Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany

Essays in Honor of H.C. Erik Midelfort

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754665687
• eBook ISBN: 9781351929141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

While the assumption of a sharp distinction between learned culture and lay society has been broadly challenged over the past three decades, the question of how ideas moved and were received and transformed by diverse individuals and groups stands as a continuing challenge to social and intellectual historians, especially with the emergence and integration of the methodologies of cultural history. This collection of essays, influenced by the scholarship of H.C. Erik Midelfort, explores the new methodologies of cultural transmission in the context of early modern Germany. Bringing together articles by European and North American scholars: this volume presents studies ranging from analyses of individual worldviews and actions, influenced by classical and contemporary intellectual history, to examinations of how ideas of the Reformation and Scientific Revolution found their way into the everyday lives of Germans of all classes. Other essays examine the ways in which individual thinkers appropriated classical, medieval, and contemporary ideas of service in new contexts, discuss the means by which groups delineated social, intellectual, and religious boundaries, explore efforts to control the circulation of information, and investigate the ways in which shifting or conflicting ideas and perceptions were played out in the daily lives of persons, families, and communities. By examining the ways in which people expected ideas to influence others and the unexpected ways the ideas really spread, the volume as a whole adds significant features to our conceptual map of life in early modern Europe.

PART ONE
LAITY

Chapter 1
Serfs “are not Cows and Calves”: Urbanus Rhegius’s Theological Effort to Legitimate Unfreedom and to Promote Personal Liberty

Peter Blickle, Randolph C. Head

In February 1525, the peasants of the Upper Swabian cloister of Ochsenhausen drafted a grievance letter about the abbot’s and convent’s rule that included the following provision: “henceforth all persons, male and female, who have until now been treated as serfs [Leibeigene¹] of the cloister shall be freed of such serfdom, and shall not be sold like cows and calves, since we all have only one Lord, namely God in heaven.”² In the same month, Urbanus Rhegius delivered a sermon in the nearby imperial city of Augsburg with the title “On Serfdom or Servitude.” In it, he sought to explain to lords and peasants how they should regard this topic on the basis of “godly law.”³

The status of serfdom [Leibeigenschaft] was highly contested around 1500. Across southern Germany over the preceding two to three generations, the condition of unfreedom [Eigenschaft] had evolved into serfdom. unfree persons [Eigenleute] had long been bound to a secular or spiritual lord in their persons and through their possessions. Such persons had a claim on a farmstead, which they would work autonomously, and for which they would render dues in both money and kind as well as services for the maintenance of the lordly seat or cloister. unfreedom and lordship possessed a directly reciprocal character. Indeed, each depended on and conditioned the other: there was no unfreedom without lordship, and, as a rule, no lordship without unfreedom.⁴ This reciprocity found legal expression in the practice of having the unfree community present the law currently in force to their lord on a fixed date every year [Weisung], while the lord allowed the unfree to confirm his regulations [Satzung]. Judicial processes conformed to this reciprocity as well: the unfree community (or a representative panel of twelve, twenty-four or more individuals) delivered verdicts before the courts, while the lord or his agent [a Vogt, Schultheiss, or Amman] announced the verdicts and carried them out.

What distinguished serfdom [Leibeigenschaft] from the more general form of unfreedom was that the peasant’s right to work a farmstead became instead an obligation. In consequence, serfs lost their previous ability to move at will, and their freedom to marry was greatly reduced. Specifically, marriages with a person not subject to the same lord came to be defined as “alien marriages” [ungenossame Ehen], that is, as taking place outside the community of subjection, and faced severe sanctions, even confiscation of the serf’s entire estate. Even a serf’s children who could not be sustained on the familial holding, and who consequently sought work and marriage in one of the many nearby imperial cities, could bring ruinous penalties down on their parents. some local regulations included penalties up to 40 Gulden, the value of ten cows, for such marriages. Moreover, on the death of a serf, the children, or heirs had to render the heriot [Totfall], which consisted of a portion of the estate such as the best animal in the farmstead’s stables, often a horse or cow, or the best piece of clothing. Release from serfdom was also extremely expensive, since the lord might demand up to a third of the family’s possessions.⁵

Areas where serfdom flourished also saw a decline in traditional forms of judicial process in villages and lordships. Lordly regulation overrode communal declaration, lordly officers intervened with arrests in civil procedures such as indebtedness, and lordships arbitrarily increased the penalties for various infractions. Lordly courts [Hofgerichte] sometimes seized jurisdiction over cases from the peasant courts, and disqualified the servile peasant jurors by substituting individuals more to their own pleasure.⁶ The judicial system seems to have collapsed completely in some places, at least according to many peasants, who argued that this decline justified their taking up external citizenship [Pfalbürger, Ausbürger] in a town, despite imperial prohibitions against this practice.⁷

The established law, often called “the old law,” thus increasingly appeared to be bent if not broken. To many peasants, the only escape from the resulting problems seemed to lie in turning to “godly law.” Measuring the existing system of dominion and legal control against the standards of godly law, and correcting them in its light, therefore became a central demand of the peasants who rebelled in 1525 during the German Peasants’ War. The subjects in upper swabia, around Lake Constance and in the Allgäu region independently sought to regulate their lives according to godly law. The peasants in Ochsenhausen, already cited above, refused to comply with their abbot’s commands, arguing that he should release them “as is fair, fitting, godly and right.” In the Klettgau near Lake Constance, peasants complained that the existing system of dominion could be justified neither by “the gospel and godly law” nor by “fairness and justice.” The peasants in the Allgäu turned to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria as the emperor’s deputy, asking him “by his grace to protect, guard, and preserve them by godly law.”⁸ All of these citations date from January and February 1525. In the Twelve Articles of the upper Swabian peasantry, the revolutionary manifesto of the Peasants’ War that was printed in March, exactly the same arguments appeared with a particularly radical turn that was manifest in their demand for “liberty.” “It has hitherto been the custom for the lords to treat us as their serfs,” the third article began, “which is pitiable since Christ has redeemed and bought us all by the shedding of his precious blood, the shepherd just as the highest, no one excepted.” Building on their argument from Christ’s liberating death, the authors continued with the hope that the lords, “as true and genuine Christians,” would “gladly release us from serfdom, or else show us from the Gospel that we are serfs.”⁹ The peasants offered three justifications for their liberty: the liberating death of Christ, Christian neighborly love, and the laws that God had issued for the world.

Urbanus Rhegius preached about the core issue of the revolution of 1525, namely serfdom, during the unsettled period when the program of the movement was taking conceptual shape and the peasants were forming a military organization ready for battle. Few other theologians were so well prepared to discuss this theme. After his birth in Langenargen on the Lake Constance, rhegius studied at the Latin school in the nearby imperial city of Lindau, thus spending his youth in one of the core regions where serfdom flourished. He began his university studies in Freiburg im Breisgau under Ulrich Zasius, who was involved in jurisprudential discussions about serfdom. Rhegius completed his theological education with a doctorate in Basel in 1520 after the cathedral chapter in Augsburg had appointed him as the cathedral preacher. After 1521 he was increasingly drawn to Martin Luther, and in 1522 he moved to a position in Hall in the Tyrol, a region that may have also affected his views on serfdom because the practice had been abolished there. When his sermons’ sympathy for the reformation led to his expulsion from the Tyrol, he returned to a position in Augsburg in 1524, appointed by the city council as their preacher. Imperial pressure forced him to leave the city in 1530 for northern Germany, where he spent the rest of his life working for the Reformation.¹⁰ He had close ties to the council of the imperial city Memmingen, for whom he drafted a consultation early in 1525 about whether and how to introduce the Reformation into the city.¹¹ Of particular importance is the consultation he provided to the city about the articles drafted by the peasants in Memmingen’s rural territory, since these articles were nearly identical to the Twelve Articles.¹²

All of the major reformers addressed the problem of serfdom, including Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Philipp Melanchthon, Johannes Brenz, Johannes Rurer, Andreas Osiander, and others. Among them, Rhegius’s sermon provides the most complete and differentiated analysis on the part of a contemporary theologian. The theological aspects of the sermon have already been discussed at length in the work of Hellmut Zschoch.¹³ The following analysis expands on his interpretation by including the perspectives that arose through Rhegius’s references to actual developments in the institution of serfdom. Connecting theology to actual practices enabled Rhegius to develop a position that differed considerably from Luther’s, even though Rhegius shared Luther’s fundamental theological convictions.

Urbanus Rhegius took up the issue of serfdom in a sermon delivered on 19 February 1525, in the context of interpreting Romans 13 (“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”).¹⁴ He framed the question by asking whether serfdom could be tolerated among Christians, who were all born into the human condition but were reborn in Christ. The sermon analyzed the question twice, first in an answer to the serfs, and then in an answer to the lords.

Rhegius followed Luther closely in presenting the doctrine of two kingdoms, according to which the kingdom of God and the worldly kingdom must not be confused. The implication of this doctrine was that serfdom, which Rhegius also called “civil servitude” [burgerliche Knechtschaft],¹⁵ is entirely capable of co-existing with “Christian liberty.” Liberty, it should be emphasized, always appeared in Rhegius’s sermon only as Christian liberty. As such, liberty was irrelevant for a human’s position in the world; indeed, using liberty to justify the abolition of serfdom would make liberty “fleshly.”¹⁶ Luther’s key argument against the peasants’ demands in 1525 relied on precisely this train of thought, drawing on passages from the Old and New Testaments to defend the legal institution of serfdom. Rhegius’s analysis paid more attention than did other theologians’ to a decisive proof-text in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 7:20-23.¹⁷ In these verses, Paul instructed the Corinthians that even those in servitude among them need not fear for their salvation. Every person should remain in the estate God had appointed to them, “but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” This passage became the locus classicus among Biblical passages concerning liberty,¹⁸ and was overwhelmingly interpreted in a restrictive sense by theologians.¹⁹

One should remain in a condition of servitude—or of serfdom—because such a condition was irrelevant to salvation. Rhegius, however, expounded this passage in a positive sense for liberty: although liberty could never be seized by violent means, the release of those in servitude that the old Testament foresaw in the seventh year provided an interpretive guide to understanding Paul’s words in I Corinthians. According to the Old Testament, moreover, servants who missed their opportunity for liberation in the seventh year would remain in servitude for the rest of their lives.

Rhegius’s interpretation of these passages did not provide practical theological guidance about how serfs should b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Witch-women and Madmen: Digging Postholes with H.C. Erik Midelfort
• PART 1: Laity
• PART 2: CLERGY
• PART 3: HUMANISTS, DOCTORS, AND PROFESSORS
• PART 4: JURISTS AND MAGISTRATES
• Conclusion: The Good, the Bad, and the Airborne:Levitation and the History of the Impossiblein Early Modern Europe
• Bibliography of H.C. Erik Midelfort’s Publications
• Select Bibliography
• Index