 1702, FranckeNachlass, 32/11:2 [10901], SBPK. It is interesting to note that at the same time Falckner failed to open a school, Pastorius succeeded in doing so. On December 30, 1701, the General Court of Germantown approved a proposal to open a school in Germantown, which opened on January 11, 1702, and was taught by Pastorius. The school’s first overseers for 1702 were Aret Klincken, Peter Schumacher, and Paul Wulff. Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis, 218, 276; Learned, Pastorius, 181–5. 60 Sachse, Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht, 234–35; my translation. 61 Heinrich Johann Deichmann, Secretary of the Philadelphia Society of Jane Leade, to his fellow believer, 15 April 1702, as cited in Wallmann, “Erfurt,” 421, who cited from Theodor Wotschke, “Der Philadelphier Johann Dithmar in Neuwied,” Monatsschrift für Rheinische Kirchengeschichte 28 (1934): 48. 62 Julius F. Sachse, Justus Falckner: Mystic and Scholar, Devout Pietist in Germany, Hermit on the Wissahickon, Missionary on the Hudson (Philadelphia, PA: Printed for author, 1903), 43–44.

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While it is not clear exactly who opposed his efforts, Falckner claimed that several, who were supposedly in “our society,” were working at cross purposes with him where the scattered German immigrants were concerned.63 Once again, Pennsylvania’s religious toleration provided ample space for those with alternative interpretations of Christianity who threatened Falckner’s plans for creating a unified Pietist community. Falckner also painted a grim picture of the religious institutions available to Lutheran immigrants. Since Philadelphia had no German Lutheran church (and Köster, who had preached regularly, did not return to the colony), Falckner confirmed that he and his brother had begun attending the Swedish Lutheran church with a few other Germans. He reported that recently five children had been baptized in his and Schuchart’s home by the Swedish pastor, who spoke little German. Falckner claimed that if only he had the financial means, he would begin a church in Germantown. He continued to lobby Francke for assistance by asking if it were not possible to use one of the many stipends available in Germany to support someone well grounded in theology to assist the Pennsylvania Lutheran community.64 In short, Falckner now struggled to recreate the Christian institutions from home with which he was familiar. Ultimately Falckner’s efforts failed, although he may have preached to the German-speaking immigrants who eventually settled at Falckner’s Swamp on some Frankfurt Company land where he and Schuchart had begun to build a house in 1702. One eighteenth-century source suggests that a fellow Lutheran minister, Anthony Jakob Henckel, who arrived and settled at Falckner’s Swamp, ordained him.65

63 Falckner, Germantown, to August Herman Francke, Halle, 16 April 1702, Francke-Nachlass, 32/11:2 [10901], SBPK; reproduced in PA Germ Soc Proceedings 18 (1907):4–13; my translation. 64 Ibid. 65 Rev. Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, New York, to Rev. Johann Friedrich Winckler, Senior of the Lutheran Ministerium, Hamburg, 24 September 1731 in Hart and Kreider, trans., Lutheran Church, 17. Historians disagree about Falckner’s role as a minister to the Lutheran congregation at Falckner’s Swamp. Sachse claims he cleared land, had a log structure built, and ministered to immigrants there until 1721. Sachse, German Pietists, 319–21. Twentieth-century historians dispute this interpretation. Charles H. Glatfelter, The History, vol. 2 of Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717–1793 (Breinigsville, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1981), 517–21. Kim-Eric Williams, however, in The Journey of Justus Falckner, 1672–1723 (Delphi, NY: ALPB Books, 2003), 117, argues that Berkenmeyer,

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But Falckner’s colonization plans did not work out as he intended and, before long, he became involved in a scandalous attempt to cheat the Frankfurt Company’s investors of their profits. Falckner evidently had problems controlling his anger and he struggled with a drinking problem.66 He also soon fell into debt. By 1709, he was implicated with Johann Heinrich Sprögel, the son of a Pietist Lutheran minister in Quedlinburg, in an attempt to obtain the Frankfurt Company’s holdings as well as those belonging to Furly. Falckner later claimed that he was in debtor’s prison and had no choice but to sign over the land to Sprögel.67 By the early 1720s, Falckner and Schuchart disappear from Pennsylvania records.68 Final Migration Once again, the couple used migration as a strategy for beginning a new life. Sometime between 1718 and 1723, they moved with their family to New Jersey, where Falckner engaged in something of a medical practice and began assisting his brother Justus with oversight of the German Lutheran congregations there.69 By that time, Justus Falckner, who had moved to Pennsylvania when Daniel returned in 1700, was ordained by Swedish Lutheran ministers and was overseeing German Lutheran churches in New York and New Jersey.70 With the arrival of several thousand “Palatine” immigrants in 1709 and 1710, his the orthodox Lutheran minister who claimed Henckel “helped” Falckner to the ministry, never questioned his ordination as legitimate. 66 Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis, 327. 67 For a brief summary of these complicated events, see Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis, 25–28; 33–5. 68 The couple deeded six acres on December 11, 1712; Duffin, ed., Acta Germanopolis, 603. If, indeed, he ordained Falckner, Henckel would have done so after his arrival in 1717. Ann H. Gable, The Pastoral Years of Rev. Anthony Henckel, 1692–1717 (Camden, ME: Penobscot Press, 1991), 115–17. 69 Between 1735 and 1741, Falckner is referred to as “Dr. Falckner” in the accounts for a local store. Kenn Stryker-Rodda, “The Janeway Account Books,” The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey 33 (1958): 73, 80; 34 (1959): 41, 43–44, 76. Berkenmeyer also talks about Falckner gathering herbs, preparing medicine, and attending to patients. See John P. Dern, ed., The Albany Protocol: Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer’s Chronicle of Lutheran Affairs in New York Colony, 1731–1750 (Ann Arbor, MI: published by author, 1971), 8–9; 21. 70 Williams, Journey of Justus Falckner, 19–70; Harry Kreider, Lutheranism in Colonial New York (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 30–40. For his work in New Jersey, see John C. Honeyman, “Zion, St. Paul and other Early Lutheran Churches in Central New Jersey,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 9 (1924): 259–62.

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congregations grew considerably. In 1722, he and Joshua Kocherthal, the Lutheran minister who had arrived with the 1709 immigrants, were overseeing at least fourteen organized congregations in New York and New Jersey.71 Following Justus Falckner’s death in 1723, Daniel took over as the pastor of the New Jersey congregations.72 He recorded baptisms he performed on September 30, 1724, at Millstone and the congregation “in the Mountain” where he claimed he had been “happily called to perform the functions of both Kocherthal and my brother, both deceased.”73 Here at last, one might imagine that he and Schuchart were able to participate in the kind of spiritual community with institutional structures that Falckner wanted to build. It is possible that for close to a decade Falckner and Schuchart led a successful religious community—at least for them and their grown children and some of their parishioners. In September 1725, Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer arrived from Hamburg and assumed responsibilities for Justus Falckner’s New York congregations. Because of the large number of congregations Berkenmeyer had to oversee and the distance between them, Daniel Falckner continued to minister to the Lutherans in the Raritan Valley. His parish consisted of at least four congregations: “in the Mountain” (formerly Raritan; near Pluckemin); Racheway (Rockaway, Potterstown); Uylekill (near Montville); and “on the Millstone River” (present town of Harlingen).74 That Falckner and his congregants considered themselves part of a larger Lutheran community is clear. In 1727, he sent a letter to Berkenmeyer with a collection of money that some of his parishioners from Millstone and “in the Mountain” contributed for the construction of a church building in New York.75 It is also clear that some members of his congregations remained very loyal to him. Evidence for the couple’s activities,

71

Kreider, Lutheranism, 30–39. For a history of the 1709/10 migration, see Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 72 Sachse, German Pietists, 324–31. For a description of the Lutheran congregations in the “Raritan” parish, see Dern, ed., The Albany Protocol, 1. 73 As quoted in Kreider, Lutheranism, 39. See also Van Doren Honeyman, “The Lutheran Church of ‘Raritan in the Hills,’ ” Somerset County Historical Quarterly 2 (1913): 95. 74 Kreider, Lutheranism, 43–4. 75 Simon Hart and Harry Kreider, trans., Protocol of The Lutheran Church in New York City, 1702–1750, (New York: The United Lutheran Synod of New York and New England, 1958), 89–91.

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however, is simply too scant to know how well Falckner’s ministry was received.76 By 1731, tensions began to emerge. Evidently, some members of Falckner’s congregations had requested Berkenmeyer’s assistance because of Falckner’s behavior. Earlier he had promised to retire (by this point he was in his sixties) and to allow the congregation to call another minister.77 When those plans had fallen through, however, he had continued in his ministry. Conflicts within his congregations had increased. Some of his parishioners at Rockaway had separated themselves from him, and at Raritan (“in the Mountain”) he refused to offer the sacraments to some while others “had been scorning him for several years now because of his offensive life.”78 He also had dismissed one of his elders from office and had reportedly expelled him from the congregation without a hearing.79 In addition, Falckner had developed a drinking problem. According to Berkenmeyer’s report, some of his parishioners had said that he had “abased himself everywhere so that several times he almost fell from the pulpit. He also has the habit of forcing people to bring him an abundance of [intoxicating] beverages and abuses and threatens to beat up those who try to talk him out of it.” Berkenmeyer claimed his drinking habit was so bad that Falckner was “sometimes found sleeping on the side of the road with the brandy keg on his back.”80 It took some diplomatic negotiations on his part, but eventually Berkenmeyer convinced Falckner to retire from the ministry. He traveled to the congregation “in the Mountain,” where Falckner lived. When he inquired about the pastor’s health, Falckner replied “My eyes, thank God, are as good as when I was younger, but my head is like a calabash. I will, therefore, resign from everything.”81 For this reason, he agreed to give up his post as minister. When it came time for the actual parish meeting, however, Falckner’s defenders (including his two sons-in-law) tried to keep him from retiring and to prohibit

76 While church records for his brother’s churches survive, none are extant for Daniel Falckner’s ministry. Kreider, Lutheranism, 138. 77 Dern, ed., The Albany Protocol, 1–7. 78 Ibid., 7. 79 Ibid., 10. 80 Rev. Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, New York, to Rev. Johann Friedrich Winckler, Senior of the Lutheran Ministerium, Hamburg, September 24 1731 in Hart and Kreider, trans., Lutheran Church, 17. 81 Dern, ed. The Albany Protocol, 9.

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his parishioners from signing a call for a new pastor. They rejected Berkenmeyer’s choice of a neutral place for holding the meeting and insisted that he go to Falckner’s house. Eventually, Falckner was convinced to join the assembly, and Berkenmeyer persuaded him and church council members to agree on the wording for a call to a new minister.82 One of Berkenmeyer’s anecdotes, however, suggests the extent to which Falckner and Schuchart ultimately failed either to establish a new kind of spiritual community or to recreate one modeled on the institutions they knew from Europe—at least in the eyes of the Lutheran clergy. An incident several weeks before Falckner’s agreement to retire, Berkenmeyer claimed, “stirr’d up a commotion through the whole area and indicated that she [Schuchart] has not yet forgotten her former devilish tricks, even though she has lost her wits and mind through her drunkenness.” Evidently, the Falckners hosted the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter and, after the ceremony, Schuchart gave the bride something to drink. The following day, when the festivities resumed, the bride seemed to faint and then, according to Berkenmeyer, “began to scream in terrible pain, making sounds not like those of a human being . . . and tore off her clothes, behaving like a maniac.” The guests “asked Falckner to use his medical skill to help her, but he laughed loudly and said, ‘My child, this is the fruit of your new love.’” At that point, the bride, who had recovered a bit, “cried ‘Bring here the old witch who did this to me.’ ” After some pleading, Schuchart agreed to help the bride and supposedly went to the garden, gathered some herbs, took them into the cookhouse, and threw them on the fire. According to Berkenmeyer, “from that moment the girl became better.”83 From the perspective of the Lutheran church and some of their neighbors, Schuchart and Falckner were once again marginalized. Because of their old age and drunkenness, Falckner’s leadership was suspect and Schuchart was accused of colluding with the devil. Tellingly, in the face of further loss, the couple considered migration

82 Ibid., 11–22. Another version of this story is in Rev. Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, New York, to Rev. Johann Friedrich Winckler, Senior of the Lutheran Ministerium, Hamburg, 24 September 1731, in Hart and Kreider, trans., Lutheran Church, 16–20. 83 Rev. Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, New York, to Rev. Johann Friedrich Winckler, Senior of the Lutheran Ministerium, Hamburg, 24 September 1731, in Hart and Kreider, trans., Lutheran Church, 19.

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again. Berkenmeyer, after noting his efforts to convince Falckner to resign his post, reported that “when we took farewell the other day, Falckner said that he wanted to sell his possessions and move away from there.”84 For Falckner and Schuchart, now well advanced in years, moving continued to be their favored strategy for mitigating loss. *

*

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Falckner and Schuchart did not, in fact, migrate again—at least not according to limited extant records. Falckner continued ministering to the congregation until 1734, when, after many difficulties and with the help of Berkenmeyer and the Hamburg Consistory, the Raritan parish called Johann August Wolf as their pastor. But Wolf was young and inexperienced and almost immediately the congregation began to complain to Berkenmeyer.85 In February 1735, one of Berkenmeyer’s fellow pastors reported that Falckner had preached a sermon when Wolf refused to do so. “After that, our Pastor Wolf preached three sermons to the great satisfaction of the members of his parish and other people. But the fourth time (so it is being told) he stopped short in the middle of the sermon, and from that time on he has always read from the manuscript.” In addition, Wolf reportedly failed to perform the sacraments correctly. Instead, he “follows his own fancy. When baptizing a child he leaves on its cap, fills his fairly large hands with water and pours it on the child’s face.” Nor did he administer communion properly.86 While the Raritan parishioners made an effort to help the young pastor at first, they soon tired of his inability to adjust to colonial conditions. Before long, the congregations and their pastor were engaged in a battle of wills that did not end until the early 1740s after a civil suit and intercession by a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania.87 Nor did Wolf respond well to admonition and advice from Berkenmeyer. When he decided to marry a local parishioner, Wolf

84

Ibid. Kreider, Lutheranism in Colonial New York, 46; Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, Loonenburg, NewYork, to Johann Friedrich Winckler, Hamburg, 17 September 1734, in Lutheran Church, trans. Hart and Kreider, 53–54. 86 Michael C. Knoll, Hackensack, New Jersey to Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, NewYork, 21 February 1735, in Lutheran Church, trans. Hart and Kreider, 65. 87 Michael C. Knoll to Lay Leaders of the Lutheran Parish at Raritan, New Jersey, 12–13 April 1735, in Lutheran Church, Hart and Kreider, trans., 70–74. The documents outlining this conflict comprise most of the rest of Hart’s and Kreider’s volume of translated letters. 85

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had Falckner perform the ceremony, in spite of the elderly minister’s resignation from office and an offer from the pastor at Hackensack (who was officially qualified) to perform the marriage.88 Falckner and Schuchart clearly remained involved in their Raritan community. While Berkenmeyer feared Falckner was creating dissention, he did not pose a serious threat.89 What, then, can we make of the couple’s failure to secure a solid place in a spiritual community? Falckner and Schuchart never fully realized their dreams for a Pietist immigrant community. Falckner did, however, succeed in ministering to several congregations of Germanspeaking immigrants between 1723 and 1735. The strong lay leadership of his parishioners in their struggle with his successor indicates that he may have, at least partially, fulfilled the ideal kind of church structure he envisioned as outlined in his response to Francke’s questions. And, perhaps ironically, Francke’s son did send a minister, Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, from Halle to tend to Pennsylvania’s Lutheran immigrants in 1742, not long after Falckner’s death in 1741. It was Mühlenberg who finally succeeded in arbitrating the conflict between the Raritan Lutherans and Wolf, Falckner’s successor. From that point on, the New Jersey German Lutherans looked to Pennsylvania and to Halle rather than New York and Hamburg for leadership.90 Nevertheless, the couple’s story provides a case study for examining how early modern Germans used migration as a strategy for negotiating loss. Like many other religious dissenters who were banished or forced to leave home because of their religious views, they sacrificed familiar surroundings for the unknown. By moving to new locations, they sought to ameliorate their sense of exile and to create new possibilities for building spiritual communities. Religious toleration and a lack of institutional structures in the mid-Atlantic colonies, however, created new challenges for the immigrants to overcome. When their initial tactics failed to produce the kind of community they sought, Falckner and Schuchart deployed migration as a strategy again and modified their goals. Their story is only one example, but it fits larger patterns in migration flows of religious dissenters at the end of the sev-

88 Michael C. Knoll, Hackensack, to Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, 17–18 April 1735, in Lutheran Church, trans. Hart and Kreider, 75–76. 89 Michael C. Knoll, Hackensack, to Wilhelm C. Berkenmeyer, April 28, 1735, in Lutheran Church, trans. Hart and Kreider, 79–80. 90 Dern, ed., The Albany Protocol, xlvii–l.

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enteenth century. For many early modern Germans, migration helped mitigate the loss of community they suffered as religious minorities and it offered new opportunities for regeneration. Their strategy frequently failed, but that did not hinder them from trying again and seeking new chances to create their ideal spiritual home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FORECASTING LOSS: CHRISTOPH SAUR’S PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN CALENDER (1751 TO 1757) Bethany Wiggin In my country we talked about the new world; And it is really a new world to me; Because everything is simply totally different here from where I used to live. —Christoph Saur, Der Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Calender (Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1751)1

The Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Calender (High German American Almanac) forecast heavy losses for 1755. Penned by full-time separatist and printer, occasional pamphleteer, and frequent polemicist Christoph Saur (1695–1758), the popular almanac offered a medium for sustained reflection on the various kinds of loss experienced by German migrants to British North America.2 Provocatively, Saur’s almanac told Pennsylvania Germans not only that they suffered loss, but that they caused it. Having migrated to Pennsylvania with a wife and young son in 1724, Saur was at the forefront of an influx into the American colony that was fast becoming the preferred destination of German settlers.3 He began the almanac in 1738 in Germantown, Pennsylvania; by the 1750s, he could draw on over three decades of experience in this new world where everything was “simply totally different” (schier alles

1 “Man hat in meinem Land von der Neuen Welt geredet; Und es ist mir wohl eine Neue Welt; Dann es ist hier schier alles gantz anderst als wo ich gewohnet habe.” All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 Like most German names in the colonies, the spelling of Saur’s last name varies. “Saur” is the name the printer used on most of his title pages. The name is also frequently spelled Sauer and, in an Anglicized form, Sower. 3 Wokeck provides the best and most recent guide to eighteenth-century German immigration. Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

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gantz anderst).4 His almanac offered its readers remedies for bewilderment and hints for orientation. Its advice is nowhere more plain than in a column that ran in the almanac from 1751 to 1758 written as a dialogue between a resident and a newcomer. Saur used the column to prophesy the radical losses that he feared new migrants’ arrival spelled. Recent German arrivals to Pennsylvania, Saur wrote repeatedly, failed to appreciate the legacy bequeathed them by English Quaker founder, William Penn. Foretelling the instrumentalization of military emergency to curtail the freedoms guaranteed Pennsylvanians in the colony’s founding frame of government, the printer’s prognostications drew heavy fire in their day. While the small number of German migrants who had sought out Pennsylvania before the 1720s did so primarily for freedom of conscience, more recent arrivals had moved there to alleviate more earthly problems.5 Propelled by economic hardship, these new Pennsylvania Germans, Saur lamented, purchased new world prosperity at a terrible price. Land around Philadelphia and Germantown grew increasingly expensive. Eager to acquire their own piece of the new world, newcomers pushed further into the “backcountry.” But this was hardly empty land—it was already claimed by various Native American and European nations. Newcomers feared the violence along always contested colonial American borders, Saur knew, but arming the frontier would take a still more terrible toll. Sorting through the many losses mediated by Saur’s almanac, this essay’s first part discusses the almanac and the remedies it offered Germans still adrift in the new world. Its second part explores the advice column’s excoriations of “Pfaffen,” the men of the cloth whom the non-conformist printer held responsible for introducing so many “old Adams” into this new world. Losing the Peace Saur began the almanac upon opening his print shop for business on Germantown’s central artery. Then fourteen years in the colony, Saur 4 Christoph Saur, Der Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Calender (Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1751). Saur’s Calender is unpaginated. All references are identified simply by the year listed on the title page. 5 Wokeck makes a compelling case for this periodization. The years from 1749– 54—overlapping with Saur’s inclusion of the advice column in the almanac—saw particularly heavy traffic in German migrants. Wokeck, Trade, 45–46.

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had already tried his hand at a number of other trades, including the tailoring for which he had trained before departing for Pennsylvania. He hailed from Schwarzenau in Wittgenstein, an area known for its heterodox Christianity, including various strains of radical Pietism.6 While Saur has sometimes been identified with the Brethren (sometimes known as Dunkers), he is most aptly described as a separatist.7 He had departed Germany in 1724 with his wife, Marie Christine, and three-year-old son, Christoph Saur II. Some of his letters to friends in Germany found their way into print in publications such as the periodical Geistliche Fama (begun in 1730; Spiritual News), an organ of radical Pietism, published in Berleburg, near Saur’s hometown.8 Saur and his press soon became well known on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1751, editors of the Weimar journal Acta historico ecclesiastica described him as follows: He is a very ingenious man, a Separatist, who has mastered nearly thirty trades without a teacher. He went to America as a tailor, and has become printer, apothecary, surgeon, botanist, maker of small and large clocks, cabinetmaker, bookbinder, editor of newspapers (who made all of his book-printing tools himself), maker [of] lead and wire, paper-maker, etc.9

German and English competitors in the Pennsylvania print trade described the non-conformist Saur in rather less flattering terms. A pamphlet published in Philadelphia in 1748—probably by Gotthard Armbrüster, an associate of Benjamin Franklin, but authored and 6 The best account of Saur’s biography remains Donald Durnbaugh, “Christoph Sauer, Pennsylvania-German Printer: His Youth in Germany and Later Relationships with Europe,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 82, no. 3 (July 1958): 316–40. Particularly illuminating on radical Pietism at this time generally is Willi Temme, Krise der Leiblichkeit: Die Sozietät der Mutter Eva (Buttlarsche Rotte) und der radikale Pietismus um 1700 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). The literature on the religious radicalism of southwest Germany is voluminous. A synopsis and further references are provided by Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 15–16. 7 Donald Durnbaugh, “Radical Pietist Involvement in Early German Emigration to Pennsylvania,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 29 (1994), 33. Saur’s son, also named Christoph Saur, was a Brethren elder. As Durnbaugh notes, the two men’s biographies have led to some confusion. Donald Durnbaugh, “The Sauer Family: An American Printing Dynasty,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 23 (1988), 34. 8 Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 4. 9 Quoted in Donald Durnbaugh, ed., The Brethren in Colonial America: A Source Book on the Transplantation and Development of the Church of the Brethren in the Eighteenth Century (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1967), 120.

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dedicated according to its title page by a “3rd handworker in Philadelphia to his friend in the country” (3ten Handwercksmann in Philadelphia an seinen Freund in Land)—emphasized not Saur’s “ingenuity” but the crafty wiles of “S—.” This pamphlet was another salvo in the print battle ignited by Franklin’s Plain Truth (1747), a brief tract in which Franklin outlined a plan to militarize the Pennsylvania border to defend against an invasion by French troops from the west. The Armbrüster-Franklin piece satirized Saur’s “enthusiasm,” his irrationality allegedly manifest in his opposition to the fortification project: “Any half-way reasonable person can easily see through his whole Charteque [program], how he must have learned the trade of lathing (turning lies and truth together) in addition to all his other arts.”10 However many his arts, Sauer’s reputation today rests on the printing press that he likely built himself and for which he had the good business sense and necessary connections to obtain the German type that made his newspaper, almanac, and other printed materials easier for colonial readers still more at home in Fraktur (German black letter) than in Roman typeface.11 Saur’s Calender was neither the first nor the last German-language almanac to be published in Pennsylvania. English printer Andrew Bradford had brought out a short-lived Teutscher Pilgrim (German Pilgrim) in Philadelphia in 1731 and 1732. Benjamin Franklin—eager to muscle in on the politically influential and financially profitable market for German-language print dominated by the Saur press in the 1740s and ’50s—cooperated with his German business partner Armbrüster to bring out the inaugural issue of the Neu-eingerichteter Americanischer Geschichts-Calender (Newly Established American History Almanac) in 1747. The venture was soon taken over by another of Franklin’s German associates, Johann Böhm.12 But Saur’s Calender was by far the most successful German-language almanac in eighteenth-century 10 “Ein jeder nur halb vernünfftiger Mensch kan leicht durch seine gantze Charteque sehen, wie er das Dreher-Handwerck (von Lügen und Wahrheit zusammen) benebst all seinen andern Künsten wohl gelernt hat.” Kurtze Verteidigung der Lautern Wahrheit (Philadelphia, 1748), 4. 11 See Durnbaugh, “Christoph Sauer,” 327–30. 12 Franklin’s frequently cited negative views of Pennsylvania’s Germans seem to have obscured the business connections he had with German printers in Philadelphia. Ralph Frasca lists several of them in “From Apprentice to Journeyman to Partner: Benjamin Franklin’s Workers and the Growth of the Early American Printing Trade,” The Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 114, no.2 (April 1990): 229–48. For a balanced account of Franklin’s writings about the colony’s German population,

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British North America. Of the hundreds of German-language materials printed by various presses in the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century—from Bibles to ABC books to hymnals to newspapers to religious pamphlets—it likely reached the largest readership. Saur began to include an advice column for new migrants twelve years into the almanac’s success. The column addressed a panoply of practical questions any new migrant might face. More interestingly, it repeatedly warned that Penn’s holy experiment in the woods was sliding swiftly into trouble. The haven Penn’s colony provided to all its inhabitants—Quaker or High Church, English or German, European or Native American—was under siege. Already threatened, Penn’s peaceable legacy would soon disappear for good, the almanac’s advice column predicted. Although it often reads as a monologue, the column is written as a dialogue between an “Einwohner” (resident) and a “Neukommer” (newcomer). Typically, questions posed by the recent migrant are brief, while the answers given by the relatively acculturated Pennsylvanian extend over several pages. Some topics address the strange new life in this new world; others concern the strangeness of the world at large. The column proceeds in a hurly-burly manner, leaping willy-nilly from topics such as the desirability of acquiring what the English call a “Receept book,” to the meaning of the word “separatist,” to how English law divides an estate in the absence of a will, to the correct legal language of indenture bonds, to fruit trees, to the longevity of Indians one-hundred-fifty years ago, to the preparation of deer skins. For every question the Neukommer had, the Einwohner had an answer. For those who could not read English script or write German script, the almanac included three pages of both model scripts and printed letters by which his readers might learn to recognize letters and even form their own. For mothers who deplored the ink that stained young writers’ clothing, he provided tips to make laundry sparkle (Calender, 1756). He advised on how to write a bill of sale, providing models in both German and English for copying. He explained the curious phrase, “Hau Di Thu”—even now Germans said it to one another and, also like their fellow English Pennsylvanians, they no longer bothered

see Glenn Weaver, “Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania Germans,” The William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 4 (October 1957): 536–59.

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to wait for a reply (1754). He knew why some Pennsylvanians refused to swear an oath (1753), how to cure sick horses (1754), when to let blood (1755), and why Turks are forbidden to drink alcohol (1756); he understood, furthermore, the manifold powers of the planets and stars on humans (1755). The almanac was a curious hybrid of New and Old World information, some original and much copied.13 The 1752 Calender contains the second issue of the column. In this “Fortsetzung des Gesprächs” (Continuation of the Conversation), the Neukommer and Einwohner begin to hash over the shortage of good schoolmasters in the world at large and “here in the bush” (hier im Busch) in particular. The Neukommer regrets that “in the wooded backcountry” (im Busch) children were fortunate if they learned both to read and to write. The Einwohner responds with a pun on the verb “wachsen”—“children wax [grow] here in this country like wood”14—and then rides off on one of Saur’s favorite hobby horses: “At important schools, many have their heads full with as many languages and things they’ve read as will fit in a person’s mind, yet all the while—or even because of their great knowledge—they have puffed-up, proud, conceited, and satanic hearts.”15 While Saur disparages those whose worldly knowledge obscures their view of eternal truth, the Einwohner is too canny a Pennsylvanian to abandon school policy to others.16 Pressed by the Neukommer to advise how peacefully to bring children of “2, 3, 4, 5 religions together in one school” (2–3–4–5 Religionen zusamen in eine Schule) (Calender, 1752), the Einwohner recommends, “A clever schoolmaster teaches children to read in those

13 After Christoph Saur the Younger took over the Calender, he included extended sections explicitly translated from The Gentleman’s Magazine, an English periodical that circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Saur the Elder also undoubtedly culled considerable material for earlier years of the almanac from a variety of Germanand English-language sources, but he does not specify titles. 14 “Es wachsen viel Kinder hier im Lande auf wie Holtz.” Calender, 1752. 15 “[E]s gibt auf grosen Schulen, solche Leute, die den gantzen Kopff voll Sprachen und gelesene Sachen haben, so viel als nur in einen Menschen-Kopff hinein kan, und haben doch dabey, ja offt eben um des vielen Wissens willen aufgeblasene, stoltze, hoffärtige, satanische Hertzen.” Ibid. 16 Saur was a vociferous opponent of Franklin’s plan for German charitable schools. See Ralph Fresca, “ ‘To Rescue the Germans out of Sauer’s Hands’: Benjamin Franklin’s German-Language Printing Partnerships,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 121, no. 4 (October 1997), 329–50. See also Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “Benjamin Franklin and the German Charity Schools,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 99, no. 6 (1955), 381–87.

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books which they bring from home.”17 Perhaps they might bring the modest volume issued from Saur’s press in its first year of operation, entitled Ein ABC Buch bey allen Religionen ohne billigen Anstoß zu gebrauchen (1738; An ABC Book Which All Religions May Use With No Unnecessary Offense).18 Saur’s Neukommer pines for a Pennsylvania of which he has heard tell but which he believes he has arrived too late to know. He wistfully invokes common opinion that “this country used to be so quiet, peaceful, and the neighbors so united and neighborly.”19 Reports styling Penn’s colony as a land of milk and honey had circulated widely across the continent since the colony’s charter was issued. Penn himself had advertisements for the colony translated into various European languages, including German, in the early 1680s. At the turn of the century, Frankfurt publisher Andreas Otto brought a wide array of American materials to the German market, including accounts of Pennsylvania by Gabriel Thomas and Daniel Falckner whose descriptions of the colony’s abundance and harmony hardly shied from rhetorical excess.20 But now, in 1751, Pennsylvania’s peace is only a distant memory: Some years ago things changed, and many neighbors can hardly bear to look at one another; and furthermore every year many more people arrive here, forced to move because of their disgrace elsewhere where they have been condemned as whores and witches; and in addition to this preachers arrive in this country who could not remain elsewhere because of still other vices; and then every year between forty to fifty and a hundred people leave here to become colonial recruiters. What do you think? What kind of people do you think time will create in this country?21

17 “Wo ein Schulmeister verständig ist, da lehret er die Kinder lesen, in solchen Büchern, die sie mit bringen.” Ibid. 18 Christoph Saur II printed the work of innovative pedagogue and famous schoolmaster Christoph Dock. Durnbaugh writes that Saur the Elder had commissioned Dock to write his “masterly guidelines for schooling,” which appeared after Saur the Elder’s death. Durnbauch, “The Sauer Family,” 34–35. 19 “Vormahls hier im Land so ruhig, friedlich, und die Nachbarn so einig und nachbarlich.” Calender, 1752. 20 Otterness, Becoming German, offers a recent account of the irresponsible rhetoric of many American colonial promotional materials. 21 “. . . Es nun bey etlichen Jahren her sich verändert habe, so daß sich viel Nachbaren einander schier nicht ansehen mögen, und über das, alle jahr noch so viel Leute herein kommen, die wegen der Schande drausen wegziehen, daß viele Huren und Hexen gescholten sind, ja noch darzu solche Prediger ins Land kommen, die wegen solcher

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He mourns a loss that the Einwohner likewise deplores. The latter, however, knows whom to blame. In other places in the advice column, the Einwohner hardly shies away from excoriating the witches that common opinion alleged responsible for breaking the peace of the past. Included in the 1757 column, for example, was a long story of a bewitched boy in the so-called backcountry that detailed a father’s desperate attempts to rid his son of the evil spirits and the rusty pins and needles sent on him by neighboring women.22 But in this case, in answer to the general complaint of the Neukommer about Pennsylvania’s slide into troubles, the older man blames neither witches nor whores. Instead, he aims squarely at newly arriving “Pfaffen” and church ministers whose dubious morals and lives had gotten them into trouble in Germany. His opinion, he assures his would-be novitiate, echoes the voice of the people. Common opinion then, the separatist Einwohner alleges, holds men of the church, not witches, responsible for the turbulence among Pennsylvania Germans. Across its many pages, the Calender repeatedly charges churchmen with breaking the peace: It is truly the case that one hears people saying: since our ministers have arrived in this country, it’s become like this; for they plant religious jealousy in people’s heads and then the people become nasty to one another and they don’t know why. From this it follows that the authorities are so busy with the Germans, yes, the chief justice in Philadelphia recently said: the Germans used to be loved for their honesty, but now many outdo even the Irish.23

und anderer Laster draussen nicht bleiben konnen, und alle jahr noch wohl 40–50 biß 100 Leute hinaus reisen und Neuländer werden, was denckestu was will es endlich mit der zeit vor ein Volck im Lande werden.” Calender, 1752. Neuländer (Newlander) was the term used for Pennsylvanians who returned to Germany to prospect for new colonists, often recruiting them with half-truths and false promises. 22 “Backcountry,” of course, from an eastern, Eurocentric perspective. William A. Pencack and Daniel J. Richter offer a helpful discussion of the difficult issues inherent in the terminology of colonial borders in their editors’ introduction to Friends & Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), xx. Pencack and Richter ruminate on the ways in which William Penn’s 1682 treaty with the Indians and the Conestoga massacre of 1763 “seem to bear no direct causal or historical relation to each other” (ix). The present essay, like those in that collection, is in part an attempt to connect the two iconic events, one bathed in a golden glow, the other in blood. 23 “Es ist freylich so, daß man die Leute so sagen höret: Seither unsere Pfaffen ins Land kommen sind, ist es so worden; dan sie bringen den Leuten den Religions=Neid in den Kopff, und da werden die Leute einander gehässig, und wissen nicht warum; Daraus folgt dan, daß die Obrigkeit so viel mit den Teutschen zu thun hat, ja es hat

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So pernicious is the influence of the recently arrived “Pfaffen,” Saur’s Einwohner asserts, that they besmirch colonial Germans’ reputation with the English authorities. Forced to intervene in German colonial conflicts, English authorities could find no worse epithet than to call their formerly honest and peace-loving neighbors “Irish.” The Neukommer wonders precisely how many religions exist in this new world. Despite appearances to the contrary, the Einwohner alleges in reply, there are only two religions here: one true, the other false. True religion is marked, like this land itself, by newness, comprised of a “new life” and a “new people” whose “new hearts” have been washed clean of old sins in rebirth. These new people, the older Pennsylvanian stresses throughout the whole of the column, might be born in Rome or in Conestoga, Pennsylvania; in Turkey or as a Jew. Whether they have been baptized as infants or adults is of no matter. The Neukommer worries, too, about the disarray in both the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, commenting with understatement, “I’ve sometimes thought that in this country the worship service is in a bad way.”24 The Einwohner agrees wholeheartedly. But, unlike his inexperienced interlocutor, the more savvy Pennsylvanian insists that churches and ministers are only necessary during the early days of the true religionist’s “new life.” The Neukommer, he insists here, is simply “still so inexperienced in this new life” (in dem neuen Leben noch so jung). As he stays on in this new world where the blessings of the new life are available to all, he will grow to understand that true worship [Gottesdinst (sic)] hardly need happen in a church, and he will no longer require guidance to hear the word of God in himself. Pressed by the Neukommer for advice on how he might keep the peace, the Einwohner suggests an analogy [Gleichnis]. In a large house, not all pots can be made of gold and silver; some, the reader would realize, must even be used as chamberpots. He changes the analogy: the King of England is served by servants both high and low. All are necessary. Furthermore, even drunken, godless preachers might find peace in the new life of the new world: “Thus it is possible that the many godless preachers and churchmen who come here (who are dead

der Oberste Richter in Philad. kürtzlich gesagt: Die Teutschen seyen vormahls geliebt worden wegen ihrer Redlichkeit; nun aber übertrafen viele die Eyrischen selbst.” Calender, 1752. 24 “Ich habe manchmal gedacht es sey hier im Land schlecht bestellt mit dem Gottesdinst.” Calender, 1752.

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with sins, and as drunkards surely have no part in the kingdom of God) mend their ways and live in the new life.”25 But with no further discussion of this possibility, the Neukommer abruptly changes the conversation to discuss fruit trees, healthy apples, and methods of grafting—a topic whose tempting metaphorical readings are weighed down by a wealth of botanical specifics: “The graft is cut on both sides and made into a point so that it fits into the opening, the branch is then cut with a knife, and. . . .”26 And so the 1752 Calender ends. In the three decades following Saur’s own arrival in Philadelphia in 1724, German migration to British North America, primarily to Pennsylvania, reached nearly ninety thousand people.27 Unlike the first Germans in Penn’s Woods whose numbers remained few, a second wave of German migrants began to arrive in the 1720s who had undertaken the perilous journey not primarily for reasons of conscience but, as historians of German migration emphasize, to improve their lot in this world rather than the next. They hoped quite simply to find better economic opportunities in the Americas and were attracted particularly by Pennsylvania’s freedom from church taxes. Of these ninety thousand Germans, some 90 percent belonged to either the Lutheran or Reformed Church.28 Whatever the degree of their concern for their religious life, they surely did not share Saur’s separatism. However, these many new sheep lacked shepherds in their colonial pastures: into the 1740s, Church officials failed to set up a significant church apparatus in North America. As Fogleman has discussed, it was only after the arrival of the Moravians in the colonies and of Zinzendorf himself in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1741 that the Reform and Lutheran churches began to send ministers in earnest, including Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, “father of the American Lutheran church,” who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1742.29 But the

25

“Also ist es möglich daß alle die gottlose Prediger oder Pfaffen die so herein kommen [welche Todt in Sünden sind, und als Trunckenbolde u. gewiß kein Theil am Reich Gottes haben] sich doch bekehren und leben können im neuen Leben.” Calender, 1752. 26 “Das Propff-Reiß beschneidet man auf beyden seiten, und spitzet es so zu, daß es sich in den Spalt schicke und spaltet das Stämgen mit einem Messer, und. . . .” Ibid. 27 Wokeck, Trade, 45–46. 28 Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 25. 29 Fogleman locates the roots of the many extreme reactions to the “Moravian challenge” in the group’s unorthodox and highly controversial teachings on sex, gender, marriage, and patriarchal authority, but he also emphasizes the importance

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Moravians were not the first challenge to peace. Instead, they exacerbated Pennsylvania’s existing confessional tumult. The fractiousness already characteristic of German communities in the 1730s is legible, for example, in the settlement of Tulpehocken and in pamphlets such as the eight-page Die Confusion von Tulpehocken (1742; The Confusion in Tuplehocken).30 Moravians, the pamphlet makes clear, entered into an already existing uproar between Germans of both confessions who could no longer agree to share the settlement’s single house of worship. So extensive was the “confusion” and so contentious the truth about the violence that had occurred in Tulpehocken, the pamphlet’s Lutheran authors aver, that they had asked the town’s most famous and trusted inhabitant, Conrad Weiser (1696–1760), to notarize their account of events.31 Tulpehocken’s Lutherans proceed to explain that they wrote to correct an English-language account blaming Moravians for “the bad Commotion which happened on Sunday the 18th of July 1742.”32 A long sequence of events had led to that fateful Sunday, “Since it is already a long-standing confusion of many years, those called the Newcomers [Moravians] cannot be the cause of it.” 33 The “Pfaffen,” as Saur’s Einwohner called church-goers and their ministers, hardly needed a Moravian challenge to break the peace. The peace, as these Lutherans noted, had long since vanished. Over the many pages of the Calender, Saur’s sharp tongue is unusually mild. In the almanac, Saur largely refrains from the polemical

of the volatile demographic situation into which the Moravians inserted themselves (ibid., 25). 30 Tulpehocken was a place of many sorts of violence. As Merrell has shown, already by 1727 Delawares and Shawnees were shocked and disgusted by Pennsylvania’s invasion of the Delawares’ Tulpehocken lands. The European settlement would be the site of Indian attacks in the late fall of 1755, soon after the raids at Shamokin in the Susquehanna Valley. James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999), 166, 228. 31 Die Confusion von Tulpehocken (Philadelphia, 1742), 8. Conrad Weiser was a prominent diplomat and peace negotiator to the Six Nations. Later, he also became father-in-law to Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg. In 1742, the year of the confusion in Tulpehocken, Mühlenberg was charged by Lutheran church officials in Halle to head the Lutheran church in Pennsylvania. Merrell provides an illuminating account of Weiser’s negotiations in Into the American Woods. The most comprehensive biography of Weiser remains Paul A.W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945). 32 This is the English title quoted in Confusion, 1. 33 “Denn weil es schon eine viel-jährige alte Confusion ist, so können diese, die man Neugekommene [Moravians] nennt, nicht die ursach davon seyn.” Ibid.

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language he deployed elsewhere, for example, in the pages of his first weekly and then bi-weekly newspaper, the Pennsylvanische Berichte (Pennsylvanian Reports), or in the print salvoes he exchanged with Franklin or with the founder of Ephrata Cloister, Conrad Beissel (1691–1768). The almanac was designed to provide advice that might appeal to Germans of all religious stripes, and it thus long avoided polemic. Quoting folk wisdom, the column’s Neukommer proclaims, “You hear people say that when you come to Pennsylvania you’re blind for seven years; but some have been here for fourteen years, and they still don’t see right.”34 The Einwohner was to be their guide on the long and often rocky path to acculturation. Helping them to “see right,” his friendly advice sought to mitigate the many losses they experienced upon departure from Germany. But the almanac’s mild, inclusive tone vanishes in the advice column whenever the Einwohner turns to the subject of “Pfaffen.” On this topic, Saur’s almanac urges its “blind” readers to see the truth in no uncertain terms. Losing Everything Having established a loyal reading public, Saur uses the almanac’s conversations as a pulpit from which to preach a message he believed crucial to keeping the colony’s peace. He polemicizes against the encroachment of organized religion, warning that it encroaches on the colony’s vaunted freedoms. The Einwohner ridicules preachers who insist, for example, that a congregation provide their terms of pay in writing immediately upon their arrival: “It is a sign that everyday things go from bad to worse concerning the anti-Christ, such that even the so-called shepherds don’t even trust their sheep at their word; how much wool they are to have must be written up according to contract.”35 Saur has his Neukommer also baldly assert that warring neighbors “are covertly and overtly spurred to enmity by their preachers or neighbors.”36

34

“Man höre die Leute sagen wan man nach Pensilvanien komt, so ist man 7 jahr blind; u. manche sind 14 jahr hier, und sehen noch nicht recht.” Calender, 1753. 35 “Das ist ein Zeichen daß es mit der Antechristenheit täglich schlimmer und ärger worden und wird, so, daß auch die sogenant Hirten ihren Schafen nicht ein mal mehr trauen auf ihre Worte; es muß alles Band=Mäßig verschrieben seyn, wie viel Wolle sie haben sollen.” Calender, 1754. 36 “von ihren Predigern oder Nachbaren heimlich und offentlich angereitzet werden zur Feindseeligkeit.” Ibid.

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The Neukommer pleads with the Einwohner for advice about how to restore the peace that formerly reigned in Pennsylvania: “I have heard that it did not used to be like this here in this country and that people talked and dealt with one another honestly.”37 Saur’s Calender disputes his many opponents—both German and English—who asserted that the colony’s discord was born of the colony’s lack of religious unity. Thus, the Neukommer wonders whether the colony’s famous freedoms might be the root of the growing troubles. He suggests to his more experienced compatriot: You sometimes hear words spoken in this country, for which in Germany you would get your mouth sealed, even if they were the pure and eternal truth. I have already heard various people say that freedom of conscience is dangerous, yes, some say that if they were in command they would allow no freedom save for their religion, and I too am of this opinion.38

In reply to this attack on freedoms of conscience and expression, the Einwohner invokes William Penn, the colony’s founder, whose wisdom, fairness, and godliness are everywhere venerated throughout the Calender. For pages on end, the Einwohner extemporizes on the religious freedom guaranteed by Penn in the fledgling colony’s First Frame of Government for all perpetuity, even providing translations of parts of the English-language document. Saur’s Neukommer is a quick study. To the lengthy exegesis that the Einwohner provides of Pennsylvania’s articles of freedom, the Neukommer adds conclusively: You can conclude from this that the first ruler of the country must have been a very conscientious man since he established freedom of conscience so firmly: we can see that all his other freedoms may be changed when six of seven men in the assembly together with the governor deem it good to change something; but freedom of conscience ought never to be changed or diminished.39

37 “Ich habe gehört, daß vor diesem dergleichen hier im Land nicht gewesen ist, und die Leute haben aufrichtig mit einander geredet und gehandelt.” Ibid., 1756. 38 “Man höret manchmal hier im Lande worte reden, wan es in Teutschland geschähe, man würde einem das Maul stopffen, ob es gleich die pure Wahrheit ist, und Ewig wahr bleibt. Ich hab schon verschiedene Leute hören sagen, daß die Gewissens=Freyheit schädlich sey, ja einige sagen, wan sie zu befehlen hätten, sie gäben keine Freyheit, als nur vor Ihre Religion, und ich bin selbst der Meinung.” Calender, 1755. 39 “Man solte sohl hieraus schliessen, der erste Herr des Landes müsse ein sehr gewissenhafter Mann gewesen seyn, weil er die Gewissens=Freyheit so fest gegründet: wir sehen zwar, daß alle seine vorhergehende Freyheiten können verändert werden, wann in der Assamble allemahl 6 aus 7 Männer nebst dem Governör es vor gut

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Saur’s Neukommer is the printer’s ideal reader, absorbing his interlocutor’s lesson with startling alacrity. He is exactly the kind of migrant the Einwohner might have wished for to restore the peace, for he quickly realizes that the colony’s peace was undergirded by the freedom of conscience that Penn had allowed “never [to] be changed or diminished.”40 While this new home in a new world confuses the Neukommer, it is a place that is growing increasingly unheimlich (i.e., both uncanny and un-homely) to the older Pennsylvanian as well. Germans have there suddenly become no longer German. As we have heard, “The Germans . . . now . . . are worse than even the Irish.”41 The Einwohner no longer recognizes his compatriots. Their foreignness is matched by a similarly recent estrangement of the new world. Its former peace, like the name of Penn, presently fades into an increasingly blurry historical memory, threatened with obscurity. The regular appeals to Penn are a chorus sung by the Calender to recall and commemorate the Quaker founder. The prophetic Saur sounds the tune again and again in the Calender. And Saur was hardly the only pursuant of peace who steadily and repeatedly invoked Penn’s memory in these decades of increased migration. As James Merrell has documented, the memory of the founder was always used for diplomatic ends. A council between Europeans and Conestogas at Philadelphia in 1729, for example, had treated territory where Saur and many other Germans had begun to farm in growing numbers, includ-

ansehen etwas zu verändern; aber die Gewissens Freyheit soll nimmermehr verändert oder vergeringert werden.” Calender, 1755. 40 In his reading of Saur’s almanac, Roeber proposes a dialectic between Saur’s understanding of freedom and property rights. Viewed from the standpoint of the American Revolution and Germans’ participation in it, the relationship of the two terms is, of course, crucial. My own reading of Saur’s almanac, on the other hand, emphasizes Saur’s backward glance at the freedoms that he saw threatened by recent immigrants. Whereas I stress Saur’s engagement with English, particularly Quaker culture, most evident in his repeated paeans to William Penn, Roeber attributes Saur’s concepts of freedom genealogically to the free-church Protestants who subscribed to the 1527 Schleitheim (Anabaptist) Confession. Saur’s notion of freedom evolved, according to Roeber, from a shared “early tendency to identify liberty with an absence of government and with inner liberty of conscience, or with freedom from coercion” to one that gradually linked the rights of freedom and property with “obligations to the public world,” such as paying taxes. A.G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 181, 198. 41 “Nun aber übertrafen viele [Teutschen] die Eyrischen selbst.” Calender, 1752.

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ing “confused” areas such as Tulpehocken. At the council, Conestoga leader Tawenna spoke of Penn at such length that Tawenna at least felt “as if William Penn himself were alive.”42 To speak of Penn was to speak of peace. Saur, like Tawenna and other negotiators along always contested and increasingly unfixed frontiers, concertedly sought to brook peace’s ebb by remembering the founder. But, of course, new migrants had no memory of Penn—and perhaps held little sympathy with the Quaker project of a peaceable kingdom. In the 1750s, the Einwohner was arguably more adrift in a newly estranged but no-longer new world than was the Neukommer. Both found themselves amid borders that were frighteningly fluid. The chorus sung by the advice column of the Calender is, of course, proper to tragedy. Foreshadowed by the arrival of “Pfaffen”—all men of the cloth, not solely Catholics—the real tragedy was not much longer in coming. As Saur wrote in the 1754 issue of the Calender, long simmering conflicts among French, Indian, and English soldiers began to boil over. After English General Braddock’s defeat at Fort DuQuesne (near Pittsburgh) in 1755, the English formally declared the war known sometimes as the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a conflict of rival global empires and sometimes referred to as the first world war.43 Violence along colonial frontiers escalated. And as the Calender chillingly reports, the violence that marked frontier borders also transformed its perpetrators. Central to the violence were the German migrants who had sought land in the Conestoga “backcountry.” Before they left Germany, they might have heard tales of the “new world,” but they remained ignorant of the new entity that Saur identified as its quintessence: the new religion whose bounds transcended church walls. Their failure to understand this message had already been coupled with the arrival of unscrupulous churchmen and so fostered religious violence within the German community, turning Germans into the so often despised Irish. But, the Calender goes further, alleging that Germans’ readiness to abandon the founder’s pacifist principles strips them of their essential humanity.

42

Merrell, Into the American Woods, 166. What is often known as the French and Indian War in the American context is usually dated to 1754, before the official war declaration of the Seven Years’ War. 43

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French and Indian raids on German Moravian settlements near the Indian village of Shamokin were widely reported in the German- and English-language press of the British colonies, including Saur’s.44 The Calender weighed in that year on the question then on the minds of many European settlers in Pennsylvania: why had formerly friendly Indians turned against them? The Einwohner points his finger at the colonial government’s increasingly shady dealings with the Delaware (Lenni Lenape) and the Iroquois nations. In this year’s column, Saur anticipates his readers’ question: “But how can those people be responsible for the lack of goodwill, fury, and brutality of the Indians who wanted no trouble with them and had to pay quite a lot for their land?”45 The convinced pacifist is ready with an unsettling answer: “The Indians have dealt brutally with people: but I have heard a German say: If I can capture an Indian, then I will cut his flesh from his living body and he will eat it before my very eyes. That is more than Indian.”46 Saur’s suggestive ambiguity in this passage invokes the long tradition in which the cannibal provided a master metaphor for America. Since Columbus’s widely circulated reports of cannibalism in the Caribbean, the American cannibal proliferated across print media, from published letters to maps to travel literature and novels.47 On into the eighteenth century, the specter of the cannibal loomed at America’s edges. American anthropophagy continued to structure widely read accounts of voyages to the new world, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first published only five years before Saur set sail for Pennsylvania. Particularly influential in propagating Columbus’s fateful substitution of canib for Carib—prompted by a conflation of canis

44 In addition to his newspaper reports, in 1756 Saur also had William and Elizabeth Fleming’s captivity narrative translated which he published as Eine Erzehlung von den Trübsalen und der Wunderbahren Befreyung so geschehen an William Flemming und dessen Weib Elizabeth . . . (Germantown, PA: Saur, 1756). An English version of the Flemings’s story had appeared that same year published by Green & Russell in Boston. 45 “Wie können aber solche Leute schuldig seyn an dem Unwillen, Zorn und Grausamkeit der Indianer/ welche nichts mit ihnen zuschaffen gehabt, und ihr Land theuer genug bezahlen müssen?” Calender, 1757. 46 “Die Indianer haben grausam mit Menschen umgegangen: aber ich habe einen Teutschen hören sagen: Wan ich einen Indianer gefangen kriege, so woll ich ihm fleisch aus seinem lebendigen leibe schneiden, das soll er mir vor meinen Augen fressen, das ist mehr als Indianisch.” Ibid. 47 See especially Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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and Cynocephali, as Frank Lestringant has shown—was the monumental collection of various travel accounts published by the Amsterdam de Bry family of engraver-publishers.48 Crucially, de Bry’s engravings for Bartolomé de Las Casas’s (1474–1566) famed accounts of Spanish atrocities against the Indians, “the black legend,” radically undermine the equation of Indians with anthropophagy.49 Like Montaigne’s essay on cannibals written in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, de Bry’s illustrations for Las Casas suggest that it is Europeans, not Indians, who most cruelly butcher and consume other humans.50 Saur’s Germans who have become “more than Indian” follows in this tradition. So strange has this new world grown, his provocative ambiguity suggests, that its old world inhabitants have gone native. Pointing to European “cannibalism,” Saur’s almanac raises the possibility that the barbarism of acts he locates beyond the human pale is in fact the universal outcome of colonial aggression. Such acts as the 1737 Walking Purchase, which considerably extended the colony’s territory, later renamed by angry Delawares “ye Running Walk,” would have been unthinkable in William Penn’s lifetime, the almanac was convinced.51 While Penn had actively pursued peace, Saur’s Einwohner argued, more recent colonists have pursued war. This war brought with it myriad losses: Pennsylvania’s ecumenical, pacifist heritage; its future peace; and its settlers’ essential humanity.

48 Travels to the Occidental Indies eventually stretched to thirteen parts and over 650 lavish copperplate engravings and was available both in German and in Latin editions. On the de Bry series, see Susanna Burghartz, ed., Inszenierte Welten/ Staging New Worlds: Die west- und ostindischen Reisen der Verleger de Bry, 1590–1630 (Basel: Schwabe, 2004). 49 The iconography of cannibalism deployed by de Bry derives in part from a wide range of earlier sources including Martin Waldseemüller’s map of the new world and Lorenz Fries’s companion cosmography (Uslegung der Mercarthen oder Cartha Marina, Strasbourg 1525), Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1554), and the famous allegorical frontispiece of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis Terrarum (1570). 50 Van Groesen illuminatingly compares the German and Latin editions of the de Bry volumes, showing how the Latin versions were toned down for export and for avoiding Catholic censors. Michiel van Groesen, “The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634): Early America Reconsidered,” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 1–24. 51 Merrell, Into the American Woods, 14.

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To the chagrin of Benjamin Franklin and others, Saur’s publications steered readers to support the colony’s long dominant Quaker political party. But from 1755 to 1756, the drums of war drowned out the almanac’s calls to keep the peace. By then, even many members of the Quaker party had abandoned their previous pacifism.52 Arming the border, Saur believed, could not bring peace or protect against the real threats to Pennsylvania’s freedoms. Instead, it heralded the final destruction of an era that Saur’s almanac washed in golden hues and idyllic tones, anticipating those famously used fifteen years later by American painter Benjamin West in Penn’s Treaty with the Indians. A time of peaceful coexistence between Indians and Europeans in Pennsylvania had drawn to a close. The loss of Penn’s legacy of peaceful dealings with the Indians followed logically, Saur’s almanac everywhere suggests, from Pennsylvanians’ neglect of the freedom of conscience on which all peace rested. It was a neglect exacerbated by the arrival of the “Pfaffen” whose every word, Saur believed, was born from strife: “I can tell you in truth that the interpretors of scripture have both caused and are guilty of all fighting and harm.”53 Their arrival tolled the passing of a new world, one that Saur believed had previously been cultivated in the Pennsylvania wilderness. It was a new world, Saur’s Cassandra-like Einwohner foretold, forever lost.

52

John J. Zimmerman, “Benjamin Franklin and the Quaker Party, 1755–1756,” The William and Mary Quarterly 17, no. 3 (July 1960): 311. 53 “Ich kan dir in Wahrheit sagen, daß die Ausleger der Schrifft an allem Streit und Unheil Ursach und schuldig sind.“ Calender, 1756.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

AFTER THE FALL: THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL DEATH AND REBIRTH IN THE WAKE OF THE HÖCHSTETTER BANKRUPTCY, 1529 TO 1586 Thomas Max Safley On August 30, 1550, the Augsburg notary Nicolaus Poll arrived at the castle of Burgwalden to carry out a post-mortem inventory.1 The holders, Ambrosius Höchstetter and his wife, Katharina Neumannin, had died earlier that year, leaving four orphaned children as their heirs. The division of the estate among them might be considered the final act in the family’s long tragedy. Some twenty years earlier, in 1529, the Höchstetter firm had suffered bankruptcy under the leadership of Ambrosius’s father, Ambrosius the Elder. To pay its debts, the family had been stripped of its property and prestige. The partners in the firm had fled, been imprisoned, or died. Their spouses and relatives had struggled to retain what little they could. When Ambrosius the Younger returned to Burgwalden in 1544, after fifteen years in debtors’ prison, he found little to remind him of those glory days and much to recall his and his family’s fall. The notary proceeded room by room, starting at the top of the castle and working his way downward to the first floor, and then outward to the supporting buildings and fields. He listed each room’s contents as he went. It makes for sober reading: wooden furniture in worn state, straw mattresses and threadbare linens, missing bed curtains and motley covers. Here and there, the families’ coats of arms—Höchstetter and Rehlinger—appeared in red and green. The family of Ambrosius the Elder’s wife Anna, the Rehlingers, now served as guardians of the Höchstetter children. Nowhere did the notary find any evidence of the “house full of rich decoration, like a princely palace”2 that the creditors 1

Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Reichsstadt Akten, Stadtgerichtsakten, 173. “Aber es ist nichtz richtiges da gefunden worden, und ist darvor ain voll haus mit aller zier wie ain fürstenhaus gewessen.” C. Sender, Chronik der deutschen Städte. Augsburg, 4:299, quoted in Ernst Kern, Studien zur Geschichte des Augsburger Kaufmannshauses der Höchstetter (Leipzig: Teubner, 1935), 14. 2

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had believed the Höchstetters to possess: instead, plate of tin and pewter, clothing of wool and linen. The silver and gold, satins and furs, had long since been, as many suspected, secreted away by the bankrupts or, as seems more likely, seized by creditors. The notary listed accommodations for more than twenty servants but noted only two old women still on the premises. He also recorded stocks, evidence of the rights of high and low justice that the Höchstetters had exercised on their estates and mortgaged to their creditors. It was an existence in quality barely suitable for an artisanal master but utterly inappropriate for a merchant-prince. The inventory proceeded to Augsburg, to a small house in the shadow of the bishop’s palace rather than the family’s great, representative dwelling on the high street. That showplace, a source of pride and scandal for family and city alike, had also been forcibly mortgaged and sold. In the little house were found copies of some of the family’s great land transactions, the record of their attempts to build a rural estate, a small country within the country. These holdings were long gone. Katharina and Anna had been forced to sue the creditors before the Imperial Supreme Court [Reichskammergericht] for access to their dwelling in Burgwalden;3 else Katharina, her children, and her husband might well have been homeless. The little house contained a surprise, however. In a chest belonging to one of the guardians, Ulrich Rehlinger, were found a number of heavy, ornate chalices cast and wrought of gold and silver. These sumptuous, expensive objects had been gifts, given to the younger Höchstetter children at their baptisms after their father’s release from prison.4 It was usual in early modern Germany for godparents to offer a token—a coin or perhaps a 3 Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, RKG 4975, 4978, 4979. See also Wilhelm Füssl and Manfred Hörner, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Reichskammergericht (Munich: Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, 2004), 11:423–35. 4 “Inventario Ambrosi Hochstetters und Katharina Newmennin seligen Verlassenschafft. Actum in Augspurg Anno 1550. . . . Ain silberes vergult Knoratz ainfachs Geschirr mit ainer Deckh darob ain Mendl nit ainer Helenbart, so die romisch [römisch?] kaiserlich Maiestate des 48 Jar der Jungen Frauen Hochstetterin verert hat, wigt alles zusamen 3 Marck 14 Lott 2 Que. Ain silberes vergultz Tobolet mit der Herren Printzen Pioment Wappen so er Ferdinanten Hochstetter sein Dotten alles er in aus der Tauff gehebt hat, vereret hat, wigt 2 Marck, 12 Lott im 48 Jar. Mer ain silbers vergultz glatz Tobolet mit ainer Deckhel so Ro, Kon. Mt. dem benannten Ferdinant Hochstetter alls jrem Maiestatt Dotten verert hat, wigt alles zusamen 3 Marck 9 Lott jm 48 Jar. Mer ain silbers vergultz Knoratz geschirlin mit ainer Dekchell darob ain Kintle mit ainem Schilt darin khain Wappen ist, hat sollichs Ertzherzog Maxmillian von Osterreich dem genannten Ferdinanto Hochstetter alls seinem Totten vereret,

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spoon—to their godchildren. These were highly unusual, therefore. The godparents had been none other than Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, and Ferdinand, King of the Romans, Habsburg employers and protectors of the Höchstetters for nearly fifty years. The notary, likely astonished at his discovery, recalled on paper that His Royal Majesty had even been present at the baptism, lifting his namesake, Ferdinand Höchstetter, the fifth child and third son of Ambrosius and Katharina,5 from the baptismal font. These were tokens, then, of ties that had bound and not loosened through generations of service and scandal, fortune and failure. The family was still deeply in debt; the estate still had to discharge more than 7,000 guilders in obligations; whether the children received anything is not known. Yet, though all else failed, all connections to friends, relatives, and associates in the city, through which the Höchstetters had slowly built their fortune, their relationship to some of the most powerful rulers of Europe, held firm. This discovery at the very end of the documentation of the Höchstetter bankruptcy raises fundamental questions about social death. Did the family suffer a permanent loss of social status that separated them from the community and corporation of merchants and prevented them from reentering business? Economic failure could be accompanied by such a social loss, particularly when fraud or deception was suspected. Given the crucial importance of reputation in determining access to credit and information, as well as cooperative relations with associates, its loss could be particularly detrimental, marking the bankrupt and his associates as pariahs, depriving them and their families of a livelihood and forcing them to emigrate. Social death is worth considering, therefore, in the context of economic failure. *

*

*

The concept of social death emerged in scholarship of the 1990s to clarify various social and political processes: the ways in which some political parties and social groups define and identify their opponents and the ways in which some societies define and enforce the boundaries

wigt alles zusamen 2 Marck 6 Lott 2 Que jm 48 Jar jnn Herren Ulrich Rechlingers Truchen.” Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Reichsstadt Akten, Stadtgerichtsakten, 173. 5 Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Augsburger Eliten des 16. Jahrhundert: Prosopographie wirtschaftlicher und politischer Führungsgruppen, 1500–1620 (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1996), 304.

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of normative behavior.6 Legal inequality, systematic maltreatment, and political or social exclusion have all been cited at one point or another as forms of social death. Perhaps because it is a scholarly neologism, social death has not yet become a terminus classicus of historiography. Yet, some of the issues it raises have inspired a broad literature. Two of the numerous perspectives, from which scholars have examined the functions of social status and its loss in premodern Europe, seem particularly applicable in the context of bankruptcy: honor and deviance. Historians have long portrayed early modern Europe as a hierarchical society, in which status—or honor, to use the contemporaneous term—played a crucial but increasingly complex role in determining social structure and social relations.7 Yet, social scientists and historians debate whether status is the property of a person or the quality of a relationship. Was honor a function of birthright within a hierarchical society, as Max Weber and his disciples argue,8 or was it characteristic of dynamic interactions between members of that society, as anthropological studies suggest?9 The two are not at all the same: the former 6 See, e.g., Stuart Waldman, “Surviving a Fate Worse than Death: The Plight of the Homebound Elderly,” Loss, Grief & Care: A Journal of Professional Practice 6 (1993): 67–71. See also Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18 (2003): 63–79; David Clark, The Sociology of Death: Theory, Culture, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); John E. Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Stefan Timmermans and David Sudnow, “Social Death as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: David Sudnow’s ‘Passing On’ Revisited,” The Sociological Quarterly 39 (1998): 453–72. 7 See, e.g., James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006). See also Friedrich Zunkel, “Ehre, Reputation,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner,Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 1–63. See also Andreas Grießinger, Das symbolische Kapital der Ehre: Streikbewegungen und kollektives Bewußtsein deutscher Handwerksgesellen im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1981). 8 “In contrast to the purely economically determined ‘class situation’ we wish to designate as ‘status situation’ every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor. This honor may be connected with any quality shared by a plurality, and, of course, it can be knit to a class situation: class distinctions are linked in the most varied ways with status distinctions. Property as such is not always recognized as a status qualification, but in the long run is, and with extraordinary regularity.” Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 932. 9 See, e.g., Elvin Hatch, “Theories of Social Honor,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 91 (1998): 341–53; Peter Schneider, “Honor and Conflict in a Sicilian Town” Anthropological Quarterly, 42 (1998): 130–54.

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would be static and universal, given to slow change at best, while the latter would be more dynamic and circumstantial. In principle, status as property would not be subject to loss, except through some action that robbed the person of his or her birthright, while status as a quality could shift and change, be lost but also regained. Emile Durkheim theorized in 1895 that deviant behavior, far from being aberrant or abnormal, is a natural social activity that serves to communicate social identity, focus social opinion, and reinforce social values.10 A deviant violates standards of conduct, commonly held by the members of his or her community; the members of that community then join together to demonstrate their indignation and condemn the offender. This process enables a community to maintain the limits of acceptable behavior—in essence to define itself in moral or ideological terms—and to mark transgressions as deviant. Scholars have seized upon Durkheim’s theory to elaborate a series of interactions by which a community establishes and reifies behavioral limits for itself.11 Such boundaries reveal not only the community’s identity but also its sense of the normal and acceptable. Crime serves this purpose by bringing social deviants and official authorities into contact.12 Law enforcement and judicial sanction are statements about the boundaries of behavior and the degree of diversity that a community will tolerate. By participating in a legal process, whether as members of a court or witnesses to a trial, persons in a community help maintain those boundaries. Each act of deviance and control sharpens the authority of the value or norm and strengthens the solidarity of the community. Discrimination, persecution, and expulsion all seem to apply to the Höchstetters after their bankruptcy. Their firm never recovered from the failure of 1529. The offices were closed; the owners were ruined; the debts were unpaid. The family seems, at first glance, to have been really and symbolically cut off from the community of Augsburg.

10 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W.D. Halls. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 150. 11 See, e.g., Kai. T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley, 1966); Thomas Max Safley, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest, A Comparative Study, 1550–1600 (Kirksville, MO: The Sixteenth Century Journal Publisher, Northeast Missouri State, 1984). 12 Erikson, Wayward Puritans, 11.

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Yet, social death suggests stasis. Death is a fixed state, so far as we know. Indeed, most scholarly treatments of status examine its loss.13 Social death loses meaning, however, in the face of what one might call dynamism. Can there be social rebirth? Under what circumstances might rehabilitation occur? It would seem to have been so for the Höchstetters. The family had risen high in the world; their fall was as low as can be imagined. Their eventual re-emergence may come as something of a surprise. How useful is the concept of social death in understanding all of this? *

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If their decline was precipitous, their ascent was not. Hierarchical societies do not allow for rapid, upward social mobility; the rise of the Höchstetters extends over a century and is typical of merchantfinanciers in Upper Germany. The family is believed to be descended originally from the Knights [Ritter] of Höchstätt, a city located on a crossing of the Danube, and its members are identifiable from the thirteenth century onward as citizens in nearby Dillingen, Donauwörth, and Augsburg. The earliest references to the family in Augsburg come from the tax registers of 1403, which list an otherwise anonymous member as a bleacher [Bleicher] of modest means.14 The son of this nameless patriarch, Ulrich Höchstetter, made himself independent in 1408 and was listed in the tax registers of 1413, 1418, and 1422 as a cloth-cutter [Sartor or Gewandschneider], that is, someone who cut and sold pieces of cloth from the bolt. The family’s fortunes improved steadily. Under Ulrich’s son, also named Ulrich (1422–97), the family advanced politically and financially. We know this from the number of high, civic offices that Ulrich the Younger occupied. It is not certain, when the Höchstetters went from small-scale traders in textiles—bleachers, cutters, retailers, and the like—to large-scale, wholesale textile merchants. Both Ulrichs probably engaged in long-distance trade; it is one of the few ways to explain their rapid rise in wealth and status. The younger Ulrich

13 One example among many, which treats dishonorable status as a caste, is Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 14 Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 2. See also Ulrich Klinkert, “Die Augsburger Handelsgesellschaft der Höchstetter: Zusammenbruch 1529, Gläubiger und soziale Verflechtung” (Hausarbeit, University of Augsburg, 1983, 17).

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moved substantially into the long-distance, wholesale trade in spices as well as textiles, had his own storage space within the German factory [Fondaco dei Tedeschi] in Venice, and is believed to have maintained a permanent station or factory [Faktorei] in Antwerp.15 His son, Ambrosius the Elder (1463–1534), whose fortune would turn in bankruptcy, radically expanded these engagements. Like other early modern firms, the Brothers Höchstetter and Associates were omni-competent; they simultaneously pursued diverse business interests. In addition to spices and textiles, they trafficked in any commodities that promised a profit. And profit they did, though at a certain cost: Ambrosius Höchstetter often oppressed the common good and the poor man with his commercial activity, not only with costly, better goods and wares but also with cheaper, poorer goods. He purchased pine wood and sold it when bad weather hindered the delivery of supplies to market, the same with wine, grain and even strings for lutes. Höchstetter would often buy the entire supply of a good at prices higher than the market, so he could press other merchants, who could not afford it.16

Other practices would earn Ambrosius Höchstetter the epithet “dangerous and harmful monopolist.”17 Would such sharp practices have contributed to a loss of status among merchants, or would merchants have understood them simply as good business? At the time of his failure, Ambrosius Höchstetter would boast of himself that “he had with God’s help earned great wealth and made all his friends rich, even the 15 One or two convoys from the Indies provided the entire annual supply of Atlantic pepper. Once the Portuguese Crown established its monopoly in the trade in 1505–06, merchants with sufficient capital bought large consignments of Atlantic and Levant pepper and formed consortia to speculate on its resale and secure the highest possible profits. The Höchstetters under Ulrich and Ambrosius participated in a number of these. Richard Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger: Geldkapital und Creditverkehr im 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Jena 1896), 1:212. See also Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 10, 17. 16 “Ambrosius Höchstetter habe mit seiner Kaufmannschaft oft den gemeinen Nutzen und den armen Mann bedrückt, nicht allein mit großem namhaften Gut und Waren, sondern auch mit billiger Ware. Er habe Fichtenholz aufgekauft und erst verkauft, als schlechtes Wetter die sonstige Zufuhr zum Markte verhinderte, desgleichen Wein und Korn und Saiten für die Lauten. Oft sei von Höchstetter ein ganzer Warenvorrat teurer, als er gewesen war, aufgekauft worden, damit er die anderen Kaufleute, die das nicht vermochten, nach seinem Gefallen drücken konnte. . . .” C. Sender, Chronik der deutschen Städte. Augsburg, 4:299, quoted in Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 14. 17 “. . . gefährlicher und schädlicher Monopolist. . . .” Sender, Chronik der deutschen Städte. Augsburg, 23:219, quoted in Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 4–5, 14.

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servants who were employed by him.”18 The Höchstetters took riches from their various enterprises and expanded into the relatively new and fabulously profitable sector of mining and metallurgy.19 Under Ambrosius’s leadership, they focused on the Habsburg territories of Tyrol and Bohemia; their methods were tried and true. They offered credit to the regents in exchange for the industrial and commercial rights to mine and sell ore from their lands.20 They rented mines or provided capital to miners, and they constructed the mills, shops, forges, and furnaces to refine the ore. The skilled labor to work metals was hired from Nuremberg, despite a prohibition on the part of that city aimed at preserving its monopoly in aspects of that craft. How much the Höchstetters produced cannot be determined, but evidence suggests both a large number of laborers and a successful business. We thus have all the benchmarks of early capitalist enterprise: large-scale capital investment, international labor force, long-distance transport of raw materials, and finished products. The Höchstetters invested chiefly in copper and silver mining and refining. They had capital holdings in all the major mining centers of Europe. Beginning in 1523, the Höchstetters set about cornering the world market in mercury, which proved their downfall.21 They strove to create a monopoly position, based upon a decline in sales (falling demand and prices), a need for credit on the part of King Ferdinand, and their own willingness to speculate at high risk.22 Their efforts failed.23 In the expectation that they would soon be able to dictate prices on the world market, the Höchstetters had purchased tremendous reserves of mercury and cinnabar. Those supplies

18 “. . . er hab mit der Gotzhilff groß gut gewunnen vnd all freundt, desgleichen all Diener, die bisherr bei Jme gewesen sein hab er auch all reich gemacht.” Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Literaliensammlung, Höchstetterselekt 1, fol. 217. 19 Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 17. 20 The penetration of commercial companies into the mining industry of a territory, in this case, Tyrol, was closely connected to credit transactions with that territory’s regents. The repayment of loans from the proceeds of the mines developed into a fixed, quasi-traditional system of fiscal management. 21 Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 13; Klinkert, “Die Augsburger Handelsgesellschaft der Höchstetter,” 21. 22 Jakob Strieder, Studien zur Geschichte kapitalistischer Organisationsformen, (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1925), 303. 23 Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 15–16; Klinkert, “Die Augsburger Handelsgesellschaft der Höchstetter, ” 23.

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now had to be reduced at prices lower than those at which they were bought. Richard Ehrenberg set their total investment at 200,000 guilders of which one-third was lost.24 Confidence in their business was badly shaken, and creditors began to seize Höchstetter assets in Antwerp, Augsburg, and elsewhere. No later than 1527, when the collapse of his business was all but inevitable, Ambrosius the Elder began to secure his family against its worst consequence, parking capital in the hands of various associates through a series of fictive sales [Scheinkäufe]. These formally transferred title to certain capital to associates, relatives, or employees but with a prearranged reversion at a fixed time and price that would allow its retrieval at a future date. As “the elder Höchstetter” explained, the fictive sales had to do with the liquidation of the firm’s capital.25 In one transaction, Höchstetter sold ore to a group of his closest associates and competitors—Fugger, Welser, Baumgartner, and others, all notable mine operators and merchant-financiers—for less than the market price. He used the proceeds to discharge some of his obligations, but his associates also agreed to pay certain of his debts. They further agreed to return the raw materials to him for their purchase price, were he at some future point to become liquid and resume business. Ambrosius paid a number of his debts, settled with his closest competitors, and preserved the chance to regain his capital and renew his business; his colleagues paid Höchstetter’s debts to themselves, got valuable raw materials, and knew that they were unlikely ever to have to return them. It was a clever series of transaction, which certainly contributed to the family’s eventual return to prosperity, but it was fraudulent in the eyes of many. The creditors, who suffered damage by not being included in these transactions, demanded the imprisonment of the leading partners in the Höchstetter firm, especially the senior member, Ambrosius the Elder.26 The City Council refused to jail them but required that they

24

Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, 1:214. Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Literaliensammlung, Höchstetterselekt 1, Erstes Höchstetters Fragestuck, 26 September 1531. 26 An account of the Höchstetter bankruptcy can be found in Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, and Klinkert, “Die Augsburger Handelsgesellschaft der Höchstetter.” These histories are based substantially on the archival collections: Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Höchstetter-Sammlung; Literaliensammlung, Höchstetterselekt 1–2; Schuld-, Klagund Appellationsakten, Teil 2, Karton XIV. 25

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swear not to leave Augsburg until and unless they had settled. When in 1529 the creditors learned that the Höchstetters had secretly removed capital from the city by hiding it in bales of cloth marked with the signs of foreign firms, and that Joachim Höchstetter and Hans Franz Baumgartner, both partners in the firm, had fled the city, they convinced the City Council to arrest Ambrosius the Elder, his son Ambrosius the Younger, and his nephew Joseph.27 They inventoried all possessions of the Höchstetters, including the contents of their houses, but found little of real value. Substantial testimony suggests that the family succeeded almost overnight in removing most household articles of any real value. Negotiations were long, bitter, and ultimately fruitless. A partial settlement, assisted by legal counsel sent by King Ferdinand and Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria, was reached in 1530, but most of the creditors insisted upon payment in full. In September 1531, the three remaining partners of the firm were transferred from house arrest to the Debtors’ Tower [Schuldturm]. In early 1532, when the case was already being argued before the Imperial Supreme Court in Speyer, the City Council resolved to sell all properties of the Höchstetters and to invest the proceeds with the senior official of the City Court, the Stadtvogt. From returns to this fund, the creditors might eventually be paid. It proved a vain hope. Sharp practices might have created resentments, but fraud would have hardened them. It is their fraud—the parking of capital, the flight from creditors, the removal of valuables—that made the Höchstetters’ loss of freedom and status inevitable. Such legal and social sanctions were written formally into Augsburg’s civic bankruptcy laws and so became the common lot of bankrupts. *

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The documents in the Höchstetter bankruptcy refer repeatedly to the traditional practices of the city, but these customary laws are nowhere recorded. Thus, the law of bankruptcy follows chronologically and logically the fall of the Höchstetters.28 Indeed, much of the statutory 27 Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 33–34; Klinkert, “Die Augsburger Handelsgesellschaft der Höchstetter,” 29. 28 Mark Häberlein, Brüder, Freunde und Betrüger: Soziale Beziehungen, Normen und Konflikte in der Augsburger Kaufmannschaft um die Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie, 1998), 323–36; Richard Hildebrandt, “Zum Verhältnis von Wirtschaftsrecht und Wirtschaftspraxis im 16. Jahrhundert: Die Fallitenordnungen

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law of bankruptcy in Augsburg merely codified traditional practices visible in the Höchstetter case. Today, bankruptcy is broadly understood as a condition in which a debtor voluntarily or at the request of his creditors is declared incapable of payment by a court of law, with the consequence that his remaining property is administered by or divided among the creditors, usually represented by court-appointed curators.29 The bankrupt may reenter business with relative ease. In early modern Europe, however, bankruptcy was more suspect; it always involved suspicion of malfeasance. The legal definition and response to bankruptcy take their point of departure from Roman law.30 Before the “Twelve Tables” were introduced in 450 BCE, bankruptcy was understood as a personal and private affair. A creditor could seize the person or property of the delinquent in satisfaction of a debt. As a last resort, he could kill his debtor and cut away a piece of the body as security against future payment. The “pound of flesh” could compel a debtor’s next-of-kin to pay the deceased’s obligations‚ because the corpse could not be formally buried until it was whole. With the introduction of the “Twelve Tables,” bankruptcy received somewhat milder treatment. One assumed that the debtor would not be immediately or arbitrarily killed. To moderate further the consequences of insolvency, Caesar Augustus introduced into law the cessio bonorum, the separation of goods. Whoever became innocently bankrupt, that is, whose bankruptcy was beyond his control, received the opportunity to transfer voluntarily all of his remaining property without exception or exclusion to his creditors. Although he retained no property with which to support himself or his dependants, the law spared the bankrupt social and physical death. In practice, the cessio bonorum, which constitutes to this day a fundamental principle of bankruptcy law, allowed for a multitude of local legal variations and idiosyncrasies. The very term, bankrupt, comes from the Italian banca rotta, or “broken bank,” recalling the fact that defaulting merchants in medieval Italy had the tables, on which they

des Augsburger Rates 1564–1580,” in Historische Studien zu Politik, Verfassung und Gesellschaft: Festschrift für Richard Dietrich zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Anita Mächler (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976). 29 See Peter Hertner, “Bankrott,” in Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, 5 vols. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1998) 1:429–32. 30 Ibid.

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transacted their business in public, ceremonially broken.31 Such rituals signaled a commercial and perhaps social death. The Augsburg Discipline and Police Ordinance of 1537 prescribed arrest and prison for anyone who could not pay debts in excess of 200 guilders.32 Even when debtor and creditors had reached a mutual agreement to settle outstanding obligations, bankruptcy meant not only a loss of freedom but also a loss of status that could prove fatal in an economy based on personal reputation and knowledge. The 1537 ordinance prescribed that the bankrupt lose his so-called “Stubengerechtigkeit” in the Merchants’ Corporation [Kaufleuteschaft], that is, that he be driven from his privileged place as an honorable merchant among his colleagues in the arcade of the city’s watchtower, that he be forbidden to carry any weapon in public, and that he be compelled to take his place among the women at the end of all public processions. Nor did his children escape stigma. Those born after the bankruptcy could no longer wear the gold chain, the emblem of Augsburg’s Merchant Corporation. The Imperial Police Ordinance of 1548 contained a paragraph: “Concerning Ruined Businessmen.”33 It determined that all those who were engaged in insecure or deceptive property transactions and suffered bankruptcy as a consequence, because they had conducted their business in a wasteful or careless manner, were to be treated as common thieves. This, too, could involve a damaging loss of status. A revised Bankruptcy Ordinance of 1564 retained the traditional distinction between honorable and dishonorable bankrupts, that is, between those who fled and those who stood.34 Those who fled—ipso facto economic criminals—were to be ostracized and punished. Noting that bankrupts robbed “good, honorable folk” of their property, the ordinance forbade all citizens to aid or abet them. Bankrupts were to provide their creditors a full accounting of all their property; they were not to hide, alter, or remove any accounts or goods that belonged to

31 The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), s.v. “Bankrupt.” 32 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Evangelisches Wesensarchiv, Lit. 155, vol. 1, Augsburger Zucht- und Polizeiordnung, 1537. 33 Reichspolizeiordnung von 1548. See also Matthias Weber, Die Reichspolizeiordnungen von 1530, 1548 und 1577: Historische Einführung und Edition (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002). 34 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Ordnungen und Statuten, Fallitenordnung, 1564. See also Häberlein, Brüder, Freunde und Betrüger, 323–24.

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their company. Most importantly, private executions would be limited by the creation of a council-appointed committee of spokespersons to act as curatores bonorum on behalf of all the bankrupt’s creditors. Further ordinances, issued in 1574 and 1580, empowered the City Council of Augsburg to seize a bankrupt’s property on behalf of his creditors in order both to prevent deception or fraud by the defaulter and to limit further the chaos of private executions.35 Beyond this innovation, they repeated and reinforced earlier strictures against collusion and evasion. These ordinances responded to the growing frequency of bankruptcies in early modern Augsburg, of which the Höchstetters’ was the earliest, most spectacular, and perhaps most catastrophic example. Whereas earlier settlements had set each party against the other— debtor against creditor and creditor against creditor—later settlements took a more coherent form.36 The state provided a framework of sorts, in which the still private resolution of indebtedness could occur with as little public disruption and damage as possible. Negotiation rather than execution became the key. Yet, the fundamental distinction between innocent and fraudulent bankrupts remained. The former, who stood ready to meet their creditors’ demands, entered into negotiation, and agreed to a cessio bonorum, might hope to regain his fortune and place one day. The latter, who fled his creditors, defied their demands, and withheld his property, might hope for nothing. For him, social death was written into the statutory law of bankruptcy. Ambrosius the Elder made clear by his actions that he had no intention of voluntarily surrendering anything. Given his efforts to preserve his family’s capital from the hands of his creditors, he seems rather to have deliberately sacrificed himself and his reputation for the sake of his family’s future. The question is whether his efforts to preserve his family’s economic basis ultimately cost it its social status.

35 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Ordnungen und Statuten, Fallitenordnung, 1574, and Fallitenordnung, 1580. See also Häberlein, Brüder, Freunde und Betrüger, 331, 333–37. 36 Alex Flessner, “Philosophies of Business Bankruptcy Law: An International Overview,” in Current Developments in International and Corporate Insolvency Law, ed. Jacob S. Ziegel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 19–28. See also Josef Kohler, Lehrbuch des Konkursrechts (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1891); Douglas G. Baird and Thomas H. Jackson, Cases, Problems and Materials on Bankruptcy, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Jean Hilaire, Introduction historique au droit commercial (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986).

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The case continued for years in the form of multiple appeals before the Imperial Supreme Court; the bankruptcy was never entirely settled. After repeated intercession by Emperor Charles V and his brother, Ferdinand, Ambrosius the Younger and Joseph Höchstetter, who had languished in prison since 1531, were released in 1544. They lived out their lives as broken men. Ambrosius the Elder had died miserably— literally rotted to death—in prison years earlier in 1534. Is this evidence of the discrimination or exclusion taken for social death? For Ambrosius the Elder, the point may be moot. For Ambrosius the Younger, it was another matter entirely. He never reentered business, whether of his own volition or through his peers’ exclusion cannot be determined, but rather retired to his heavily mortgaged estate of Burgwalden, where he died in 1550. Of his seven children, only one ever married. Ferdinand, the godson of a future emperor, was born after his father’s bankruptcy and so likely required all the leverage even a spiritual relationship to the House of Habsburg might supply. His fate, like those of his siblings, remains unclear, and thus is a potential sign of social death.37 Ambrosius’s cousin Joseph reentered business, it is true, but only at far remove from the place of his disgrace. He moved to Venice, where he eked out a living as a minor representative of various German merchants until his death in 1565.38 Though married twice, he had no heirs. His line of the family died with him. Of the other partners, Joachim (1505–35) sought exile rather than face prison. As noted, he managed to escape Augsburg in 1529.39 Diplomatic dispatches, sent to King Christian of Denmark by Johan, Archbishop of Lund, who represented the king in the matter of a debt of 30,000 guilders at the Höchstetter bankruptcy proceedings, indicate that the Höchstetters were insolvent and their creditors, led by aristocratic investors, demanded imprisonment by the city. When the Council refused, Johan sent for Joachim, who claimed that he was no longer a partner in the company and wished to negotiate for himself, to reach a private settlement. After a meeting with Joachim, Johan brought him to the Netherlands, beyond the grasp of the other credi37

Reinhard, Augsburger Eliten des 16. Jahrhundert, 303–4. Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Reichsstadt Akten. 39 Christian C.A. Lange, C.R. Unger, H.J. Huitfeldt-Kaas, Gustav Storm, Alexander Bugge, Christopher Brinchmann, and Oluf Kolsrud, eds., Diplomatarium Norvegicum, 21 vols. (Christiana [Oslo]: P.T. Mallings, 1847–[1995]), 8:630–33, Nos. 546–47. 38

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tors. Though a settlement was negotiated, it remains unclear whether the debt with Denmark was ever settled. Joachim later used commercial connections as well as ties to German émigré miners and managers to enter the tin-mining industry of England and become a Master of Mines [Bergmeister] to Christian in 1532, an indication that the king was satisfied with his service.40 Though Joachim died a few years later, his star seems to have been on the rise once again. He and his wife, Anna Langenmantel, who remained in Augsburg, had four children, all of whom were born before the bankruptcy and therefore were formally untouched by its stigma.41 The eldest, Daniel, migrated to England, where he found his fortune as head of the Company of Mines Royal. The second, Joachim the Younger, remained in Augsburg, where he eventually established himself as a moderately successful businessman. He served as a named partner in a series of trading companies, including Abraham Rem, Joachim Höchstetter and Associates, 1570; Joachim Höchstetter, Philipp König and Associates, 1572–1580; and Joachim Höchstetter and Friedrich Rentz, which ended in bankruptcy in 1586 after five years of active trading. Before his failure, in 1575, he paid a tax of 69 guilders, which indicated a total worth between 17,125 and 34,250 guilders, placing him approximately in the top 10 percent of the city’s taxpayers.42 Though there is no clear evidence that Joachim left Augsburg after his bankruptcy, 40 Staatsarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, Bergwerksrechte in Schweden 10, Urkunde aus dem Jahre 1532 betr. Bestellung Joachim Hoechstetters I. zum Bergmeister: 250r– 255r: “Privilegia der Beckwerck aus Schonn / Joachim Hoechsteder gegeben / Anno etc. 1532. 41 It is important to bear in mind at this point that Augsburg’s bankruptcy laws prescribed a loss of status only for those children born to a bankrupt after his failure. 42 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Reichsstadt Akten, Steuerbücher, 1575. Augsburg taxed the total of real and moveable property, the value of which can be calculated as the product of the tax assessment and the tax rate. Because the city relied on two separate rates—0.25 percent for real property and 0.50 percent for moveable property—but listed only a single, undifferentiated figure as the liability of a given tax payer, the result is a range rather than a specific worth. See Friedrich Blendinger, “Versuch einer Bestimmung der Mittelschicht in der Reichsstadt Augsburg vom Ende des 14. bis zum Anfange des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Städtische Mittelschichten, ed. Erich Maschke and Jürgen Sydow (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972), 71; Claus-Peter Clasen, Die Augsburger Steuerbücher um 1600 (Augsburg: Mühlberger, 1976), 7–9. With regard to Augsburg’s socio-economic structure, see Claus-Peter Clasen, “Arm und Reich in Augsburg vor dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” in Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg von der Römerzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Gunther Gottlieb et al. (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss, 1985), 318; Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalendarstreit und Parität, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 1:398.

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evidence suggests that his fortunes suffered a radical social and economic decline.43 The number of his business dealings declined to a few contacts in Venice, indicative of isolated dealings rather than on-going engagements. His seats in the Great Council and in the city’s elite corporation, the Patrons of Society [Mehrer der Gesellschaft], expired in 1587. He rendered no tax in 1590, and his residence is listed as the City Hall, suggesting that he had been imprisoned for debt. Finally, his patronage relationships—a series of trusteeships for widows and orphans of elite families—are transferred to others. It would seem the surviving, direct descendants of Ambrosius Höchstetter had suffered misfortune again. Yet it is worth noting that the loss of status did not predictably affect Joachim’s family. Only one child, Maria, a daughter by his third wife, Helena Stammler, was born after the bankruptcy. In 1623, she married Philipp Apfelfelder, about whom little more is known than that his family was not a member of any of Augsburg’s elite corporations. The possibility of a déclassé marriage was balanced to a certain extent by the careers of Maria’s siblings, especially her elder brother, Philipp, his father’s sole surviving male heir.44 In his Familienbuch, Philipp makes no mention of his father’s bankruptcy or, for that matter, even his father’s death. Sometime in the period between 1583 and 1590, he writes ambiguously, “After my mother’s pious end, Fortune played wondrously with us and my father and behaved badly toward him. God shone his mercy upon us children, however, and gave to each of us as much as each needed.”45 Despite the disadvantages of being bankrupt and orphaned early, Philipp began his schooling at the evangelical gymnasium, the Collegium St. Anna, in Augsburg and pursued medical studies from 1600 to 1604 at the universities of Basel and Padua. He returned to his home town in 1605 with the degree Doctoris Medicinae and matriculated in the college of physicians, the Collegium Medicum Augustanum. The author of sev-

43

Reinhard, Augsburger Eliten des 16. Jahrhundert, 310–12. Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Höchstetter Sammlung 10/34, Tagebuch des Dr. Philipp Höchstetter, 1578–1635. See also Josef Herz, “Das Tagebuch des Augsburger Arztes und Stadtphysikus Dr. Philipp Höchstetter, 1576–1635,” Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins für Schwaben 70 (1976): 180–224. 45 “Nach meiner Muetter seeligem Endt, Hatt das glückh wunderbarlich mit uns und unserm Vatter gespielt. Und übel sich mit Ihm verhalten. Doch hat uns Kind Gott widerumb mit seiner gnad angesehen und einen Jeden nach seiner gnad mit getheilt, als vil es von nöthen gehabt.” Ibid., 9. 44

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eral volumes of medical observations, dedicated to the City Council, he rose to become the city’s Primary Physician [Physikus primaries] in 1632. During his career, he served as physician to the Cloister of St. Catharine, the city’s infirmary, and the city’s orphanage as well as private physician to a number of elite families, including the Fuggers. Though he did not restore his immediate family to its traditional place among the Patrons of Society, a place it had occupied since the day of his great-great-grandfather, Ulrich, he was nonetheless a prominent citizen and official of Augsburg. He perished during an epidemic in 1635 but only after establishing a large and prosperous family. Meanwhile, another scion of the family helped it to step further out of the shadows of failure and disgrace. Johannes Baptista Höchstetter (1532–1604) was the son of Georg Höchstetter the Younger and Sabina Reihing, the grandson of Georg the Elder, a brother and early partner of Ambrosius the Elder, and thus a grand-nephew of the bankrupt and third cousin and contemporary of the younger Joachim. He entered business as a textile wholesaler, dealing in woolens for the most part, and was, like his distant relatives Joachim the Elder and the Younger, a member of the Patrons of Society. He married well; Maria Herwart was a daughter of the patrician Hans Heinrich Herwart and Maria Haintzel. He and Maria had five children, who likewise married patron or patrician spouses.46 Social status accompanied economic means; his wealth in 1575 ranged between 16,800 and 33,600 guilders,47 a very substantial sum though less than the worth of his cousin Joachim and by no means comparable to the wealth of his great-uncle Ambrosius the Elder. His prominence in Augsburg’s financial community may also be measured to some extent by the breadth of his credit relations and the fact that he served as curator bonorum in a number of bankruptcies, including those of the Meutings in 1572, the Herwarts in 1576, and his distant cousin Joachim Höchstetter the Younger in 1586.48 Johannes Baptista sued the City and his family’s creditors between 1573 and 1576 for the restoration of properties seized or sold for debt in 1529.49 His arguments included the assertion that those properties had belonged to the entire family and had been alienated

46

Reinhard, Augsburger Eliten des 16. Jahrhundert, 308–9. Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Reichsstadt Akten, Steuerbücher, 1575. 48 Reinhard, Augsburger Eliten des 16. Jahrhundert, 308–9. 49 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Reichsstadt Akten, Schuld-, Klag- und Appellationsakten, Teil 2, Karton 14. 47

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improperly to pay the debts of certain members only. The economic, legal, and social sanctions that accompanied bankruptcy could not be applied to those untouched by the bankruptcy. Yet another instance of renewed fortune involved capital that Ambrosius the Elder had “parked” beyond the reach of his creditors in anticipation of his bankruptcy. Wolfgang Vittl, an employee of the Höchstetter firm for twenty years and their factor in Schwatz, Tyrol, opened a glassworks in nearby Hall around 1531.50 He apparently used 20,000 guilders, realized from the sale of Höchstetter textiles, to acquire the fixed capital and raw materials and to bring them into operation. After his death forced his widow to sell, Emperor Ferdinand, who had promoted Höchstetter interests in the 1520s, ordered the glassworks sold to Sebastian Höchstetter the Younger, a member of the Imperial Council and a cadet branch of the family, for a token price of 253 guilders, roughly a tenth of its original value.51 Sebastian would raise the glassworks among the premier manufactories of Tyrol, making glass that competed with that of Murano to the south. The claim that this new prosperity had nothing to do with the fates or fortunes of other branches of the family cannot be sustained in light of the capital transactions.52 Ambrosius risked social death and economic ruin precisely to achieve social and economic rebirth. Insofar as it is at all applicable to bankrupts, social death appears to have applied only to the fraudulent defaulter and his immediate associates. It achieved its greatest effect where they were most bound to a single community. Flight or emigration, even patronage and persistence held the promise of new beginnings. *

*

*

Around 1531, when the bankrupts entered prison and the so-called “Monopoly Controversy” was at its height, the jurist and humanist Conrad Peutinger, who had grown up with Ambrosius the Elder as

50 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Literaliensammlung, Höchstetterselekt 1, Erste Höchstetters Fragestuck, 26 September 1531. 51 Tiroler Landesarchiv Innsbruck, Gemeine Missiven, 1531, fol. 79v, 14 March 1531. 52 “Nur an einigen Orten des europäischen Wirtschaftslebens erblühen einige Zweige der Familie aufs neue, jedoch völlig unabhängig voneinander. In Tirol ist es die Haller Glasindustrie, in der unter Sebastian Höchstetter, einem Neffen des alten Ambrosius, der Name Höchstetter noch einmal führend in die Erscheinung tritt.” Kern, Studien zur Geschichte, 34–35.

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his mother’s younger brother and his father’s legal ward, wrote with a clear eye to his friend’s fate: May God protect us from such ruin. It is nothing new, but has always been so, not only in business but in all human affairs: one becomes rich, and another gets into need; Fortune smiles on one, to another she grants nothing. All of us are not born under the constellation of wealth. Rotat omne fatum. That does not mean, however, that great enterprises should not be undertaken or that great companies should be prohibited.53

Every fate turns. Perhaps he might have added: no fate is final. This brief account of the Höchstetters, taking up as it does only one aspect of a complicated event, suggests that the concept of social death may be of less utility for understanding economic and social life than its advocates believe. Static and final, it distorts the complexity of human actions and relations. It denies, whether implicitly or explicitly, mobility, multivalency, spontaneity, and agency. It ignores dynamism: social status is subject to change over time and space, as the careers of Ambrosius the Elder’s descendants and relatives make clear. Certainly, the fates of the captured bankrupts and their dependants suggest a fatal and final disgrace and ostracism. Yet the precise boundaries of social death remain frustratingly hard to define. The law prescribed its legal conditions and ceremonial signs for the bankrupt, but even the fraudulent might engineer their social rebirth. Some, like Joachim the Elder, sought new beginnings in other communities, a possibility open to great merchants who traded in foreign lands and were suspected traditionally of being outsiders. Still others, like Daniel or Sebastian, appear to have relied on powerful patronage to assist their social rehabilitation. And then there were those, like Joachim the Younger or Johannes Baptista, who understood the difference between prescriptive statutes and lived experience and persisted

53 “Gott möge einen jeden von solchem Unheil behüten. Aber das ist nichts Neues, sondern von jeher ist es so, nicht nur in Geschäften, sondern auch gleichsam in allen anderen Handlungen: der eine wird reich, der andere gerät in offenbare Not; dem einen lächelt das Glück, dem anderen gönnt es nichts. Nicht wir alle werden unter der Konstellation des Reichtums geboren. Rotat omne fatum. Aber daraus erfolgt nicht, dass deshalb keine großen Geschäfte unternommen werden dürfen, noch dass die großen Gesellschaften beseitigt werden sollte.” Heinrich Lutz and Conrad Peutinger, Beiträge zu einer politischen Biographie (Augsburg: Verlag die Brigg, 1958), 140, as cited in Klinkert, “Die Augsburger Handelsgesellschaft der Höchstetter. Zusammenbruch 1529, Gläubiger und soziale Verflechtung,”10.

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in their hometown and among their peers to make a new beginning for themselves and their families. Social death is a beautifully simple notion. A person or group violates the standards of a community and is cast out. Their status inheres, whether by virtue of race, culture, creed, or behavior, and the options for rebirth are limited accordingly. Yet, history is seldom so neat. For early modern merchants, Fortuna was a real and present force in events, her wheel turning and turning again. Persons rise and fall, only to rise again. Beyond the quotidian, early modern Christians took as an article of faith an afterlife. “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.”54 Death—whether spiritual or social—was as much a beginning as an end. No loss was necessarily permanent.

54

The Apostles Creed.

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INDEX Abraham Rem, Philipp König and Associates, 429 “aconfessional” religion, 252 Adalbero, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 343 affect: regulation of within Pietism, 216–17, 220, 228–29; structures of, 216 Afra, Saint, 319, 330, 332, 338, 343, 348–49, 354, 356n65, 361–62 Agata, Countess of Hohenlohe, née Tübingen, 153 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Cornelius, 253 Ailly, Pierre d’, 231 Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, 98 Albertinus, Aegidius, 304–5 Albrecht, Duke of Prussia, 142–43 Albrecht Friedrich, Duke of Prussia, 144 Aleander, Girolamo, 244 Alexander VI (pope), 354 altars: as location of private masses, 321–22; significance of as place within Catholicism, 309, 316, 318, 320–21, 324 Alte Pinakothek, 100 Amerbach, Boniface, 253 Anabaptism, accusations of, 235, 250, 252, 257 Anapaptists: and “aconfessional” religion, 252; persecution of, 244, 250–51, 315; and rebellion, 235, 250. See also under Mosheim, Ruprecht von Angerkloster. See Convent of St. Jakob am Anger Anna, Countess of Hohenlohe, née Solms, 153 Anna, Electress of Brandenburg, née Prussia, 141, 147, 155–56 Anna, Electress of Saxony, née Denmark, 176–77 Anna Catharina, Queen of Denmark, 163 Anna Eleonora, Duchess of BrunswickLüneburg, née Hesse-Darmstadt, 153

Anna Maria, Duchess of Prussia, née Brunswick-Calenberg, 140, 142 Anna Sabina, Duchess of Württemberg, 154n63 Anna Sophia, Electress of Saxony, née Denmark, 182n63 Anne, Saint, 295n22, 299–300 Apelles, 92, 99, 303–4 Apfelfelder, Philipp, 340 Ariès, Philippe, 116, 187n2, 192n24 Armbrüster, Gotthard, 399–400 Arndt, Johann, 147 Aron, Raymond, 47, 48n67 ars moriendi. See art of dying art of dying, 53, 77, 108–9, 109n17, 118–22, 122n60; Protestant, 10, 106–7, 126–27, 129–30 Augsburg, Bankruptcy Ordinances of: 1564, 426–27; 1574, 417; 1580, 427 Augsburg, Discipline and Police Ordinance of, 1537, 427 Augsburg, Patrons of Society of (Mehrer der Gesellschaft). See Patrons of Society (Augsburg) August, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, 162n3, 179 August, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Wolfenbüttel, 142, 147–48n45 August II the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, 139–40n21 autobiographical writing: and death of children, 193, 197; and perceptions of the Thirty Years’ War, 33, 38–43; and Pietism, 14, 215–16, 228–29 autonomy of convents and nuns, decrease in, 16, 18, 259–61, 279–80 bankruptcy: dishonorable when characterized by fraud, 23, 424, 426–27, 432; and loss of honor, 418, 426; and Roman law, 415; stigma of affecting bankrupts’ children, 417, 426, 428–30, 429n41 Barbara, Saint, 298 table 2, 300 Barbara Sophia, Duchess of Württemberg, 153, 154n66 Bastian, Hermann, 251

464

index

Baumgartner, Hans Franz, 423–24 Beck, Dietrich, 245 Beck, Hans, 245 Behm, Johann, 155–56, 156n71 Beilstein, Johann von, 250 Beissel, Conrad, 408 Bellini, Giovanni, 79, 81 Benedict, Saint: rule of, 260; sculpture of at Nonnberg, 277 Benedictines: pre-Reformation history of in Augsburg, 331. See also under St. Jacob’s Chapel; SS. Ulrich and Afra, Basilica of (Augsburg); St. Ulrich’s Church, Augsburg Bengel, Johann Albrecht, 226 bereavement, expression of. See mourning Berkenmeyer, Wilhelm Christoph, 388–89n65, 389n69, 390–94 Bernardino of Siena, 231 Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, 154n63 Biber, Heinrich Ignaz Franz, 273–74 biconfessionality, policy of in Augsburg, 19, 314–15, 319–20, 339–40, 342, 366 Birken, Sigmund von, 1, 3–4 Blanck, Susanna, 297, 298 table 2, 299 Blaurer, Ambrosius, 247–48 Bode, Eduard, 44 Böhm, Johann, 400 Boniface VIII (pope), 260 book collection: and dynastic women’s independent identity, 134, 144; as monument to spousal fidelity, 12, 144–46; and women’s religious authority, 140–41, 144 Borromeo, Carlo, 272 Boticelli, Sandro, 304 Braddock, Edward, General, 411 Bradford, Andrew, 400 Braun, Placidus, 360–62, 362n75 Breithaupt, Joachim Justus, 371, 373 Briefer, Bonaventura, 289–90 Brückner, Georg Heinrich, 372 Bucer, Martin, 247–49, 252, 255–56, 319 Burk, Maria Barbara, née Bengel, 225–26 Burk, Philipp David, 226 Burton, Robert, 233 Calvin, John, 240, 245n49, 247, 255–56, 321–22 Calvinism, 156n71, 157–59; conversion to, 141, 158. See also CryptoCalvinism

Camerarius, Joachim, 253 cannibalism, 42, 412–13 carpe diem: as element of the vanitas topos, 54, 57, 68 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 413 Caspart, Maria Dorothea, née Rieger, 215 Cassander, Joris, 253 Castellio, Sebastian, 253 catastrophe: definition of, 27, 27nn10–11; Thirty Years’ War as, 8, 26–28, 30, 32, 46 Catherine, Saint, 298 table 2, 300 Catholic League, 339 Cecilia, Saint, 298 table 2, 299–304 cemeteries: as consecrated spaces with diverse meaning, 19, 316–17; as sites of religious conflict and contested memory, 340–43, 364 cessio bonorum, 425, 427 Charles V (emperor), 85, 240–41, 249n58, 315, 317, 343, 428 Chiari, Isidoro, 254 childhood: defined by age, 189, 193, 213; defined by social and religious knowledge, 213; legal definitions of, 193 children: depictions of as yearning to die, 223–34; love owed to parents by, 211; piety of dying, 223; purity of, 200. See also death, of children; parental love of children Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian, Duke of Saxe-Merseburg, 178–79 Christian, Prince of Saxe-Altenburg (son of Magdalena Sibylle and Friedrich Wilhelm II), 162–63. See also under Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Saxe-Altenburg, née Saxony Christian, Prince-Elect of Denmark, 12, 163, 169 Christian II, Elector of Saxony, 174 Christian II, King of Denmark, 428–29 Christian IV, King of Denmark, 163 Christiane Eberhardine, Electress of Saxony and Queen of Poland, née Brandenburg-Bayreuth, 139–40n21 Christine de Pizan, 231 Christoph von Stadion, Bishop, 311 Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer, 47 Cochlaeus, Johann, 246, 256 claustration: abandonment of by Munich nuns, 17–18, 288; and

index architectural changes in convents, 17, 260, 262, 267–68, 284; and erosion of authority of convents, 16, 179, 262–63, 292; musical culture as response to, 268–74, 287; musical propaganda in favor of, 18, 282, 299, 305; opposition to, 283 table 1, 285–86; as a result of Tridentine reforms, 18, 260, 267, 282, 283 table 1. See also autonomy of convents and nuns, decrease in; freedom of movement, loss of cloistered women’s spirituality: female role models and, 297, 300–303; and wedding to Christ, 297, 298 table 2, 303–4. See also claustration; music; Nonnberg, Convent of; veneration of saints and post-Tridentine reform; virginity commemoration: of dynasty, 171–72, 179–84, 186; of the Thirty Years’ War, 33, 43–45. See also under Dürer, Albrecht; Gustavus Adolphus communication: among courts, 178–79; and media 6, 6n12, 34; through sensual perception, 115; with God, 224 Communion, 3, 5, 242, 248, 312, 320–22, 324, 373, 376, 379, 387 Conestogas, 404n22, 410–11 confessional claims to jurisdiction, importance of the year 1624 to, 339–41, 344, 349–51, 364 confessional culture, characteristics of, 224 confessional parity in Augsburg, 20–21, 45, 327, 329, 340, 342, 366–67 Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (Advice for Correcting the Church), 243 consolation, writing as, 1–4, 9, 11–13, 163–70, 176, 179, 185–86 contemptus mundi as defense against loss, 53, 57 Convent of St. Jakob am Anger (Angerkloster), 281–82, 283 table 1, 284, 288–89, 294 copyright: lack of and feelings of loss, 82, 84, 95 Corpus Evangelicorum, 351 Council of Trent. See Trent, Council of Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 72, 126n73 Cranach, Lucas, the Younger, 206

465

creditors, claims on bankrupts of, 23, 424–27 Croesus, King of Lydia, 303–4 Crucifixion, the: altars linked to within Catholicism, 322; as prefiguration of human suffering, 120 Crypto-Calvinism, 12, 134, 160 Czepko, Daniel, 57n17, 58 Dach, Simon, 64 dead, cult of: in confessional disputes, 20, 343 death, of children: as punishment of their parents, 15, 186, 221, 226–28; as reason to rejoice, 14, 200, 208–9, 228 death, good, 1–2, 119 death, social, 23, 417–20, 425–28, 432–34 death, sudden, 116 deathbed: and human relation to Christ, 106, 121, 123; mourners positioned at a distance from the dying at the, 106, 126; as occasion for observing and learning, 107, 109, 115, 127 de Bry, Theodor, 413 debtor, creditors’ settlements with, 425–27 debtor’s tower (Augsburg), 424 Defoe, Daniel, 412–13 de Gaulle, Charles, 47, 48n67 Delawares (Lenni Lenape), colonial government’s dealing with, 407n30, 412–13 devotional literature, dynastic women as collectors and publishers of, 140–49, 151–52, 160 diaries within Pietism, 216, 228 Diet of Augsburg (1530), 240, 257–58 Diet of Regensburg (1532), 240, 351 Dietrich, Veit, 127 Divine Providence, 210, 225 Dominicus à Jesu Maria, 285 Dorffschmid, Anna, 264 Dorothea, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, née Princess of Denmark, 142, 152–53 Dorothea, Duchess of Saxe-Eisenach, née Saxe-Altenburg, 149–50 Dorothea, Margravine of Prussia, née Princess of Denmark, 242–43 Dorothea, Saint, 283 table 1, 298 table 2, 300

466

index

Dorothea Maria, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, née Princess of Anhalt, 157–58 Dorothea Susanna, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, née Countess Palatine, 149, 151–52 dowager courts, 12, 134, 136 Dugo, Johannes Philonius, 240 Dürer, Agnes (wife of Albrecht), 85, 117, 130 Dürer, Albrecht: commemorations of, 10, 96, 98–100, 126, 130–32; and illness, 87–88, 124–25; and Martin Luther, 77–78; monogram of as hedge against copying, 82, 95–96; perceptions of financial loss by, 78–86; recording of dreams by, 9, 89–90; report on his father’s death of, 71, 107–9, 114, 118–19; report on his mother’s death of, 10, 109–10, 111–13, 123 Dürer, Albrecht, works of art of: Adoration of the Holy Trinity (Landauer Altar, 1511), 96; Assumption of the Virgin (Heller Altar, 1509), 84–85, 95; Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (1508–1509), 95, 97; Christ’s Descent into Limbo (1510), 95; Death of Crescentia Pirckheimer (1504), 76–77, 122; Death Riding a Horse (drawing; 1505), 123; Feast of the Rose Garlands (1506), 79–80, 84, 95; Four Apostles (1526), 91–92; Head of the Dead Christ (1503), 123; Head of a Suffering Man (1503), 123; Karlsruhe Man of Sorrows (1493), 123; Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), 124; Large Passion (1497–1500), 95; Life of the Virgin (1511), 82–83; Martyrdom of 10,000, 95; Melencolia I (1514), 124; Portrait Drawing of Barbara Dürer (1514), 74–76 113; Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon (1526), 96–97; The Resurrection (1511), 95; Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), 124; Self-Portrait (1493), 72; Self-Portrait (1500), 93–94; Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows (1522), 86–88; Self-Portrait as Melancholic (undated), 123–24; Small Passion (1509–11), 82, 95 Dürer, Albrecht, writings of: diary of his journey to the Low Countries, 85–88; family chronicle, 84, 103n4,

112, 120n52, 129, 132; Four Books on Human Proportion, 91n53, 93–94, 99, 131; Instruction in Measurement, 90, 93; memorial book (Gedenkbuch), 10, 75, 103–14, 116–19 Dürer, Albrecht the Elder (father of Albrecht), 72–75, 107, 109, 113–14, 117, 120n52, 123 Dürer, Andreas (also Endres; brother of Albrecht), 74 Dürer, Barbara, née Holper (mother of Albrecht): as Christian exemplar for her son, 114–15, 118–20; Dürer’s description of the death of, 10, 75, 77, 115–18, 120; as mother of eighteen children, 72, 113; suffering of in life, 114, 119–20. See also under Dürer, Albrecht, works of art of Dürer, Hans (brother of Albrecht), 74 Durkheim, Emile, 419 Eck, Johannes, 244–45, 247, 250, 254n78, 255–56 Edict of Restitution 1629 (Augsburg). See Restitution, Edict of (1629), Edmund, Abbot of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, 274 Ehrenberg, Richard, 423 Eleonore, Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt, née Württemberg, widowed Anhalt, 135, 146, 152, 157–59 Eleonore Hedwig, Princess of Anhalt-Bernburg, 219 Elisabeth, Duchess of Brunswick-Calenberg, née Brandenburg, 140, 142–43, 151 Elisabeth, Duchess of BrunswickWolfenbüttel, née Princess of Denmark, 136 Elisabeth, Electress of Bavaria, née Lorraine, 271 Elisabeth, Electress of Brandenburg, née Anhalt, 138 Ellenbog, Nikolaus, 254–55, 254–55n78 Erasmianism, 252, 257 Erasmus, Desiderius, 78, 98, 239 Erdl, Maria Antonia, 266 Erentrudis, Saint: altar dedicated to, 276; head reliquary of, 268, 277–78; sculpture of, 277; translation of remains of, 275; veneration of at Nonnberg, 17, 263–64, 275

index Erich, Duke of Brunswick-Calenberg, 143 Ernesta Augusta, Princess of Anhalt-Bernburg, 219–20 Ernst, Duke of Bavaria, 241, 244–45 Eucharist. See Communion exile: as alternative to debtor’s prison, 428; of dynastic families, 153–54; mitigation of sense of, 376; of Munich nuns during the Swedish invasion, 18, 282, 283 table 1, 288–94, 304; of religious minorities, 21, 244, 370, 374. See also migration experience: as measure of truth in witnessing, 39–41 Fabri, Johannes, Bishop of Vienna, 240 Falckner, Daniel: accused of moral failing, 377, 389, 391–92; Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania in Nord-America, 381–83; dealings of with the Frankfurt Company, 384–86, 389; ecstatic revelations of, 373; excommunication of, 377–78; first settlement in Germantown, Pennsylvania, of, 377–80; involvement in religious controversy in the New World of, 21, 378–80, 387–88; marriage to Anna Maria Schuchart, 377; search for religious community of, 21–22, 370, 380–81 383–86, 390, 394; second settlement in Germantown of, 385–89; settlement in New Jersey of, 389–94; Falckner, Justus (brother of Daniel), 384, 386, 389–90 Febvre, Lucien, 194, 257 Fellner, Ferdinand, 88 Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, King of the Romans, etc.), 16, 239–41, 243, 247, 249, 417, 422, 424, 432 Festival of Thanksgiving (Leipzig, 1650), 25–26 fictive sales (Scheinkäufe), 423 Fleisch von Lerchenberg, Eva Maria, née Rettinger, Abbess of Nonnberg, 265–66, 271, 276 Fleming, Paul, 64 Fondaco dei Tedeschi (German factory, Venice), 421 Foucault, Michel, 59, Franciscans, 281–82, 283 table 1, 284, 312

467

Franck, Michael, 59 Franck, Sebastian, 98, 242, 249, 252–53, 257 Francke, August Hermann, 371–73, 381, 383–84, 386–88, 394 Frankfurt Company, 379, 384–86, 388–89 Franklin, Benjamin, 399–400, 402n16, 408, 414 Frecht, Martin, 242–43n32, 247–48 freedom of conscience and settlement of Pennsylvania, 406. See also under Saur, Christoph freedom of movement, loss of, 6, 283 table 1. See also claustration Freud, Sigmund, 233 Frey, Hans (father-in-law of Albrecht Dürer), 77 Friedrich, Prince of Saxe-Weimar, 174 Friedrich III, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, 179 Friedrich the Wise, Elector of Saxony, 87 Friedrich Ulrich, Duke of BrunswickLüneburg, 154n64 Friedrich Wilhem II, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg, 162, 162n3, 172, 174, 178n52, 182, 184n64, 185, 186n69 Friedrich Wilhelm III, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg (son of Friedrich Wilhelm II and Magdalena Sibylle), 162n3, 172, 178, 178n52, 182 Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitbearing Society), 158, 174–75 Fuchsstein, Sebastian von, 234 Fugger, Georg, 123n62 “Fugger chapel,” 321 Fuggers, 320, 423, 431 funeral books, 5, 11–13, 138, 153–54n63, 158, 162, 186. See also under Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Saxe-Altenburg, née Saxony funeral portraits, 13, 166, 171–73, 176–80, 184 funerals, dynastic, 152, 155, 157, 159, 162, 174–75, 184–85 funeral sermons: as normative texts for Christian behavior, 191; as source on dynastic women, 138, 152, 156–57, 159–60; as sources for the history of childhood, 189–92, 195–96, 199, 205, 212 Furly, Benjamin, 374, 384–86, 389

468

index

Galbiato, Antonio, 283 table 1, 284–86, 295n20 Gedicke, Simon, 138–39 gender: as a category of analysis in parental mourning, 210–11; in vanitas poetry, 9, 66–69. See also grief writing, women’s; and under grief; mourning Georg, Duke of Brunswick-LüneburgCalenberg, 153 Georg I, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, 135, 157 Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, 144, 154 Gerhard, Johann, 147 Germantown, Pennsylvania, 374, 377, 379, 386–88, 397–98 Gerold, Anna Maria, 297, 298 table 2 Gerson, Jean, 120, 231 Geß, Charlotte, née Williardts, 228 Glöckner, Albert, 178 Glöckner, Enoch, 178 Götz (also Götze), Johann, 199–200 Grawer, Albrecht, 157 Greiffenberg, Anna Regina von (sister of Catharina), 3 Greiffenberg, Catharina Regina von, 1–5 Greiffenberg, Eva Maria von, née Baroness von Prank zu Reinthal und Fronsberg, (mother of Catharina): death of, 1–3; experience of near miscarriage of, 2 Greiffenberg, Hans Rudolf von (uncle and husband of Catharina), 3 grief: coded as female when prolonged, 170; maternal, 13, 161, 169, 171, 176, 184, 186, 203; paternal, 202, 210–11; suppression of expression of in Pietism, 14–15, 215–17, 220–24, 228–29. See also mourning; selfcensorship, emotional; and under gender grief writing, women’s, 3, 163–64, 168–69, 185–86. See also mourning Grien, Hans Baldung, 98, 132 Groß, Jörg, 347 Groß, Maria Magdalena, née Williardts, 223–24 Grünewald, Matthias, 72, 125–26 Günther, Johann Christian, 54 Gryphius, Andreas, 53–55, 57–58, 61n34, 62–66, 69 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden: Benedictine oath of allegiance to,

339n19; commemorations of, 29, 44, 44n57; incursions into Bavaria of, 287–88, 293–94 Hagendorf, Anna, née Stadlerin, 198 Hagendorf, Anna Maria (daughter of Peter and Anna Maria, née Buchlerin), 198 Hagendorf, Anna Maria, née Buchlerin, 198 Hagendorf, Eliesabedt (daughter of Peter and Anna, née Stadlerin), 198 Hagendorf, Melchert (son of Peter and Anna Maria, née Buchlerin), 198 Hagendorf, Peter, 198–99, 213 Hahn, Beata Regina, née Flattich, 227–28 Hahn, Philipp Matthäus, 227–28 Hall in Tyrol: as destination of nuns’ exile, 18, 288; as site of glassworks, 432 Happe, Volkmar, 42 Haug, Wolfgang, 361 Heberle, Hans, 37–38, 37–38nn42–43, 39n45 Hedwig of Hesse-Marburg, née Princess of Württemberg, 135 Hedwig of Saxony, née Princess of Denmark, 148–49 Heinrich II (Holy Roman Emperor), 277 Heller, Jakob, 84–85, 95 Henckel, Anthony Jakob, 388, 388–89n65, 389n68 Hertfelder, Bernard, 242–43; history of the basilica SS. Afra and Ulrich of, 353–56, 361, 363; illustrations in the history of, 334, 336–37, 356–59, 359n66 Herwart, Hans Heinrich, 342 Herwart, Maria, née Haintzel (wife of Hans Heinrich), 342 Hessus, Helius Eobanus, 98–99, 131 Hirschvogel, Anna, 235–36 Hirschvogel, Bernhard, 77n12 historical anthropology, 5, 7, 41, 190, 192, 194 Hobsbawm, Eric J., 47, 49 Hochenstein, Johannes von, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 343, 355 Höchstetter, Ambrosius the Elder, 421–24, 427–28, 430–33 Höchstetter, Ambrosius the Younger, 417, 424, 428 Höchstetter, Anna née Langenmantelin (wife of Joachim the Elder), 429

index Höchstetter, Anna née Rehlingerin (wife of Ambrosius the Elder), 415–16 Höchstetter, Daniel (son of Joachim and Anna), 429, 433 Höchstetter, Ferdinand (son of Ambrosius the Younger and Katharina), 417, 428 Höchstetter, Georg the Elder, 431 Höchstetter, Georg the Younger, 431 Höchstetter, Helena née Stammlerin (third wife of Joachim the Younger), 430 Höchstetter, Joachim the Elder (son of Ambrosius the Elder and Anna), 424, 428–31, 433 Höchstetter, Joachim the Younger (son of Joachim the Elder), 429–31, 433 Höchstetter, Johannes Baptista (son of Georg the Younger and Sabina, née Reihing), 431, 433 Höchstetter, Joseph (nephew of Ambrosius the Elder), 424, 428 Höchstetter, Katharina, née Neumannin (wife of Ambrosius the Younger), 416–17 Höchstetter, Maria (daughter of Joachim the Younger and Helena), 430 Höchstetter, Maria, née Herwartin (wife of Johannes Baptista), 431 Höchstetter, Philipp (son of Joachim the Younger), 430–31 Höchstetter, Sabina, née Reihing (wife of Johannes Baptista), 431 Höchstetter, Sebastian the Younger, 432–33 Höchstetter, Ulrich the Elder, 420 Höchstetter, Ulrich the Younger (son of Ulrich the Elder), 420 Hoffmann, Wolffgang, 199 Hoffmannswaldau, Christian Hoffmann von, 51, 54, 57n17, 58–59, 62–63, 67–69 Höller, Chunegund, 264 Huch, Richarda, 47 Hueber, Fortunatus, 283 table 1 Hülsemann, Caspar Peter, 201–5, 204–5n78 humanists and religious controversy, 252–53, 257 Hundt, Hermann, 251 Huthen (also Hutten), Martin, 206

469

iconoclasm, 19, 90–91, 233, 308–9, 363 identity: construction of through the perception of loss, 12, 100, 133–34, 173 Imperial Aulic Council, 351, 362n75 Imperial Police Ordinance of 1548, 426 Imperial Restitution Edict of 1629 (Augsburg). See Restitution, Edict of (1629) Imperial Supreme Court in Speyer, 424 intercession for the dead: loss of in Protestantism, 11, 106, 130 intercessory prayer, 139 intimacy with God, 14–15, 216–17, 224, 229 introspection, 71, 108, 224 inwardness in Pietism, 217, 229 Jawert, Johann, 384, 384n49, 386 Jesus Christ: as bridegroom, 200, 298 table 2; Dürer’s depictions of, 95, 111, 128; Greiffenberg’s meditations on the life of, 3–4; memorializing of, 2; position of believers to, 128; second coming of, 42; and sharing pain, 215; voluntary submission to human suffering of, 5. See also Crucifixion, the; suffering, Christ’s Joachim Ernst, Prince of Anhalt, 157–58 Joachim Höchstetter, Philipp König and Associates, 429 Joachim Höchstetter and Friedrich Rentz (firm), 429 Johan, Archbishop of Lund, 428 Johann Adolph, Duke of SaxeWeissenfels, 162n3 Johanna Magdalena, Duchess of Saxe-Weissenfels, née Saxe-Altenburg, 178 Johann Georg, Prince of Anhalt, 157 Johann Georg I, Elector of Saxony, 25, 174 Johann Georg II, Elector of Saxony, 177 Johann Georg III, Elector of Saxony, 182n63 Johann Philipp, Prince of Saxe-Zeitz (infant son of Moritz, Duke of Saxe-Zeitz), 177 Johann Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg, 155 Johann Wilhelm, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 151, 176

470

index

John of Capistrano, 231 Julius Friedrich, Duke of Württemberg, 154n63 Karupfen, Johann, 343 Kaufleuteschaft. See Merchants’ Corporation (Augsburg) Keith, George, 278–79 Keithian schism, 278–79, 380n36, 387 Kelpius, Johannes, 276, 278–79, 284, 286, 287n59 Khuen, Johannes, 18, 282, 294–305 Kirchhuber, Barnaba, 284 table 1 Kistler, Romanus, 353, 355, 361, 363 Kocherthal, Joshua, 390 Köster, Heinrich Bernard, 373–74, 377–81, 384–85, 388 Kötzler, Georg, 88 Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), 100 Kuntsch, Friedrich Christian von (son of Margaretha Susanna), 186 Kuntsch, Margaretha Susanna von, 185–86 Küssinger, Johannes, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 355 lay sisters: in Munich convents, 283 table 1, 286–287; in Nonnberg, 16–17, 260, 263–68, 272, 279 Lenz, Rudolf, 189–90, 191n21 Leyser, Dorothea, née Schmidt, 206–7, 209 Leyser, Friedrich, 206–7, 209 Leyser, Friedrich (son of Friedrich and Dorothea), 205–10, 212 Leyser, Georg (son of Friedrich and Dorothea), 209–10 Leyser, Polycarpus (son of Friedrich and Dorothea), 205–10 Lodron, M. Benedicta Erentraud von, 266 Lodron, Paris, Count and PrinceArchbishop of Salzburg), 262–63, 265, 267, 270, 279 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, 58 Lord’s Supper. See Communion love of childen. See parental love of children love of God, 14, 196, 202–3, 210–12 Lower Austria, re-Catholization of, 3 Lucius, Saint, 354 Luther, Martin: reflections on dying, 121. See also under Dürer, Albrecht; Mosheim, Ruprecht von

Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Saxe-Altenburg, née Saxony: as author of festival book of baptismal tournaments, 162; as author of lamentation in the funeral book for her son, 163–73; as author of strophic songs, 166; Gebet- und Gesang-Büchlein (1650), 163–64, 166, 168; influence of her funeral practices on neighboring courts, 13, 180–84; widowhood in Denmark of, 12, 163–64 Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Württemberg, née Hesse-Darmstadt, 138 Magdalena Sibylle, Electress of Saxony, née Prussia, 139, 149n52, 177 Manasser, Daniel, prints of, 332, 334, 336, 350, 356–57, 356n65 Mang, Saint, 364–65 Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy and regent of the Netherlands, 85–86 Margareta, Saint, 277 Maria Anna, Electress of Bavaria, née Archduchess of Austria, 287, 298 table 2 Marian devotion, 266, 293, 296–97, 298 table 2, 299–300, 299nn22–23 Marie Elisabeth, Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp, née Saxony, 179 Marquard, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 343 Mary, Saint, mother of Jesus Christ, 2, 170, 295n22, 298 table 2, 300; chastity of, 5, 299; at the cross, 111; depictions of the death of, 77; image of on the façade of St. Ulrich’s in Augsburg, 332, 348–49, 362–63; as model for women’s spirituality, 299; sculpture of in Nonnberg, 277. See also Marian devotion Mary of Egypt, Saint, 297n22, 298 table 2, 300 Mary Magdalen, Saint, 170, 297n22, 298 table 2, 300, Matthew of Cracow, 231 Maximilian I, Duke/Elector of Bavaria, 98, 281–82, 297, 304 Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, etc.), 82, 84–87, 284, 355, 417 mediating theologians, 253–54, 257. See also middle ground in religious controversy, loss of; “third Germans”; and under Mosheim, Ruprecht von

index Mechov, Joachim, 219–20 Mehrer der Gesellschaft. See Patrons of Society (Augsburg) Meichl, Franziska von (Chorregentin at Nonnberg), 273 melancholy, 7, 62, 124–25, 233–34, 290 Melanchthon, Philip, 96–98, 131, 231–32n3, 247–48, 254 memento mori: as element of vanitas poetry, 53, 58, 68 memorials. See commemoration memory: cultural, 43, 340n20; dynastic, 12–13, 134, 143, 148, 152, 161, 169, 172–73, 180, 184–85 Menzinger, Johann, 256 Merchants’ Corporation (Augsburg), 417, 426 Merk, Johann, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 338–39 Meutings, bankruptcy of, 431 middle ground in religious controversy, loss of, 15–16, 256–58. See also “third Germans”; and under Mosheim, Ruprecht von migration: as exile, 370, 376; as response to loss, 21–23, 294, 369–70, 376, 381, 389, 392–95, 432; voluntary, 21, 370. See also exile; religious dissenters and migration minority confessions: placelessness of, 314–15, 325 Montaigne, Michel de, 204–5n69, 413 Moore, Cornelia Niekus, 189–90, 218 Moravian settlers, 406–7, 406–7n29, 412 Moritz, Duke of Saxe-Zeitz, 177–79 Moritz, Prince of Saxe-Zeitz (infant son of Moritz, Duke of Saxe-Zeitz), 177 Mörmann, Scholastica, 270, 272 Morone, Giovanni, Cardinal, 240, 243, 243n34, 246, 249 mors repentina. See death, sudden Mosheim, Ruprecht von: and Anabaptists, 242, 244–45, 249; mediating doctrine of, 16, 242, 247, 249, 253, 257; suspicions of affinities to Lutheranism of, 243; views of Luther of, 254–55 motherly admonition, genre of, 143, 151–53 mourning: and court etiquette, 169; court as new locus of dynastic mourning, 169, 172, 180, 185; gender and, 184–86, 204–5, 210–11, 226–28;

471

predictability of deceased’s death as influence on, 208–9; representations of, 5, 11, 111, 216, 229. See also under parental love of children Mühlenberg, Heinrich Melchior, 394, 406, 407n31 Munich’s houses of Franciscan tertiary nuns. See Convent of St. Jakob am Anger (Angerkloster); Pütrich Convent of St. Christophorus; Ridler Convent of St. Johannes auf der Stiege Müntzer, Thomas, 250 music: and liturgy, 266, 272, 287; polyphonic in convents, 272, 283 table 1, 286–87, 297 Nass, Johann, 304 Native Americans: conflicts of German settlers with, 22, 398, 411–14. See also Conestogas; Delawares Neumark, Georg, 174–75 Neust, Peter, 345 Niederstätt, Burchard, 201–5, 202n61, 210–11 Niederstättin, Maria Elisabeth (daughter of Burchard), 201–5, 203n64, 212 Ninguarda, Felician (also Felix and Feliciano), 261, 283 table 1, 284 Nonnberg, Convent of: altar of, 17, 276–77, 277n69; architectural renovations of, 17, 260, 262, 267–70, 276–77; musical culture of, 17, 260, 263, 268–74, 279; role of lay sisters in, 16, 260, 263–67, 276. See also under Erentrudis, Saint; Mary, Saint, mother of Jesus Christ Nuremberg Accords (1650), 25 Oberweimar, Florentina von, 236 occasional meditation, 4–5 Oertel, Hieronymus, 147–48 Osiander, Andreas, 246n51, 247, 247–48n54, 248 Ostendorfer, Matthäus, 268–69 Otto, Andreas, 403 Otto, Bernhard, 253–54 pain: and community, 114; expression of within the Lutheran tradition, 215–20; recording of, 1, 4; rendering communicable, 220–22, 224–28; representation of in song, 289–90, 292, 303–4; silence of inner churchly Pietists on the subject of, 215–21,

472

index

224, 229; silence of women on subject of, 228n40; visual representation of, 11, 71, 73, 74–75, 123–25; written depictions of, 65–66, 217–20, 223–24. See also under Dürer, Albrecht; Dürer, Albrecht, works of art of; Dürer, Barbara; Jesus Christ; Magdalena Sibylle, Duchess of Saxe-Altenburg, née Saxony; suffering, Christ’s parental love of children: and love of God, 14, 197, 200, 202–3, 205, 210–12; mourning as indicator of, 195–96, 201–5, 212; not a historical constant, 187–88, 189; as sign of godly adherence to norms, 191, 203–5, 210; as transgressing norms, 202–5, 210–11, 213 parity, confessional (in Augsburg). See confessional parity in Augsburg Pastorius, Francis Daniel, 379–80, 384, 385n53, 386, 387n59 patronage: and dynastic women, 147–49, 160; religious, 238, 277–78, 320–22, 355, 365; social, 23, 430, 432–33 Patrons of Society (Augsburg), 430–31 Paul III (pope), 243, 260 Peace of Augsburg (1555), 319 Peace of Münster and Osnabrück. See Peace of Westphalia (1648) Peace of Prague (1635), 29, 32n26 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 20, 327, 329, 339–41, 340n20, 342–44, 346–49, 351, 356, 366–67 Pelagia, Saint, 298 table 2, 300 Penn, William, 22, 374, 384, 398, 401, 403, 404n22, 406, 409–11, 410n40, 413, 414 Pennsylvania Germans: and confessional conflicts, 21–22, 378–80, 394, 404–8, 414; and religious tolerance, 21–22, 370, 377, 380, 388, 398, 401, 409, 413–14 personal accounts: validity of, 38–43 Petz, Wolfgang, 364 Peucer, Caspar, 131 Peuntner, Thomas, 120 Peutinger, Conrad, 432–33 Pfalz-Neuburg, Alexander Sigmund von, Bishop of Augsburg, 348nn43–44 Pfisterer, Anna Maria, 271 Pflug, Julius, 245n49, 253–54 Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, 245, 251–52, 252n70, 256 Pietism: in Erfurt, 21, 371–73; inner churchly, 14, 215–16; in North

America, 374, 376–80, 385, 388, 394; second wave of, 372 pilgrimages: internal, 283 table 1; and the religious landscape, 274, 297n23, 318–20, 324, 331 Pirckheimer, Caritas (sister of Sabina and Willibald), 236 Pirckheimer, Crescentia (wife of Willibald), 77, 122 Pirckheimer, Sabina (sister of Caritas and Willibald), 98 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 77, 77n12, 79–81, 84, 87, 90–91, 91n53, 96, 98–99, 122, 129–31, 239, 253–54 place: altered conceptions of resulting from the Reformation, 314–19, 321–22, 324–25; attachment of meaning to, 43–44, 44n57, 171–73, 308, 310, 316–21, 328, 363; sanctification of, 19, 307–8, 319–20, 324–25, 330, 342–43, 354; social connotations of, 112, 317–18, 340 Plebanus, Johannes, 39–40 Pliny the Elder, 91 polarization, confessional, 16, 234–36, 239–41, 242–43n32, 247–50, 252–58 Poor Clares, 281–82, 283–84 table 1, 295n20, 298 table 2 Pozham, Helena, 270 Predigthaus. See Saint Ulrich’s Church purgatory, loss of, 11, 106 Pütrich Convent of St. Christophorus, 281–82, 283–84 table 1, 285, 297, 298 table 2 Quaker party in Pennsylvania, 414 Quakers, 374, 378–80, 387, 398, 401, 410, 410n40, 411 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 81–82, 95 Rain, Battle at (1632), 293–94 Ramhaufski, Anna Kunigund (daughter of Benjamin Ludwig), 273 Ramhaufski, Benjamin Ludwig (organist of Lambach Abbey), 273 Ramhaufski, Eleanora (daughter of Benjamin Ludwig), 273 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 304, Rauch, Christian Daniel, 100 re-Catholization: in Augsburg, 339, 341n22; in Lower Austria, 3 Reformation and material loss, 232–33, 238, 309. See also under iconoclasm; place; relics

index Rehlinger, Ulrich, 416 Rehlinger family, 415 Reichshofrat. See Imperial Aulic Council Reichskammergericht. See Supreme Court (of Holy Roman Empire) Reichspolizeiordnung 1548. See Imperial Police Ordinance of 1548 Reischnigg, Contantia, 264 relics: cult of, 18–19, 98, 132, 153, 268, 274–75, 277, 283, 305, 319, 343, 353; fate of after the Reformation, 232, 242, 319–20 religion, geography of, 19, 310–11. See also place; space and sacrality; and under pilgrimages religious dissenters and migration, 21–22, 244, 370, 374–77, 378, 380–81, 385, 387–88, 394–95, 398, 406 religious freedom, 22, 346, 366–67, 380, 398, 408–10, 410n40, 414 religious toleration: as obstacle to spiritual community in the New World, 21, 370, 380, 387–88, 394. See also under Pennsylvania Germans Renate, Countess of Törring auf Seefeld, 297, 298 table 2, 300 Rese, Joachim, 33 Restitution, Edict of (1629), 32n26, 339 “Restoration of Religion” (1548), 307, 315–17 Reuchlin, Johannes, 254 Reuß, Albrecht Richard, 222 Reuß, Sophia Elisabeth, née Bengel, 226 Rhenanus, Beatus, 253 Ridler Convent of St. Johannes auf der Stiege, 281–82, 283 table 1, 285–86, 295n20, 298 table 2, 299 Riesenfels, Franz von, 3 Rinckhardt, Martin, 210 Röber (Rober), Paul, 136–37, 205–9, 206n72 Roman law, 425. See also cessio bonorum; Twelve Tables; and under bankruptcy Roos, Magnus Friedrich, 200n13, 220–22 Rupert of Salzburg, Saint, 274, 277 Sachs, Hans, 131 Sack, Robert David, 18, 308n3, 311n8, 318n24 sacraments, 71, 75, 77, 117n44, 129–30, 237, 251, 275–76, 290–91, 391, 393. See also Communion

473

sadness, representations of, 162–63, 169–70, 205, 215–16, 220. See also grief; mourning Sadoleto, Jacopo, Cardinal, 243 Sagittarius, Johann, 149nn53–54, 164n10, 166n16, 169, 169n26, 170n30, 178n50, 186n69 Saubert, Johann, the Elder, 147 Saur, Christoph: advice column for new immigrants of, 22, 398, 398n5, 401–6, 408–10; conflicts with Benjamin Franklin of 399–400, 400–401n12, 402n16, 408, 414; emigration to Pennsylvania of, 397, 399, 406; fame of as printer, 399–400; sense of lost paradise of, 398, 403–6, 408–13; as separatist, 397, 399, 406; and William Penn, 22, 398, 401, 403, 404n22, 409–11, 410n40, 413–14; views on freedom of conscience of, 22, 398, 409–10, 410n40, 414 Saur, Christoph, II (son of Christoph and Marie Christine), 399, 399n7, 402n13, 403n18 Saur, Marie Christine (wife of Christoph), 399 Savonarola, Girolamo, 231 Schaumberg, Peter von, Cardinal and Bishop of Augsburg, 354 Scheffler, Gregorius, 345–46 Scheinkäufe. See fictive sales Scheurl, Christoph, 98, 132 Schmalkaldic League, 239n16, 252 Schneeweiss, Maria Magdalena, Abbess of Nonnberg, 265n22, 267–68 Schneider, Michael, 244 Schoepper, Jacob, 253 Schön, Erhard, 99–100 Schorer, Jacob, 345n32 Schrenck, Anna Regina, 298 table 2, 299 Schuchart, Anna Maria (wife of Daniel Falckner): accused of consorting with the devil, 21, 369, 392; ecstatic revelations of, 369, 371–73, 377, 387; excommunication of, 21, 377–78; involvement in religious controversy in the New World of, 21, 378–80, 388; and radical pietism in Erfurt, 21, 371–73 Schuldturm. See debtor’s tower (Augsburg) Schütz, Katharina Elisabeth, 385 Schwarz, Christoph, 364–66

474

index

Schwartz, Emanuel Jacob, 345 Schweickart, Barbara (widow of Sebastian von Fuchsstein), 234–35 Schweickart, Ulrich (kinsman of Barbara), 235 Schwenckfeld, Caspar von, 242, 249 Schwenckfeldians, 315, 321 Scribner, Robert W. (also Bob), 233–34n5, 308n2 Second Thirty Years’ War: viability of as term, 8, 47–49, 48n67 Seelig, Johannes, 374n18, 377n26, 386–87, 387n59 Seitzen, Jeremiah, 347n41 Seld, Georg, 312, 318–19 self-censorship, emotional, 14, 170, 216–17, 220–21, 224, 229 self-perception: correspondence of to externally imposed categories, 216 Seneca, 53n8, 376 Senger, Justitia, 149 Servetus, Michael, 242, 249 Seven Years’ War, 22, 411, 411n43 Shakespeare, William, 59 Sibylle of Brunswick-Dannenberg, née Brunswick-Lüneburg, 142 Sigismund (Holy Roman Emperor), 355 social death. See death, social Society of Friends. See Quakers Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, 376–77 Sodalitas Staupitziana (Sodalitas Martiniana), 77, 121, 128 Solari, Santino, 267–70 Sophia, Electress of Saxony, née Brandenburg, 142 Sophia, Margravine of BrandenburgAnsbach, née Brunswick-Lüneburg, 12, 141, 144–48, 147–48n45, 152–55, 155nn67–68 Sophia Eleonora, Landgravine of HesseDarmstadt, née Saxony, 5, 11, 138, 142, 146, 179 space and sacrality: lack of hierarchy within Protestantism, 19, 318, 324–25. See also altars; cemetaries Spalatin, Georg, 87, 98, 247–48n54 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 21, 220, 220n13, 371–73, 379, 384 Spengler, Lazarus, 128–29 spiritual diary: and conformity, 225–26; as “technology of the self,” 226 Sprögel, Johann Heinrich, 389

SS. Ulrich and Afra, Basilica of (Augsburg): architectural renovations of as source of conflict, 338; Benedictine claims to based on pre-Reformation use of, 330–32, 331n9, 333–37, 353–55, 359n66; Lutheran claims to, 331; nineteenthcentury memorialization of, 359–63; vandalization by Lutherans of, 346 Stadlmayr, Barbara, 273 Stadlmayr, Johann, 273 Stamheim, Melchior von, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 333, 361 St. Anna’s Cathedral (Augsburg), 123n62, 315–16, 317–18, 320–22 status, as subject to loss, 4, 6, 9, 12, 16–17, 23, 81, 134–35, 233, 417–20, 418n8, 421, 424, 426–34, 429n41. See also death, social Staupitz, Johann von, 115n37, 119n49, 120–21 St. Jacob’s Chapel (Augsburg): Catholic rights of use of, 333, 338, 342, 346, 348–49, 351, 355–56, 362, 364; as site of confessional conflict, 333–38, 344–49, 359 St. Margaretha, Convent of (Augsburg), 315 Stolberg-Königstein, Henrica, née Countess of (daughter of Margarita and Heinrich), 199–201, 199n51, 212 Stolberg-Königstein, Margarita, née Countess of Solms-Laubach, 199 Stolberg-Königstein, Rutschenfurth, Wernigerodt and Hohenstein, Heinrich Vollrath, Count of, 199–200 Stöltzlin, Bonifacius, 217–18 Storch, Arnold, 385 Strasser, Ulrike, 275, 282, 284, 292 Stubengerechtigkeit (in Augsburg), 426. See also Merchants’ Corporation (Augsburg) St. Ulrich’s Church, Augsburg (Predigthaus): architectural renovations of as source of conflict, 338–39, 348–52, 362; Benedictine claims to based on pre-Reformation use of, 339, 342–44, 352, 355–56; disputes over exterior façade of, 348–50, 350n50, 358–59, 363; disruptions of interior space of, 345–47, 349n47; Lutheran claims to, 351; as parish church in

index pre-Reformation times, 332–33; separation from Catholicism in 1526, 333; vandalization of by Catholics, 337–38, 344 suffering, Christ’s: and community, 122–25; as model for human suffering, 120–21, 126–27. See also theology of the cross Supreme Court (of Holy Roman Empire), 416, 424, 428 survival: of art, 90–96; of dynastic families through writing and publication, 12–13, 133, 157–58; enacted in vanitas poetry, 8–9, 63–64, 69; personal in war, 36–38. See also under widows, dynastic Tawenna (Conestoga leader), 411 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 285, 298 table 2 textualization. See under Thirty Years’ War theology of the cross, 11, 127–28 “third Germans,” 247, 250, 252, 257 Thirty Years’ War: afterlife in the twentieth century, 8, 46–49; as invention after the fact, 25–26, 30, 33–35, 37; commemoration of, 25–26, 33, 41, 43–45, 44n57; compared with Peloponnesian War, 28–30, 32, 32n26; depiction of horrors of, 38–40, 41–42; memory of, 30, 35–36, 41, 43, 45–49, 61; testimony to suffering in, 38–39, 41; textualization of, 45–49. See also Huch, Ricarda; and under catastrophe Thomas, Gabriel, 403 Tilly, Johann Tserclaes, Count, 43, 293–94 Trarbach, Johann von, 153 trauma, 8–9, 59–61, 64, 305 traumatic disposition in Baroque culture, 8, 61–65, 69 Trent, Council of, 246n52, 259–61, 268, 279–80, 324n35 Tridentine reform, 16–18, 259–63, 267, 270, 279–87, 283 table 1. See also veneration of saints and Tridentine reform Tridentine spirituality, 263, 274–76, 279, 299 Truchsess von Waldburg, Otto, Bishop of Augsburg, 307–8, 310, 320, 324 Twelve Tables, 425

475

Ulrich, Saint, 311, 330–32, 332n14, 343, 348–49, 354, 356n65, 361–62, 362n75 unauthorized copying. See copyright Urlsperger, Samuel, 220, 220n13 Ursula, Duchess of Münsterberg, 236 Valckenborch, Frederick van, 98 vanity and eternity, 51–53 Vasari, Giorgio, 81–82, 82n26 Venatorius, Thomas, 98 veneration of saints and Tridentine reform, 17, 260, 263, 274–75, 277–79 Vincens, Carl Friedrich, 345 Vincent Ferrer, Saint, 231 violence, 8, 17, 26, 38, 40–42, 46–47, 49, 59, 64, 228n40, 233n5, 307, 320, 398, 407, 407n30, 411. See also iconoclasm virginity: rhetoric of, 18, 203, 287, 292, 305; as sign of God’s grace, 284, 292, 304; and spiritual practice, 18, 282, 287, 299, 301 Vischer, Georg, 95 Viterpius. See Wikterp, Bishop of Augsburg Vitruvius Pollio, 93 Vittl, Wolfgang, 432 Vogel, Johann, 25n3, 26n5, 26n7, 147 Wagner, Maria Kunigunda Josepha, 267 Waldburger, Hans, 276–77 Walhalla (on the Danube), 100 Walking Purchase (1737), 413 war: monuments to, 43–45, 44n57; newspaper accounts of, 43; and trauma, 37–41, 51, 62; writing about experience of, 36–38, 39n45 Wartenberg, Franz Wilhelm von, 18, 294–95, 295n19, Wartenberg, Maria Maximiliana von, 283 table 1, 285–86, 285n7, 295, 295n20 Weber, Max, 418 Weickmann, Christoph, 98 Weid, Antoni, 345n32 Weiser, Conrad, 407, 407n31 Wengert, Paul, 327–28, 328n5 West, Benjamin, 414 widowhood: as akin to a monastic order, 138–39; as defined by loss, 3, 12,

476

index

133–35, 176, 184, 215; as opportunity, 12, 134 widows, dynastic: as book collectors, 12, 134, 140–46, 147n45, 160; and construction of identity, 12, 134, 153, 155, 172–73, 173n36; as designers of their own funerals, 13, 142, 152–57, 154n66, 159; as guardians of the faith, 12, 143, 148, 157–59; as keepers of dynastic memory, 12–13, 134, 142–44, 146, 148–53, 157–58, 172–74, 176, 178–79, 180–84; piety of, 136–40, 139–40n21, 142–43, 147–51, 151n56, 157–58; social expectations of, 134–40 Wied, Hermann von, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, 246n52, 247–49 Wikterp, Bishop of Augsburg (also known as Viterpius, Widprecht, or Wigbert), 365 Wild, Johannes, 253–54, 256 Wilhelm IV, Duke of Bavaria, 424 Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, 284, 295n19 Wilhelm IV, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 174–75 Wilhelm the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Celle, 133n3, 152–53

Wilhelmine Eleonore, Princess of Saxe-Weimar, 174–75, 175n41 Williardts, Christian Gottlieb, 223–24 Williardts, Friederike, née Schütz, 228 Williardts, Johanne Rosine, née Bengel, 226, 226n32 Willibald, Abbot of SS. Ulrich and Afra, 348 Witzel, Georg, 253–56, 254n78 Wolf, Johann August, 393–94 Wolfhard, Bartholomeus, 255 Wolkenstein-Lodron, Johanna von, Abbess of Nonnberg, 277 women, dynastic: as bulwarks of Lutheran orthodoxy, 151, 155–59; networks of, 142–43, 147, 149. See also devotional literature, dynastic women as collectors and publishers of; widows, dynastic; and under patronage Yetelhauser, Michel, 244–45 Zeller, Charlotte, née Geß, 226n32 Zimmermann, Johann Jakob, 374, 376, 378 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von, 406 Zwingli, Huldrych, 27–28n11, 248, 333