The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland (The Past and Present Book Series) 0192846450, 9780192846457

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The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland Carla Roth https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.001.0001 Published: 2022

Online ISBN: 9780191938771

Print ISBN: 9780192846457

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Copyright Page  https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.002.0003 Published: February 2022

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Subject: Social and Cultural History Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Carla Roth 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950222 ISBN 978–0–19–284645–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland Carla Roth https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.001.0001 Published: 2022

Online ISBN: 9780191938771

Print ISBN: 9780192846457

FRONT MATTER

Acknowledgements 

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Published: February 2022

Subject: Social and Cultural History Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

This book would not exist without the generous support of various funds and institutions which allowed me

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to spend several years focusing on research and writing. My doctorate at Oxford University was funded by the Clarendon Fund, which, in addition to its nancial support, provided many opportunities for fruitful interdisciplinary exchange with other Clarendon scholars. A Charterhouse Bursary, a Santander Academic Travel Award, and scholarships from the German Historical Institute London and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) allowed me to spend a year doing archival research in Germany and as a guest researcher at the University of the Saarland. Thanks to a postdoc position at the University of Basel, I was able to turn my thesis into a book while working in a stimulating academic environment and being close to my sources, and I am grateful to Susanna Burghartz for this opportunity. I am deeply indebted to the sta

of the Vadianische Sammlung St. Gallen and the Stadtarchiv der

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Ortsbürgergemeinde St. Gallen, who have made my visits to the archives both productive and very enjoyable. In particular, I would like to thank Rudolf Gamper, Stefan Sonderegger, Nicole Stadelmann, Dorothee Guggenheimer, Rezia Krauer, and Wolfgang Göldi for o ering their experience and expertise, for their patience and assistance in tracing even the most obscure sixteenth-century St Gallers, and, most importantly, for sharing my enthusiasm for Johannes Rütiner’s Commentationes. I was not fortunate enough to meet the editor of the Commentationes, the late Ernst Gerhard Rüsch, in person. Without his painstaking work towards an edition and translation of Rütiner’s notebooks, this book would have been impossible. This is a book about talk, but it is also one that emerged from, and developed over, more conversations than I can now remember. I owe much to my friends and colleagues who read parts of the manuscript and/or provided invaluable feedback and support at various stages over the last nine years: in particular to Mette Ahlefeldt-Laurvig, Markus Bardenheuer, Boris Belge, Alexandra Binnenkade, Johanna Blume, Christina Brauner, Adrianna Catena, Martin Christ, Tom Hamilton, Kat Hill, Bianca Hoenig, Chris Kissane, Nina Lamal, Saskia Limbach, David Mache, Jan Machielsen, Jan-Friedrich Missfelder, Hannah Murphy, Jessika Nowak, Milo Probst, Eveline Szarka, Gábor M. Tóth, and Edmund Wareham. I am particularly grateful to Susanna Burghartz, Mirjam Hähnle, John Jordan, and Sarah-Maria Schober, who were kind enough to read and comment on drafts of the entire manuscript. Special thanks are also due to my DPhil examiners, Johnp. viii

Paul Ghobrial and Bridget Heal, and to the four

anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful suggestions

proved invaluable in the process of turning the thesis into a book. Wolfgang Behringer, Daniela Hacke, John Gallagher, John-Paul Ghobrial, Laura Gowing, Matthias Pohlig, Massimo Rospocher, and Rudolf Schlögl have all o ered me opportunities to present my research at seminars, workshops, and conferences, and this

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book has pro ted enormously from the discussions which arose from these occasions. Many fruitful conversations with Emily Katzenstein have helped me nd and re ne my argument. Manuel Willimann, best friend and ercest critic, has contributed more to this book than he realizes (and much more than I care to admit). At a crucial stage during my DPhil, Yvonne Dammert, Catherine Moreau, and Katharina Quadt gave me a home away from home, and it is no exaggeration to say that their friendship played an essential part in the birth of this book. I am most deeply indebted to my academic supervisor, Lyndal Roper. I could not have been in better hands.

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Lyndal has been an inspiration and true mentor throughout my DPhil and beyond, both academically and personally. She patiently read through numerous drafts of chapters and papers, encouraged me to push myself further where I was too hesitant, and guided me through all ups and downs of the DPhil. Her impulses, incisive questions, and apt critique of my work have been invaluable, and I doubt that I would ever have nished (or even started) this book were it not for her ceaseless encouragement. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family, who have patiently listened to me rambling on about the notebooks of an obscure St Galler for far too many years. I am deeply grateful to my parents, Susanna and Urs, for instilling me with a passion for good stories; to my sister, Lisa, for teaching me how to listen; to ‘cousin’ Betty for sharing my interest in history and supporting me throughout my studies; to Tim, a wonderful conversational partner and unwavering source of love, humour, and optimism; and to my wonderful darling Milo, whose arrival, despite all odds, has helped me nish this book. The Talk of the Town is dedicated to them.

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The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland Carla Roth https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846457.001.0001 Published: 2022

Online ISBN: 9780191938771

Print ISBN: 9780192846457

END MATTER

Bibliography  Published: February 2022

Subject: Social and Cultural History Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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Introduction Early in 1537, a group of men gathered to discuss the latest news in St Gall, a small town on the edge of the Swiss Confederacy. Two local merchants had recently returned from Lyon—an important centre of trade for St Gall’s high-quality linen—with news that the French had provided 800 Ottoman troops with lodgings in Marseille. A Turkish ambassador, moreover, was on his way to the French king in Paris; the purpose of this journey, however, was still unknown. The vague yet disconcerting news was shared with the group by a man called Erasmus Schlumpf and prompted an animated discussion among his audience. One Bartholome Schobinger admitted that news he had previously spread had now turned out to be false. At the same time, however, he insisted that he was not to blame and proceeded to cast some doubt on Schlumpf ’s sources as well: ‘What I said about this . . . was meaningless and random. It came from the Lyon merchants; now they too are telling [stories] like that.’¹ The news from Lyon also prompted another bystander, Caspar Huseli, to share a piece of news which he had picked up in the nearby town of Wil the week before. There, a ‘trustworthy man’ had told him ‘that a messenger from Nuremberg, dressed in the city’s colours and coat of arms, had passed through Winterthur. This man said that he had just seen the Turk, the king of France, and the Pope in Marseille, from where he was returning.’² A fourth man, Gebentinger, finally pointed out that the mayor of St Gall had recently read out a letter after a church service at St. Laurenzen—a letter which claimed that the Turkish sultan, the king of France, and the pope had met in Venice to form an alliance.³ By the beginning of 1537, then, news of the Franco-Ottoman treaty signed the previous year had reached St Gall.⁴ Or had it? According to the talk of the town, somewhere (in Paris, Marseille, or Venice) an alliance had been forged (or was to be negotiated) between King Francis I, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent—and the pope. In fact, over the next few months St Gall’s newsmongers would also add the

¹ ‘vana et euentita erant quae de . . . hoc dice/bam [ ] Lugdunensibus mercatoribus fuit iam/ipsi talia referunt’. ² ‘Nuncius Nurenbergensis/colore et insigni vrbis indutus [ ] Ille dixit se/iam Massiliae vnde redeat [ ] Vidisse [ ] Turcam/Regem Franciae et Papam’. ³ Comm. II.25. ⁴ On the 1536 treaty between King Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent and its political and economic consequences, see De Lamar Jensen, ‘The Ottoman Turks in Sixteenth Century French Diplomacy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 16/4 (1985), 451–70.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0001

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Venetians and the German emperor to the list.⁵ Rather than a Franco-Ottoman agreement, it was thus a Catholic–Ottoman alliance which materialized in the talk of St Gall at the beginning of 1537. Such an alliance was perceived as a potentially existential threat to the Protestant town. Granted, St Gallers still debated what exactly this alliance entailed and whether it had really been signed, yet the sheer possibility that Europe’s most powerful Catholic rulers and the Turkish sultan had entered into negotiations after years of fighting one another was cause for alarm. So was the contradictory nature of the information floating around, as a fifth man, a local linen trader named Johannes Rütiner, pointed out. Cutting through the noise of St Gall’s many disparate voices, Rütiner claimed that the lack of reliable information could only mean one thing: war was imminent.⁶ This is a book about the talk of a small town and the role it played in the circulation of information across and within early modern communities. The example above anticipates some of the central themes of this study. It illustrates St Gallers’ hunger for reliable current news, their heavy reliance on oral informants, and their frustration and fear in the face of uncertain and contradictory accounts. It reveals how a piece of information evolved as it travelled across the continent, across different media, and from one person to another, continuously adapting to the demands and anxieties of a new audience. Most importantly, but perhaps less obviously, it offers a glimpse into the social dimension of early modern information exchanges. The names Erasmus Schlumpf, Bartholome Schobinger, Gebentinger, and Caspar Huseli may not mean much to us today. Yet to Johannes Rütiner—to whom we owe this extraordinarily detailed account of a conversation that took place almost 500 years ago—they were a fellow guildsman, an erudite authority, a local schoolmaster, and a trusted friend. These men were well known to Rütiner from numerous previous interactions and past conversations, and all of them had themselves been the subject of talk in St Gall at one point or another. Now that it was their turn to speak, each of the four men eagerly contributed to the conversation and used it to display their knowledge, to stress the profile and reliability of their sources, to cast doubt on other accounts—or to pre-empt accusations of having spread false information. It is no coincidence, then, that Rütiner carefully recorded each of these men’s contributions: it was not only truth, but also reputation, that was at stake when information was shared. This study taps into the unique potential of Rütiner’s notebooks—or Commentationes, as he called them⁷—to bring to light an oral world typically hidden from view. In 1529, shortly after the Reformation had been formally introduced in St Gall, Rütiner began recording the talk of his hometown. Over a period of ten years, he filled two volumes with a potpourri of anecdotes, gossip, rumours, and news from all over Europe, with densely scribbled notes on past and ⁵ For a more extensive analysis of these rumours, see Ch. 5. ⁶ Comm. II.25. ⁷ See Ch. 1 for a more detailed discussion of the title and genre of Rütiner’s notes.

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contemporary events, economic developments, family histories, accidents, crimes, and scandals—in short, with anything he heard and considered noteworthy. A close reading of his notes on hundreds of conversations allows us to explore what the inhabitants of a sixteenth-century town talked about, what kind of information they valued, through which channels such information reached them, and how it was then processed, shared, criticized, contradicted, and employed as a means to forge and strengthen social bonds. An analysis of this early modern microcosm of communication shows that the circulation of information remained inseparably linked to the social dynamics of face-to-face exchanges long into the age of print. Personal networks and oral exchanges played a key role in the dissemination, processing, and reception of information in the sixteenth century, even when such information travelled over long distances and in manuscript or printed form. At the same time, everyday exchanges of information provided individuals on all social levels with a welcome opportunity for self-promotion. If we seek to understand how information circulated and how it affected early modern communities’ views of the world in which they lived, we therefore need to gain a better understanding of the social settings within which it was shared and of the social dynamics that structured them. In short, in addition to studying the relationship between orality, manuscript, and print, we need to bring together the histories of sociability and information. *

*

*

The early modern period has long been described as a time in which the dissemination of information underwent radical changes. The period was, indeed, characterized by a steep rise in the volume, variety, and reach of written and printed information. It saw a marked increase in both administrative records and personal writing, an explosion of printed books, and gradually witnessed the emergence of a wide range of new print media such as pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and journals.⁸ These new media, in turn, have been linked by ⁸ The historiography on the rise of early modern printing and its consequences is so vast that only a small selection of particularly influential titles can be mentioned here: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1980, 1st edn 1979); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962); Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie über die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frankfurt a.M., 1991). For a concise overview of the emergence of new print genres, see Andreas Würgler, Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2013). On illustrated pamphlets and ephemeral print, see e.g. Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994, 1st edn 1981); Michael Schilling, Bildpublizistik der Frühen Neuzeit: Aufgaben und Leistungen des illustrierten Flugblatts in Deutschland bis um 1700 (Tübingen, 1990); Hans-Joachim Köhler (ed.), Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit: Beiträge zum Tübinger Symposion 1980 (Stuttgart, 1981), and more recently Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester, 2014). For a more general introduction to media in historical research, see Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge, 2002).

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historians to many fundamental developments of the period, such as the spreading of the Reformation, the scientific revolution, or the emergence of a public sphere.⁹ As recent scholarship has shown, the growing number of texts in circulation required early modern people to develop new strategies for sorting, organizing, and storing information.¹⁰ These developments were moreover accompanied by the creation of institutions and infrastructure that facilitated the circulation of both people and paper—such as an increasingly dense web of travel routes, a public postal system, and global trade networks. This provided the means for disseminating information at an unprecedented speed and on a hitherto unknown geographical scale.¹¹ In light of such research, the early modern period thus appears as a time in which a fundamental communications revolution took place, heralding the dawn of the modern information age.¹² How does speech—arguably the most universal and accessible, but least revolutionary means of communication in the early modern period—fit into a story of such profound change? An earlier strand of scholarship, focusing heavily on print, paid little attention to the spoken word. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of media theorists, literary scholars, and social anthropologists such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, and Jack Goody, this line of research was particularly interested in the cognitive and social transformations brought about by the advent

⁹ For a recent overview of the literature on print and the Reformation, see Silvia Serena Tschopp, ‘Flugschriften als Leitmedien reformatorischer Öffentlichkeit’, in Helga Schnabel-Schütte (ed.), Reformation: Historisch-kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch (Stuttgart, 2017), 311–30. See also Eisenstein, Printing Press. On Habermas’s widely, and controversially, discussed concept of the public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied, 1962). The growth of communication history has recently revived the discussion over Habermas’s thesis; see e.g. Massimo Rospocher (ed.), Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna, 2012). ¹⁰ See e.g. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, 2010). On contemporary strategies for dealing with this overflow of information, see the articles assembled in a special issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas: Daniel Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64/1 (2003), 1–9. Recently, archives have emerged as a central object of study for historians interested in the history of information; see esp. Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Social History of the Archive: RecordKeeping in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2016). ¹¹ On the link between infrastructure and communication, see esp. Wolfgang Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2003). ¹² Elizabeth Eisenstein initially used the term ‘communications revolution’ to describe the changes brought about by printing (Eisenstein, Printing Press, 44), before turning to the narrower ‘printing revolution’ in the abridged version of her monumental work: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983). More recently, the ‘communications revolution’ has seen a revival, not least thanks to Wolfgang Behringer’s work: see e.g. Behringer, Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution; ‘Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept’, German History, 24/3 (2006), 333–74; ‘Von der Gutenberg-Galaxis zur Taxis-Galaxis: Die Kommunikationsrevolution: Ein Konzept zum besseren Verständnis der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Johannes Burkhardt and Christine Werkstetter (eds), Kommunikation und Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2005), 39–54; and ‘Introduction: Communication and Historiography’, German History, 24/3 (2006), 325–32. The term now comprises both Eisenstein’s ‘printing revolution’ and the infrastructural developments described by Behringer.

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of new communication technologies.¹³ The main concern of early modern historians such as Elizabeth Eisenstein was thus to trace what they saw as the most fundamental medial transformation of their period, namely the shift from manuscript to print—or, to put it in McLuhan’s words, the ‘making of typographic man’.¹⁴ Orality, in contrast, rarely featured in this story, and when it did, it was often depicted as a medium in decline. In his seminal study of the printing revolution, for instance, Michael Giesecke argued that the spoken word had been devalued with the rise of print at the turn from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century.¹⁵ For Giesecke, the early modern period was instead ‘dominated by the competition of two information technologies, the art of writing, perfected over thousands of years . . . and the art of printing’.¹⁶ An exclusive focus on manuscript and print, however, not only ignores the continuing importance of speech in everyday interactions, but also fails to recognize a fundamental characteristic of the reception of early modern texts.¹⁷ Historians of reading were among the first to point out that the consumption of both manuscript and printed material was in fact a deeply oral affair, as texts were not just read but also read aloud, sung, and performed.¹⁸ In fact, taking into account oral exchanges allowed them to argue for an even greater reach of textual material: both the illiterate and an educated elite could now be counted among its potential consumers.¹⁹ Inspired by these arguments, a growing number of scholars have since embedded the history of media and print within a much broader history of communication. Instead of looking at one medium in isolation, the goal of such research is to study how early modern speech, manuscript, and print interacted with one

¹³ McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy; and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London, 1964); Jack Goody and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5/3 (1963), 304–45; and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982). The history of orality, literacy, and print, as they tell it (albeit with some variations), broadly consists of a series of evolutions which turned Homo sapiens into chirographic and then ‘typographic man’; a shift first from an oral/aural world of myth to a literate/visual world of history, scepticism, and logic, followed by another shift to print which paved the way for the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ and modernity. For a critique of the ‘technological determinism’ underlying these studies, see e.g. Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford, 1988), and more recently Paul N. Edwards, Lisa Gitelman, Gabrielle Hecht et al., ‘AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information’, American Historical Review, 116/5 (2011), 1393–1435. ¹⁴ McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy. ¹⁵ Giesecke, Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit, 33. ¹⁶ Ibid. 67. Throughout Giesecke’s book, it becomes clear that in his view it was the latter that prevailed. At the end of his study, he concludes that the ‘intellectual history of the (early) modern period should be written as a history of typographical information’: pp. 501–2. ¹⁷ Elizabeth Horodowich, ‘Introduction: Speech and Oral Culture in Early Modern Europe and Beyond’, Journal of Early Modern History, 16/4 (2012), 301–13, here 302. ¹⁸ Prominently Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochraine (Princeton NJ, 1987). ¹⁹ A similar argument has also been made with regards to illustrations in printed material; see Robert B. Scribner, ‘Flugblatt und Analphabetentum: Wie kam der gemeine Mann zu reformatorischen Ideen?’, in Hans-Joachim Köhler (ed.), Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit: Beiträge zum Tübinger Symposion 1980 (Stuttgart, 1981), 65–76.

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another.²⁰ Historians of communication have consistently demonstrated that information constantly moved back and forth between those media as whispers were recorded, manuscripts printed, and prints became the subject of conversation. In tracing such information flows, they have paid particular attention to the ways in which specific sites—in particular public ones such as taverns, churches, pharmacies, streets, and squares—facilitated social interaction and the exchange of information.²¹ By focusing on information exchanges and specific settings rather than individual social groups, they have moreover shown how easily information moved between different social milieus, often facilitated by a diverse cast of characters—apothecaries, barbers, translators, spies, or street singers—who acted as intermediaries and information brokers. In his seminal work on communication in seventeenth-century Venice, for instance, Filippo de Vivo was able to demonstrate that such intermediaries carried even supposedly arcane political information far beyond the city’s ruling elite, who considered such intelligence their prerogative.²² Recent scholarship has thus reclaimed a role for the spoken word within the early modern ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ by demonstrating, among other things, that it amplified the impact of information circulating in manuscript and print. In fact, most historians now seem to agree that throughout the period, speech remained ²⁰ For on early call on historians of journalism to give up their ‘tiresome “media fixation” ’ in favour of a broader history of communication, see e.g. Winfried G. Lerg, ‘Pressegeschichte oder Kommunikationsgeschichte?’, in Presse und Geschichte: Beiträge zur historischen Kommunikationsforschung (Munich, 1977), 9–24, here 13. Since the early 2000s, the field of communication history has grown considerably; see e.g. Robert Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, American Historical Review, 105/1 (2000), 1–35; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000); Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007); John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013); Stefano Dall’Aglio, Brian Richardson, and Massimo Rospocher (eds), Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London, 2017); Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds), Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus, OH, 2000). ²¹ The following represents only a small selection of recent literature which combines the study of space with the history of early modern communication: Helmut Bräuer and Elke Schlenkrich (eds), Die Stadt als Kommunikationsraum. Karl Czok zum 75. Geburtstag (Leipzig, 2001); Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke, 2007); and ‘Wirtshaus, Verkehr und Kommunikationsrevolution im frühneuzeitlichen Alpenraum’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 9/3–4 (2005), 376–93; Filippo de Vivo, ‘Pharmacies as Centres of Communication in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 21/4 (2007), 505–21; Daniel Bellingradt, ‘The Early Modern City as a Resonating Box: Media Public Opinion, and the Urban Space of the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne, and Hamburg ca. 1700’, Journal of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), 201–40; Alexander Cowan, ‘Seeing Is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice’, Gender & History, 23/3 (2011), 721–38; Susanne Rau, ‘Orte der Gastlichkeit—Orte der Kommunikation: Aspekte der Raumkonstitution von Herbergen in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 9/3–4 (2005), 394–417; Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Die grosse Welt im kleinen Raum: Zur Ver-Ortung überlokaler Kommunikationsräume in der Frühen Neuzeit’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 9/3–4 (2005), 367–75; Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘To Pray, to Work, to Hear, to Speak: Women in Roman Streets c. 1600’, Journal of Early Modern History, 12/3 (2008), 289–311. ²² De Vivo, Information and Communication.

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the most common means for spreading information.²³ Unfortunately, however, it is precisely these most mundane of exchanges—a piece of gossip shared over dinner, a bit of small talk exchanged on the market square, a conversation about an uncertain piece of news—that usually lie beyond the reach of historians. The ephemeral nature of talk not only means that the vast majority of early modern information flows remains unaccounted for; it also makes it extremely difficult to get a sense of what early modern audiences made of the information they received.²⁴ Did they understand, believe, or mistrust it? Did they ignore or act upon it? What prompted them to share one piece of information but not another? If our goal is to study information’s effect on society, answering these questions is essential. Yet they quickly take us far beyond what the sources can offer, and into a largely undocumented sphere of oral exchanges. How, then, can a thousand conversations that left no trace in the historical record possibly compete with a single pamphlet that survived? Granted, once one starts looking, small hints at an oral world await at every turn: there are letters referring to the messenger for the bulk of the information they bring, prints demanding to be read aloud or sung, court records detailing neighbourhood gossip. Yet the evidence is often too widely scattered to allow for a systematic, let alone quantitative, analysis. As a consequence, studies of early modern orality have typically focused on large cities with particularly rich archives, such as Rome, Venice, Paris, or Istanbul.²⁵ They have also centred on the kinds of talk that have a better chance of making it into the historical record. Literary historians, for instance, have mined early modern literature for traces of oral tradition, ‘fictitious

²³ See similarly Horodowich, ‘Introduction’, 301. ²⁴ See similarly Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society’, 30. ²⁵ In addition to Filippo de Vivo’s work on Venice, see e.g. Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge, 2008); and ‘The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks, Public Life and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 19/1 (2005), 22–45; Alexander Cowan, ‘Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Journal of Early Modern History, 12 (2008), 313–33; Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in Judicial Records from Early Modern Rome’, Journal of Early Modern History, 16/4 (2012), 403–30; Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts’, in Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey (eds), Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400–1700) (Leiden, 2015), 139–81; Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher, ‘Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication’, Cultural and Social History, 9/1 (2012), 9–26. On Paris, see e.g. Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society’; on information flows between Istanbul, London, and Paris, see Ghobrial, Whispers of Cities. Smaller towns have not yet received as much attention, with the exception of Adam Fox’s work on England (Fox, Oral and Literate Culture). In the German-speaking areas, which are the main focus of this book, little resonance was found by early impulses from Robert Scribner (‘Mündliche Kommunikation und Strategien der Macht in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert’, in Herwig Wolfram and Helmut Hundsbichler (eds), Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Vienna, 1992), 183–97) and a call for a cultural history of ‘uncontrolled talk’ by Pia Holenstein and Norbert Schindler (‘Geschwätzgeschichte(n): Ein kulturhistorisches Plädoyer für die Rehabilitierung der unkontrollierten Rede’, in Richard van Dülmen (ed.), Dynamik der Tradition: Studien zur historischen Kulturforschung IV (Frankfurt a.M., 1992), 41–108). One notable exception is Benedikt Mauer’s study of Augsburg: ‘Gemain Geschray’ und ‘teglich Reden’. Georg Kölderer: Ein Augsburger Chronist des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Augsburg, 2001).

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orality’, and performance.²⁶ Historians of the Reformation have stressed the central role sermons played in communicating the new faith to a broader audience.²⁷ Legal and cultural historians have investigated ‘crimes of the tongue’ such as libel, insults, and blasphemy, demonstrating the power attributed to words that threatened people’s honour or, worse still, the honour of God.²⁸ Historians of communication likewise make extensive use of court records; after all, informal information networks and oral exchanges typically remained invisible unless they caught the attention of early modern authorities.²⁹ Yet while literary texts, sermons, and court records help us reconstruct some of the contents and conventions of speech, they offer only a limited, and possibly rather skewed, perspective on everyday talk and its role in the dissemination of information.³⁰ By focusing on sources born from conflict and efforts to moralize, moreover, we risk reinforcing the negative picture of talk that pervades many early modern texts.³¹ Rütiner’s Commentationes provide a remedy for several of these methodological challenges. First, their distinctive format and content make them uniquely suitable for a systematic study of everyday information exchanges. At first sight, Rütiner’s notes may appear like a random collection of innumerable fragments of stories, an assortment of incoherent voices and snippets of conversations. Written in poor Latin, the nearly 2,000 entries in Rütiner’s Commentationes follow no discernible chronological or thematic order and cover every topic imaginable. Against this background, it is perhaps understandable that when Rütiner’s notes were first discussed as a historical source more than a century ago, one historian lamented that the few factual ‘golden nuggets’ they contained were hidden ‘underneath an enormous amount of worthless slag’.³² A few historians have ²⁶ For an introduction to the place of orality within literary history, see Karl Reichl (ed.), Medieval Oral Literature (Berlin, 2012). With regard to performances of early modern texts, see a special issue edited by Brian Richardson, ‘Introduction: Oral Culture in Early Modern Italy: Performance, Language, Religion’, The Italianist, 34/3 (2014), 313–17. For the German context, see the results of the ‘Freiburger Sonderforschungsbereich 321: Übergänge und Spannungsfelder zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’, summarized in Wolfgang Raible, Medienwechsel: Ergebnisse aus zwölf Jahren Forschung zum Thema ‘Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’ (Tübingen, 1998), or Rudolf Schenda, Von Mund zu Ohr: Bausteine zu einer Kulturgeschichte volkstümlichen Erzählens (Göttingen, 1993). ²⁷ See e.g. Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation. Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (Oxford, 2006), or Albrecht Beutel, ‘Kommunikation des Evangeliums. Die Predigt als zentrales theologisches Vermittlungsmedium der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Irene Dingel and Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele (eds), Kommunikation und Transfer im Christentum der frühen Neuzeit (Mainz, 2007), 3–15. On the aural reception of sermons, see also Norbert Schindler, ‘Die Prinzipien des Hörensagens: Predigt und Publikum in der Frühen Neuzeit’, Historische Anthropologie, 1 (1993), 359–93. ²⁸ See e.g. David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in PreModern England (Oxford, 2010); Francisca Loetz, Mit Gott handeln: Von den Zürcher Gotteslästerern der Frühen Neuzeit zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Religiösen (Göttingen, 2002); Gerd Schwerhoff, Zungen wie Schwerter: Blasphemie in alteuropäischen Gesellschaften, 1200–1650 (Konstanz, 2005); Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996). ²⁹ See e.g. Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society’, 10ff. ³⁰ See similarly Horodowich, ‘Introduction’, 306. ³¹ For a more detailed discussion of this problem, see Ch. 4. ³² Theodor von Liebenau, ‘Aus einem historischen Notizbuch der Reformationszeit’, Katholische Schweizer-Blätter und Archiv für schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, 3/1 (1904), 341–52, here 342.

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since mined the Commentationes for some of these precious nuggets, but because Rütiner’s notes rarely made it beyond a handful of footnotes, they remain largely unknown, even within Switzerland.³³ The ‘worthless slag’, however—the debris of talk in a sixteenth-century town— is in fact precisely where the greatest value of Rütiner’s Commentationes lies. Intended as private notebooks rather than as a chronicle to be handed down to future generations, they contain an unpolished record of the talk of St Gall, including the innumerable repetitions, gaps, uncertainties, and contradictions that characterized it. Since Rütiner meticulously recorded his informants, their sources, and the context in which information was exchanged, his notebooks allow us to quantify St Gallers’ reliance on different sources of information and to zoom in on an informal, and largely oral, network—and one which, as we shall see, represents a broad cross-section of St Gall’s society. In combination with a variety of sources from St Gall and beyond—contemporary chronicles, letters, pamphlets, and court records—Rütiner’s notes enable us to study not only how information travelled or how individual stories changed over time and over many conversations, but also how St Gallers discussed, challenged, and processed them.

³³ This is perhaps partly due to the fact that Ernst Gerhart Rüsch’s 1996 edition and German translation of the Commentationes was self-published and therefore did not receive the attention it deserved. Rüsch’s brief but excellent introduction to his edition is still the most substantial contribution on Rütiner and his notebooks; see Kommentarband, 13–50. Most of Rüsch’s other publications on Rütiner only consist of excerpts from the Commentationes; see e.g. Rüsch, Alltag in St. Gallen um 1530. Aus dem Diarium des Leinwandherrn Johannes Rütiner (St Gall, 1991); ‘Zwingli im Diarium Johannes Rütiners’, Zwingliana, 19/1 (1992), 293–305; ‘Schaffhausen im Diarium des St. Gallers Johannes Rütiner 1529–1539’, Schaffhauser Beiträge zur Geschichte, 69 (1992), 7–19; and ‘Woluff vom pflegel und vom pflug!’ Reisläufergeschichten aus dem alten St. Gallen: Aus dem Diarium von Johannes Rütiner (St Gall, 1993). The same is true for two earlier publications by Theodor von Liebenau, ‘Aus einem historischen Notizbuch’ and ‘Aus dem Diarium des Johannes Rütiner von St. Gallen aus den Jahren 1529–1539’, Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 4 (1905), 45–53. Since the 19th century, the Commentationes have occasionally been mentioned in works on Swiss historiography; e.g. Georg von Wyss, Geschichte der Historiographie in der Schweiz (Zurich, 1895), 238–9; Richard Feller and Edgar Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz: Vom Spätmittelalter zur Neuzeit, 2 vols (Basle, 1962), here i, 238; more extensively in Rudolf Gamper, ‘Liebe und Zorn: Menschliche Regungen und die Allmacht Gottes in St. Galler Chroniken der Reformationszeit’, in Andreas Härter (ed.), Liebe und Zorn: Zu Literatur und Buchkultur in St. Gallen (Wiesbaden, 2009), 40–63. They are also used as a source for local histories, most extensively by Wilhelm Ehrenzeller, St. Gallische Geschichte im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit, 3 vols (St Gall, 1931–47), here iii, 34–50; Paul Staerkle, Beiträge zur spätmittelalterlichen Bildungsgeschichte St. Gallens (St Gall, 1939); Johannes Häne, Der Auflauf zu St. Gallen im Jahre 1491 (St Gall, 1899), or selectively mined for evidence on a variety of topics. See e.g. Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago, 2003), 78; Pirmin Meier, Paracelsus, Arzt und Prophet: Annäherungen an Teophrastus von Hohenheim (Zurich, 2004, 1st edn 1993), 46–58; Kaspar von Greyerz, Passagen und Stationen: Lebensstufen zwischen Mittelalter und Moderne (Göttingen, 2010), 45, 115, 162; and ‘Das Haus als Ort der Andacht’, in Joachim Eibach and Inken Schmidt-Voges (eds), Das Haus in der Geschichte Europas: Ein Handbuch (Berlin, 2015), 537–52, here 542. Since the publication of Rüsch’s edition in 1996, to my knowledge only two articles which focus solely on Rütiner’s Commentationes have been published: Ursula Brunold-Bigler, ‘Historien von Krieg, Pest und Hunger: Bemerkungen zu den “Commentationes” des Johannes Rütiner, St. Gallen 1529–1539’, Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde, 84 (1998), 175–87, and Carla Roth, ‘Obscene Humour, Gender, and Sociability in Sixteenth-Century St Gallen’, Past & Present, 234/1 (2017), 39–70.

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In short, the Commentationes offer a glimpse into an oral world that usually lies beyond the historian’s gaze.³⁴ Second, the broad thematic scope of the Commentationes helps us overcome some of the fragmentation which still persists in the history of communication, and forces us to rethink both what constituted valuable information in the sixteenth century and who was able to provide it. Due to the variety and disparate nature of potentially relevant source material, historians of communication have typically reduced the scale of analysis in other ways—for instance, by tracing communications around a single event, or by focusing on one particular type of information.³⁵ Yet if the circulation of political news, religious ideas, technical knowledge, and neighbourhood gossip are all dealt with separately, it is difficult to get a sense of the common communicative space they shared. This in turn tends to promote a second, perhaps less visible divide between the study of sociability and entertainment on the one hand and the circulation of ‘valuable’—typically political, religious, scholarly, or economic—information on the other. Rütiner’s notes, however, defy such distinctions. Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, in sixteenth-century St Gall the circulation of such diverse content as jokes, gossip, news, and tales of the past was intimately intertwined, and one was used to gain access to, or judge, the other. Take Caspar Huseli, for instance—one of the men who informed Rütiner about the possible Catholic–Ottoman alliance discussed at the beginning of this introduction. On other occasions, Huseli also told Rütiner about a local office-holder’s digestive problems and shared a jocular proverb about the social consequences of bad wine harvests.³⁶ It is telling that Rütiner took equal care to record a piece of gossip, a joke, and a snippet of political news: to him, they all held value. Finally, zooming in on a small sixteenth-century town enables us to examine what the early modern communications revolution looked like for a community which did not directly partake in its novelties. Like many of his contemporaries, Rütiner spent most of his life in a town without a printing press, without direct access to the imperial post, and far away from the large urban information hubs ³⁴ Perhaps thanks to St Gall’s rich archives, the town’s oral culture at two different points in its history has already been the subject of two articles, one focusing on the medieval period and the monk Notker (d. 912), the other on the central role played by oral exchanges in the town’s Reformation: Matthew Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society’, Past & Present, 158 (1998), 3–36, and Arnold Snyder, ‘Communication and the People: The Case of Reformation St. Gall’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 67/2 (1993), 152–73. ³⁵ In a chapter on communication in early modern Bristol, Jonathan Barry perfectly summarizes the challenge faced by historians of communication: ‘At one level, almost all the surviving records could be pertinent to this topic’; see Jonathan Barry, ‘Communicating with Authority: The Uses of Script, Print and Speech in Bristol 1640–1714’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), 191–208, here 193. For an excellent reflection on how the history of communication profits from a reduction of scale, see Filippo de Vivo, ‘Microhistories of LongDistance Information: Space, Movement and Agency in the Early Modern News’, in John-Paul Ghobrial (ed.), Global History and Microhistory (Oxford, 2019), 179–214, here esp. 182–90. ³⁶ Comm. I.893n; I.970.

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upon which historians have so far bestowed much of their attention. The case of St Gall therefore sheds some light on the impact of print outside of the large printing centres, and on the range of information available on the periphery of Europe’s emerging communication system. It also alerts us to the scepticism and competition faced by printed news in particular. As we shall see, print did indeed leave a noticeable mark on the talk of St Gall, but it played a much smaller and more indirect role in the provision of information than one might expect. Like all studies of early modern orality, this book relies on written sources, and a few words of caution are therefore in order. While the Commentationes often create the illusion that they allow us to listen in on conversations 500 years in the past, they do not, of course, give us access to the spoken word itself. Rütiner typically recorded brief summaries of his conversations, and his notes are thus shaped by both his personal interests and the limits of his memory. Even where he provides direct speech, as he does on many occasions, we should be careful not to mistake it for a transcript of the precise words spoken—and all the more so given that Rütiner not only turned speech into script, but also translated the vernacular into Latin.³⁷ What his notes enable us to do, however, is to explore the contents, social settings, mechanisms, and conventions of everyday exchanges in a small sixteenth-century town. Another matter of concern might be the extent to which the results of this study are representative of communication in sixteenth-century St Gall and beyond. After all, the Commentationes are clearly an exceptional source, and the glimpse of oral communication they offer might thus come at the expense of considerable distortions. By taking a wide range of other contemporary sources into account, such distortions can be identified and balanced out. Moreover, as a record of conversations, the Commentationes contain not just one voice, but many—at least 349, to be precise. That is the number of informants cited by Rütiner.³⁸ Granted, these voices are filtered through Rütiner’s writing, yet some common characteristics are undeniable. For example, people of all social backgrounds—from an elderly midwife to St Gall’s mayor—routinely provided elaborate frame narratives to assure their audiences that they were drawing on reliable sources.³⁹ In this sense, the Commentationes represent a ‘normal exception’ as conceived by Edoardo Grendi: an extraordinary source filled with ordinary content.⁴⁰ The purpose of this book is to study oral exchanges in a specific historical context, not to contribute to the vast field of communication theory. Nevertheless, a few remarks on the theoretical underpinnings of this study are necessary. From Marshall McLuhan, it takes the awareness that the medium is (part of) the

³⁷ For a discussion of Rütiner’s decision to write in Latin and its consequences, see Ch. 1. ³⁸ See Ch. 2. ³⁹ See Ch. 5. ⁴⁰ Edoardo Grendi, ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni storici, 35 (1977), 506–20, here 512.

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message.⁴¹ Where the medium is speech, the message is tied to the physical presence of the speaker; it is embodied.⁴² As Rudolf Schlögl reminds us in his work on face-to-face communication, speech, in contrast to other early modern media, allows speakers and their audiences to observe one another. It is not only heard, but seen: a substantial part of the message is conveyed not in the words spoken but in the speakers’ intonation, facial expressions, and gestures. Because it is tied to the body, speech is moreover attached to a social persona and embedded in a specific social context. This social context not only affects how the audience understands and reacts to a message—a joke, for instance, may well be met with laughter in one context and with uncomfortable silence in another. In reaction to, or in anticipation of, an audience’s presumed reaction, the speaker may choose different words, leave out parts deemed problematic, add explanations, or remain silent altogether.⁴³ It is therefore one of the main premises of this book that in order to understand oral exchanges of information, we must also study the social settings in which they took place.⁴⁴ In this regard, focusing on St Gall offers a distinct practical advantage: its moderate size enables us to trace individuals through a variety of sources and to situate them within the town’s social structure.⁴⁵ Exchanges of information in sixteenth-century St Gall were simultaneously driven and shaped by what I call communicative capital.⁴⁶ Pierre Bourdieu, on whose work the term builds, described linguistic exchanges as structured by the social and cultural capital of those who speak. He rightly drew attention to the fact that dialect, performance, and social standing—to name just a few—have an effect on the authority of a speaker and the weight and value attributed to their words.⁴⁷ ⁴¹ McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7–11. ⁴² On the relationship between the body and communication, see e.g. Michael Jucker, ‘Körper und Plurimedialität. Überlegungen zur spätmittelalterlichen Kommunikationspraxis im eidgenössischen Geandtschaftswesen’, Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung, 8/1 (2003), 68–83. ⁴³ Rudolf Schlögl, ‘Kommunikation und Vergesellschaftung unter Anwesenden. Formen des Sozialen und ihre Transformation in der Frühen Neuzeit’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 34 (2008), 155–224, here esp. 164–5, 183–8; more extensively, idem, Anwesende und Abwesende. Grundriss für eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Constance, 2014). See similarly Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey (eds), Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400–1700) (Leiden, 2015), 1–44, here 10–14. ⁴⁴ A similar argument is made by Ghobrial, Whispers of Cities, 13, and Jörg Meier, ‘Städtische Kommunikation im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Andreas Laubinger, Brunhilde Gedderth, and Claudia Dobrinski (eds), Text—Bild—Schrift: Vermittlung von Information im Mittelalter (Munich, 2007), 127–45, here esp. 144. ⁴⁵ This is the method suggested in Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, ‘The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe: Selections from Quaderni storici (London, 1991), 1–10. ⁴⁶ The term is inspired by an article which explores the communicative basis of social capital as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu: Hernando Rojas, Dhavan V. Sha, and Lewis A. Friedland, ‘A Communicative Approach to Social Capital’, Journal of Communication, 61 (2011), 689–712. For a brief introduction to social capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital’, trans. Reinhard Kreckel, in Reinhard Kreckel (ed.), Soziale Ungleichheiten (Göttingen, 1983), 183–98. ⁴⁷ Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris, 1982).

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Yet, since Bourdieu focused on the form of linguistic exchanges rather than their content, an unqualified application of his theories threatens to further disenfranchise those already deprived of formal power. If being listened to depends primarily on mastering certain linguistic codes, and if those codes are at the same time the privilege of a small elite, those on the lower end of the social ladder are robbed of their voices even where they have information to share. The conflation of social status and communicative authority is particularly problematic when it is applied to a historical period in which, as Claire Walker has pointed out, ‘the exchange of information was a key factor in establishing . . . relationships’.⁴⁸ Throughout this book, I use the term ‘communicative capital’ to describe the communicative potential of individuals. I argue that this potential depended on a person’s access to information as well as on their oratorial and social skills, and was thus not necessarily equal to their social status. This is not to say that St Gallers of different social ranks exchanged information as equals, of course.⁴⁹ Instead, the concept of communicative capital helps us understand why some St Gallers were quite successful at making themselves heard in spite of their low status. In addition to its engagement with the history of communication and information, this book also represents the first comprehensive study of Rütiner’s Commentationes. The first two chapters lay the groundwork for an analysis of this source. Chapter 1 introduces St Gall, Rütiner, and his notebooks, which it discusses as part of a broader trend that saw numerous St Gallers take up writing around the time of the Reformation. Chapter 2 deals with the most striking feature of Rütiner’s work, namely the references he provided for over 70 per cent of his notebook entries. Based on these references, the chapter offers a reconstruction of his information network and explores his place between two powerful, but fairly separate social groups in St Gall: the weavers’ guild on the one hand and St Gall’s educated elite on the other. Sixteenth-century St Gallers relied heavily on their personal networks and oral informants to provide them with news and information of all kinds. As a consequence, their access to information largely depended on the social circles within which they spent their lives. As St Gallers sought to secure a place for themselves in such circles, they in turn used jokes, gossip, information, and stories of all kinds as a form of communicative capital, allowing them to present themselves as witty, well-connected, knowledgeable, and trustworthy. This practice and its consequences are dealt with in the main body of the book. Chapter 3 embeds a series of obscene jokes recorded by Rütiner in their social and cultural context, and shows how St Gallers cleverly adapted the ⁴⁸ Claire Walker, ‘Whispering Fama: Talk and Reputation in Early Modern Society’, in Heather Kerr and Claire Walker (eds), Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2015), 9–35, here 22. ⁴⁹ On the rules governing verbal exchanges between people of different rank, see e.g. Elspeth Jajdelska, Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600–1750: Studies in Social Rank and Communication (London, 2016), esp. 32–56.

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humorous material in circulation, allowing them to display their wittiness and social skills. Chapter 4 explores gossip as a source of social knowledge. Although gossip was condemned in theory as an inherently disruptive and primarily female form of communication, in practice it provided essential and highly valued information for anyone who sought to navigate St Gall’s social world. It also played a central role in the verification of rumours and news, which are the subject of Chapter 5. Even educated St Gallers like Rütiner typically obtained news through informal networks and in the form of rumours. Since it was usually impossible to verify such information independently, Rütiner and his contemporaries relied on an elaborate system of ‘source criticism’ instead—a system which often worked in favour of oral sources because it linked people’s trust in a piece of news to their trust in the messenger. Eyewitnesses were considered particularly reliable. As I argue in Chapter 6, this meant that where the town’s past was concerned, the voices of an older generation of St Gallers carried particular weight. The evolution of their stories over time and over many conversations offers us important insights into the storytellers’ present and allows us to observe history in the making. Jokes and gossip, news and tales—although the topics assembled in this book might seem somewhat eclectic on the surface, they mirror Rütiner’s Commentationes, in which these types of exchanges, too, stand side by side, illuminating one another in a myriad of ways. It is through their combined study that the close entanglement of information and sociability in sixteenth-century St Gall becomes apparent. Indeed, one way to look at the history of early modern communication is as a period in which this entanglement underwent considerable change as some information exchanges came to be seen as mere social practices, while others became less dependent on personal networks for their circulation. In a roundabout way, then, the case of St Gall may alert us to shifts in the relationship between information and community throughout the early modern period, and beyond.

1 Taking note of a ‘wondrous time’ Johannes Rütiner and his St Gall Situated on the margins of the Swiss Confederacy, a few kilometres south-east of Lake Constance, Rütiner’s St Gall was a Protestant town of around four to five thousand inhabitants.¹ The town had developed around the renowned St Gall abbey (Fig. 1.1), but since the fourteenth century it had gradually freed itself from the abbot’s rule and become a largely independent political and, eventually, confessional entity. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, St Gall was both a Free Imperial City and an associate member of the Swiss Confederacy.² It was ruled by a Small Council composed of councilmen and guild masters and headed by a triumvirate who rotated between the positions of mayor, old mayor, and imperial bailiff every year. The considerably less powerful Great Council consisted of the Small Council and representatives from each of the town’s six guilds.³ The weavers’ guild was by far the largest and most powerful among them, reflecting the fact that St Gall’s economy was dominated by, and largely dependent on, the linen trade.⁴ Rigorous controls at every stage of production ensured high quality standards and made St Gall linen a highly sought-after commodity all over Europe.⁵ It was this flourishing linen trade that had drawn Rütiner’s grandfather to St Gall.⁶ By the time Rütiner was born in 1501, his father, Hansi Rütiner, owned a successful business and held several public offices, most of which were linked to

¹ Hans-Peter Höhener, ‘Bevölkerung und Vermögensstruktur der Stadt Sankt Gallen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Auswertung der Steuerbücher)’ (PhD thesis, University of Zurich, 1974), 29. ² Werner Näf, Vadian und seine Stadt St. Gallen, 2 vols (St Gall, 1944–57), esp. i, 21–63, and ii, 180–190, 236–41. For an analysis of St Gall’s position between the Swiss Confederacy and the Holy Roman Empire, see Bettina Braun and Wolfgang Dobras, ‘St. Gallen: Eine Stadtrepublik zwischen Reich und Eidgenossenschaft’, in Christine Roll, Bettina Braun, and Heide Stratenwerth (eds), Recht und Reich im Zeitalter der Reformation: Festschrift für Horst Rabe (Frankfurt a.M., 1996), 397–416. ³ For a concise introduction to St Gall’s political system, see Ernst Ehrenzeller, Geschichte der Stadt St. Gallen (St Gall, 1988), esp. 231–5. More detailed, but imprecise in parts, is Carl Moser-Nef, Die freie Reichsstadt und Republik St. Gallen, 7 vols (Zurich, 1931–51), here i, 88–98 and 166–233. ⁴ According to the St Gall humanist and mayor Joachim von Watt, better known as Vadianus, the weavers’ guild consisted of ‘450 masters . . . not counting those who have neither a wife nor children’ (‘vierdhalbhundert meister . . . one die, die weder weib noch kind habend’). Joachim von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, ed. Ernst Götzinger, 3 vols (St Gall, 1875–9), here ii, 422. ⁵ Hans Conrad Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel der Stadt St. Gallen von den Anfängen bis 1520, 2 vols (St Gall, 1960). ⁶ Comm. II.31; Kommentarband, 15.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0002

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Fig. 1.1. Melchior Frank, Die loblich Stat Sant Gallen sambt dem Furstlichen Clostr (The praiseworthy city of St Gall including the princely abbey, 1596). Stadtarchiv der Ortsbürgergemeinde St. Gallen, Plan-A., S 2, 1. Note: The abbot’s gate, or Karlstor (marked T), was only built in the 1560s. Before then, the abbey was completely enclosed within the town’s walls.

the linen trade.⁷ Although he never acquired a fortune comparable to that of the richest linen merchants in St Gall, by the end of his life Hansi Rütiner belonged to the richest 10 per cent of the town’s taxpayers.⁸ Thanks to his family’s economic advancement, Rütiner was able to enjoy a broad education. He first attended the local Latin school and then moved to Basle in 1519 or 1520 to continue his studies at university.⁹ In addition to Rütiner’s few entries in the Commentationes on his time in Basle, a collection of texts which he copied and annotated during his time as a pupil and student provides a fragmentary, but nevertheless enlightening, picture of his education.¹⁰ At university, he ⁷ Between 1481 and 1513, Hansi Rütiner was appointed linen inspector numerous times. See Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel, ii, 83–7. From 1504 to 1510, Hansi was a member of the Small Council, and from 1514 to 1515 he represented the weavers’ guild on the Great Council as one of the weavers’ Elfer: StadtASG, AA, 919a, Johann Jacob Scherer and Jacob Huber, ‘Ämterbuch der Stadt St. Gallen, worin alle oberkeitlichen Stellen wie auch alle geistlichen und weltlichen Friedens- und Kriegsämter und bürgerlichen Dienste, von wem und wie lange dieselben bedient worden, verzeichnet sind, 1400–1816’, here pp. 6 and 26. ⁸ Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel, 64 and 78. ⁹ It was not until 1522, however, that Rütiner appeared in the university’s matriculation lists: Hans Georg Wackernagel (ed.), Die Matrikel der Universität Basel, 5 vols (Basle, 1951–80), here i, 351. ¹⁰ VadSlg, Ms 485, ‘Sammelhandschrift humanistischen Inhalts’.

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was taught regularly by Johannes Atrocianus, an outspoken opponent of Protestantism, as well as by Magister Gabriel Beronanus, whom Rütiner called ‘my most beloved teacher’.¹¹ The main focus lay on classical authors such as Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Horace, and on satirists like Lucian of Samosata, Juvenal, Plautus, and Persius. Alongside these classical texts, Rütiner studied the work of contemporary humanists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Angelus Politianus, and Joachim von Watt, better known as Vadianus (1483/4–1551), who later became the town physician and mayor of St Gall and a driving force behind the town’s Reformation.¹² Latin authors, or Latin translations of Greek authors, were Rütiner’s main focus, while his knowledge of Greek appears to have been limited.¹³ This was in line with the purpose of his studies: it is likely that he never intended to earn a degree, let alone to become a priest, as has sometimes been suggested. Rather, he sought to improve his Latin and to earn a broad humanist education before entering his family’s trade.¹⁴ The years Rütiner spent in Basle seem to have been formative in many respects, and it is likely that they also laid the foundations for his loyal support of the Reformation. In Basle, he was exposed to texts by leading humanists and critics of the papacy. He attended lectures by Melchior Macrinus and Konrad Pellikan, both of whom later became important supporters of Protestant reform.¹⁵ He also spent his first years in Basle in the company of a man who was to play a significant role in bringing the Reformation to St Gall: Johannes Kessler (1502/3–74), a fellow citizen and childhood friend of Rütiner, who later went on to study theology in Wittenberg and was among the first laymen to hold public Bible readings in St Gall.¹⁶ Late in 1524 or early in 1525, around the time when the Reformation was starting to take root in his hometown, Rütiner returned to St Gall to take up his family’s trade. At first, he lived with his brother Christian, but by 1526 he was already head of his own household on the Neugasse.¹⁷ Little is known about ¹¹ ‘praeceptor meus amantissimus’. Comm. I.892. Gabriel Beronanus is likely identical with the ‘Gabriel Meyer de Berona’ who matriculated in Basle in 1513/4: Kommentarband, 19–20. ¹² For a full list of the texts copied and annotated by Rütiner in this compilation, see VadSlg, Ms 485, ‘Sammelhandschrift humanistischen Inhalts’, fos. 684r–v. ¹³ Comm. I.81g contains a Greek expression, but otherwise there is little evidence that Rütiner had any more than superficial knowledge of Greek. The only Greek piece in his schoolbook is an extract from Homer’s Odyssey (VadSlg, Ms 485, ‘Sammelhandschrift humanistischen Inhalts’, fos. 555r–569v). Normally, Rütiner read Greek authors in Latin translation; see e.g. VadSlg, Ms 485, ‘Sammelhandschrift humanistischen Inhalts’, fos. 295r–304r, and a collection of prints owned by Rütiner, now in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, which contains Latin translations of sermons by the Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nanzianzus: ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara 18.423, [collection of printed works owned by Johannes Rütiner]. ¹⁴ Kommentarband, 22–3. ¹⁵ Comm. II.156b and I.575. ¹⁶ For evidence that Kessler and Rütiner studied together, see a poem by Kessler dating from 1520 and dedicated to their teacher Atrocianus, which Rütiner wrote down in his schoolbook: VadSlg, Ms 485, ‘Sammelhandschrift humanistischen Inhalts’, fol. 264v and Kommentarband, 21. ¹⁷ StadtASG, AA, 274, ‘Steuerbuch 1525’, fol. 31r, lists Rütiner as part of his brother’s household, whereas he is listed as head of his own household in StadtASG, AA, 275, ‘Steuerbuch 1526’, fol. 24r.

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Rütiner’s business. While he regularly writes about the linen trade and the successes (and failures) of his fellow guildsmen, he only mentions a single purchase of his own.¹⁸ One entry in his notebooks at least gives us an idea of the size of his business after a few years in the trade. In 1528, he tells us, he presented twenty-three pieces of cloth to the linen inspectors: eight were considered altogether unsuitable for bleaching, thirteen only received the town’s third-rate quality seal, and the two pieces which did satisfy the inspectors were downgraded after bleaching.¹⁹ 1528 went down in St Gall history as the year of the ‘rigorous linen examination’, a year in which a group of newly elected inspectors demanded even higher quality standards than usual and many weavers struggled to survive. This entry nevertheless gives us a hint of the scale of Rütiner’s business that year: twenty-three pieces of linen corresponded roughly to the number produced by two to three weavers.²⁰ Considering that Rütiner had entered the linen trade only four years earlier, that was a respectable number, but it certainly did not place him among the ranks of his most successful fellow guildsmen, some of whom employed over twenty weavers and produced more than one hundred pieces of linen per year.²¹ There is no evidence that Rütiner engaged in any longdistance trading either. In fact, in the years in which he wrote his notebooks, he hardly seems to have travelled at all. Rütiner did not know the area around Lake Zurich well, and he could not even recall the route to the nearby town of Constance with any certainty: when he listed the villages through which one passed on the way back to St Gall, he put them in the wrong order.²² Rütiner’s regular journeys only took him to the nearby markets in Wil, Lichtensteig, Bischofszell, and Rorschach, where local farmers sold yarn and raw linen.²³ At some time between 1526 and 1528, Rütiner married Engla Keiser, whose father and brothers were in the linen business as well. Together they had six children: Salomon (b. 24 September 1528), Isaak (b. 28 August 1530, d. 11 October 1531), Sara (b. 9 December 1533), Isaak II (b. 23 January 1535), Johannes (b. 4 August 1536), and Barbara (b. 17 November 1538).²⁴ Despite the fact that most of his children’s births fall into the ten-year period in which Rütiner wrote

¹⁸ Comm. II.294e. For more general remarks on the linen trade and his fellow weavers’ businesses, see esp. Comm. I.935, as well Comm. I.84; II.81f/g; II.162c; II.206c; II.210; II.322; II.372m. ¹⁹ Comm. I.84. On the ‘rigorous linen examination’, see also Comm. II.162c. On St Gall’s linen inspection and quality seals, see Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel, ii, 20–1. ²⁰ Hans Conrad Peyer estimates that one weaver produced 10–12 pieces of cloth per year, each 130 ells (approx. 97.5m) long. Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel, ii, 15. ²¹ According to Rütiner, Heinrich Locher employed 17 weavers who produced a total of 107 pieces of cloth, while Conrad Scheiwiler employed 23 weavers. Comm. II.81f. ²² Comm. I.495 and II.389. ²³ For evidence of Rütiner travelling to these towns, see e.g. Comm. I.282; I.831; I.833; I.838; I.906; I.949c; II.1; II.2; II.4; II.31; II.37–8; II.162c. On the role of these towns within St Gall’s linen trade, see Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel, ii, 5 and 11. ²⁴ StadtASG, AA, 510, ‘Taufbuch St. Laurenzen und St. Mangen, Band 1: 1527–1566’, pp. 51, 108, 201, 230, 261, 301.

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the Commentationes, his family plays only a minor role in the notebooks, and he only mentions two of his children at all.²⁵ Similarly, Rütiner only speaks of his political career in passing and with great modesty. When he became an assistant to the linen inspectors in 1534, he made sure to stress that he owed his election to an unexpected vacancy.²⁶ That same year, he was elected weavers’ Elfer, one of eleven men representing the weavers’ guild on the Great Council.²⁷ Although the Great Council’s powers were limited, this office marked an important step in Rütiner’s career, not least because, as we shall see in the next chapter, his fellow Elfer soon ranked among his most frequent informants. In August 1539, his name appears on a list of councillors who investigated a sermon by the St Gall minister Furtmüller concerning the invalidity of marriage vows that lacked parental consent.²⁸ Rütiner seems to have proven himself in this investigation, for less than a year later he was chosen to serve alongside his friend Johannes Kessler and the mayor, Joachim Vadianus, as one of the five lay and four clerical judges of the marriage court. Rütiner was by far the least experienced among them, and it is likely that his prominent contacts helped him secure this position.²⁹ He left the marriage court when he was elected to serve on the Small Council in 1549.³⁰ This was to be the peak of his political career, and he remained a councillor until 1555, shortly before his death in 1556 or 1557.³¹ From the tax records we know that his wealth increased fairly steadily throughout his life (Fig. 1.2). The only noticeable leaps in the graph—from 1541 to 1542 and 1549 to 1550—roughly coincide with the years in which he was appointed to a new public office. At the end of his life, he belonged to the richest 15 per cent of the town’s taxpayers.³² With a few exceptions, Rütiner wrote about anything but himself—a fact which not only sets the Commentationes apart from the many more famous ego-documents produced by Rütiner’s contemporaries, but also makes it rather ²⁵ Rütiner writes entries on the birth of Sara (Comm. I.524) and the death of Isaak (Comm. I.354; I.455). ²⁶ Comm. I.497. ²⁷ StadtASG, AA, 919a, Scherer and Huber, ‘Ämterbuch’, p. 26. ²⁸ StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 25. August 1533–26. September 1541’, p. 302, 29 Aug. 1539. ²⁹ Apart from Martin Salzmann, about whom little is known, the panel of lay judges consisted of the mayor, Vadianus, the councillor Ambrosius Aigen, and the former head of the St Gall court, Jakob Rütlinger. The panel of clerical judges included Dominik Zili, Matthäus Altherr (also known as Ab der Rüti), Johannes Kessler, and Hulrich Ramsauer, all of whom rank among Rütiner’s most frequent contacts. See Ch. 2, and StadtASG, AA, 919a, Scherer and Huber, ‘Ämterbuch’, pp. 109–10. ³⁰ Ibid. p. 7. ³¹ StadtASG, AA, 916, ‘Regimentsbuch der Stadt St. Gallen, Band 1: Rats- und Gerichtsämter, 1378–1798’, p. 21; Kommentarband, 27 and 35. A few more public offices allegedly held by Rütiner are listed in the Stemmatologia Sangallensis (StadtASG, Johann Jacob Scherrer and Jacob Huber, ‘Stemmatalogia Sangallensis oder Geschlecht-Register aller in der Stadt St. Gallen verbürgerten und sich noch im Wesen findenden Geschlechtern, von ihrem Ursprung, soweit man auf denselben kommen können, in genealogischer Ordnung hergeleitet bis auf das Jahr 1732 von Johann Jacob Scherrer und bis auf jetzige Zeiten fortgesetzt von Jacob Huber’, 27 vols, 1752–69). However, I have been unable to find any evidence of Rütiner holding these additional offices. ³² Höhener, Bevölkerung und Vermögensstruktur, 71, fig. 4.

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Ib 1500 1000 500

1526 1527 1528 1529 1530 1531 1532 1533 1534 1535 1536 1537 1538 1539 1540 1541 1542 1543 1544 1545 1546 1547 1548 1549 1550 1551 1552 1553 1554 1555 1556

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Rütiner’s taxable assets

Fig. 1.2. Rütiner’s taxable assets from his first appearance in the tax records as head of his own household (1526) until his death. Based on data from StadtASG, AA, 275–296d, ‘Steuerbücher 1526–1556’. Note: Rütiner’s wealth was calculated from the taxes he paid each year and the yearly tax rate of 0.25%. St Gall’s citizens were taxed based on their own estimates of their assets (Höhener, Bevölkerung und Vermögensstruktur, 15–17). Rütiner’s actual wealth might therefore have been slightly greater than suggested by the tax records. The gaps in the graph are due to the loss of the tax records from 1528, 1539–40, and 1554–5.

difficult to answer even some of the simplest questions about his life.³³ A close reading of his notebooks and a few other sources, however, can add some flesh to the bare bones of the biography that emerges from the archival record sketched above. In his writing, Rütiner appears as a loyal supporter of the Reformation. He considered those still adhering to the old faith to be ‘enemies of the Gospel’,³⁴ and his portrayal of Catholics clearly echoes Protestant propaganda: the Commentationes are full of stories about lecherous and greedy Catholic clergy and dismissive remarks about the old faith’s excessively pompous rituals and processions.³⁵ Indeed, Rütiner carefully distances himself from Catholic doctrine throughout the notebooks. His notes on a conversation about Purgatory, for instance, indicate that St Galllers now looked back on their former views in disbelief. ‘Look . . . at our blindness. Why did we feed the priests at the time?’, Rütiner quotes the Protestant minister Altherr, adding: ‘It was well said. Nobody ³³ Examples of contemporary ego-documents in which the ‘ego’ plays a decidedly larger role include the famous Buch Weinsberg by Hermann von Weinsberg of Cologne (1518–87), or the Trachtenbuch by the Augsburg merchant Matthäus Schwarz (1497–1574). On von Weinsberg, see most recently Matthew Lundin, Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World (London, 2012); on Schwarz, see e.g. Valentin Groebner, ‘Inside Out: Clothes, Dissimulation, and the Arts of Accounting in the Autobiography of Matthäus Schwarz, 1496–1574’, Representations, 66 (1999), 100–21. ³⁴ ‘Aduersarij euangelio’. Comm. I.412. ³⁵ For criticism of the clergy, see e.g. Comm. II.39, II.296c and II.372f; for criticism of Catholic ritual and processions, see e.g. Comm. I.762, I.936, II.138 and II.400g.

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scolded him.’³⁶ Rütiner’s desire to distance himself from Catholicism even extended to terms associated with the old faith. When he wrote about the ritual objects saved by the St Gall abbot as he fled from the reformed town, the list included, among other things, ‘monstrances, as they call them, for the Eucharist’.³⁷ Little more than a decade after the Reformation had started to take root in St Gall, Rütiner thus described Catholic doctrine and ritual objects as though they were completely alien to the town’s inhabitants.³⁸ Yet the distance separating Protestant St Gallers from Catholicism and their own Catholic past was certainly neither as wide nor as insurmountable as Rütiner has us (and perhaps himself) believe. With the exception of the few years between 1529 and 1531, during which the St Gall abbot was in exile, Protestant St Gall continued to share the confined space within its walls with the Catholic abbey, and was moreover surrounded by the prince-abbot’s territory (Fig. 1.1). Much to the distress of St Gall’s Protestant citizens and authorities, Catholic processions regularly penetrated the town’s space on their way to the abbey.³⁹ The Catholic objects and rituals described by Rütiner as foreign were thus not only familiar to him from his youth; they also remained visible all around. Perhaps, then, it was the palpable, continuing presence of Catholicism in St Gall, not its absence, which made it necessary for Rütiner to write about it as if it were a distant memory. In contrast to his depiction of Catholicism, Rütiner’s views on Anabaptism were much more nuanced. These were not ‘enemies of the Gospel’, but rather people who had misunderstood it. Although he sometimes wrote of the ‘madness of the Anabaptists’ or the ‘heresy of Anabaptism’,⁴⁰ he also retained a lot of sympathy for those who were persuaded by its teachings, and seems to have objected to their violent persecution. On several occasions he reports executions of Anabaptists in much detail and with great compassion, indirectly pointing out the irony of a crowd of sinners and adulterers condemning those who had only ‘talked a little about God’.⁴¹ When the former Anabaptist Felix Hottinger told Rütiner about his family’s martyrdom when they met on the road to Wil one day, Rütiner even stressed his emotional response to Hottinger’s story: ‘As he told me

³⁶ ‘videte . . . cecitatem nostram/cur nutriuimus sacrificulos eo tempore [ ] bene/dictum fuit [ ] nemo obiurgauit’. Comm. II.296c. On the changing views on Purgatory in Protestant St Gall, see Alfred Ehrensperger, Der Gottesdienst in der Stadt St. Gallen, im Kloster und in den fürstäbtischen Gebieten vor, während und nach der Reformation (Zurich, 2012), 51–4. ³⁷ ‘monstrantia vt vo/cant Eucharistiae’. Comm. I.529. See similarly Comm. I.541. ³⁸ Similar phrasing can also be found in the chronicle of Rütiner’s contemporary Hermann Miles; see Hermann Miles, Die Chronik des Hermann Miles, ed. Ernst Götzinger and Traugott Schiess (Mitteilungen zur vaterländischen Geschichte 28, St Gall, 1902), 275–385, here e.g. 355. ³⁹ E.g. Comm. I.594 and II.400g. See also Comm. I.410–12, where Rütiner personally observes some of his fellow citizens performing Catholic rituals in St Gall. ⁴⁰ ‘in/sania catabaptistarum’ and ‘h/eresi catabaptismi’; Comm. II.306e and II.347 respectively. ⁴¹ ‘cum parum [sic] de deo locuti’. Thus Rütiner quotes one martyr without calling the observation into question; Comm. I.186.

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about the farewell from his father and sisters, he moved me to tears.’⁴² While Rütiner’s attitude towards individual Anabaptists may seem surprisingly empathetic, it reflects the broader sentiment towards the movement in St Gall. Although adult baptism and other Anabaptist practices were forbidden in St Gall following a 1525 disputation, Anabaptists met with much more sympathy than Catholics and were not persecuted as violently as elsewhere.⁴³ Not a single Anabaptist was executed on account of their faith, and many of them continued their political careers after 1525—including one of Rütiner’s regular informants, the weaver and linen trader Jakob Spichermann.⁴⁴ Rütiner’s views on religion were thus fairly conventional for Protestant St Gall, and the same is true for his opinions on other matters. To a large extent they echo the views of the Protestant town council. On several occasions he criticized gambling and excessive drinking, as for instance when his neighbour Marcus Stucheler bragged of his drunken adventures ‘as if [they were] noble deeds. At last it has reached the point where these are the famous deeds of the nobles with which knights are adorned.’⁴⁵ Moderation, hard work, domestic prudence, and the promotion of the common good, on the other hand, were presented as ideals worth striving towards.⁴⁶ Cautionary tales about men who had lost their fortunes through gambling and extravagant lifestyles circulated in great numbers and were contrasted with the biographies of those who had acquired moderate but lasting wealth through honest work.⁴⁷ In several entries, Rütiner pointed out the selfish behaviour of mercenary commanders who were only interested in pensions and personal profit, and contrasted this with an idealized past in which commanders had sought to promote the good of the community by negotiating tax exemptions

⁴² ‘mihi fletum narrando patris et sororum valedictionem/concitauit’. Comm. II.1. ⁴³ As Heinold Fast argues, the large Anabaptist movement which had grown out of Kessler’s public Bible readings held a decisively different status from that of similar movements in other reformed towns—partly because of the kinship ties between Vadianus and the leading Anabaptist Konrad Grebel, and partly because Anabaptism enjoyed great support among several members of the Great Council: Heinold Fast, ‘Die Sonderstellung der Täufer in St. Gallen und Appenzell’, Zwingliana, 11/4 (1960), 223–40. According to Ingeborg Wissmann, Kessler, like Rütiner, saw Catholicism as the main enemy. He rarely called Anabaptists heretics, but depicted them as people who had misunderstood the Gospel: Ingeborg Wissmann, Die St. Galler Reformationschronik des Johannes Kessler (1503–1574): Studien zum städtischen Reformationsverständnis und seinen Wandlungen im 16. Jahrhundert in der Sabbata (Stuttgart, 1972), 17 and 145. ⁴⁴ A long account of Spichermann’s spiritual development and his imprisonment in 1525 can be found in Comm. II.106b. See also Fast, ‘Sonderstellung der Täufer’, 231. ⁴⁵ ‘tamquam generosa fa/cinora [ ] Huc tandem ventum vt haec nobelium/praeclara gesta quibus in equites ornantur’. Comm. II.299d. See also Comm. II.36 and II.330d. ⁴⁶ This comes out strongly in an entry in which Rütiner contrasts a monk’s excessive whoring and idleness with what he considers more appropriate, namely ‘care for the household’ (‘curis dome/sticis’; Comm. II.372f.), and in an entry in which he claims that a father’s ‘wrongfully acquired riches’ (‘diuitiae male partae’) turned his son into a criminal, and his daughter into a whore (Comm. II.39). ⁴⁷ See e.g. Comm. I.694–5; II.81f; II.196; II.269; II.372m; II.409l.

    ‘ ’

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for all St Gallers in exchange for their services. ‘Oh, the faithful citizens who prefer the common [good] to the private,’ he exclaimed in this context.⁴⁸ Rütiner’s primary interest lay in recording, not commenting on, the events around him. Remarks such as the ones discussed above are rare and appear primarily towards the end of the notebooks. Moreover, even when we do find them, his comments often remain somewhat stereotypical. To get a clearer picture of the man who left behind such an extraordinary collection of stories—many of which, moreover, speak of anything but moderation—it is not sufficient to study the few instances where he explicitly states his opinion. Rather, it also seems necessary to take a closer look at his interests and activities, and in particular those on which he spent most of his free time and money. Even after Rütiner had left university, he retained a keen interest in books. There is evidence that he used the St Gall abbey library—to which he referred as ‘our library’—while it was under the town’s control.⁴⁹ After Abbot Diethelm’s return to St Gall in 1532, Rütiner made snide comments about the abbot’s lack of appreciation and care for the wealth of knowledge in his possession, which stood in stark contrast with the abbot’s avid interest in other forms of wealth.⁵⁰ Perhaps it was a lack of access to the abbey library after the abbot’s return that inspired Rütiner to draw up and copy catalogues of numerous private libraries in St Gall and elsewhere from 1534 onwards.⁵¹ He also started a collection of his own: when Johannes Kessler addressed Rütiner in his Reformation chronicle, the Sabbata, he praised his friend for accumulating ‘a precious treasure’ of learned books.⁵² Since Kessler clearly intended to flatter his friend, this may well have been something of an exaggeration. Yet evidence from the Commentationes indeed confirms that Rütiner was in regular contact with booksellers and bookbinders, and bears witness to his keen interest in purchasing books.⁵³ One particularly lucky purchase ⁴⁸ ‘O fideles ci/ues publicum priuato praeferentes’. Comm. II.244c. For an introduction to the concept of the common good, see Peter Hibst, Utilitas Publica—Gemeiner Nutz—Gemeinwohl: Untersuchungen zur Idee eines politischen Leitbegriffs von der Antike bis zum späten Mittelalter (Frankfurt a.M., 1991). ⁴⁹ ‘bib/liotheca nostra’. Comm. I.505. See also Comm. I.219; I.248. ⁵⁰ Comm. I.908. Similar accusations were made by Vadianus and Kessler: Conradin Bonorand, ‘Bücher und Bibliotheken in der Beurteilung Vadians und seiner St. Galler Freunde’, Zwingliana, 14/ 2–3 (1974/5), 89–108, here esp. 102–3. In a work dedicated to Vadianus and dating from 1531, Kessler even has the library herself complain about the carelessness and infidelity of her husband, the abbey: Johannes Kessler, Die Rede der Klosterbibliothek zu St. Gallen an den Herrn Bürgermeister Joachim von Watt MDXXXI, ed. and trans. Ernst Gerhard Rüsch (St Gall, 1984), esp. 19–27. ⁵¹ VadSlg, Ms 80, Johannes Rütiner, ‘Bücherverzeichnisse’. The volume includes a list of the books owned by the Zurich physician Conrad Gesner, the St Gall minister Wolfgang Wetter, the merchant Bartholome Schobinger (a friend of Rütiner), and Leonhard Beck, a friend of Vadianus in Augsburg. For an admiring description of Beck’s library, see also Comm. II.215. ⁵² ‘ainen kostlichen schatz [der gelerten buocher]’. Johannes Kessler, Sabbata: Mit kleineren Schriften und Briefen, ed. Emil Egli and Rudolf Schoch (St Gall, 1902), 16 (= fol. 11b). ⁵³ Rütiner’s informants included the itinerant bookseller David from Wil, the bookbinder and bookseller Anton, the bookseller Andreas Dick (also known as Pingius), and the Basle printer Johannes Oporinus; see e.g. Comm. I.370–1, I.511, I.557, I.932e–f, II.79; II.129; II.391d. Rütiner’s friendship with Oporinus is confirmed in letters to Vadianus, where Oporinus asks the mayor to

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is documented in two separate notebook entries: upon his death, a schoolmaster with ambitions to study medicine left behind a ‘beautiful treasure of new books of every kind’.⁵⁴ Since his heirs had no use for the books, Vadianus, the scholar and merchant Bartholome Schobinger, and Rütiner were able to buy the books at a good price and divide them amongst themselves.⁵⁵ Scattered across several Swiss libraries, five volumes of printed texts from Rütiner’s collection survive. They include a volume containing a potpourri of historical, geographical, mathematical, and medical works; an edition of Augustine’s Sermones in two volumes; and two volumes containing short theological works and translations by contemporary reformers such as Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Oecolampadius.⁵⁶ Although few in number, the volumes that survive from Rütiner’s collection suggest a broad interest in scholarship. Other sources, however, show that he was particularly interested in history. He was familiar with several popular printed chronicles, and copied parts of them in a volume which was later inherited by his youngest daughter, Barbara.⁵⁷ Numerous activities pursued by Rütiner in his spare time, moreover, bear witness to his keen interest in etymology, numismatics, and antiquarianism, all subjects which were regularly discussed among his humanist friends.⁵⁸ With Kessler, Vadianus, and the pastor Matthäus Altherr, Rütiner sometimes studied ancient coins, trying to decipher their inscriptions and depictions in order to date them.⁵⁹ Time and again, he also recorded detailed descriptions of local castles and ruins, most of which were passed on to him by Johannes Maier, who, like Rütiner, had studied at university before taking up a trade.⁶⁰ On one occasion, Maier even took Rütiner on a veritable tour of the castles along the route from Bischofszell to St Gall—to Singenberg, Heidelberg, Blidegg, and

pass on greetings to his ‘old friends’ Kessler and Rütiner: Emil Arbenz and Hermann Wartmann (eds), Die Vadianische Briefsammlung der Stadtbibliothek St. Gallen, 7 vols (St Gall, 1890–1913), here v, 406–7, no. 943: Johannes Oporinus to Vadianus, 1 Feb. 1537. See also Kommentarband, 4. On Rütiner’s book purchases, see Comm. I.571 and I.932b and Rudolf Gamper, ‘Bartlome Schobinger’, in Rudolf Gamper and Thomas Hofmeier (eds), Alchemische Vereinigung. Das Rosarium Philosophorum und sein Besitzer Bartlome Schobinger (Zurich, 2014), 124–92, here 165–7. ⁵⁴ ‘pulcherrimam librorum/thesaurum omni genere nouorum’. Comm. I.571. ⁵⁵ Comm. I.571 and I.932b. See also Gamper, ‘Bartlome Schobinger’, 165–7. ⁵⁶ VadSlg, Inc 808, ‘Sammelband’ (including Gaius Julius Solinus’ Polyhistor, Pomponius Mela’s De situ orbis libri tres, Heinrich Glarean’s De geographia, Jordanus Nemorarius’ De ponderibus, and Niccoló Leoniceno’s De Plinii et plurium alorium medicorum in medicina erroribus); ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara 2.36–2.37, Aurelius Augustinus, Sermones, ed. Sebastian Brandt, 2 vols (Basle: Johannes Amerbach, 1494–5); ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara 18.423; ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara III.B.94, [collection of printed works owned by Johannes Rütiner]. ⁵⁷ Comm. II.244c (Sebastian Franck); Comm. I.505, I.791–2, I.859, II.159 (Beatus Rhenanus); Comm. I.789; II.374 (Petermann Etterlin). See also VadSlg, Ms 77, ‘Chroniken zur St. Galler Geschichte’, which contains, among other things, extracts from Johannes Stumpf ’s chronicle and other works copied by Rütiner between 1547 and 1552. ⁵⁸ On etymology and ancient languages, see e.g. Comm. I.118; I.597; I.789; II.386. On history, see Comm. I.219; I.226c. On numismatics, see Comm. II.240, II.326, II.358. ⁵⁹ For the most detailed description of this activity, see Comm. II.326. ⁶⁰ See e.g. Comm. I.698–706; I.728; I.734; II.5; II.139. On Johannes Maier’s career, see Comm. I.954c and II.7c.

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Alt-Ramschwag—during which the two men carefully examined the ruins: ‘The width of the tower [of Alt-Ramschwag]: my height and four fingers.’⁶¹ Despite Rütiner’s interest in history and ‘books of every kind’, we should not think of him as a scholar. When his daily business offered him an opportunity to pursue such pastimes, he took it—as for instance when he made a small detour from his regular route between the market in Bischofszell and St Gall to visit the nearby castles. Although he was interested in etymology, there is no indication that he read much Greek, and even his Latin was crude and full of mistakes. In fact, even when Rütiner bought learned books, he was depicted by his friend Kessler not as a scholar, but rather as a ‘prudent housekeeper’ who prepared for harsher times by stocking up on wine and grain in times of plenty.⁶² Buying books was at once a means to confirm one’s status as a member of the educated elite and a potentially worthwhile investment. It was therefore worth pursuing despite the fact that Rütiner, as Kessler claims, did not have time to read his books from cover to cover: And if you must hear the mockers say: ‘What do you want with so many books, you can never read them all’, you always answer according to your gentle nature: ‘Although I may not read them all in their entirety, I read a little bit in each of them.’⁶³

Indeed, of the surviving printed texts that were once owned by Rütiner, only Solinus’ Polyhistor, Oecolampadius’ In Genesim enarratio, and Augustine’s Sermones contain underlining and marginalia, and in the former two works even these are limited to a few pages.⁶⁴ Yet besides providing him with material for his own reading—thus Kessler continues to quote Rütiner—his collection of books might also have offered him an opportunity to contribute to the common good: ‘I can also show and lend [my books] to others and let them grow into something beneficial and good. Perhaps this is my calling and office, the benefit and fruit yielding from my studies, to assist other people’s learning in this way, given that I do not otherwise teach or preach; for there are still too many who despise the

⁶¹ ‘turris/densitas meae Staturae et 4 digito/rum’. Comm. I.906. On all of these castles and for a map depicting them lined up along the Sitter on the way from Bischofszell to St Gall, see Gottlieb Felder, Die Burgen der Kantone St. Gallen und Appenzell. Erster Teil (St Gall, 1907), esp. 95. ⁶² ‘fürsichtigen hushaltern’. Kessler, Sabbata, 26 (= fol. 12a). See similarly Kessler, Rede der Klosterbibliothek, 49. ⁶³ ‘Und so du die spötter hören muost sagen: was wiltu mit so vil buocher thuon? du magst die niemer durchlesen, antwortestu alweg nach diner sänftmuott: Ob ich die nit alle durchlis, lis ich uß ietlichem etwas’. Kessler, Sabbata, 28 (= fol. 11b). ⁶⁴ VadSlg, Inc 808, ‘Sammelband’; ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara III.B.94; ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara 2.36–2.37.

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     purchase of books as an unnecessary, dispensable thing, or who, worthy and appreciative of them, cannot buy them on account of their poverty.’⁶⁵

In Kessler’s view, then, by collecting books and lending them to others, Rütiner was able to turn his university education into something productive in spite of the fact that he had not become a scholar or a preacher himself. In many respects, Rütiner was thus a rather unremarkable figure: he owned a medium-sized business; for the most part he shared the local majority’s views on religious, social, and economic issues; and though he may have read more than most of his fellow guildsmen, he was more of a collector than a scholar. Yet it may have been precisely Rütiner’s mediocrity and his humble ambitions which produced some of the unique characteristics of the Commentationes.

The Commentationes in context ‘At Christmas [15]29, I began.’⁶⁶ With these words, and without any further explanation, Rütiner started his notebooks. Over the next ten years, he filled hundreds of pages with densely written notes in Latin, covering seemingly everything from local marital conflicts to the war against the Ottomans, from the struggles of Protestant reformers to his neighbour’s digestive problems. What inspired Rütiner to take these notes? The title he chose for his notebooks might give us a first clue. His notebooks are now commonly—and misleadingly— known as a Diarium (diary), a title given to them when they were rediscovered in the eighteenth century.⁶⁷ Written across the fore-edges of both volumes, the original title is unfortunately no longer decipherable with any certainty. Commentationes (studies, treatise) is the most common transcription, which is why it is used throughout this book. The earliest author to mention Rütiner’s notebooks, however, read it as commentarii (notes, recordings).⁶⁸ If this was indeed the original title, it may well have been inspired by Pliny the Elder’s commentarii described in the widely read letters of Pliny the Younger.⁶⁹

⁶⁵ ‘kain och anderen die fürsetzen, lichen und zuo nutz und guottem erschießen laßen. Das ist villicht min beruof und ampt, nutz und frucht uß minem studieren erwachsen, so ich niemat sunst mit leren und predigen, doch den weg anderen ander zu leren behulfen sin; dann nach deren nun zuo vil sind, so den buocherkof als ain unnutz, überflüßig ding verachtend oder, die den werd und hoch achtend, zuo kofen von armuott nit haben.’ Kessler, Sabbata, 16 (= fos. 11b–12a). ⁶⁶ ‘Natiuitatis 29 incepi’. Comm. I.1. ⁶⁷ Though Ernst Gerhard Rüsch disagreed with the characterization of Rütiner’s notebooks as a Diarium (or as a chronicle, for that matter), he used the term in his edition to avoid confusion: Kommentarband, 37 and 39. ⁶⁸ Gottlieb von Haller, Bibliothek der Schweizer-Geschichte und aller Theile, so dahin Bezug haben, 6 vols (Bern, 1785–8), here iii, 170. See also Kommentarband, 45–8. ⁶⁹ Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Briefe: Epistularum Libri Decem, ed. and trans. Helmut Kasten (Dusseldorf, 1967), 140 (= Pliny the Younger, Epistulae, III.5). A 16th-c. Ms copy of Pliny’s epistles can

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These commentarii were ‘second-order notes . . . sorted under topical headings and copied onto papyrus for long-term preservation from an earlier stage of temporary notes’.⁷⁰ Ann Blair has shown that the greater availability of paper and information, combined with an acute awareness for how much knowledge had been lost since antiquity, formed the fertile soil on which early modern note-taking practices grew. Students of Latin such as Rütiner were not only instructed to annotate the texts they read in class but also encouraged to take notes while reading independently and, in a second step, to copy and rearrange their notes thematically.⁷¹ Although Rütiner primarily recorded what he heard, not what he read, and though he never attempted to order his notes by subject matter, his note-taking practice may nevertheless have been influenced by the model note-takers presented to him in his readings and the instructions he had been given as a student.⁷² Historiographical practices in St Gall provided another source of inspiration. When Rütiner began taking notes, his friend Johannes Kessler was already working on a Reformation chronicle, the Sabbata, and the St Gall mayor Joachim Vadianus had just started a Diarium in which he recorded current events.⁷³ Both men have been credited with inspiring Rütiner’s notebooks.⁷⁴ Yet Rütiner, Kessler, and Vadianus were part of a much larger phenomenon that saw numerous St Gallers take up writing in the late 1520s and 1530s. Six contemporary chronicles and diaries survive either in their original form or in the form of a copy,⁷⁵ and at least three more have been lost (Table 1.1).⁷⁶ be found in the Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, Cod. Sang. 896, C. Plinius, ‘Epistolarum liber I–III’, and two early 16th-c. editions of Pliny the Younger’s letters survive in the Vadianische Sammlung (VadSlg, Inc 764 and VadSlg, Inc 758). ⁷⁰ Ann Blair, ‘The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe’, Intellectual History Review, 20/3 (2010), 303–16, here 307. ⁷¹ Ibid. 309–13. ⁷² In terms of form and genre, the Commentationes are thus much more closely related to Vadianus’ Epitome, a collection of notes on which the humanist relied for his Grössere Chronik der Äbte (Great Chronicle of the Abbots), than to Kessler’s Sabbata: much like Rütiner’s notes, the Epitome was not ordered chronologically, but instead structured by the logic of the historical sources Vadianus consulted. The Epitome was published alongside the Diarium in von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, 165–226 (see also Ernst Götzinger’s introduction to von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, pp. v–x). ⁷³ von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, 227–528. ⁷⁴ Rüsch, ‘Zwingli im Diarium’, 293. Wilhelm Ehrenzeller even suggested that Rütiner might have named his notes after Vadianus’ Diarium: Ehrenzeller, St. Gallische Geschichte, iii, 39. This argument clearly does not hold in light of the fact that the title Diarium was only added in the 18th century. ⁷⁵ All surviving diaries and chronicles have since been published in print. In addition to those by Kessler and Vadianus, see Rudolf Sailer, Die Tagebücher Rudolf Sailers aus der Regierungszeit der Äbte Kilian German und Diethelm Blarer (12. August 1529 bis 20. November 1532), ed. Joseph Müller (Mitteilungen zur vaterländischen Geschichte 33/2, St Gall, 1913), 241–549; Gabriel P. Meier, ‘Bericht über das Frauenkloster St. Leonhard in St. Gallen von der Frau Mutter Wiborada Fluri, 1524–1538’, Anzeiger für schweizerische Geschichte, 13/1 (1915), 14–44; Fridolin Sicher, Fridolin Sichers Chronik, ed. Ernst Götzinger (Mitteilungen zur vaterländischen Geschichte 20, St Gall, 1885), 1–284; Miles, Chronik. ⁷⁶ See Ehrenzeller, Geschichte der Stadt St. Gallen, 130, and Feller and Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz, i, 220–39, for an (incomplete) listing of the St Gall chronicles of this period. For a discussion of the St Gall chronicles, see Renate Frohne, ‘Städtische Chronistik zur Zeit der

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It is no coincidence that so many St Gallers chose to write about their times in the late 1520s and early 1530s. The Reformation, and in particular the dramatic events of 1529 and 1531, inspired many of them to put pen to paper.⁷⁷ The year 1529 in particular seemed to mark a new era in the history of St Gall: over the course of a few months, an iconoclastic mob stormed the abbey cathedral, the fatally ill Abbot Franz fled St Gall and died shortly thereafter in exile, and for the first time in its history, the reformed town seized control of the abandoned abbey. Yet the Protestant town’s victory over the abbey was short-lived: during the Second War of Kappel (1531), the Protestant states of the Swiss Confederacy suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Catholic five inner states (fünf innere Orte) and lost their most prominent figure, the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli. The defeat of the Protestant alliance, which was followed by the new abbot’s triumphant return to St Gall in 1532, left many St Gallers completely disillusioned.⁷⁸ By the end of the 1530s, most of the St Gall chroniclers had given up writing; many of their works remained unfinished.⁷⁹ While these dramatic events may have prompted many St Gallers to take up writing, the town’s Protestant chroniclers did not do so independently of one another. Recording the Reformation of St Gall for posterity was, at least in part, a joint project—a project with roots in Rütiner’s wider social circle. All of the Protestant writers listed in Table 1.1 were connected to one another—and to Rütiner—through friendship, kinship, or professional ties.⁸⁰ Moreover, they knew about, and supported, each other’s work. Upon Hermann Miles’ death, Kessler noted that Miles recorded ‘all noteworthy events which happened during his time’, and that his legacy would ‘be accepted with gratitude and . . . never be forgotten’.⁸¹ Vadianus is known to have encouraged Kessler’s work on the

Reformation’, in Werner Wunderlich (ed.), St. Gallen: Geschichte einer literarischen Kultur. Kloster— Stadt—Kanton—Region, 2 vols (St Gall, 1999), i, 299–328, and Ernst Gerhard Rüsch, ‘Städtische Chronistik in St. Gallen in der Reformationszeit’, Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des Bodensees und seiner Umgebung, 112 (1994), 45–57. For a broader overview of German town chronicles in the late medieval and early modern period, see e.g. Peter Johanek (ed.), Städtische Geschichtsschreibung im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2000), and Gamper, ‘Liebe und Zorn’. ⁷⁷ Ibid. 42. See also Sicher, Chronik, 178, and Kessler, Sabbata, 15 (= fol. 11a). ⁷⁸ According to Rütiner and Kessler, Vadianus suffered a breakdown after the Battle of Kappel; see Comm. I.361 and Kessler, Sabbata, 371 (= fol. 390a). ⁷⁹ Gamper, ‘Liebe und Zorn’, 42. ⁸⁰ Rütiner, Kessler, and Hermann Miles were part of the group of learned men and theologians around Vadianus (for the connection between Rütiner and Miles, see Comm. I.785 and I.977; for evidence of the friendship between Miles and Vadianus, see afterword to Miles, Chronik, 364–6). Hermann and Beda Miles may have been related, and the latter is likely identical with the Beda Miles in whose house Kessler held his first Bible readings in 1524 (Kessler, Sabbata, 198–9 (= fos. 125a–6b)). We know that Beda Miles was Rütiner’s neighbour and that he shared intimate secrets with him when they spent the night together at the inn in Wil (StadtASG, AA, 277, ‘Steuerbuch 1529’, fol. 26v; Comm. I.870; I.893g). ⁸¹ ‘aller fürnemen lofen, die sich zu sinen ziten zuogetragen haben; das billich mit dankbarkait anzenemmen und im nimmer solle vergessen werden.’ Kessler, Sabbata, 399 (= fol. 422a).

Protestant Protestant

Physician, mayor

Minister, former Catholic priest Catholic priest, organist at the St Gall abbey Chancellor at the St Gall abbey

Weaver?

Beda Miles

Protestant/ Anabaptist?

n.a.

Protestant

Catholic

Catholic

Chronicle of St Gall since 1423; the period up to 1515 is based on an earlier chronicle Diaries covering Abbot Kilian’s exile (probably commissioned by the abbot) and the beginning of Abbot Diethelm’s reign Record of the nuns’ fight against the reformed town council’s attempts to dissolve their convent Lost; according to Rütiner, Lieb took notes on council business and entries into the monastery (Comm. I.306) Lost; chronicle containing, according to Rütiner, notes on the weather, weddings, executions, and a few political events (Comm. I.754) Lost; the town council considered his chronicle to be harmful to the town’s reputationa

Chronicle of St Gall with focus on Reformation

Diary

Chronicle with focus on the Reformation

Text

StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 9. Dezember 1556–23. September 1557’, fol. 14v, 1 Feb. 1557.

n.a.

Georg Wallen

a

Abbess at the convent St. Leonhard Former Catholic priest

Wiborada Mörli, known as Fluri (d. 1550) Othmar Lieb (d. 1540)

Rudolf Sailer (d. 1531)

Catholic

Protestant

Saddler, minister

Johannes Kessler (1502/3–1574) Joachim Vadianus (1483/4–1551) Hermann Miles (1463–1533)

Fridolin Sicher (1490–1546)

Confession

Occupation

Name

Table 1.1 Chroniclers and diarists in 1530s St Gall

n.a.

n.a.

1490s–?

1524–38

1529–31

Foundation to 1532 1423–1531

1529–33

1523–39

Period covered

30

    

Sabbata,⁸² and Kessler explicitly credited Rütiner with inspiring him to record their turbulent times: Now then, my Johannes, thus you receive what you have often requested of me, namely my chronicle; yet perhaps it is different from what you expected. As you know well, in our various discussions and conversations (which we had together from our youth onwards . . . ), but especially now, after falling into contemplation of this, our wondrous time, we have considered it to be a shameful negligence to let the Lord’s great miraculous deeds pass unnoticed and not to offer ourselves and our own a short memory [gedechtnus] of the same. Due to all your advice . . . I have therefore resolved to record in my free hours the most noteworthy local and foreign histories, as far as they were truthfully reported to me . . . ⁸³

According to Kessler, the resolution to record those ‘wondrous times’ was thus a collective one, emerging from conversations among St Gall’s reformers and their supporters. It was facilitated by the fact that Vadianus, Kessler, and Hermann Miles exchanged extracts of their work in progress.⁸⁴ Rütiner had access to the Sabbata as early as 1534, and he owned hand-copied extracts from both the Sabbata and Vadianus’ Diarium.⁸⁵ Long before many of the St Gall chronicles appeared in print in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they thus circulated in manuscript form among St Gall’s educated elite. There is one glaring hole in the web of connections and cross-references that ties together most of the St Gall chroniclers and diarists, however: nobody, not even Kessler, ever mentions Rütiner’s Commentationes. Since Rütiner’s notebooks contain a lot of compromising information about prominent people in St Gall, including his closest friends, it was certainly not in his interest to share his notes.

⁸² Wissmann, St. Galler Reformationschronik, 15. See also Kessler, Sabbata, 15–16 (= fol. 11b), where Kessler mentions that similar Reformation chronicles were being written by Martin Luther, by the pastors of Zurich, and by Vadianus. ⁸³ ‘Wolhin, min Joannes, so empfach ain mal, das du von mir oftmals begert hast, namlich diß min chronische verzeichnungen; aber villicht anderst, dann du vermainst. Dir ist ja wol wißend under anderen unseren manigfaltigen underredungen und gesprechen (so wir von jugend an . . . mit ananderen gehalten) fürnemlich aber ietzund, so wir fälend in betrachtung diser unser wunderbarlichen zit, vermeintend wir gar ain ufhebliche hinleßigkait sin, also unachtsam die großen wunderwerk Gottes verschinen laßen und nit uns und den unseren doch ain kurze gedechtnus der selbigen stellen. Hierumb ich och durch dinen samethaften ratschlag . . . fürgenommen hab, fürnemste in- und ußländige historien zuo minen gelegnen stunden, so ver ich deren mit warhait bericht wurd, zu verzeichnen’. Kessler, Sabbata, 15 (= fol. 11a). ⁸⁴ See afterword to Götzinger and Schiess (eds), Chronik, 366 and 70–1. On the close collaboration between Kessler and Vadianus in particular, see also Bernhard Stettler’s introduction to Joachim von Watt, Kleinere Chronik der Äbte, ed. Bernhard Stettler (Zurich, 2013), esp. 31–8. ⁸⁵ Rütiner seems to have drawn on the Sabbata on several occasions, and cites it in Comm. I.366 and II.400g. For Rütiner’s copies of extracts from Kessler’s and Vadianus’ works, see VadSlg, Ms 77, ‘Chroniken zur St. Galler Geschichte’ and Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, Cod. Sang. 653, ‘Excerpta ex chronico Vadiani’, which was written in Rütiner’s hand; see Gustav Scherrer, Verzeichnis der Handschriften der Stiftsbibliothek von St. Gallen (Halle, 1875), 213.

    ‘ ’

31

If Kessler had no ‘intention or desire to write publicly for the community, or to make [the Sabbata] known beyond my [family] and yours’⁸⁶—a claim which is clearly at odds with the prestigious character and imposing format of his chronicle—Rütiner’s ambitions were even more modest, and it is likely that he did not envision any readership at all.⁸⁷ Rütiner seems to have been quite successful at keeping his notebooks to himself, and it was indeed in his best interest to do so. In 1556, shortly before Rütiner’s death, the Small Council grew suspicious of its writing citizens. On 20 July, Beda Miles was called before the council and told to hand over his chronicle.⁸⁸ The records do not tell us why the council had looked into Miles and his chronicle in the first place, but we later learn that he had ‘written slanderous and unseemly things to the detriment of the common town’.⁸⁹ It seems that the controversial nature of Miles’ work prompted the council to take a closer look at the town’s other chroniclers. When Miles appeared before the council, he was told to name everyone engaging in similar activities, and it seems that he complied: over the next few days, five more men were called before the council. Both Johannes Kessler and Magnus Murer, who had copied and continued Hermann Miles’ chronicle, had their works scrutinized, while three other men denied having written chronicles and were released under the condition that they keep quiet.⁹⁰ A few months later, in January of 1557, the court scribe Wolfgang Fechter was also summoned and told to hand over all the books and chronicles which had belonged to the late mayor Vadianus. Fechter had previously copied Vadianus’ chronicle; now he was forbidden from writing anything that ‘concerns the common city’ without the council’s knowledge.⁹¹ Although only Beda Miles’ chronicle was found problematic in the end, over the course of a few months most chronicles originating from the circle around Rütiner were thus inspected by the council, either in their original form or in a copy—but the Commentationes were not. It is likely that Rütiner, whose notebooks were probably the most controversial of them all, was spared because nobody knew of their existence. The fact that he kept his notes to himself was not the only glaring difference between Rütiner and the St Gall chroniclers. In contrast to the latter, Rütiner made no attempt at arranging his notes chronologically, let alone thematically. Instead, ⁸⁶ ‘nit des fürnemens nach willens, offenlich in die gemain ze schriben oder ferns dann den minen und dinen kundt ze machen’. Kessler, Sabbata, 15 (= fol. 11a). ⁸⁷ On the representative character of the Sabbata, see also Wissmann, St. Galler Reformationschronik, 20–1, and Rudolf Gamper, ‘Repräsentative Chronikreinschriften in der Reformationszeit’, in Katharina Koller-Weiss and Christian Sieber (eds), Aegidius Tschudi und seine Zeit (Basle, 2002), 269–86, here esp. 276–8. ⁸⁸ StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 30. Dezember 1555–22. Dezember 1556’, fol. 111v, 20 July 1556. ⁸⁹ ‘schmählich und ungeschikht ding geschriben unnd gemainer statt nachteilig’. StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 9. Dezember 1556–23. September 1557’, fol. 18v, 1 Feb. 1557. ⁹⁰ StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 30. Dezember 1555–22. Dezember 1556’, fos. 113v–114v, 21–3 July 1556. ⁹¹ ‘das gemaine statt möchte berüren’. StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 9. Dezember 1556–23. September 1557’, fol. 15r, 25 Jan. 1557.

32

    

he simply recorded information in the order in which it reached him—and because he rarely dated his entries and initially wrote on unbound bundles of paper, even that order was partially lost.⁹² Moreover, many of Rütiner’s notebook entries consist of short, only loosely associated sentences and cryptic references which require additional knowledge to be deciphered. Another obstacle to any potential reader’s engagement with the Commentationes is Rütiner’s decision to write in Latin, a language he had long studied, but not quite mastered. His grammar was faulty and unpolished, and his limited vocabulary regularly forced him to fall back on his German dialect and to intersperse his Latin notes with German phrases.⁹³ Not only censorship but also substantial rewriting and reordering would therefore have been necessary before he could have passed his notes on to a wider audience—if that was ever his intention in the first place. There is reason to believe that in their present from, the Commentationes did not even work properly as a memory aid for the author himself. In contrast to Kessler’s Sabbata, Rütiner’s notebooks contained no subheadings, no marginalia, and no index, and the sheer number of entries would have made it very difficult to retrieve information from the notebooks. Indeed, Rütiner regularly recorded several contradictory accounts of the same event, and he rarely returned to correct earlier entries when new information proved them wrong.⁹⁴ The character of Rütiner’s notes changed noticeably in the second half of the decade, and in particular with the start of his second notebook. In contrast to Kessler, whose account focuses primarily on the early stages of the Reformation and who only throws a cursory glance at the events of the late 1530s, Rütiner seems to have taken particular interest in those years.⁹⁵ Both the length and the total number of entries per year increased, reaching its peak in 1537. At the same time, his notes became more systematic: he started recording the names of his informants, dated his entries more regularly, and largely managed to avoid mixing up notes taken several years apart.⁹⁶ It may be tempting to read these formal

⁹² The first volume starts with a few entries dated to 1528 (Comm. I.1–I.12), continues with notes from 1529 (c. Comm. I.13–I.177), then leaps to 1532 (Comm. I.178, perhaps also I.176 and I.179) before returning to 1529 (c. Comm. I.180–I.261). Later in the same volume, notes from 1532 (c. Comm. I. 294b–I.304) are followed by notes from 1534 (Comm. I.305–c. I.314), before returning to 1532 (Comm. I.315 or I.343–c. I.348). For an attempt at reconstructing the original chronological order of Rütiner’s notes, albeit one which is imprecise in parts, see Kommentarband, 60. ⁹³ E.g. Comm. I.340, in which Rütiner names various items of clothing for which he lacks a Latin equivalent. ⁹⁴ See e.g. Comm. I.356, II.235 and II.360 (on the Battle of Kappel, with differing numbers of casualties); I.834, II.151, and II.361q (on a man from the Thurgau who was buried in a waistcoat containing most of his fortune, with differing accounts of how the money was eventually recovered by his sons); II.274b, II.305, and II.359c (on a man from Roggwil charged with blasphemy, with contradictory information about the exact date of the arrest and the severity of the sentence). ⁹⁵ With the exception of 1537, in which Kessler extensively discusses the Wittenberg Concord of the year before, he dedicates fewer and fewer pages to each year of the late 1530s. ⁹⁶ With the exception of two later additions (Comm. II.89c–e and II.301), the chronological order of Rütiner’s entries remains intact in the second notebook.

    ‘ ’

33

developments as a sign of the Commentationes’ slow transformation from a private memory aid into a much more elaborate project modelled on Kessler’s Sabbata, but the content of Rütiner’s notes defies any such interpretation. It was certainly never Rütiner’s intention to write a chronicle of the St Gall Reformation.⁹⁷ Instead, he recorded any information he considered memorable, and that concerned the mundane details of his fellow citizens’ lives, dirty jokes and petty quarrels just as much as ‘God’s miraculous deeds’. As we shall see over the course of this book, the formal changes in Rütiner’s note-taking practice instead reflect an (only partially successful) attempt at dealing with a growing flood of potentially relevant but increasingly contradictory information. In the spring of 1539, the Commentationes end abruptly: ‘All Elfer’ reads the last entry, but Rütiner never recorded what his fellow guildsmen had told him.⁹⁸ Ernst Gerhard Rüsch speculated that by 1539, Rütiner had either become too busy to continue his notes or was starting to worry about their potentially explosive nature and the harm they could do to his political career.⁹⁹ Yet both hypotheses fall short of explaining why Rütiner, who had worked on the Commentationes with increasing intensity for an entire decade and who had never shied away from recording controversial information, would discontinue his notes from one day to the next. It seems significant that Kessler, too, did not extend the Sabbata beyond 1539. Perhaps, then, by 1539 they both felt that the ‘wondrous times’ had passed and that there were now more important tasks at hand. By 1540, at least, Rütiner, Kessler, and Vadianus shared a new responsibility—this time as judges of the marriage court.¹⁰⁰ It seems curious that in spite of Rütiner’s apparent secrecy, his notebooks not only survived but ultimately did so alongside the chronicles and diaries written by his friends. Today, the Commentationes are part of the Vadianische Sammlung, a collection of medieval and early modern books and manuscripts founded during Rütiner’s lifetime. At the core of the collection lies Vadianus’ private library, which he left to the town shortly before his death in 1551, as well as the more modest book collections of some of the town’s first Protestant ministers. We can only speculate when and how the Commentationes became part of the collection, for they do not appear in the library catalogues before 1740.¹⁰¹ However, we do know that by the early seventeenth century, bequeathing books, manuscripts, and even material objects to the growing library had become a matter of prestige among St Gall’s citizenry and guilds.¹⁰² Moreover, Rütiner’s schoolbook, his

⁹⁷ Rüsch, ‘Städtische Chronistik’, 53. ⁹⁸ ‘Omnes vndenarij’. Comm. II.427. ⁹⁹ Kommentarband, 42–3. ¹⁰⁰ StadtASG, AA, 919a, Scherer and Huber, ‘Ämterbuch’, pp. 109–10. ¹⁰¹ Kommentarband, 45. ¹⁰² On the history of the Vadiana, see Georg Caspar Scherer, Die Stadtbibliothek St. Gallen (Vadiana). 1. Teil: Geschichte der öffentlichen Bibliothek der Stadt St. Gallen, 1551–1801, ed. Hans Fehrlin (St Gall, 1951), esp. 13–14 and 23.

34

    

copies of library catalogues and chronicles, and a compilation of printed texts from his collection all survived in the Vadianische Sammlung alongside the Commentationes. It therefore seems likely that Rütiner’s descendants donated his books and manuscripts to the library some time after his death, perhaps without properly grasping the Commentationes’ controversial nature. In contrast to Kessler, whose Sabbata also ended up in the Vadianische Sammlung, it is doubtful that Rütiner would have approved of his notebooks’ preservation in a public institution. Although his notes may have grown out of contemporary note-taking practices and local historiographical activities, his was a decidedly different project, and indeed, any attempt to press the Commentationes into familiar genres threatens to conceal the peculiarities of this source.¹⁰³ Written in unpolished Latin, lacking chronological order, and containing little selfreflection, and instead a plethora of unflattering stories about St Gall’s elite—and some of Rütiner’s closest friends—the Commentationes were not intended as a personal diary or a chronicle to be handed down to future generations, but as a private collection of information pertinent to Rütiner’s present.

¹⁰³ In the past, the Commentationes have variously, and misleadingly, been described as a diary, chronicle, collectanea, and commonplace book. See e.g. Ehrenzeller, St. Gallische Geschichte, iii, 34–50, or Brunold-Bigler, ‘Historien von Krieg’, 175 and 180).

2 Informants and networks One of the most peculiar features of the Commentationes are the ‘references’ Rütiner recorded for the majority of the entries in his notebooks. It was not unusual for early modern chroniclers and diarists to indicate from time to time which sources and informants they drew upon. In his extensive diaries, the famous Cologne city councillor Hermann von Weinsberg (1518–97) named numerous sources, including oral informants, rumours, prints, and chronicles.¹ The Augsburg chronicler Georg Kölderer (c.1550–1607) not only referenced some of his oral informants with their full names, and many more with their initials, but also inserted some of the pamphlets and broadsheets he drew upon into his chronicle.² Yet Rütiner’s ‘references’, which seem to have grown out of his increasingly systematic approach to note-taking, clearly stand out in number, detail, and form. From around 1534 onwards, Rütiner started to systematically record his sources, often by writing the name of an informant underneath the relevant entry (Fig. 2.1).³ Overall, more than two thirds of the 1,842 entries in the Commentationes are thus linked to one or several informants. These ‘references’ soon became more and more detailed. First, Rütiner started writing down not only one, but several informants, occasionally specifying which part of the story was told by whom. Sometimes he recorded long information chains and traced stories as closely back to their alleged origins as he possibly could. Then he started adding details about the context in which he or his informants had heard a story. Such details could include the place and time of an exchange, a list of the people present, and information on whether a story was shared in writing or orally. Finally, and in particular when gathering information from people he did not know well, he carefully noted any character traits that made them seem reliable: ‘Leonhard, otherwise a taciturn man, related this at the table in Wil, on 5 February, [when] he dined and breakfasted with us.’⁴ ¹ Lundin, Paper Memory, 239–45. ² Mauer, Gemain Geschray, 23–4; 41–2. For further examples, see e.g. Gerhard Diehl, Exempla für eine sich wandelnde Welt: Studien zur norddeutschen Geschichtsschreibung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld, 2000), 188–96; Heidy Greco-Kaufmann, ‘ “Observiert vnd duchgegründet”: Renward Cysat (1545–1614) als Sammler und Vermittler von Wissen’, in Andreas Gardt, Mireille Schnyder, and Jürgen Wolf (eds), Buchkultur und Wissensvermittlung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Berlin, Boston, 2011), 119–30, here 124. ³ Some of his earliest entries are also followed by a name, but these are later additions written in a different ink. ⁴ ‘Leonardus homo alias taciturnus retulit/z Wyl in mensa 5 februarij nobiscum coe/natus et pransus.’ Comm. II.370.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0003

36

    

Fig. 2.1. Johannes Rütiner, page from the Commentationes. Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana St. Gallen, Vadianische Sammlung, Ms 79, fos. 109v–110r.

The care Rütiner took in recording this data, which occasionally borders on the obsessive, indicates that to him this was important information inseparably linked to the stories he recorded. Chapter 5 will discuss the purpose of these references in the context of early modern news-mongering. Here, they will be used to explore Rütiner’s information network and the social contexts in which information was shared in sixteenth-century St Gall. As we shall see, St Gallers relied heavily on personal networks to provide them with news and information of all kinds. Rütiner’s place between two powerful, well-connected, and well-travelled but fairly separate social groups within St Gall thus put him in a prime position for collecting information, and may moreover explain some of the peculiar features of his notebooks.

Rütiner’s information network Who were the 349 people that Rütiner drew upon as he wrote his Commentationes?⁵ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them were men (Table 2.1). This reflects ⁵ I reconstructed Rütiner’s network with the help of a comprehensive relational database containing records for each of the 2,474 people mentioned in the Commentationes and combining them, wherever possible, with a broad range of biographical information and relational data. For the most part this data

  

37

Table 2.1. Male and female informants in the Commentationes

Male informants Female informants Total number of informants

No. of people

Percentage

307 42 349

88 12 100

a broader gender imbalance in Rütiner’s notebooks: the percentage of women mentioned in the Commentationes lies only slightly above that of female informants. Information regarding the professions of Rütiner’s informants is sparser and less conclusive, covering only about a third of the people involved in Rütiner’s network. Nevertheless, the available data suggests that Rütiner drew on informants from all walks of life. Weavers, bleachers, millers, barbers, ministers, printers, peasants, publicans, pedlars, wealthy merchants, a midwife, a washerwoman, and even the St Gall executioner—they all shared stories with Rütiner which he considered worth recording. Although many of Rütiner’s informants were involved in the production and trading of linen, his information network thus stretched far beyond the weavers’ guild, and far beyond the social group to which he himself belonged. The Commentationes and archival records allow us to locate over half of Rütiner’s informants in St Gall, and another 14 per cent in a variety of places within the Swiss Confederacy and southern Germany (Fig. 2.2, left). These included larger towns such as Basle, Zurich, and Constance, but the majority of informants in this second group lived in the various villages surrounding St Gall: in Wittenbach, Straubenzell, Teufen, Rorschach, Wil, Lichtensteig, Bischofszell, and many others. Even though we lack information on the whereabouts of Rütiner’s remaining informants, it is clear that the bulk of his network was distinctly local and concentrated in and around his hometown. If we take a closer look at the type of information exchanges which lay at the heart of Rütiner’s network, we see that they confirm this picture. For the most part, the network was based on oral, face-to-face exchanges of information. Although

is taken from Rütiner’s notebooks themselves. To complement or, where necessary, correct the information given by Rütiner, I have drawn on other sources such as Kessler’s Sabbata, the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, 13 vols (Basle, 2002–14), , accessed 20 Jan. 2021, and the book of public offices of St Gall (StadtASG, AA, 919a, Scherer and Huber, ‘Ämterbuch’). Whenever possible, I reconstructed kinship ties with the help of the Commentationes and the genealogical reference work for St Gall, the Stemmatalogia Sangallensis (StadtASG, Scherrer and Huber, ‘Stemmatalogia Sangallensis’). All economic data is taken from the tax records of St Gall (StadtASG, AA, 227–86, ‘Steuerbücher 1529–1538’). Since taxes were recorded street by street, the tax records may also give us an indication of who lived in a given neighbourhood. In what follows, each entry in the Commentationes which cites a particular informant is counted as one exchange of information. This is a somewhat imperfect unit of measurement, of course: in reality, one entry in the Commentationes may be based on several exchanges, and a single exchange may be cited on several different occasions. However, the number of entries in which an informant is cited may nevertheless indicate the regularity with which they interacted with Rütiner.

38

     52ºN Mengen Memmingen Constance Basle Zurich

47˚N

Kempten

50ºN Latitude

Latitude

48˚N

48ºN

9˚E Longitude

10˚E

Vienna

Basle

St Gall

Sources: Esri, USGS, NOAA

8˚E

Nuremberg

Strasbourg

46ºN 20 km 20 mi

Wittenberg Leipzig Eisfeld

St Gall

Lyon Venice

100 km 50 mi

5˚E

Sources: Esri, USGS, NOAA

10˚E Longitude

15˚E

Fig. 2.2. Locations of Rütiner’s informants (left) and some of their former places of residence (right). Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann. Note: In the interest of readability, two known former places of residence of Rütiner’s informants— Spain and Crete—have not been included in the map on the right.

Table 2.2. Oral and textual sources in the Commentationes No. of entries Entries followed by name of informant only Entries citing oral exchange Entries citing textual source(s): Consulted directly As mediated by informants Unclear Entries without source of information Total no. of entries

959 371 66 10 41 15 446 1,842

Percentage 52.1 20.1 3.6

24.2 100

Rütiner only explicitly cites such exchanges in about 20 per cent of all entries (Table 2.2), the actual number must have been significantly higher, and likely includes most entries which are followed by nothing but the name of an informant. Nothing suggests that he corresponded with his informants, and given that most of them lived in St Gall or close by, there was neither need nor incentive to do so. Rather, Rütiner’s day-to-day activities and his business provided him with plenty of opportunity to meet and talk to a variety of people. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his informants often related stories in convivial contexts such as during dinner and while drinking, and information was also shared when people met on the market square, at the local bathhouse, or in church.⁶ The weavers’ guild

⁶ See e.g. Comm. I.761; I.864; 949c; II.32e; II.159 (over drinks or dinner), Comm. I.204 (at the inn); Comm. I.90; II.52 (on the market square), Comm. I.124; I.137; II.99g (at the bathhouse); Comm. II.400g (in church).

  

39

represented another information hub, as Rütiner gathered information at meetings with his fellow Elfer and in the ‘little chamber’ (hipocaustulum), most likely a meeting chamber in the weavers’ guild hall.⁷ More remarkable, however, are the many stories that Rütiner heard on the road, while travelling to or from Wil, Rorschach, or Lichtensteig.⁸ All three towns were local centres for the production of yarn and raw linen, which were then transported to St Gall to be bleached and sold on the textile market.⁹ Situated between 20 and 30 kilometres from St Gall, the journey there offered small-scale traders like Rütiner plenty of opportunities for long conversations with fellow travellers, as well as for chance encounters. In fact, we owe some of the most interesting stories in the Commentationes to surprisingly personal exchanges between Rütiner and strangers when they met on the road to one of these towns and decided to travel together.¹⁰ As we have seen, Rütiner’s network was largely based on oral exchanges, and these often coincided with other types of interactions such as social gatherings, business transactions, guild meetings, or travel. Written and printed sources of information, on the other hand, played a much more minor role than one might expect. Only 66 times, which amounts to less than 4 per cent of all entries, does Rütiner name textual sources at all (Table 2.2). They include the works of humanists and reformers such as Erasmus and Luther, chronicles like Petermann Etterlin’s Kronica von der loblichen Eydtgnoschaft and Kessler’s Sabbata, and a variety of other authors including Sebastian Franck, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Hans Sachs.¹¹ Almost half of the textual sources cited were letters, yet not a single one of them was addressed to Rütiner. Some were sent to his fellow guildsmen by family members or factors trading in cities such as Nuremberg and Cracow, and their content was then shared with Rütiner and other members of the weavers’ guild.¹² If such letters were relevant to the town council, they were also read out in front of the whole assembly.¹³ Vadianus often shared letters sent to him with his inner circle over dinner, and Kessler summarized them for Rütiner when he was not invited.¹⁴ On at least two occasions, a copy of a letter by Luther reached St Gall; it was then circulated and discussed among the town’s educated elite.¹⁵ All of these ⁷ This is where Ernst Gerhard Rüsch located the hipocaustulum; see Comm. I.930; I.932h. While Rütiner does not explicitly say where the ‘little chamber’ was located, the context of his entries suggests that it was a place where he interacted principally with his fellow weavers, and especially with the Elfer (see e.g. Comm. II.26; II.39; II.259; II.361a or II.416b). ⁸ See e.g. Comm. I.831; I.838; I.838; II.1; II.4a; II.37-II.38; II.59. ⁹ Peyer, Leinwandgewerbe und Fernhandel, ii, 5 and 11. ¹⁰ Among them we find the story of the Anabaptist Felix Hottinger mentioned in Ch. 1; Comm. II.1. ¹¹ See e.g. Comm. I.50, I.538 (Luther); I.571 (Agrippa); I.613 (Kessler); I.856 (Erasmus); I.889 (Hans Sachs); II.244c (Franck); II.374 (Etterlin). ¹² See e.g. Comm. I.663, I.956, II.142, II.261, II.266c. ¹³ See e.g. Comm. II.375. ¹⁴ See e.g. Comm. II.165, II.359c. Kessler also included copies of letters by Vadianus, Luther, and others in his chronicle: Kessler, Sabbata, e.g. 452–3 (= fos. 470a–b), or 458–65 (= fos. 475a–82b). ¹⁵ Comm. II.90; I.671.

40

    

practices support the argument that letters were not considered private, but formed an integral part of oral communication practices.¹⁶ The fact that written and printed sources played such a minor role compared to oral informants is remarkable, and even more so seeing that over half of the textual sources mentioned by Rütiner also reached him in oral form as they were read out, summarized, and discussed in St Gall (Table 2.2). This is how one might expect illiterate individuals to consume letters and printed material, not a former university student who kept extensive notes in Latin. Just as striking is the scarcity of references to so-called ‘popular print’. While Rütiner owned several Protestant pamphlets and mentions another three authored by Luther in his Commentationes, there are only two occasions on which he explicitly refers to print as a source of news.¹⁷ In 1537, he received news of a disastrous thunderstorm in Heidelberg from a variety of oral informants, including Hulrich Ramsauer, who ‘read it from printed letters’.¹⁸ The phrasing and the close parallels between Rütiner’s account and a news pamphlet printed in Wittenberg suggest that Ramsauer may have read the print aloud.¹⁹ One year later, Rütiner mentions a printed tract on a volcanic eruption near Naples, but it remains unclear whether he personally consulted the source or simply recorded a conversation about it.²⁰ To some extent, the minor role that written and printed material played in Rütiner’s network can be explained by the lack of a local printing press and of a regular, affordable public postal service in 1530s St Gall, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. It may also be linked to the purpose of Rütiner’s notebooks: if they were intended as a personal memory aid, it made sense for him to focus on the most fleeting form of communication, namely speech. Yet even if the Commentationes merely complemented written and printed material, the wealth of knowledge Rütiner drew from his distinctly local and overwhelmingly oral network seems to confirm Henk van Nierop’s claim that in the sixteenth

¹⁶ Simon Teuscher, ‘Bernische Privatbriefe aus der Zeit um 1500: Überlegungen zu ihren zeitgenössischen Funktionen und zu Möglichkeiten ihrer historischen Auswertung’, in Eckart Conrad Lutz (ed.), Mittelalterliche Literatur im Lebenszusammenhang (Fribourg, 1997), 359–85, here 375–6 and 378; Esther-Beate Körber, ‘Der soziale Ort des Briefs im 16. Jahrhundert’, in Horst Wenzel (ed.), Gespräche—Boten—Briefe: Körpergedächtnis und Schriftgedächtnis im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1997), 244–58, here 251–7. ¹⁷ For the pamphlets owned by Rütiner, see ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara 18.423, and ZB, A.Drucke Rara III. B.94. In the Commentationes, Rütiner refers only to Martin Luther, Von Kauffshandlung und wucher (1524) by title; see Comm. I.378. Comm. I.50 contains a vague reference to Luther’s work (‘aliquo loco’, i.e. ‘some place’ in Luther’s work), but the content suggests that Rütiner was here referring to An den Christlichenn Adel deutscher Nation (1520). Luther’s Ursach vn antwort das jungkfrawen kloster gotlich verlassen mugen (1523) is referred to as an ‘Epistola paraenetica’ in Comm. I.678; the context of the entry suggests that Rütiner may not have read the pamphlet himself. ¹⁸ ‘ex literis impressis legit’. Comm. II.160. ¹⁹ See Ein erschregliche Newe zeitung/von einem grausamen Vngewitter/So sich auff S.Marcus tag zu Heidelberg/jnn diesem XXXVII jar/erhaben hat (Wittenberg: Nickel Schirlentz, 1537, VD16 E 3840). ²⁰ Comm. II.421. See also Ch. 5.

  

41

century ‘written information—let alone printed information—played only a limited role in the daily provision of information’, even among the literate.²¹ Indeed, in spite of its heavy reliance on oral exchanges, Rütiner’s network provided him with information on a large geographical area. While his informants were concentrated around St Gall, the information they shared with him not only covered the Swiss Confederacy (Fig. 2.3) and a large part of Europe (Fig. 2.4), but even touched on a few places in Asia, Africa, and South America (Fig. 2.5).²² How did such information reach Rütiner, a man who, it seems, rarely travelled beyond the villages surrounding St Gall? First, many of Rütiner’s informants travelled much further and much more frequently than he did. St Gall’s economy depended greatly on the export of linen to larger centres of trade such as Lyon, Nuremberg, and Venice, and indeed these cities—and those along the route to them—are frequently mentioned in the Commentationes. Not only did St Gall’s trading companies correspond with their subsidiaries and partners in those cities, but many of the town’s long-distance merchants also regularly travelled there in person to deliver linen to factors or to sell it on the local market. Along with wax, metal, spices, and fur, they brought back Schaffhausen

Constance

Basle Bischofszell Wil

Baden

Latitude

47˚30’N

Lindau Arbon Rorschach

Zurich Altstätten Appenzell

Lucerne

47˚N Bern 20 km

Sources: Esri, USGS, NOAA

10 mi

8˚E

Longitude

9˚E

No. of mentions 120 80 40 1 St Gall

Fig. 2.3. Places mentioned in Rütiner’s Commentationes (Swiss Confederacy). Online Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann. ²¹ Henk van Nierop, ‘ “And Ye shall Hear of Wars and Rumours of Wars.” Rumour and the Revolt of the Netherlands’, in Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer (eds), Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands: Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke (Leiden, 2007), 69–86, here 70. ²² Among them Yucatán and Peru in South America; Calicut (now Kozhikode) on India’s west coast, and ‘Alcheir’ (Cairo) in Egypt. See e.g. Comm. I.130; I.949c; I.956; II.141; II.250.

42

     55˚N Danzig

London

Wittenberg Leipzig

Antwerp Frankfurt a. M.

50˚N Latitude

Paris

Krakow

Nuremberg Strasbourg

Ulm

Augsburg

Vienna

Innsbruck Lyon

Milan

45˚N

Venice Belgrade Florence

Marseille

Rome Naples Sources: Esri, USGS, NOAA

200 km 100 mi

0˚ No. of mentions

5˚E

10˚E

15˚E

20˚E

Longitude

120 80 40 1 St Gall

Fig. 2.4. Places mentioned in Rütiner’s Commentationes (Europe). Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann.

foreign news and rumours when they returned. Some of them took their role as bearers of news quite seriously. When a rumour spread in Alsace about the arrest of a general, for instance, the St Gall merchant Conrad Kapfman, who was in Lyon at the time, ‘waited for two days to discover the truth’ before returning to St Gall with the news that the rumour was false.²³ Klaus Gerteis has argued that their privileged access to foreign news and information gave long-distance traders a distinct advantage over their competitors.²⁴ As we shall see in the next few chapters, it also allowed ²³ ‘expectauit 2 dies vera/scissitaturus’. Comm. I.941. ²⁴ Klaus Gerteis, ‘Reisen, Boten, Posten, Korrespondenzen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit’, in Hans Pohl (ed.), Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Referate der 12. Arbeitstagung der Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom 22.–25.4.1987 in Siegen (Stuttgart, 1989), 19–36, here 26. Rütiner also regularly suggests that information could translate into

  

43

60˚N

London

45˚N

Compostela Madrid

Latitude

30˚N

15˚N

Danzig Poznan Krakow Budapest Belgrade Athens Rhodos Ninive Cyprus Jerusalem Cairo

Yucatán Calicut

0˚ Peru

15˚S

1000 km 500 mi

90˚W

Sources: Esri, USGS, NOAA

60˚W

30˚W

0˚ Longitude

30˚E

60˚E

Fig. 2.5. Places mentioned in Rütiner’s Commentationes (World). Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann.

them to present themselves as bearers of information and to accumulate communicative capital. Yet merchants were not the only well-travelled people in St Gall. At least 28 of Rütiner’s informants had fought in battles in northern Italy or France at some point in their lives, and one of them bragged that he had visited more splendid cities during his time as a soldier than some merchants had in an entire lifetime of travelling for business.²⁵ Some of Rütiner’s informants represented St Gall at the Imperial Diet or, more frequently, at the Swiss Diet in Baden.²⁶ Many more had moved to the town from abroad, or had spent several years living, working, or studying elsewhere before settling in St Gall (Fig. 2.2, right). Secondly, Rütiner’s network did not stop at his direct informants. They, too, had their own circles of informants, and by repeating stories heard elsewhere they granted him access to an even larger pool of information. Rütiner recorded such chains of information on over 200 occasions. If he did not know the names of his informants’ sources, he wrote down a short description instead: ‘Johannes Studer heard it from customers who speak truthfully.’²⁷ Whenever Rütiner does name indirect informants, we can see that they not only enlarged his information network, but also ‘upgraded’ it: His informants often drew—or in some cases perhaps rather claimed to draw—on information passed on to them by prominent economic advantage: see e.g. the case of Friedrich Schuhmacher, who tricked his relatives into selling him a certain type of fabric at a very cheap price, knowing from his travels to Lyon that demand for this fabric was increasing; Comm. I.514. See also Ch. 4. ²⁵ Namely Milan and Florence: Comm. I.514. ²⁶ E.g. Conrad Scheiwiler or Andreas Müller; see Kessler, Sabbata, 118 (=fol. 134b), 421 (=fol. 441a). ²⁷ ‘Ioannes/Studer a veridicis cunden audiuit’. Comm. II.89c.

44

    

public figures such as Baron Georg von Hewen, the reformer Johannes Zwick, and even Luther himself.²⁸ Rütiner’s indirect informants also substantially extended his network’s geographical reach. Indeed, even the New World seemed only a few middlemen away, as two brief entries on the Americas suggest.²⁹ In one instance, Rütiner learned from the St Gall iron merchant and scholar Bartholome Schobinger that the people of Peru showed little interest in goods considered valuable in Europe, but happily purchased anything shiny. Schobinger knew this from several letters forwarded to him from Munich by his brother Heinrich, who, he claimed, had received them from a relative who had personally taken part in an expedition to Peru.³⁰ In another entry, the St Galler Jakob Schlapfer, also known as Sailer, told Rütiner about a fertile island with such a mild climate that people walked about naked. Sailer, too, could boast access to sources familiar with the New World: one of his sons was working for their relative Hieronymus Sailer, who had married into the Welser family of Augsburg and had been involved in negotiations over their colonial ventures in Venezuela.³¹ In the same conversation—and again thanks to his connections to the Welsers—Jakob Sailer was moreover able to cite a letter by Melchior Grübel, a St Galler who had left his wife and children behind to become a factor for the Welsers in Venezuela.³² Rütiner’s network thus reached far beyond the towns and villages where his informants lived, and the information it provided covered a large geographical range as well as a variety of topics—not least because the network included people from many different backgrounds and all social levels. What mattered to Rütiner was not so much an individual’s social standing, but rather whether they had an interesting story to share and whether they seemed reliable (which was occasionally, but not necessarily, linked back to their status). This does not mean, however, that all of Rütiner’s informants were equally important. The majority of them only vouched for a handful of entries, while his most frequent informant, Paulus Schlumpf, is cited no fewer than 105 times. Rütiner met some of his informants only once, on the road to Wil or as they were passing through St Gall, while others were his neighbours, or members of his

²⁸ See e.g. Comm. II.261 (von Hewen); II.165 (Zwick); II.90 and II.427 (Luther). ²⁹ On the networks and media which spread the news of the New World, see Renate Pieper, Die Vermittlung einer neuen Welt. Amerika im Nachrichtennetz des habsburgischen Imperiums, 1493–1598 (Mainz, 2000). ³⁰ Comm. II.141. ³¹ Comm. I.956. On Hieronymus Sailer, see Conradin Bonorand, ‘Hieronymus Sailer aus St. Gallen, Schwiegersohn des Augsburger Großkaufherrn Bartholomäus Welser, und seine Tätigkeit im Lichte seines Briefwechsels mit Vadian’, Zwingliana, 20 (1993), 103–25, and Jörg Denzer, Die Konquista der Augsburger Welser-Gesellschaft in Südamerika (1528–1556): Historische Rekonstruktion, Historiografie und Lokale Erinnerungskultur in Kolumbien und Venezuela (Munich, 2005), 63. ³² On Grübel, see Bonorand, ‘Hieronymus Sailer aus St. Gallen’, 121–2, and Denzer, Konquista der Augsburger Welser-Gesellschaft, 63 and 166. In St Gall, there seems to have been some confusion about Grübel’s exact location. In Comm. II.141, Rütiner writes that Grübel was currently in a place commonly called ‘Iuckenthan’ (Yucatán), but also notes that this name was incorrect.

  

45

guild. In order to understand his network and the social contexts in which he received information, it is therefore necessary to take a closer look at the network’s central protagonists and to explore their relationship to Rütiner.

Weaver, merchant, humanist? Rütiner among his most frequent informants The vast majority of entries in the Commentationes are based on information provided by Rütiner’s 80 most frequent informants, most of whom lived in St Gall. Tracing them through the Commentationes, Kessler’s Sabbata, and a variety of archival sources such as genealogical records, tax books, and lists of public officeholders moreover reveals that most of these people were linked to Rütiner in a number of ways: they were his relatives, friends, neighbours, and fellow guildsmen as well as his informants, and some of them were all these things at once. Two distinct social groups stand out (Fig. 2.6). As a staunch Protestant and former university student with humanist ambitions, Rütiner was part of a loose circle of learned men and Protestant clergy—a group with close ties to Vadianus, and in which Rütiner’s friends Kessler and Johannes Brendly, a barber-surgeon, seem to have played a central role.³³ The second, and even more significant, subgroup in Rütiner’s network was the weavers’ guild, and in particular the group of men who served alongside him as Elfer. In addition to these two main social circles, Rütiner also gathered information among his neighbours on the Neugasse and his family. Most of his frequent female informants were related to him; they included his mother, sister, aunt, and wife.³⁴ These groups were not separate from one another, of course. Rütiner’s family, his neighbours, and the weavers’ guild in particular overlapped considerably. His most frequent informant, the weaver and Elfer Paulus Schlumpf, for instance, not only lived in close proximity to Rütiner on the Neugasse, but was also married to Rütiner’s sister Katharina.³⁵ There was considerably less overlap, however, between these groups and the circle of learned men and clergy around Kessler and Vadianus. Social interactions between Rütiner’s two main groups of informants seem to have been rare, too. In the 1520s, Kessler had been encouraged to hold Bible readings by a group of weavers, including many of Rütiner’s informants, yet only Rütiner, Vadianus, and several other members of St Gall’s educated elite were invited

³³ Kessler and Brendly not only rank among Rütiner’s most frequent informants, but also served as godfathers to Rütiner’s children. See StadtASG, AA, 510, ‘Taufbuch St. Laurenzen und St. Mangen’, pp. 51, 108, 201, 261, 301. ³⁴ See e.g. Comm. I.149, I.341, II.49, II.86 (Tely, Rütiner’s mother); Comm. I.733, I.760d/e, II.109e, II.211, II.416d (Verena, Rütiner’s sister); Comm. I.30, I.877, I.883, I.887c, I.893b/e/f/g/h, II.12, II.31, II.52, II.54, II.59, II.61, II.62, II.109b (Ursula, Rütiner’s aunt and his principal informant regarding his family’s history); Comm. I.488, I.512, II.184b, II.265k, II.271f, II.296k, II.316a, II.361cc, II.366f, II.409s (Engla, Rütiner’s wife). ³⁵ StadtASG, AA, 513a, ‘Ehebuch, Band 1: 1528–1862’, p. 6.

Fig. 2.6. Rütiner’s most frequent informants, sorted by social group and frequency of appearance as an informant. Illustration by Urs B. Roth.

  

47

8000 7000

Taxable assets [Ib]

6000 5000 4000 3000 2000

0

Conred Scheiwiler Albrecht Schlumpf Bartholome Schobinger Hulrich Bruderer David von Watt Paulus Schlumpf Joachim von Watt (Vadianus) Ambrosius Schlumpf Erasmus Schlumpf Heinrich Locher Gabriel Billwiller Joseph Friederich Johannes Studer Hulrich Girtanner Petrus Lorer, known as Müller Gallus Keiser Johannes Rütiner Johannes Baumgartner Joachim Schlumpf Johannes Keiser Hulrich Ramsauer Jakob Spichermann Sebastian Hagmann Johannes Falck Petrus Brugger Simon Maier Heinrich Ritz Urban Staiger Othmar Kuntzly Andreas Stercker Christian Rütiner Conrad Fluck Andreas Wild Johannes Nell Johannes Brendly Georg Forster Andreas Müller Sebastian Cuntz [Johannes Weninger] Johannes Kessler Johannes Hirt Wilhelm Ringly Johannes Witzig Anna Bösch Jakob Kunkler Johannes Gebentinger Marcus Stucheler

1000

Fig. 2.7. Taxable assets of Rütiner’s most frequent informants. Based on data from StadtASG, 281, ‘Steuerbuch 1533’. Note: The tax records of 1533 were chosen for a closer analysis because they show Rütiner’s economic standing a few years into writing the Commentationes, but just precede his election as Elfer. Square brackets are used to mark individuals who could not be identified with complete certainty.

to Kessler’s wedding in 1525.³⁶ Likewise, Vadianus regularly met with high-ranking members of the weavers’ guild on the town council, yet little suggests that they socialized outside the realm of politics. Not once does Rütiner mention his fellow guildsmen in the context of a gathering of St Gall’s learned elite. What, then, was Rütiner’s position among his informants? The tax records suggest that economically, he stood somewhere in the middle. Even his innermost circle of informants covered a broad cross-section of St Gall’s society, ranging from the almost penniless former soldier Marcus Stucheler to the councillor Conrad Scheiwiler, one of the town’s wealthiest citizens (Fig. 2.7).³⁷ What many of his informants lacked in wealth, however, they made up for in knowledge and expertise. When Rütiner was elected to the weavers’ Elfer in 1534, he joined a group led by senior guildsmen who could boast years of political experience (Table 2.3). They had lived through the troubled years at the end of the fifteenth century when St Gall was threatened from the outside as well as from within—the war with the Swiss Confederacy (1490), an attempt to overthrow the town council during the St. Galler Auflauf (1491), and the Swabian War (1499). Many of Rütiner’s older informants within the weavers’ guild had also served as soldiers ³⁶ Kessler, Sabbata, 107 (=fol. 125b) and 207 (=fol. 211a). ³⁷ In the 1530s and 1540s, Scheiwiler ranked among the 20 wealthiest citizens in St Gall. Höhener, Bevölkerung und Vermögensstruktur, 83.

1476 n.a. 1486 n.a. n.a. Before 1491 1500 1499 1508

n.a. 1501

Conrad Scheiwiler

Johannes Baumgartner

Joseph Friederich

Heinrich Locher

Andreas Wild Sebastian Hagmann Paulus Schlumpf Urban Staiger Andreas Morly

Augustin Teschler Johannes Rütiner

Weavers’ Elfer

1484

Johannes Studer

Year of birth

Guild master

Name

Table 2.3. The guild master and Elfer of the weavers’ guild in 1534

1534 1534

1529 1530 1532 1532 1533

1528

1525

1524

1510

1530

Year of first election as Elfer

Marriage Court 1542–9 Small Council 1549–56

Guild Master 1558–9 Deputy Mayor 1559–66 Mayor 1566–80

Small Council 1541–63

Guild Master 1533–5 Deputy Mayor 1535–42 Mayor 1542–7 Small Council 1521–35 Guild Master 1536–42 Guild Master 1535–7 Deputy Mayor 1537–61 Guild Master 1542–4 Deputy Mayor 1544–57 Guild Master 1548–56 Small Council 1556–65 Guild Master 1556–66

Further public offices

0

47 14 105 11 1

23

69

27

88

83

Mentions as informant (entries)

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49

in the Italian Wars and had returned to St Gall with adventurous stories of bravery and survival. Rütiner recorded their stories in incredible detail, but he had little to offer in return. He had never fought in a war and depended heavily on his senior guildsmen’s inside knowledge of St Gall’s economy, history, and politics. Even in comparison to some of the younger Elfer, such as his brother-in-law Paulus Schlumpf, Rütiner seems to have fallen short. Rütiner and Schlumpf, one year his senior, had probably been classmates at the local Latin school. In contrast to Rütiner, however, Schlumpf never went beyond the education he received in St Gall. In fact, as Rütiner tells us, Schlumpf ’s academic progress was rather slow and it was only with great difficulty that he managed to master the basics of arithmetic.³⁸ Yet in all other areas, Schlumpf was one step ahead of Rütiner. He owned more than twice as much as Rütiner did in any given year, and while his political career must have seemed mediocre in comparison to that of his father, the late mayor Caspar Schlumpf, he still climbed the political ladder at a much faster pace than Rütiner. Not only did he join the weavers’ Elfer two years before Rütiner; he also became Rütiner’s superior when he was appointed to the office of linen inspector and Rütiner became his assistant in 1534. Finally, Schlumpf was elected to the Small Council eight years before Rütiner, in 1541. If Rütiner had hoped that his years of study at Basle University and his ability to read and write in Latin would raise his status within the weavers’ guild, benefit his business, or boost his political career, he was disappointed. In contrast to most of his fellow Elfer, Rütiner would never be elected guild master, let alone mayor (Table 2.3). By the time he returned to St Gall, even the slow learner Paulus Schlumpf had surpassed him. In fact, in the eyes of his fellow guildsmen, Rütiner’s higher education even stood in the way of his becoming a successful weaver and linen merchant.³⁹ ‘I have never seen students rise,’ Joseph Friederich warned Rütiner after telling him the story of his father, another alumnus of Basle University, who had returned to the linen trade in St Gall only to lose all his money. ‘They are always more remiss and prone to slacking, except for Johannes Maier, who is exceptionally industrious and diligent.’ Rütiner took Friederich’s words rather personally: ‘[Joseph Friederich] and Erasmus Schlumpf . . . said this in a harsh tone, as if they were reproaching me. From then on I was more diligent.’⁴⁰ Rütiner was not the only linen trader who had studied for some time at Basle University, but what did perhaps distinguish him was his reluctance to give up his past as a student in favour of his business. As we have seen, he continued to spend considerable sums of money on books he had no time to read, and stubbornly

³⁸ Comm. II.104g. ³⁹ That education was often seen as a waste of time by those who took up a trade is also suggested by Fernando J. Bouza Alvarez, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, 2004), 61–2. ⁴⁰ ‘Numquam vidi/emergere Studentes [ ] semper remissiores sunt/ad schlecken proni [ ] praeter Ioannem Mayer/ille praeter omnem morem industrius et diligens/Adeo acerbe retulit ipse et Erasmus Sch/lumpff . . . quasi mihi exprobr/arent [ ] in posterum magis adhibui diligentiam’. Comm. I.954c.

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clung to Latin when writing his notebooks, despite the fact that this academic language regularly proved inadequate for capturing the everyday talk of St Gall.⁴¹ Did Rütiner feel closer to the learned men of St Gall, to the circle around Kessler and Vadianus, than to the men in his guild? Kessler seems to have thought so. When he addressed Rütiner at the beginning of the Sabbata, he told his friend to disregard ‘the idle talk of the ignorant’ and reassured him that his place was ‘with the erudite and the learned’. Yet his flattery was followed by a warning indicating that Rütiner’s position among St Gall’s educated elite was not quite as secure as Kessler portrayed it: ‘You know what Quintilian says: he who seeks to please the ignorant displeases the learned.’⁴² There is no doubt that Rütiner thoroughly enjoyed the company of the learned and thrived off their conversations. His friendship with Kessler and the time they had spent together in Basle had opened up the door to the circle of ministers and learned men around Vadianus, indirectly granting him access to the even broader network of Protestant clergy and humanists across Europe with which they corresponded. It was with much pride that he recorded the news and knowledge this group shared with him and any evenings spent in their company: Vadianus told us all this and many other things on the Wednesday after the Circumcision of Christ [1537] in the house of Johannes Brendly, because on that day we had a farewell meal with Marcus Angelus . . . . Vadianus, Kessler, H[ulrich] Ramsauer, J[ohannes] Weninger, and I.⁴³

The fact that Rütiner felt it necessary to explicitly include himself in the list of people present at the dinner shows what great importance this occasion held for him. Yet it also indicates that such occasions were a rare pleasure. Rütiner said so more explicitly when he compared the farewell meal of 1537 to a night he spent observing a comet alongside Vadianus and Kessler in 1531: Oh, what a welcome, sweet dinner conversation we had! Everybody opened their hearts, whatever they could they shared with us. We have not encountered anything more pleasant since that night when we watched the comet from Hochrütiner’s Bürgli. Oh, how true spoke Aeneas Silvius’ father: the greatest pleasure is to associate and converse with learned men.⁴⁴ ⁴¹ Perhaps using the language of scholarship, much like buying books, was part of Rütiner’s selfimage as a member of the educated elite. In addition, writing in Latin rather than in German may well have guaranteed a higher level of privacy within Rütiner’s household. ⁴² ‘laß nun etlicher unverständigen gschwetz vor oren gon . . . Din ruom ist by den glerten und verständigen; du waist, wie Quintilianus spricht: Der sich flist den unglerten ze gefallen, missfalt den glerten.’ Kessler, Sabbata, 17 (=fol. 12a). ⁴³ ‘Omnia illa et varia retulit nobis Vadianus Die/Mercurij sequenti post Circumcisionis Domini in aed/ibus Ioannis Brendly [ ] Quia eo die prandium/cum Marco angelo sumpsimus pro valedictione . . . Vadianus Ahenarius/H Ramsower [ ] I Weniger [ ] et Ego.’ Comm. I.788. ⁴⁴ ‘O quam grates et dulces colloquij epulas habui/mus [ ] Vterque sinum aperiens quicquid potuerunt no/bis impartiti sunt [ ] a nocte illa qua Cometen/obseruauimus in arcula Hochrutiners

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Of course, this does not mean that between 1531 and 1537 Rütiner never spent time in the company of these learned men; if that had been the case, they would not have ranked among his most frequent informants. It seems, however, that he never belonged to Vadianus’ innermost circle. When prominent Reformation figures such as Martin Bucer visited St Gall, for instance, Rütiner was not among those invited to dine with Vadianus and his guest.⁴⁵ Whenever Rütiner did join Vadianus’ circle, he was perceived as Kessler’s sidekick—so much so, in fact, that when Kessler was on his own for once, Vadianus allegedly jokingly asked: ‘Hans, where have you left your Johannes Rütiner?’⁴⁶ The fact that Vadianus is regularly named as an indirect rather than as a direct informant similarly suggests that the relationship between him and Rütiner was somewhat one-sided and not very close.⁴⁷ As Rüsch noted, Rütiner was probably unable to make a substantial contribution to the discussions revolving around theology, politics, history, and linguistics, but instead collected them like precious gems and preserved them in his notebooks.⁴⁸ Although Rütiner rarely writes about himself, the few instances where he does so show that he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings and the limitations imposed on him by his career choices. As a student at the University of Basle, he had acquired a broad education, but unlike Vadianus and Kessler he had not continued his studies or graduated with a degree. He knew Latin and had read many classical and contemporary authors, yet his decision to return to St Gall and enter the linen trade had stopped him from taking his education any further. At the same time, his peers who had not studied at university had gained a head start in the linen business. When Rütiner learned that the hunchbacked Koler of Lichtensteig had become steward of a monastery, his frustration became apparent: ‘All of us who were at Basle [University] have come to nothing, only this hunchback parades so many horses.’⁴⁹ This was a huge exaggeration, of course. Although Rütiner did not follow his guild’s typical cursus honorum, thanks to his learned contacts he would eventually hold a few public offices beyond the reach of most weavers (Table 2.3). The tax records show that his economic rise was slow but steady, and that many of his close peers—including Johannes Kessler—found themselves in a far more precarious economic position. If Rütiner nevertheless perceived himself as a failure, it was because he compared himself to the wrong people: to his fellow Elfer Conrad nih/il interim lepidius nobis contigit [ ] O quam vere dix/it Aeneae siluij Pater [ ] Summum bonum esse conver/sari doctis et colloqui’. Comm. I.788. For a longer description of the night the group around Vadianus spent observing the comet from Hochrütiner’s Bürgli (little castle) on the Bernegg, see Kessler, Sabbata, 359–62 (= fos. 376b–378b). ⁴⁵ Kessler, Sabbata, 403–4 (= fos. 425b–426a). ⁴⁶ ‘Hans, wo hastu dinen Joann Rütiner?’ Kessler, Sabbata, 17 (= fol. 12b). ⁴⁷ See e.g. Comm. I.361, I.879, I.930, II.52, II.154–146a, II.165, II.217, II.248, II.271c, II.276, II.386. ⁴⁸ Kommentarband, 26. See also Comm. I.856 for an example of Rütiner paraphrasing Erasmus in a conversation with Kessler, only to be lectured by his friend. ⁴⁹ ‘omnes nos qui Basileae fuimus/in nihilum redacti solus ille gibbosus tot equis ince/dit’. Comm. I.880.

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Scheiwiler, one of the richest men in town; to Kessler and Vadianus, who had surpassed him in all academic matters; and to Paulus Schlumpf, who could build on his late father’s reputation and thus always seemed one step ahead of Rütiner. Rütiner was certainly not a figure on the margins, even though he may have perceived his position in that way. In fact, his position was somewhere in the middle: halfway between the learned men and the weavers of St Gall, halfway between the wealthy linen traders in his guild and the craftsmen in his neighbourhood.⁵⁰ And perhaps it was exactly this intermediate position to which we owe the peculiar form, if not the very existence, of the Commentationes, for they too stand halfway between two traditions. Rütiner’s notebooks may have been inspired by his learned friends’ call to record ‘God’s miraculous deeds’ and by instructions for taking notes which he had received as a student, but his ambitions were more modest and his notes often concerned with very mundane things—with the linen business, familial relationships, local gossip, and conflicts between his fellow citizens. This is not to suggest that such things were not discussed among St Gall’s educated elite—they were, and in abundance—but rather that the St Galler chroniclers did not usually deem them worthy of being included in their works. In his Commentationes, in contrast, Rütiner filled an academic format with everyday content, thus reflecting the two worlds which shaped his daily life. What Rütiner may not have realized was that his place in the middle also gave him a distinct advantage in collecting information, for it allowed him to tap into a great number and a great variety of sources. He was able to gather first-hand accounts of battles and wars from former soldiers, recipes for economic success from his fellow guildsmen, news and political rumours from merchants returning from markets all over Europe, information about the progress of the Reformation from the St Gall reformers Vadianus and Kessler, and many not-so-well-kept secrets about his fellow citizens from their neighbours, friends, and employees. Yet this is not the only way in which Rütiner may have profited from his position in-between. As we shall see over the next few chapters, oral exchanges in early modern St Gall typically took place in a social context which was not limited to the sharing of what we would deem ‘useful’ information, but which involved eating, drinking, cracking jokes, telling entertaining and shocking tales, and sharing gossip. Contributing to these conversations allowed St Gallers on all social levels to present themselves as bearers of insider information and to raise communicative capital. Rütiner does not discuss the purpose of his notebooks, but at least in theory they represented both a record of past conversations and plenty of material for future ones. His position at the intersection of two powerful but largely separate groups may therefore have offered him an opportunity to share stories gathered in one circle with the other, presenting himself as a source of knowledge and entertainment to both of them. ⁵⁰ It may be worth noting that other 16th-century ego-documents were also written by otherwise unremarkable men trapped between two worlds. See e.g. the case of Hermann Weinsberg, who claimed—albeit more in self-defence rather than with any conviction—that ‘the middle is best’. Lundin, Paper Memory, esp. 75 and 110–21.

3 Obscene humour and sociability In 1529, Rütiner learned of the misfortune of a groom in a nearby town:¹ The surgeon of Bischofszell gave a purgative powder to a companion, a widower already engaged, who had begged him for an aid for fornication for the [wedding] night. When he entered his bride’s bed, he soiled it. He got up [and] would have grabbed the doctor by the throat if others had not intervened.²

On the surface, the story fits neatly into the long list of accidents, mishaps, and petty quarrels recorded by Rütiner in his notebooks. Often retold as cautionary tales, such stories warned St Gallers of risky behaviour and shady individuals while at the same time providing them with juicy gossip about their neighbours. In this particular instance, however, something else was going on. For curiously enough, a few years later another elderly groom’s wedding night was ruined in a strikingly similar manner, this time in Wittenberg: An old man married a young woman in Wittenberg. He came to an apothecary to have a strengthening [medicine] prepared. Meanwhile another man asked for a laxative. [The apothecary] made both, placed them at the window and left it to the maid to distribute them. She gave them the wrong way. The groom spent all night shitting. He wanted to kill the apothecary. Jakob Kuntz [heard it] from the publican in Leipzig from where he came.³

What Rütiner presented as two humorous events that had taken place in Bischofszell and Wittenberg, respectively, was in fact an evergreen of sixteenthcentury bawdy humour. As typical of its time as it was popular, the joke combined three humorous stock ingredients—an old man, sex, and faeces. It was printed in many different variations in some of the most prominent Latin and German joke ¹ A version of this chapter was published as Carla Roth, ‘Obscene Humour, Gender, and Sociability in Sixteenth-Century St Gallen’, Past & Present, 234/1 (2017), 39–70. ² ‘Bischoffzell chyrurgus/socio viduo iam sponso orantem vt pro nocte/adiumentum stupri daret [ ] dedit puluerem pro pur/gatione [ ] conscenso lecto sponsae lectum foedauit/surgens iugulum medici petiisset nisi in/tercessum fuisset ab alijs’. Comm. I.210. ³ ‘Vuittenbergae senior iuuenculam duxit [ ] ad ph/armacopolum venit vt confortatiuum praeparet/ interim alius petijt Relaxationem [ ] ambo/fecit [ ] ad fenestram posuit [ ] ancillae commisit/distribi [ ] diuersimodo dedit [ ] sponsus totam noctem/cacando consumpsit interfecturus pharmacop/olam [ ] Iacob Cuntz ab hospite/z Libttz unde migratus’. Comm. I.545.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0004

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collections, and—as Rütiner’s Commentationes indicate—it was widely circulated by word of mouth, too.⁴ As Robert Darnton has famously argued in The Great Cat Massacre, humour can serve as a key to a foreign culture. Jokes playfully exploit common stereotypes and ambiguous metaphors which only make sense and produce laughter in a particular historical context. If we ‘get the joke’, we may also get a better understanding of the culture of which it was part, and in particular of that culture’s more obscure aspects.⁵ Yet jokes are also shaped by their circulation and the social settings in which they are shared. If we study them not just as an expression of a specific cultural environment, but also as a means and product of communication, they can offer us insights into the dissemination and evolution of stories and into aspects of early modern sociability that often remain hidden from the historian’s gaze. Thus far, research on early modern humour has primarily focused on Shrovetide plays, comic tales, satires, printed joke collections, and other literary texts.⁶ These types of sources provide historians with a large stock of jokes and can thus highlight some of the common themes of early modern humour. Yet they rarely shed any light on the place and role of humour in everyday life.⁷ They neither tell us how jokes were circulated orally, by whom, where, and in what form they were retold, nor how the audience understood and reacted to them. Lacking evidence for the social context of jokes, early modern historians have often drawn on psychological and sociological theories when writing about the function of humour—a move which deserves more critical reflection than it has hitherto received, for it is based on the assumption that while humour has a history, its social function does not. Two theories have dominated existing discussion. The first has its roots in the psychological release and relief theories developed since the nineteenth century, and sees humour as a safety valve. Aggressions, anxieties, ⁴ See e.g. Johannes Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ed. Johannes Bolte, 2 vols (Berlin, 1924), ii, 13, no. 708; Heinrich Bebel, Fazetien: Drei Bücher, trans. Manfred Fuhrmann (Constance, 2005), 101, no. 15. ⁵ Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985), 77–8. ⁶ See e.g. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, ‘Introduction: Humour and History’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1997), 1–10, here 3. Recent studies include Sebastian Coxon, Laughter and Narrative in the Middle Ages: German Comic Tales 1350–1525 (London, 2008); Albrecht Classen, Deutsche Schwankliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts: Studien zu Martin Montanus, Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof und Michael Lindener (Trier, 2009); Lisa Perfetti, Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature (Ann Arbor, 2003); Johannes Klaus Kipf, Cluoge geschichten: Humanistische Fazetienliteratur im deutschen Sprachraum (Stuttgart, 2010); Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 2003); Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2011); Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006). ⁷ See also Gerd Dicke, ‘Fazetieren: Ein Konversationstyp der italienischen Renaissance und seine deutsche Rezeption im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, in Eckhart Conrad Lutz, Johanna Thali, and René Wetzel (eds), Literatur und Wandmalerei II: Konventionalität und Konversation. Burgdorfer Colloquium 2001 (Tübingen, 2005), 155–88, here 178–9. According to Sebastian Coxon, Heinrich Bebel’s collection is an exception to the rule: Sebastian Coxon, ‘Friendship, Wit and Laughter in Heinrich Bebel’s Facetiae’, Oxford German Studies, 36/2 (2007), 306–20, here 312–16.

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and illicit desires which may otherwise disturb the peace of a community are channelled into humour and find release in laughter.⁸ The second draws on sociological research which explores the role of humour in the making and breaking of social bonds.⁹ According to this approach, humour fosters group cohesion by forming ‘communities of laughter’, whose shared laughter—and, by extension, shared values—separate them from outsiders and from the people ridiculed. Humour creates and confirms these communities, and laughter simultaneously draws their boundaries, outside of which we find those who have transgressed the written or customary rules and are punished with scorn and ridicule.¹⁰ While alternative theoretical approaches stressing humour’s close relationship to play and entertainment have not received much attention, both of the dominant humour theories thus associate humour with aggression and describe jokes as an act of non-physical violence involving insiders and outsiders, or an aggressor and a victim.¹¹ This conception of humour, however, makes it difficult to distinguish between jokes and insults.¹² Moreover, it has had far-reaching consequences, ⁸ For an overview and critique of these early humour theories, see Patricia Keith-Spiegel, ‘Early Conceptions of Humor: Varieties and Issues’, in Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (eds), The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues (New York, 1972), 3–39, here esp. 10–13 and 20–1. Sigmund Freud is often cited as one of the most prominent advocates of this theory: Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London, 1960). For the application of the relief theory in historical research, see e.g. Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 5, 46, 177; Roger Thompson, ‘Popular Reading and Humour in Restoration England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 9/3 (1975), 653–71, here 658; Jacques Le Goff, ‘Laughter in the Middle Ages’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1997), 40–53, here 47; Gerd Dicke, ‘Homo facetus: Vom Mittelalter eines humanistischen Ideals’, in Nicola McLelland, Hans-Jochen Schiewer, and Stefanie Schmitt (eds), Humanismus in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters und in der frühen Neuzeit. XVIII. Anglo-German Colloquium, Hofgeismar 2003 (Tübingen, 2008), 299–332, here 326, and Dicke, ‘Fazetieren’, 158. ⁹ Eugène Dupréel’s essay on the sociological problem of laughter is usually seen as the foundational text of this theory: Eugène Dupréel, ‘Le problème sociologique du rire’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 106 (1928), 213–60, here esp. 234–5. For a concise introduction to the sociological approaches to humour, see Gary Alan Fine, ‘Sociological Approaches to the Study of Humor’, in Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein (eds), Handbook of Humour Research, 2 vols (New York, 1983), i, 159–81. ¹⁰ For the application of the theory of ‘communities of laughter’ in early modern history, see e.g. Werner Röcke and Hans R. Velten (eds), Lachgemeinschaften: Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter in Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2005); Derek Brewer, ‘Prose Jest-Books Mainly in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries in England’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1997), 90–111, here 90; Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 5, 8, 78, 178; Norbert Schindler, Widerspenstige Leute: Studien zur Volkskultur in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M., 1992), 158; Johan Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (Basingstoke, 1999), 100. ¹¹ One notable exception is of course Mikhail Bakhtin, who stressed early on that modern humour theories are inadequate for dealing with Renaissance humour because they portray it in an overly negative light: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984), 71. For an alternative humour theory, see e.g. Daniel E. Berlyne, ‘Laughter, Humor, and Play’, in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (eds), The Handbook of Social Psychology, 5 vols (Reading, MA, 1969), iii, 795–852. ¹² See e.g. Schindler, Widerspenstige Leute, 153–8, who draws no clear distinction between humour, insult and blasphemy in his description of carnival rituals.

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in particular with regards to sexual humour, where the line between aggressor and victim has usually been drawn along the line separating the sexes. Thus, early modern sexual humour has commonly been fitted into a narrative of male dominance, aggression, and sexual violence against women. This chapter proposes a different view on early modern humour, and on obscene humour in particular. It is, of course, not the intention to present here an alternative general theory of obscene humour, but rather to draw attention to some aspects of sixteenth-century obscene humour which have often been overlooked, in part because of the ways in which the theories discussed above have shaped our view of the sources, but largely because of the limitations of the source material itself. In contrast to literary sources, which usually present jokes as detached from their social context, the Commentationes allow us to study humour as part of a variety of social interactions and communicative processes in an early modern town. This is particularly enlightening with regards to obscene humour, a type of talk typically described as gendered and located on the margins of acceptable speech.¹³ The two main sections of this chapter discuss Rütiner’s jokes within their social and cultural contexts respectively. The first deals with the dissemination of jokes through speech and print, and with the social settings in which they were shared in St Gall. I argue that the key to understanding both early modern humour and the narrative strategies pursued by early modern jokesters often lies in the subtle changes made to jokes as they were retold. Complementing the approach in the first section, the second provides a detailed analysis of Rütiner’s joke collection and places it within its broader cultural context. Sexual and scatological humour emerge as closely linked, during the period, through both medical discourse and a common set of metaphors. Rather than representing a safety valve for men’s aggression against women, obscene jokes offered jokers an opportunity to display their wit, their social and linguistic skills, and their sexual knowledge. If employed successfully, jokes could thus be used to get an audience’s attention and to present oneself in a favourable light—in short, they could serve to raise communicative capital.

Circulation and social context of obscene humour Obscene humour can be found in a wide range of sixteenth-century sources, bearing witness to its broad appeal as well as to its wide circulation. Exploiting a plethora of sexual metaphors and double entendres and containing only thinly veiled, detailed descriptions of sex and defecation, Shrovetide plays feature among

¹³ For want of a better term to capture both sexual and scatological jokes, I shall refer to them as ‘obscene jokes’. This is not meant to imply that these jokes also seemed obscene to the early modern reader.

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the most extreme varieties of bawdy humour.¹⁴ Yet while carnival certainly suspended some of the rules which normally constrained excessive humour, obscene jokes were by no means limited to carnival season, nor were they a peculiarity of popular culture. Recent scholarship has made it abundantly clear that the learned elite played a central part in the recording and dissemination of humorous material, including its sexual and scatological varieties.¹⁵ Since the art of joking was closely linked to ancient rhetoric, it was commonly taught as part of the syllabus in Latin schools; indeed, it was during his studies that Rütiner was first introduced to classical satire in the work of Plautus, Persius, Juvenal, and Lucian of Samosata.¹⁶ Printed joke collections by humanist authors such as Heinrich Bebel, or by members of the clergy such as Johannes Pauli, were also full of sexual and scatological humour, albeit dressed up in academic Latin and hidden beneath a thin layer of moral justification.¹⁷ Since humour was often seen as the sugar which made the medicine go down more easily, crude jokes were even used in sermons, in particular at Easter, when it was customary to give the congregation a good laugh.¹⁸ This type of humour also leaked into other media. Protestant pamphlets used scathing humour full of sexual and scatological references to denounce the excesses of the pope and the Catholic clergy in word and image; depicting, for instance, the papacy’s birth from a she-devil’s anus and peasants exposing their backsides to the pope.¹⁹ The work of the Nuremberg illustrator Peter Flötner contained illustrations featuring defecating peasants and a ‘human sundial’ formed of a half-naked male body with widely spread legs, allowing the beholder to take a close look at the man’s anus and his faeces at the very moment of their

¹⁴ For a detailed review of the sexual and scatological vocabulary in German Shrovetide plays, see Johannes Müller, Schwert und Scheide: Der sexuelle und skatologische Wortschatz im Nürnberger Fasnachtspiel des 15. Jahrhunderts (Bern, 1988). ¹⁵ See esp. Barbara C. Bowen, Humour and Humanism in the Renaissance (Aldershot, 2004); Kipf, Cluoge geschichten; Anja Grebe, ‘Der Künstler als Komiker: Albrecht Dürers Selbstbildnisse und die Lachkultur des Humanismus’, in Stefan Biessenecker and Christian Kuhn (eds), Valenzen des Lachens in der Vormoderne (1250–1750) (Bamberg, 2012), 187–210. Yet while it has been widely acknowledged that humour played an important role in humanist sociability, the extent to which the learned elite revelled in obscene humour is still occasionally downplayed; see e.g. Dicke, ‘Fazetieren’, 166 and 172. ¹⁶ See Rütiner’s copies of these texts in VadSlg, Ms 485, ‘Sammelband humanistischen Inhalts’. On the role of classical satire in early modern education, see e.g. Bremmer and Roodenburg, ‘Introduction’, 6–7, or David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor, 1998), 7–8. ¹⁷ Bowen, Humour and Humanism, 266–7. For examples of sexual and scatological humour in these works, see e.g. Bebel, Fazetien, 21, no. 11; 51, no. 51; 55, no. 60; 69–70, no. 80; 99, nos 13 and 14, to name just a few; or Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, i, 48, no. 65; 49, no. 68; 186, no. 294; 331, no. 585; 364, no. 653. ¹⁸ This was also the case in St Gall: Ehrensperger, Gottesdienst in der Stadt St. Gallen, 31–2. The Basle reformer Johannes Oecolampadius harshly criticized the widespread practice of the risus paschalis. See Oecolampadius’s letter to Wolfgang Fabricius Capito (18 Mar. 1518), which was published with Frobenius: Ernst Staehelin (ed.), Briefe und Akten zum Leben Oekolompads: Zum vierhundertjährigen Jubiläum der Basler Reformation, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1927–34), i, 44–59, no. 35. ¹⁹ See e.g. Eric W. Gritsch, ‘Luther on Humor’, Lutheran Quarterly, 18/4 (2004), 373–86, here 377.

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expulsion²⁰—a joke which presumably played on the idea that the human body with its regular excretions provided the most accurate clock of all. Most importantly, however, jokes were a common element of a wide range of social interactions. In contrast to the Benedictine abbey in its midst, where strict monastic rule forbade excessive laughter, the town of St Gall was a place where humour, obscene and otherwise, regularly entered conversations.²¹ Inns and taverns have traditionally been listed among humour’s most natural habitats, and indeed Rütiner often heard jokes in this context.²² Along with his fellow guildsmen, Rütiner regularly travelled to the smaller market towns around St Gall to purchase yarn and raw linen, and spending the night at the local inn offered them an opportunity for exuberant conviviality.²³ The jesting culture pertaining to these spaces is particularly visible in the sources, not least because it is often associated with excessive drinking and violent conflict and thus found its way into court records.²⁴ Yet obscene jokes were not restricted to sociability in inns and taverns. Both inside and outside of these public spaces, conversations about a wide variety of topics were interspersed with obscene jokes. The elderly maid and midwife Anna Bösch, for instance, provided Rütiner with an account of her former employer Georg Gerung’s marriages, a detailed description of his sex life, and an obscene joke which Gerung’s second wife once made at his expense—all while, so it seems, Bösch was looking after Rütiner’s wife in childbed and their new-born daughter Barbara.²⁵ On other occasions, an account of the first war at Kappel am Albis (1529) was accompanied by a humorous anecdote about a mercenary, a series of sexual jokes delivered by a schoolmaster was followed by a list of his familial ties, and a conversation about the war against the Turks turned into a joke about a Catholic priest.²⁶ Obscene jokes were also a common feature of social gatherings among St Gall’s learned elite, in particular in the circle around Vadianus.²⁷ Warnings against

²⁰ Barbara Dienst, Der Kosmos des Peter Flötner: Eine Bildwelt der Renaissance in Deutschland (Munich, 2002), 79. ²¹ The monastic ban on laughter was itself the target of one of Rütiner’s jokes. In Comm. I.688, the abbot of St Gall forbids the tailor Andreas from visiting the monks (‘Noli eos/adire’), for he considers Andreas and his excessive joking a threat to monastic life. The next day, however, Andreas lives up to his reputation by crawling through their door, saying: ‘I have been forbidden from walking’ (‘inter/ dictum mihi ire’). ²² See e.g. Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke, 2007), 123–4; Brown, Better a Shrew, 72. See also Comm. I.316; I.545; II.402a/b. ²³ The most detailed description of such an evening can be found in Comm. II.402b. ²⁴ See e.g. Phil Withington, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, Social History, 32/ 3 (2007), 291–307, here 291–3. ²⁵ Comm. II.385b/c. Ch. 4 offers a more detailed discussion of Anna Bösch’s relationship to Rütiner and her role as Rütiner’s informant. ²⁶ Comm. I.309–10; I.316–7; II.158–62a. ²⁷ The merchants David and Georg von Watt, Vadianus’ brother and cousin, shared sexual and scatological jokes with Rütiner on several occasions, and so did Johannes Weniger, a regular guest at Vadianus’ dinner table. Comm. I.591b; I.652; II.162a. For evidence of Johannes Weniger’s link to Vadianus’ circle, see also Comm. I.788.

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excessive joking and obscene humour by influential figures such as Erasmus, Oecolampadius, and Luther thus seem to have mostly fallen on deaf ears even among their greatest admirers—all the more, perhaps, because some of these men set a rather poor example.²⁸ Only once does Rütiner explicitly mention Vadianus’ direct involvement in a prank with sexual undertones. The occasion deserves a detailed analysis, however, for it illustrates some of the key characteristics of learned humour. As Vadianus personally told Rütiner, he had once been complicit in a prank played by Benedikt Burgauer on the elderly Catholic priest Adam Weckerli during a game of dice: Whenever Adam [Weckerli] rolled the dice badly, he got up, for he was weak-sighted . . . Burgauer fetched an egg, in Vadianus’ presence and with his permission. When [Weckerli] got up, [Burgauer] placed it under him. He felt it immediately and laughed, because he only wore a shirt and sleeves.²⁹

To some extent, the joke depended on the kind of situational comedy that seems easily relatable: one need only imagine the egg cracking under the weight of the priest’s behind; the surprise on his face; the wet, yellow smudge staining his shirt. Yet the egg was not a random choice of prop. In combination with Weckerli’s long white shirt and sleeves and his constant, rapid movements, the egg perfected the visual image of a nervous breeding hen. It thus linked and likened Weckerli to a popular character in the contemporary joke collections: a man laying or breeding eggs.³⁰ In one of Heinrich Bebel’s jokes, for instance, an imposter successfully convinces his host that he is able to lay eggs, and ends his demonstration by defecating in the host’s hand as the latter eagerly awaits an egg to emerge from his guest’s bottom.³¹ Similarly, in a joke which circulated in St Gall about Claus Narr, court fool of Duke Albrecht of Saxony, Claus observes a hen brooding eggs and then spends several days sitting on a pile of horse excrements, determined to make foals hatch from these ‘eggs’ too.³² Patricia Simons has shown that eggs were also a ²⁸ Luther’s biting and often scatological humour is well known. See e.g. Gritsch, ‘Luther on Humour’; Dicke, ‘Homo facetus’, 304; Dicke, ‘Fazetieren’, 180–4. While Erasmus’ humour was more moderate, he nevertheless included many jokes of sexual and scatological content in his Apophthegmata: Desiderius Erasmus, Apophthegmata, ed. and trans. Heribert Philips (Würzburg, 2001), e.g. 222, no. 40; 231, no. 100. ²⁹ ‘quoties male protrusit tesseras Adam/Surrexit [] luscosus enim fuit . . . Burggower praesente Vadiano eius/consensu ouum attulit [ ] cum autem surrexit suppo/suit subito sentiuit [ ] risit [ ] Nam camisia et/braccha solum indutus’. Comm. I.787. ³⁰ This character also appears in many illustrated popular prints where he mocks men dominated by their wives: Kristina Bake, Spiegel einer Christlichen vnd friedsamen Hausshaltung: Die Ehe in der populären Druckgraphik des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 2013), 230–3 and 480, fig. 118. ³¹ Bebel, Fazetien, 283–8, no. 111. ³² Comm. I.652. In Johannes Pauli’s later version of the joke, published in 1555, Claus Narr sits on a slice of cheese trying to produce a calf (Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ii, 83, no. 841). Vadianus and his friends were likely familiar with this joke and the additional comic layer it added to Burgauer’s prank, for it was Vadianus’ cousin Georg von Watt who shared the joke about Claus Narr with Rütiner.

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common metaphor for the testicles, and broken eggs often referred to semen spilled in vain, in particular in the context of jokes about masturbation.³³ In these jokes, eggs, faeces, and testicles symbolized each other, and together they pointed to men’s futile attempts at reproduction.³⁴ As a symbol of fertility and a common metaphor for both the testicles and faeces, the egg in Vadianus’ joke could thus not have been more perfectly placed. Squashed under the bottom of an elderly man, and a Catholic cleric no less, it insinuated that Weckerli was incontinent as well as short-sighted—or worse, it could be understood to poke fun at his inability to procreate due to his age and vocation. This scene must have been entertaining enough at the time, but when Vadianus repeated the joke in Rütiner’s presence and in the context of postReformation St Gall, the fact that the now Protestant pastor Burgauer had made the joke at the expense of Weckerli, who, in contrast, had stayed Catholic and bound by his pledge to celibacy, added yet another twist to the story. The changed circumstances allowed Vadianus to turn the joke into a critique of the Catholic clergy’s pledge to celibacy, symbolized by the image of an old Catholic priest literally sitting on, and thus crushing, his long-hoarded ‘eggs’.³⁵ The above example highlights three important aspects of the circulation and the social context of (sexualized) jokes which are further discussed below. First, it confirms that obscene jokes were a common feature of social gatherings among the educated elite and even among churchmen, and one that was not surrounded by secrecy or shame. Quite the contrary: the fact that Vadianus stressed his own role—‘in Vadianus’ presence and with his permission’—suggests that he was proud of his complicity in such an excellent prank. Second, it seems difficult to draw a clear dividing line between a ‘community of laughter’ and the target of the joke, for Weckerli allegedly laughed along with the prank played on him. This is of course not to suggest that Weckerli appreciated the joke to the same extent or for the same reasons that Vadianus and Burgauer did, and perhaps he simply felt obliged to laugh along to prevent an escalation, but it nevertheless suggests that the mechanisms at work were too complex to allow for a neat separation between those bonding over laughter and the person being laughed at. And finally, this

³³ Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 2011), 248. For a joke in which broken eggs represent semen spilled in the context of masturbation, see e.g. Rudolf M. Dekker, Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Basingstoke, 2001), 113. ³⁴ For the metaphoric connection between eggs and faeces, see e.g. Müller, Schwert und Scheide, 204–5. ³⁵ Weckerli later became the victim of a second joke; one which also mocked his old age and his stubborn loyalty to the Catholic faith for all the wrong reasons. When Weckerli complained that the proposed salary of 15 lb for Protestant pastors was far too low, Vadianus replied: ‘In spem vivatis’ (you shall live in hope). Yet the half-deaf Weckerli understood ‘ite an speng’ (go to the distribution of alms) and immediately launched upon an angry tirade: ‘The devil shall go to the alms box! [This is] intolerable, intolerable’ (‘Diabolus . . . eat ad stipem [ ] intoll/erabile intollerabile’). According to the two Protestant pastors Hulrich Girtanner and Mathäus Altherr, everybody present burst into laughter. Comm. II.287.

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example illustrates that an old joke delivered in new circumstances could take on quite a different meaning. A popular character in the contemporary joke collections, a man brooding or laying eggs certainly lent himself well to an adaptation in a practical joke. Yet Vadianus’ account, delivered in the context of postReformation St Gall, added another comic dimension. If jokes only make sense in context, this context is both cultural and social: it depends both on a set of common humorous stock figures and the specific context of the conversation in which a joke is made. While printed joke collections tell us little about the social context of jokes, they can shed some light on the sources for Rütiner’s collection and on the circulation of jokes in general. Rütiner never directly cites a collection of facetiae (jokes, jests), but he knew some of the important contemporary authors—Angelus Politianus, Heinrich Bebel, Johannes Pauli—by name.³⁶ It is, therefore, possible that he was familiar with their work and drew on it for his own collection. Mostly, however, jokes from these collections circulated orally and reached Rütiner through friends or acquaintances.³⁷ In 1535, for instance, Vadianus’ cousin Georg von Watt told Rütiner three jokes about Claus Narr, two of which were variations of jokes published in Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst, a hugely popular and often obscene German collection of entertaining and moralizing short stories.³⁸ Another humorous anecdote taken from Pauli’s collection was shared with Rütiner in the following context: Jakob Venetus, the son of Johannes Venetus in Wil . . . related this drollery . . . On Christmas Eve he had dinner with us in Wil. He knows extremely well how to act like a Bavarian or Lower German . . . He is the one for whom Antonius [the bookbinder] bound together Polydore Virgil, Herodotus, and Schimpf und Ernst.³⁹

Again, this example demonstrates that jokes were not a guilty pleasure, but an integral part of humanist culture: Johannes Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst stood quite literally side by side with the works of Herodotus and the Italian humanist Polydore Virgil. Yet Jakob Venetus did not simply reproduce a joke he had found in Schimpf und Ernst. Instead, he inserted it into a much more elaborate comic performance. Tellingly, this performance took place during a dinner just before Christmas. The eve of an important religious holiday was apparently not

³⁶ Comm. I.506; I.538; II.402a/b. ³⁷ E.g. Comm. I.887a and Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, i, 94, no. 138; Bebel, Fazetien, 41, nos 35, 75, 85. ³⁸ Comm. I.652 and Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ii, 82–3, nos 840–1. ³⁹ ‘Iacobus Venetus Ioannis Veneti Wil filius . . . retulit illam fabul/am . . . Vigilia/natiuitatis nobiscum cenatus z Wil/perquam bellissime nouit agere Bauarum item/Germanum inferiorem . . . ille est cui Antonius Vergilium Po/lidorum Herodotum et Schimpf v Ernst combi/nauit’. Comm. II.402a/b. See also Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, i, 15, no. 14.

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reserved for solemnity and serious conversation. Instead, it was spent cracking jokes and mimicking Germans. This episode suggests that instead of only looking at the relationship between the ‘community of laughter’ and those targeted by its jokes, we should perhaps explore the role of the joker himself. Herman Roodenburg has suggested that one of the main purposes of jest-books was to serve in conversation, and that being able to entertain your companions with witty remarks and well-timed jokes was an essential requirement for any gentleman.⁴⁰ Similarly, in an article on the homo facetus (man of wit), Gerd Dicke has described this humanist ideal as someone who could entertain and simultaneously ‘demonstrate intellectual, linguistic, and social finesse’.⁴¹ The same clearly applied to those delivering sexual and scatological jokes. ‘Social finesse’ was certainly required when choosing the audience and the target of the joke, but by no means did it entail the exclusion of obscene humour.⁴² In fact, Rütiner’s notebooks bear witness not only to the huge popularity of this material, but also to the social esteem enjoyed by those who could draw on such jokes to provide entertainment, both inside and outside of humanist circles. If laughter was indeed ‘a kind of “admission ticket” into the world of humanism’,⁴³ it could also open the doors to other social groups. Rütiner and his fellow guildsmen very much appreciated the company of a talented entertainer such as Venetus, and Venetus in turn used his copy of Schimpf und Ernst to establish himself as a witty, and therefore valuable, dinner companion. Others were known and admired for their clever practical jokes, and they often personally delivered detailed accounts of their pranks, earning them a second round of laughter.⁴⁴ It seems that it was highly desirable to be known as a homo ioci plenus (a man full of wit) or his (albeit much rarer) female counterpart.⁴⁵ Wit increased the value of an individual’s company—perhaps not least because of the health-promoting qualities which sixteenth-century humanists and physicians ascribed to laughter.⁴⁶

⁴⁰ Herman Roodenburg, ‘To Converse Agreeably: Civility and the Telling of Jokes in SeventeenthCentury Holland’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1997), 112–33, here 122–5. For a similar argument, see also Withington, ‘Company and Sociability’, esp. 302–3; Phil Withington, ‘ “Tumbled into the Dirt”: Wit and Incivility in Early Modern England’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 12/1–2 (2011), 156–77, and Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 36–8. ⁴¹ Dicke, ‘Homo facetus’, 300–1. ⁴² As Stephanie Altrock has aptly noted, the authors of early modern joke collections often reassure their readers that they have excluded obscene material, only to then provide a detailed account of the jokes they claim to have erased from their collection. Stephanie Altrock, Gewitztes Erzählen in der frühen Neuzeit: Heinrich Bebels Fazetien und ihre deutsche Übersetzung (Cologne, 2009), 33–4. ⁴³ Grebe, ‘Künstler als Komiker’, 206. ⁴⁴ E.g. Comm. I.316; I.584; I.787. ⁴⁵ E.g. Comm. I.85; II.385b; II.387h. ⁴⁶ See Sebastian Coxon, ‘Gelächter und Gesundheit: Humanistische Thematik im >Quacksalber< des Hans Folz?’, in Nicola McLelland, Hans-Jochen Schiewer, and Stefanie Schmitt (eds), Humanismus in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters und in der frühen Neuzeit: XVIII. Anglo-German Colloquium, Hofgeismar 2003 (Tübingen, 2008), 383–9, here 384.

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How was a reputation as a homo ioci plenus earned? According to early modern instructions for delivering a successful joke, the joker had to take into consideration the time and place, and his audience as well as his own social position.⁴⁷ A certain degree of social intelligence was required, in particular if a joke targeted a specific individual, and even more so if that individual was present at the time the joke was made. A homo ioci plenus knew how to entertain without causing irreparable damage, and thus the surest sign of a successful joke was not the audience’s laughter—although that, too, was necessary—but the victim’s.⁴⁸ This may explain why Rütiner so often insists that the person targeted ‘intellexit [et] risit’—that they got the joke and laughed along.⁴⁹ Yet even jokes which did not target a specific individual were often adapted to the circumstances in which they were to be performed, and existing jokes were frequently rebranded as factual stories. When the wealthy weaver and councillor Albrecht Schlumpf bragged about his rather crude pranks, for instance, he failed to mention that he drew heavily on the large stock of humorous anecdotes in circulation, and perhaps even on printed sources. During his stay at an inn in Lichtensteig, Schlumpf allegedly conspired with a peasant to play a prank on a mercenary from Glarus who prided himself a little too much on his achievements on the battlefield. Schlumpf duped the soldier into thinking that the peasant was an Ammann, that is the head of the local community, and when this so-called Ammann defecated in the bed he shared with the mercenary, the humiliated soldier did not dare to blame him, and paid a maid to remove the excrement.⁵⁰ Yet what was presented by Schlumpf as an original prank bore striking similarities to one of the stories in Johannes Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst. There, a priest is subjected to a similarly humiliating procedure by a man resentful of the fact that the priest is treated as a guest of honour, while he has to sit with the common folk.⁵¹ The differences between the two versions of the joke are small but effective. Instead of targeting a priest, Schlumpf ’s prank was directed against another popular target of Swiss Protestantism: the mercenary. Moreover, Schlumpf managed to present himself as the mastermind behind the operation without compromising his respectability. He demonstrated his wit, but left the dirty work to someone he apparently considered more suitable for the job: a peasant. Given the right circumstances, printed or orally circulated facetiae thus translated easily into practical jokes—or could at least be retold as such. Schlumpf was not alone in his clever adaptation of existing jokes. The subtle differences between printed jokes and their counterparts in the Commentationes suggest that the printed raw material was continuously changed to fit a new place

⁴⁷ Giovanni Pontano, Ioannis Ioviani Pontani De Sermone Libri Sex, ed. Sergio Lupi and Antonino Risicato (Lucca, 1954), 17–19. ⁴⁸ Dicke, ‘Fazetieren’, esp. 159. ⁴⁹ E.g. Comm. I.591b–c; I.787; II.385c. ⁵⁰ Comm. I.316. ⁵¹ Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, i, 364, no. 653.

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and the particular tastes of a different audience.⁵² The joke about the old groom cited at the beginning of this chapter provides a particularly striking example. The two oral versions of the joke recorded by Rütiner were at the same time more specific and more concise than those published by Bebel and Pauli in 1508 and 1533, respectively.⁵³ They were more specific with regards to location: when the joke was told in St Gall, the events it referred to had supposedly taken place in the town of Bischofszell; when Rütiner’s fellow citizen Jakob Kuntz heard the same joke from ‘the publican in Leipzig’,⁵⁴ however, the groom turned into a man from Wittenberg. In each case, a town close by was chosen as the setting. This simple change created a more intimate relationship between the audience and the joke and increased its comic effect; it turned a fictional joke into a supposedly factual story which had happened close by, and perhaps even to someone known to the audience.⁵⁵ Yet there was also a much more substantial change to the version published in print. As the joke circulated, it was reduced to its humorous essence, to the very minimum necessary for it to work. While Bebel and Pauli follow both the old groom and the man who accidentally receives the aphrodisiac in his stead and is ‘tortured all night by the erection of his prick without relief ’,⁵⁶ the Wittenberg version mentions both but focuses only on the agony of the old groom. Finally, the Bischofszell version does not even mention the confusion but presents the story as a prank played by a witty surgeon. When jokes are circulated, they undergo processes of assimilation and accentuation.⁵⁷ In contrast to the printed joke collections, these altered versions can tell us how a wider audience understood and reproduced jokes. It can also show us what exactly people laughed at. Returning to the example above, an elderly man soiling his wedding bed apparently seemed hilarious, while the other half of the joke, about a man suffering from an unwanted erection, could be discarded without the joke losing any of its appeal. What, then, was so funny about an old man soiling himself on his wedding night? In order to answer this question, we need to place the joke within its broader cultural context.

Gender and obscene humour In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud claimed that obscene jokes were ⁵² See similarly Keith Thomas, ‘Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England: Essays in Celebration of the Work of Bernard Capp (Basingstoke, 2010), 9–30, here 19. ⁵³ Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ii, 13, no. 708; Bebel, Fazetien, 101, no. 15. ⁵⁴ Comm. I.545. ⁵⁵ On this effect, see also Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 37; Altrock, Gewitztes Erzählen, 61. ⁵⁶ ‘tota nocte cruciabatur erectione virgae sine laxatione’. Bebel, Fazetien, 101, no. 15. ⁵⁷ Both of these processes have also been described by rumour theorists. See e.g. Pamela Donovan, ‘How Idle Is Idle Talk? One Hundred Years of Rumour Research’, Diogenes, 54 (2007), 59–82, here 64.

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originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction. If a man in a company of men enjoys telling or listening to smut, the original situation, which owing to social inhibitions cannot be realized, is at the same time imagined. A person who laughs at smut that he hears is laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression.⁵⁸

Freud’s gendered view of sexual humour has been echoed in numerous studies which rightly point out the blatant misogyny encountered in much of early modern humour.⁵⁹ Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, for instance, have argued that female voices in obscene jokes are ‘mostly faked, functioning as a vehicle to bolster existing hierarchies’.⁶⁰ Sebastian Coxon has argued that the German comic tales which contain explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse offer no moral message but instead reinforce ‘traditional (misogynist) sexual stereotypes’.⁶¹ Even when cuckoldry and impotence were identified as dominant themes in sexual humour, as for instance by Roger Thompson in an article on seventeenth-century British humour, it was suggested that these ‘deep-seated neuroses’ could represent an ‘attempt at the restoration of anxious masculine dominance’.⁶² Few scholars put it as bluntly as Gershon Legman in The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, but much of the literature on early modern humour nevertheless supports his impression that ‘this material has all been created by men, and there is no place in it for women except as the butt’.⁶³ A number of scholars have recently begun to criticise this narrative.⁶⁴ Sarah Toulalan has convincingly argued that by linking sexual humour to sexual aggression, the psychoanalytic approach obscures the pleasurable and erotic dimensions

⁵⁸ Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 97. ⁵⁹ In addition to the examples cited below, see e.g. Francis E. Dolan, ‘Why Are Nuns Funny?’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70/4 (2007), 509–35, here esp. 512; Elfriede Moser-Rath, ‘Lustige Gesellschaft’: Schwank und Witz des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in kultur- und sozialgeschichtlichem Kontext (Stuttgart, 1984), esp. 91–2, 101–8, 116–17; Hiram Kümper, ‘Sexualität—Gewalt—Humor’, in Stefan Biessenecker and Christian Kuhn (eds), Valenzen des Lachens in der Vormoderne (1250–1750) (Bamberg, 2012), 437–61; Miroslawa Czarnecka, ‘Misogyne Lachgemeinschaft: Barocke Frauensatire im deutsch-polnischen Vergleich’, in Stefanie Arend, Thomas Borgstedt, Nicola Kaminski et al. (eds), Anthropologie und Medialität des Komischen im 17. Jahrhundert (1580–1730) (Amsterdam, 2008), 357–70; Monika Jonas, ‘Idealisierung und Dämonisierung als Mittel der Repression: Eine Untersuchung zur Weiblichkeitsdarstellung im spätmittelalterlichen Schwank’, in Sylvia Wallinger and Monika Jonas (eds), Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung: Studien zur bezwungenen Weiblichkeit in der Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Innsbruck, 1986), 67–93, here esp. 90; Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, esp. 190–249; Schilling, Bildpublizistik der Frühen Neuzeit, esp. 242–5. ⁶⁰ Bremmer and Roodenburg, ‘Introduction’, 5. ⁶¹ Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 46. ⁶² Thompson, ‘Popular Reading’, 667. ⁶³ Gershon Legman, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humour (New York, 2006), 217. ⁶⁴ In addition to the scholars mentioned below, see also Simons, Sex of Men, 96; Silvia Serena Tschopp, ‘Geschlechterkampf als Gesprächsspiel: Frühneuzeitliche Ehesatire im Spannungsfeld von Affirmation und Diskursivierung sozialethischer Normen’, in Stefanie Arend, Thomas Borgstedt, Nicola Kaminski et al. (eds), Anthropologie und Medialität des Komischen im 17. Jahrhundert (1580–1730) (Amsterdan, 2008), 429–63, here esp. 456–8.

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of sexual humour. Instead, Toulalan reads obscene jokes through the lens of contemporary medical theory and thus uncovers a variety of layers and hidden targets in jokes which seem exclusively misogynist on the surface.⁶⁵ While Toulalan argues that women were not the only butt of sexual jokes, Pamela Allen Brown opposes the view that making such jokes was a male prerogative. Jesting women, Brown argues, played an important part in early modern comic literature, and female humour ‘constitutes a previously unnoticed vector of critique and social power, which may at times threaten and even disrupt reigning ideologies enforcing female subjection’.⁶⁶ Fictional female jesters do not, of course, necessarily represent female humour, let alone female agency. In her more recent work on the seventeenth-century manuscript jest-book of Sir Nicholas Le Strange, Brown therefore moves beyond literary sources to show that elite women did in fact regularly make bawdy jokes at social gatherings.⁶⁷ My analysis of Rütiner’s collection builds on Toulalan’s and Brown’s insights, but seeks to exploit the peculiarities of the Commentationes to make clearer how their findings relate to joking practices and to the experiences of real women and men. Moreover, the notion that obscene jokes are necessarily weapons in a struggle between the sexes itself deserves some scrutiny.⁶⁸ Indeed, Rütiner’s jokes demonstrate that men and women could laugh with as well as at each other, and men frequently revelled in obscene humour targeted at their own sex. Let us first look at some examples of women taking part in sexual humour. In December 1538, the maid and midwife Anna Bösch shared the following anecdote with Rütiner: her former employer Georg Gerung the Elder once refused to sleep with his wife during vigil on the eve of a religious celebration. The next day, his wife cut off a Schuben, a kind of apron, from his best piece of linen. When Gerung asked what she was doing, she replied: ‘Yesterday night was Holy Vigil, surely a holy festival follows and I should dress accordingly.’⁶⁹ She thus took revenge on her husband and simultaneously mocked him for being so prudish: the Schuben was a common symbol of chastity worn by virgins.⁷⁰ By exaggerating her eagerness to remain chaste during vigil—for what she suggested was nothing less than a

⁶⁵ Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2007), esp. 199–204 and 231–2. ⁶⁶ Brown, Better a Shrew, 3–4. For a similar study, but one focusing on medieval literature, see also Perfetti, Women and Laughter, 2–3. ⁶⁷ Pamela Allen Brown, ‘Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange’, in Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (eds), Women Players in England, 1500–1600: Beyond the All-Male Stage (Aldershot, 2005), 305–14, here esp. 306–8. ⁶⁸ Brown is critical of the claim that early modern humour is authored only by men, but does not generally question that sexual jokes are targeted at members of the opposite sex: Brown, Better a Shrew, 3–4 and 10. ⁶⁹ ‘Sacra inquit Vi/gilia heri noctium fuit [ ] vtique sacra festi/uitas sequitur [ ] festiue me induam’. Comm. II.385b. ⁷⁰ ‘Schieben, Schuben’, in Schweizerisches Idiotikon: Wörterbuch zur Schweizerdeutschen Sprache, 17 vols (Frauenfeld, 1881–), viii, cols 75–6.

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return to her virginal state—the wife poked fun at the rules prescribing a period of sexual abstinence and those who adhered to them. Even though her husband was the victim of her joke—and a joke which would have been quite expensive at that—‘the good man understood his wife’s humour and liked her joke’.⁷¹ Gerung was not the only man said to appreciate female humour, even if that humour was much more explicitly sexual and highly insulting. Elisabeth, a maid who served Hulrich Ramsauer in St Gall, allegedly got away with the following joke: On the day when the grandfather bathed in the copper [tub], the daughter Barbara and the maid [Elisabeth] wanted to lift him up because he was not able to do anything by himself [sui nihil potens erat]. When he stood erect, the maid pulled away the nude man’s thigh, in the presence of the daughter, who forbade it. Touching his penis with her little finger [Elisabeth] said: ‘Ah, how impotent.’ The father laughed.⁷²

The joke contains two puns: just when the old man stands erect, his missing erection becomes visible. By paralleling nihil potens with impotens, the joke further mocks the old man’s lack of physical strength and sexual potency and thus questions his masculinity in both regards. Contrary to what one might expect, however, Elisabeth’s disrespectful joke did not earn her master’s rage, but his laughter. Of course, it can be argued that these are also faked female voices—that this second joke is just as much a product of male fantasy as those printed in the early modern joke collections. Even if Elisabeth did make a sexual joke at the expense of her master’s father, it is very unlikely that she would have had the necessary linguistic skills to play on the double entendre of erectus and impotens. Yet apparently it seemed perfectly plausible to Rütiner that women would mock men and their sexuality in this way.⁷³ And more importantly: it was funny. Men laughed along with women at members of their own sex. Indeed, more often than seeing men laughing at women, we find men laughing at men and their (sexual) shortcomings in Rütiner’s notebooks. And more often than the female body, it is the male body and its fluids that generate a comic effect. Ejaculation, impotence, and male incontinence are among the most common themes in Rütiner’s collection. In what ways did they produce laughter among a male audience?

⁷¹ ‘In/tellexit vir bonus mulieris lepiditatem [ ] com/placuit ei iocus’. Comm. II.385b. For a second joke criticizing sexual abstinence during vigil, see Comm. I.303. ⁷² ‘quo die auus lauatus se in aheno [ ] filia Bar/bara cum ancilla volentes eum extrahere quia/sui nihil potens erat [ ] erectus [ ] ancilla nudo/foemorale abtraxit praesente et vetante filia/Priapum digitulo tangens ait [ ] ah quam impotens/risit pater’. Comm. I.591b. ⁷³ For more examples of women taking a very active part in sexual and scatological humour, see Brown, ‘Jesting Rights’.

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In jokes revolving around ejaculation, comic effect is usually produced by the use of unfamiliar metaphors to describe sperm to a woman who has never seen it before. In one (to the modern reader particularly shocking) joke told by the schoolmaster Ignatius Rotmund, for instance, a nun who confessed to herself rather than to her priest is punished with rape and told that the semen is her ‘absolution’. Two things which share nothing but their being given by a priest to a nun—semen and absolution—are paralleled for comic effect, and sin is forgiven by committing sin. The joke thus mocks the Catholics by pointing out their corruption and the dire state of their sacraments. Yet it does not end there: ‘If only I had shat in church,’ the nun replies to the priest, ‘what would have been laid upon/put inside [impositum] me then!’⁷⁴ The joke plays on the ambiguity of the verb imponere: the nun is clearly referring to the punishment which was imposed on her, but she is also commenting on the person who lay upon her and on the penis he put inside her. By fantasizing about how much more would have been laid upon, or, literally, put inside her, had she committed an even greater sin, she is suggesting that both the punishment and the priest’s body have failed to fulfil their purpose; in short, he has proved himself inadequate as both priest and lover. In another joke following the same pattern, the man replies that the semen is ‘eggs cooked in butter’.⁷⁵ This is more than just an unconventional description of sperm. As we have already seen, eggs were a common symbol for the testicles, and sex was often likened to cooking in both popular and medical discourse.⁷⁶ The French physician Jean Fernel, for instance, described the sexual act as one in which semen was ‘clotted and whitened by heat’, invoking the image of an egg being fried.⁷⁷ Rütiner’s joke, too, plays on this symbolism as it describes sperm as the content of the male ‘eggs’ cooked in the nun’s ‘butter’ (i.e. vaginal lubrication). Moreover, it refers to a dish charged with notions of fertility—Eier-i-Schmalz (eggs-in-fat)—which was commonly served after a wedding.⁷⁸ Hence the joke not only works on the level of the unusual analogy, but also because Eier-i-Schmalz ironically invokes the image of a luxurious wedding when it is in fact the result of rape. Yet again, this is not the end of the joke. ‘Lift up the Pfannenknecht [i.e. a metal device used to stabilize a pan during cooking], or else the butter will run down to the arse,’⁷⁹ the woman replies, turning the joke back on her attacker. Adding to the metaphors he employs, she points out that his Pfannenknecht is no longer performing as required but has to be ‘lifted up’. In yet another joke of the same type, a woman touches a man’s penis and asks whether it is made of bone or sinew. After the man has ejaculated, he responds: ⁷⁴ ‘vtinam cacassem/in templum [ ] quid mihi tandem impositum esset’. Comm. I.309. ⁷⁵ ‘Oua cocta in butyro’. Comm. I.309. ⁷⁶ Simons, Sex of Men, e.g. 248 and 262. ⁷⁷ Jean Fernel, The Physiologia of Jean Fernel (1567), trans. John M. Forrester (Philadelphia, 2003), 547; see also 541–53. ⁷⁸ ‘Eierischmalz’, in Schweizerisches Idiotikon, i, col. 13. ⁷⁹ ‘leuate pfannen/knecht alias butyrum in culum descendit.’ Comm. I.309.

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‘They are bones, but broken ones. The marrow flows through the anus.’⁸⁰ Again, the joke humorously reflects the medical knowledge of the time. First suggested by Plato, the idea that sperm flew from the spinal marrow to the testicles was still very much alive in Rütiner’s time and was depicted, for instance, in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of sexual intercourse.⁸¹ This idea was combined with the ‘broken bone’ metaphor, a common image linked to the flaccid or impotent penis.⁸² The sexual act was thus imagined as one in which an injury was inflicted on the man, a violent fight which ended with marrow flowing from his broken bone. At the centre of most of these jokes lies a violent act against a woman, who is simultaneously ridiculed for her ignorance in sexual matters. Yet, given that the women usually have the last word and expose their attackers with witty replies, it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that women are the only butt of these jokes.⁸³ Moreover, none of these jokes focus on the female body. This is particularly striking when compared with the sexual jokes discussed by Sarah Toulalan, which mostly revolve around the exposure of female genitals and ‘do not generally make [male genitalia] the object of derision’.⁸⁴ Rütiner’s jokes, in contrast, primarily draw attention to, and laugh at, the male body and its fluids. In his entire collection, there is only one instance in which a sexual joke focuses exclusively on the vagina; namely one in which the duchess of Saxony jokingly offers her sexual services to Claus Narr at the price of 10 gulden, and claims that her private parts are ‘golden and surrounded by pearls’.⁸⁵ Yet even then it is the gullible, sexually inexperienced fool who is ridiculed, not the duchess. Referring to printed joke-books, Barbara Bowen has argued that ‘with a few exceptions, ‘dirty’ jokes are either sexual or scatological’.⁸⁶ The jokes collected by Rütiner, however, suggest that sexual, anal and scatological humour were closely intertwined. In many of the jokes already discussed, the sexual act is linked to excretion and sperm is imagined to flow through or down to the anus after intercourse. Although there are no explicit descriptions of anal sex, some of the jokes clearly play with the taboo. In one of them, a prostitute confesses to cheating on a man she had previously stolen from another woman. Appalled by her shameless behaviour, the priest shouts: ‘Earth, open up and suffocate her.’ Yet the quick-witted woman turns her buttocks towards the priest and replies: ‘Arse,

⁸⁰ ‘Ossa sunt [ ] fracta autem [ ] med/ulla per anum fluit.’ Comm. I.309. ⁸¹ Simons, Sex of Men, 135 and 161. ⁸² Müller, Schwert und Scheide, 115. ⁸³ Roger Thompson has observed similar patterns in English jokes: Thompson, ‘Popular Reading’, 664. ⁸⁴ Toulalan, Imagining Sex, 218. ⁸⁵ ‘aureum cum margarithis sceptum’. Comm. I.652. See similarly, but without the explicit reference to the duchess’s vagina: Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ii, 82, no. 840. ⁸⁶ Barbara C. Bowen, ‘The “Honorable Art of Farting” in Continental Renaissance Literature’, in Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim (eds), Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Aldershot, 2004), 1–13, here 2.

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suffocate the priest.’⁸⁷ As Coxon has pointed out, turning one’s exposed backside towards another person was a common insult, but one which was almost exclusively employed by men. When a woman used it, the gesture took on a distinctly sexual connotation.⁸⁸ The prostitute in Rütiner’s joke alludes to this when she tells her behind to ‘suffocate’ the priest. By revealing her backside, she simultaneously exposes his desire for it, making him a bigger sinner than herself. Another joke similarly references anal sex, albeit even more obscurely: Discord arose between dogs and cats about the private parts. They dispatched a dog to Rome. They fastened a charter of liberties under the tail/penis [sub pene]. Therefore they look for it there [i.e. beneath the tail] when they meet. They hate the cats.⁸⁹

Cats were closely associated with women and the female sphere, and the vagina was also often referred to as a cat—a metaphoric link which still lives on in words such as ‘pussy’, or the French ‘chatte’.⁹⁰ The dogs in this joke, on the other hand, are clearly marked as male by their penises. The joke seems to play on the observation that dogs sniff each other’s behinds when they meet; a phenomenon which is explained with their search for the papal decree fastened to their penises/ underneath their tails, i.e. near the anus. Perhaps, then, the dogs represent the Catholic clergy, who, ‘liberated’ by papal decree from intercourse with cats/ women, engage in much more sinful sexual practices with one another. While jokes about sodomy are hidden underneath several layers of metaphors, scatological jokes are much more explicit, and more explicitly linked to sex. The various fluids and solids erupting plentifully from the male body—semen, faeces, urine—were likened to each other, and impotence was often joined by incontinence.⁹¹ In the joke about the old groom who accidentally takes a laxative rather than an aphrodisiac, his inability to perform sexually is matched by his failure to control his bodily functions during his wedding night, and instead of semen, faeces flow uncontrollably from his body.⁹² It is not a coincidence that an old man was chosen as the target of this joke. According to contemporary medical theory, men were hotter and dryer than women, yet they lost some of their virile strength and distinctly male

⁸⁷ ‘Terra aperi te/suffoca illam [ ] reversa culum aposuit, ait [ ] culum suffoca/sacerdotem.’ Comm. I.309. ⁸⁸ Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 137. ⁸⁹ ‘Discordia orta inter canes et feles super/inguina [ ] dimiserunt canem Romam sub/pene literas ligarunt de libertate hac id/eo quaerunt eam convenientes [ ] feles odientes’. Comm. I.132c. ⁹⁰ Darnton, Great Cat Massacre, 95. ⁹¹ On the association of masculinity with this threat of erupting and soiling liquids in 16th-c. Germany, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), here 112. ⁹² Comm. I.210; I.545.

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characteristics as they grew older and colder.⁹³ Impotence and incontinence were thus both symptoms of a transformation which old men were imagined to undergo— a transformation which moved them closer to the opposite sex.⁹⁴ The sexual act and semen were also paralleled with defecation and faeces, as for instance in a joke which Rütiner records at the very beginning of his notebooks in 1529: A man visited a nunnery. After long prayers, he lay down on a bench and uncovered his penis. Asked what it was, he replied: ‘It is a pipe/oats [avena].’ ‘Give it to my hen,’ [the nun] said. After he had given it often, he finally shat on her. He said it was the brood.⁹⁵

Here, several jokes are wrapped up in one. The first plays on the double meaning of the Latin word avena: originally referring to oats, its secondary meaning, ‘pipe’, is derived from the similarities in the shape of the stalk of the oat and the instrument. Both, moreover, were common contemporary metaphors for the penis.⁹⁶ In a second step, the nun builds on the metaphor and assures the man that her hungry ‘hen’ craves his ‘oats’.⁹⁷ Finally, the man defecates on the nun and calls his excrements ‘the brood’. Thus, the joke above not only draws on the likeness of egg and faeces to playfully extend the oat/hen metaphor even further, but it also literally reproduces a contemporary German expression: bescheissen, ‘to shit upon’, also meant to betray and was commonly used when a man took a woman’s virginity but broke his promise of marriage.⁹⁸ Moreover, the joke points out the illegitimacy and fruitlessness of the sexual encounter between the man and the nun: excretion takes the place of ejaculation, and instead of legitimate offspring, their relationship produces only faeces.⁹⁹

⁹³ Simons, Sex of Men, 154. In fact, some physicians even prescribed complete sexual abstinence to their elderly patients, for each ejaculation was thought to draw precious heat from their aging bodies. See Anthony Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama: Comic Elders on the Italian and Shakespearean Stage (Farnham, 2009), here 1–4. ⁹⁴ For an example of how negative stereotypes regarding old age and gender intersected in the figure of the comically lecherous old man, see Gabriela Signori, ‘Die verlorene Ehre des Heiligen Joseph oder Männlichkeit im Spannungsfeld spätmittelalterlicher Altersstereotypen: Zur Genese von Urs Grafs “Heiliger Familie” (1521)’, in Klaus Schreiner and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Verletzte Ehre. Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 1995), 183–213. ⁹⁵ ‘Quidam in nonialium claustro diuertens/post longas preces super scannum decumbens/priapum detegens interrogatus quid esset/respondit auenum est [ ] Da inquit gallinae/meae [ ] sepius dato tandem cacauit in/eam [ ] ait esse bruott [ ] etc’. Comm. I.185. ⁹⁶ Müller, Schwert und Scheide, 83 and 88; Simons, Sex of Men, 236. ⁹⁷ (Female) hunger was a common metaphor for sexual desire, and eating a metaphor for coitus. See Müller, Schwert und Scheide, 105–7 and 121–8; Simons, Sex of Men, 201. ⁹⁸ ‘Bescheissen’ in Schweizerisches Idiotikon, viii, cols 1334–41. See also Müller, Schwert und Scheide, 200. ⁹⁹ A similar joke later became the subject of an illustrated pamphlet: it depicts a man and a woman in monastic habit sitting atop several eggs on a bed, their backsides exposed. Some of the eggs have cracked open, revealing the couple’s offspring: a multitude of small monks. The print is reproduced in

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The close link between sex and defecation in early modern jokes may seem foreign to us, but we should be careful not to view it as pathological.¹⁰⁰ In the context of sixteenth-century culture, the connections between intercourse and digestion were numerous and more than just metaphoric. This was a culture in which the sexual act was described using metaphors linked to cooking and eating, in which the penis, testicles, and semen were likened to foodstuffs and the vagina to a hungry mouth waiting to be fed.¹⁰¹ It was also a time in which the medical discourse postulated close links between all bodily fluids: food was thought to be transformed into blood as it went through the digestive system, blood in turn became breast milk and semen, and the latter was also metaphorically represented by marrow and urine.¹⁰² The healthy body depended on the right flow and balance of all its fluids, and sex and excretion, responsible as they were for the expulsion and transfer of liquids, played an important role within this system.¹⁰³ This shared role made it easy to draw parallels between the sexual and excretory functions of the body.¹⁰⁴ As Toulalan has argued, this means that ‘the body’s excretions can . . . all stand for one another, so that humour about breaking wind, defecation, and urination can also be about sex and sexual fluids’.¹⁰⁵ In the context of Renaissance medicine, then, faeces were not only associated with dirt and degradation. In a system that depended on the flow and balance of bodily fluids, excretion was of high importance to sustain a healthy body.¹⁰⁶ This idea is reflected in another joke recorded by Rütiner, in which a group of poor students insert a piece of wood into the anus of a baker’s pig. The next day the pig dies ‘because it could not shit’.¹⁰⁷ Due to its sudden and mysterious death, the pig’s meat cannot be legally sold, and so it is given to the only people still willing to have it: to the students who were responsible for the pig’s death in the first place. It has sometimes been suggested that talking about sex and faeces constituted a taboo, and consequently the comic effect of scatological jokes was attributed to a pleasurable transgression of social norms and the relief it provided.¹⁰⁸ By now,

Helga Meise, ‘Medienkonsum oder Wissensdispositif? Zur Stellung von Flugblättern und Flugschriften in Marcus zum Lamms Thesaurus picturarum (1564–1606)’, Daphnis, 37 (2008), 153–77, here 175, fig. 9. ¹⁰⁰ See similarly Lyndal Roper, Der feiste Doktor: Luther, sein Körper und seine Biographen, trans. Karin Wördemann (Göttingen, 2012), 64. Nor is it productive to apply psychoanalytic categories to early modern scatological humour, as has sometimes been attempted. See e.g. Claude Gandelman, ‘ “Patri-arse”: Revolution as Anality in the Scatological Caricatures of the Reformation and the French Revolution’, American Imago, 53/1 (1996), 7–24. ¹⁰¹ E.g. Simons, Sex of Men, 248 and 262. ¹⁰² Ibid. 153–4 and 272; Toulalan, Imagining Sex, 199. ¹⁰³ Simons, Sex of Men, 126 and 272. ¹⁰⁴ Toulalan, Imagining Sex, 230–1. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid. 199. ¹⁰⁶ For an extreme example of how crucial the balance between intake and excretion seemed to doctors in the early modern period, see e.g. Shigehisa Kuriyama, ‘The Forgotten Fear of Excrement’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38/3 (2008), 413–42. See also Toulalan, Imagining Sex, 199 and 228–9, and Simons, Sex of Men, 127. ¹⁰⁷ ‘quia non cacare/potuit moritur.’ Comm. II.183. ¹⁰⁸ E.g. Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 8, or Thompson, ‘Popular Reading’, 665.

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however, it should have become clear that the taboo is a modern one—based on the idea that defecation in particular is a private, shameful act and an inappropriate topic of conversation. In the sixteenth century, talking about faeces was not forbidden, and excretion was less hidden.¹⁰⁹ Norbert Elias has famously used Erasmus of Rotterdam’s De civilitate morum puerilium to argue that ideas about manners started to shift at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but he also noted that Erasmus did not yet find it shameful to call ‘the bodily functions by their name’.¹¹⁰ The same is true for Rütiner and his contemporaries, who regularly and openly discussed both sexual and scatological matters. It has already been noted that even women could talk about sex under certain circumstances, as in the case of Bösch, who laid bare her late employer Georg Gerung the Elder’s sexual activities, detailing, for instance, how he ‘stood next to [his maid’s] bed with a lustful penis’ one night and asked her to sleep with him.¹¹¹ Rütiner and his friends also regularly discussed other men’s (in)digestion over dinner.¹¹² They talked about the steward of Oberberg, who ‘did not shit for two full years’,¹¹³ or about Friedrich Schuhmacher, who suffered from such terrible diarrhoea that he ‘shat from his horse’ while riding to the market in Lyon.¹¹⁴ Jokes did not offer a space of freedom to discuss things which could not otherwise be addressed; rather, they represented a specific way of addressing them. But if these jokes drew their comic effect neither from allowing aggression against women to be released nor from breaking a taboo related to sex and faeces, what made them funny? I would argue that the jokes play on inversion and misplacement.¹¹⁵ Faeces produced laughter when they were imagined to be dumped where they did not belong, such as in a church or in the marital bed. They were hilarious when they took the place of semen during intercourse or when, as Bebel puts it, a man’s expected sexual potency was replaced by the ‘old man’s strongest potency’, namely incontinence.¹¹⁶ When semen was described as a cooked egg or bone marrow, or when a man emptied his bowels instead of his testicles after sex, the jokes referred to the contemporary medical knowledge but simultaneously inverted it, comically replacing one bodily fluid with another.

¹⁰⁹ See Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, ‘Introduction: Scatology, the Last Taboo’, in Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim (eds), Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Aldershot, 2004), pp. xiii–xxi, here p. xvii; Thomas, ‘Bodily Control and Social Unease’, 11, and similarly Toulalan, Imagining Sex, 228–9. For an account of Martin Luther’s anal and scatological rhetoric and its link to Luther’s theology, see e.g. Roper, Der feiste Doktor, 54–67. ¹¹⁰ Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols (Frankfurt a.M., 1976), i, 273–4. ¹¹¹ ‘nocte quadam iuxta lectum eius/stetit pruriente mentula’. Comm. II.385c. ¹¹² See e.g. Comm. I.361. ¹¹³ ‘2 integris annis/non cacavit’. Comm. I.893n. ¹¹⁴ ‘de/equo cacauit’. Comm. II.153f. ¹¹⁵ See also Coxon, Laughter and Narrative, 99. ¹¹⁶ Bebel, Fazetien, 101, no. 15.

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Inversion and misplacement both served to challenge the masculinity of the main characters in Rütiner’s jokes in a number of ways. Men were likened to brooding hens, they symbolically crushed their own testicles, their penises were described as broken and in need of being ‘lifted up’, or they were considered fodder for a nun’s hen or a prostitute’s buttocks. They shat uncontrollably, soiling themselves and others, and some were even accused of sodomitical tendencies. Rather than only reinforcing misogynist sexual stereotypes, these jokes first and foremost paraded a whole army of inadequate men. Impotent grooms, incontinent old men, gullible fools, humiliated mercenaries, and lecherous priests—these are the ‘heroes’ of Rütiner’s jokes. It seems important to note that the cuckold, so prominent a target in early modern printed joke collections, is missing from the list.¹¹⁷ Rütiner and his friends apparently preferred to laugh at men who were betrayed by their own bodies, not their wives. Through their jokes, then, they circumscribed and reaffirmed an image of desirable masculinity as rooted in the body and dependent on sexual potency, physical strength, and full control of all bodily functions. *

*

*

In the sixteenth century, sexual and scatological jokes were not a guilty pleasure, not something to be read in secret and repeated only in hushed voices, in the privacy of one’s home, earning slightly uncomfortable chuckles. Evidence from St Gall shows that both men and women, artisans and the intellectual elite, made and enjoyed obscene jokes, which were often shared over dinner, in the presence of both friends and strangers. By studying the social context of Rütiner’s jokes, it becomes evident that the latter were not only a safety valve for aggression and unwanted emotions, but also a source of positive ones. Wit required a high degree of social intelligence, and was therefore both a valued possession and an important element of sociability. Although Rütiner and his friends borrowed plentifully from the humorous material in circulation, they never recited a joke just as it appeared in a printed joke collection. Sometimes they retold it as an ingenious practical joke, or as a factual story which had ‘truly’ happened in a town close by. Sometimes they replaced the butt of a joke with a more suitable target, or they got rid of an element which no longer seemed funny. Therefore, the printed collections of facetiae are not in themselves representative of sixteenth-century everyday humour, despite the fact that they often served as one of its sources. In general, Rütiner’s jokes are even more explicitly sexual, more detailed in their description of bodily excretions, and, for the most part, free of any moralizing. Yet they are also complex and multi-layered, often playfully exploiting the double entendre of Latin words and

¹¹⁷ On the popularity and interpretation of cuckoldry jokes, see esp. Brown, Better a Shrew, 83–117, and Moser-Rath, Lustige Gesellschaft, 123–30.

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drawing on contemporary medical discourse, making it impossible to separate sexual from erudite humour.¹¹⁸ Sexual humour was also closely related to anal and scatological humour. This was the consequence of a culture in which coitus was described with metaphors related to eating and cooking, and in which semen and excretions were believed to belong to the same system of bodily fluids.¹¹⁹ In fact humour, too, was part of this system, for laughter, like sex and digestion, was thought to enhance the flow and release of liquids.¹²⁰ It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that Rütiner and his friends often shared sexual and scatological jokes over dinner: as they consumed food and drink, they humorously reflected about the substances into which the former would be processed, and perhaps they even imagined their laughter to support this transformation. Historians have often found early modern jokes to be aggressive and misogynist. Yet the fact that most obscene jokes in Rütiner’s Commentationes focus on the male body and its fluids suggests that we should also take a closer look at the ways in which men targeted other men and their sexuality in early modern humour. Like excessive misogyny, men’s aggressions towards those who fail to meet the dominant standards of masculinity, along with their anxious attempts to comply with these standards, have sometimes been taken as evidence for a crisis of masculinity itself.¹²¹ This is not how Rütiner’s jokes should be understood, however. If anything, the Commentationes point towards competition rather than anxiety. In the same contexts in which Rütiner heard most of the jokes discussed in this chapter, his learned friends demonstrated their knowledge of history, linguistics, and classical literature, councillors offered glimpses into local politics, and well-travelled merchants boasted about their international networks which provided them with news from all over Europe. In this context, obscene humour provided one opportunity among many for people to distinguish themselves and to contribute to the conversation. Those who made successful jokes displayed their social skills, their intelligence, and, in a humanist setting, their proficiency in Latin. Those who made obscene jokes, moreover, boasted medical knowledge and sexual experience. And if these jokes targeted other men and their failing bodies, the male joker implied that he, in contrast, understood and satisfied

¹¹⁸ Herman Roodenburg has made similar observations in relation to a private manuscript joke collection dating from the seventeenth century: Roodenburg, ‘To Converse Agreeably’, 119–21. ¹¹⁹ See e.g. Simons, Sex of Men, 262–4. ¹²⁰ Coxon, ‘Gelächter und Gesundheit’, esp. 384–5. ¹²¹ Miroslawa Czarnecka, for instance, argues that misogynist humour is symptomatic for a crisis of masculinity: Czarnecka, ‘Misogyne Lachgemeinschaft’, 369. As Toby L. Ditz has aptly noted, however, historians risk downplaying male power by laying the emphasis on anxious, fragile and fragmented masculinities: Toby L. Ditz, ‘The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History’, Gender and History, 16/1 (2004), 1–35. For a similar critique, see also Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2006), 5; Simons, Sex of Men, 73–8.

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the expectations early modern society placed on men. Perhaps, then, this particular type of humour was so popular among Rütiner’s friends because it allowed them to present themselves as clever entertainers and to display their masculinity at the same time. In social settings, early modern jokes could thus function as a kind of communicative currency. Another type of currency—gossip—will be the subject of the next chapter.

4 Gossip and the value of social knowledge Rütiner did not like people who talked thoughtlessly. His attitude towards those who did not know when to keep their mouths shut is perhaps best illustrated by the following anecdote: Kessler once spoke of how nature indicated silence with the teeth, which fortify [the mouth] like a fence so that talk cannot burst out, similarly the lips etc. Immediately Andreas Stercker burst out: ‘That is why’, he said, ‘old women are so talkative and [why they] always chatter: because of the broken fence.’ He was unaware that he was jumping over the fence himself; he did not listen to nature’s warning. I was present myself.¹

Rütiner agreed with Kessler that talking too much violated nature’s commands and—more crucially—those of the Lord. The comparison Kessler drew between teeth, lips, and a fence echoed the Book of Psalms: ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.’² This was only one of numerous condemnations of loose talk in the Old Testament. ‘In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise,’³ the Proverbs taught, for instance, while Leviticus warned that ‘thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people’, continuing, revealingly, ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour’.⁴ In the Bible, idle talk was thus presented as incompatible with neighbourly love, as an immoral activity which led, almost inevitably, to conflict and sin. It was the type of talk that threatened both people’s reputations and the ties that held communities together. Indeed, Rütiner himself experienced the destructive power of talk when three of his siblings-in-law died within the space of a few weeks. ‘Dissolute and all-too-trusting’⁵ people in town immediately started a rumour that Rütiner’s in-laws had been called to the Valley of Josaphat, where, according to popular belief, God judged over sinners. ‘I wondered’, Rütiner writes,

¹ ‘Ahenarius aliquando locutus quemadmodum natura sil/entium indicauerit per dentes quae tanquam sepe mu/niunt ne loquacitas prorumpat [ ] similiter labia etc/Serie prorupit Andreas Stercker [ ] Hinc fit/inquit [ ] quod vetulae tam loquaces subinde garri/unt fracto sepe [ ] Ipse immemor quod et/ipse transiliens sepe naturam non audit/monentem [ ] ipse interfui’. Comm. I.932k. ² Psalms 141:3. ³ Proverbs 10:19. ⁴ Lev. 19:16. ⁵ ‘solutos et praefideles’. Comm. II.316a.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0005

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‘why the magistrate did not fine some of the people who talked so thoughtlessly, [bringing] disgrace on the gospel.’⁶ As Andreas Stercker’s joke about old women’s toothless mouths suggested, by the sixteenth century idle talk had become closely associated with female talk.⁷ Women’s sharp tongues, early modern writers argued, posed a threat to male authority and honour and had to be closely controlled; silence was considered a central female virtue.⁸ A famous sixteenth-century woodcut of the ideal virtuous woman, for instance, depicted her with a lock sealing her lips ‘so that it may prevent idle talk / and never harm anybody’s honour’.⁹ At the same time as they warned of the destructive power of women’s talk, early modern writers also sought to undercut its power by depicting that kind of talk as idle and unreliable.¹⁰ Over the last few decades, historians have taken particular interest in one specific type of idle talk—gossip—as an ‘expression of the rules and values governing behaviour in a particular time and place’.¹¹ Much as in the case of humour, historians’ interest in gossip was in part inspired by the work of psychologists and social anthropologists.¹² Based on Elizabeth Colson’s study of the Makah, the social anthropologist Max Gluckman argued that gossip fosters group cohesion by reaffirming a group’s values, demarcating its boundaries, and

⁶ ‘mirabar non a magistratu aliquot homines mul/ctatos tam temere loquentes in infamiam/ Euangelij’. Comm. II.316a. ⁷ Etymologically, both the term ‘gossip’ and its German equivalent, Klatsch, are linked to the female sphere. According to Bernard Capp, over time the term god-sib (god-parent) came to ‘apply almost exclusively to women, and to denote a close female friend’; Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 51. The term Klatsch is even more closely associated with the female sphere. Originally describing a loud bang or a dirty stain, it links gossip to a quintessential place of female labour, the washhouse; Birgit Althans, ‘ “Halte dich fern von den klatschenden Weibern . . . ”: Zur Phänomenologie des Klatsches’, Feministische Studien, 4/2 (1985), 46–53, here 46. ⁸ See however Christina Luckyj, “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2010), who argues that in some instances, silence could also be seen as a male virtue. ⁹ Anton Woensam and Wolfgang Resch, Dise Figur sol man an schawen: Die bedewtet ein weyse Frawen (c.1525), woodcut, Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, DG 1966/218. Quoted here after Bake, Spiegel einer Christlichen vnd friedsamen Hausshaltung, 453, fig. 68. In full, the accompanying poem goes as follows: ‘Von gold trag ich vor meinem munde/Ein schloß tag nacht und alle stunde/Auff das es unnütz red vermeyd/Und niemand nie sein Eer abschneyd’ (‘On my mouth I carry a golden/lock, day and night and at all hours,/so that it may prevent idle talk/and never harm anybody’s honour’). ¹⁰ See e.g. Holenstein and Schindler, ‘Geschwätzgeschichte(n)’, 42–3 and 47–51; Horodowich, ‘Gossiping Tongue’, 5–8 and Horodowich, Language and Statecraft, 134–41. ¹¹ Edith B. Gelles, ‘Gossip: An Eighteenth-Century Case’, Journal of Social History, 22/4 (1989), 667–83, here 668. ¹² The parallels between research on early modern humour and gossip are striking: both were elusive oral practices which left few traces outside of literary sources and court records; both are typically studied through the lens of theories proposed by scholars of disciplines adjacent to history, such as anthropology and sociology; and in both cases, these theories have tried to make sense of such practices by linking them to processes of inclusion and exclusion. Psychoanalysts have also suggested that gossip touches on taboos and provides a ‘discharge mechanism’ for anxieties and aggression which cannot otherwise be expressed: Jean B. Rosenbaum and Mayer Subrin, ‘The Psychology of Gossip’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11 (1963), 817–31, here esp. 820–30.

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providing a tool for the control and sanctioning of outsiders.¹³ He thus proposed a kind of ‘community of gossip’ akin to the ‘community of laughter’ discussed in the previous chapter: a relatively homogeneous social group in which gossip functions as the ‘hallmark of membership’.¹⁴ Gluckman’s view of gossip has been quite influential among early modern historians, who have since studied the various ways in which social groups, and especially groups of women and those deprived of formal power, upheld their values, policed deviant behaviour, and resisted the authorities through gossip.¹⁵ Yet while Gluckman’s article has rightly alerted scholars to gossip’s social functions, it has also (and perhaps inadvertently) contributed to the idea that ‘the content of the talk is not as important as the interaction which the talking supports’.¹⁶ Viewed primarily as a social practice, gossip’s informational value is rarely discussed, and sometimes deemed negligible. In his work on speech, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu lists gossip—alongside libel and insults—among the ‘small coins of everyday life’ used by those who lack the social and cultural capital to speak with authority.¹⁷ Gossip is presented as a type of unlicensed talk aimed at undermining those in power—but one which holds little value on the marketplace of information and is thus given little credit. With regards to the early modern period, such a view of gossip may be further amplified by a bias in the sources. After all, early modern writers actively discredited talk considered unseemly or threatening by labelling it as gossip. Many studies of early modern gossip, moreover, rely on court records, where such talk is typically discussed as part of libel charges or evidence of criminal behaviour is brought to light by gossip networks.¹⁸ In these records, we typically find a very specific, and possibly rather extreme, variety of gossip—and one which tends to confirm the image of gossip as a socially divisive form of talk. ¹³ Max Gluckman, ‘Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, 4/3 (1963), 307–16. ¹⁴ Ibid. 313. ¹⁵ There is hardly a historical study of gossip which does not cite Gluckman, and his arguments, although based on a small sample of cases taken from a secondary source, usually remain unchallenged. See e.g. Suzannah Lipscomb, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Gossip, Insults, and Violence in SixteenthCentury France’, French History, 25/4 (2011), 408–26, here esp. 412–13; Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot, 1995), e.g. 2 and 4; Gelles, ‘Gossip’, 667–8; Chris Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance Among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past & Present 160 (1998), 3–24, here 9–13 and 16; Walker, ‘Whispering Fama’, 23. ¹⁶ Sally Yerkovich, ‘Gossiping as a Way of Speaking’, Journal for Communication, 27/1 (1977), 192–6, here 192. See also similarly Capp, When Gossips Meet, 57, and Gelles, ‘Gossip’, 667. ¹⁷ ‘la petite monnaie quotidienne’. Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire, 99–100. ¹⁸ For a critical reflection on court records as a source for gossip, see Horodowich, Language and Statecraft, esp. 141–2. Studies of gossip focusing on court cases include Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), esp. 16–42; Steve Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9/3 (1994), 391–419; Horodowich, ‘Witchcraft and Rumour in Renaissance Venice’, in Heather Kerr and Claire Walker (eds), Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2015), 65–83; Lipscomb, ‘Crossing Boundaries’; Cowan, ‘Gossip and Street Culture’. One notable exception is Gelles, ‘Gossip’, which explores gossip in transatlantic letters sent between members of an 18th-century family.

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A closer analysis of the Commentationes allows us to study a broader range of gossip practices—here defined as practices involving the sharing of information about physically absent but socially relevant third parties¹⁹—in a variety of social contexts. Although Rütiner and his fellow citizens shared their contemporaries’ negative views on gossip in theory, in practice they constantly relied upon, and took part in, the very talk they deemed immoral and untrustworthy. They shared gossip with people outside their social circles, they gossiped about their own friends and allies, they were reluctant to apply the stereotype of the unreliable chatty woman to their female informants—and they clearly did not deem the content of gossip negligible. After all, Rütiner himself spent so much time, ink, and paper on recording local gossip that historians initially dismissed the Commentationes as an unreliable source on that very basis.²⁰ Gossip should therefore be taken seriously not just as a social practice or as a weapon used by those lacking formal power, but also as a means for spreading and obtaining information.²¹ It provided St Gallers with valuable knowledge about one another and allowed gossipers to raise communicative capital.

Anna Bösch: an outsider on the inside Anna Bösch and Rütiner had little in common. They were neither related nor did they live in the same neighbourhood. As a single woman whose wealth amounted to less than a tenth of Rütiner’s and who was almost thirty years his senior, it is ¹⁹ This definition builds upon those proposed by Gelles, ‘Gossip’, 667; Horodowich, Language and Statecraft, 133, and Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance’, 11. Generally it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between gossip, rumour, slander, and idle talk, and some historians have argued that it does not make sense to separate these concepts (see e.g. Walker, ‘Whispering Fama’, 12). Yet Rütiner only uses the term fama to denote what gossip affects, i.e. reputation and rumour, not the process of gossiping itself (see also Ch. 5). Moreover, Rütiner would certainly not have described his own activities as ‘gossiping’, even if he had had the vocabulary to do so. We therefore cannot avoid relying to some extent on a modern conception of gossip. My definition attempts to bring to light some of the specific characteristics of gossip: (1) Gossip can turn into slander, and the threat gossip could potentially pose to individuals’ honour is what made it a matter of public concern in the first place, but gossip is not always aimed at harming another person’s reputation. (2) Gossip sometimes involves rumours, but in contrast to the latter it is always concerned with people. Talk about a natural disaster could take on the form of a rumour, but it would not qualify as gossip—unless, say, that natural disaster destroyed goods owned by one’s neighbour or a well-known merchant in town. (3) Similarly, gossip is sometimes considered news or comes in the form of a tale, but in contrast to the latter it only concerns named individuals connected in some way or another to the community within which it is shared. ²⁰ See e.g. Bernhard Milt, Vadian als Arzt (St Gall, 1959), 137, where Milt calls the Commentationes a ‘cracker-barrel-diary . . . containing no small amount of city gossip’ (‘Stammtisch-Tagebuch . . . das nicht wenig Stadtklatsch enth[ält]’); Bonorand, ‘Bücher und Bibliotheken’, 102; von Liebenau, ‘Aus dem Diarium’, 45; similarly, but not as dismissive, von Wyss, Geschichte der Historiographie, 239, and Feller and Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz, 238. See also Ernst Gerhard Rüsch’s apt criticism of such views in his introduction to the Commentationes: Kommentarband, 44–5. Rüsch ultimately argued that Rütiner’s notes should not be viewed as gossip, but as a depiction of life in St Gall at a key moment in its history. ²¹ For the theoretical underpinnings of such an approach to gossip, see Robert Paine, ‘What Is Gossip About? An Alternative Hypothesis’, Man, n.s. 2/2 (1967), 278–85, here 282.

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also highly unlikely that she moved in the same social circles as him.²² And yet, for a few months in 1536 and 1538 respectively, Bösch suddenly became Rütiner’s primary source of information. In this short time, she supplied Rütiner with plenty of juicy stories about St Gall’s elite families and shared more memorable stories with him than Vadianus did in the entire decade between 1529 and 1539. In fact, Bösch is cited more frequently than any other female informant in the Commentationes, including Rütiner’s wife. Who, then, was this woman whose stories apparently managed to capture Rütiner’s attention? Bösch belonged to a group of women typically associated with gossip due to their access to the most intimate spheres of early modern households: born in 1474, she had spent many decades working as a maid, wetnurse, midwife, and nurse in St Gall. Although Rütiner never explicitly says so, it seems that he, too, employed Bösch’s services: her appearances in the Commentationes always coincide with the birth of one of his children.²³ As a midwife and nurse, or Pflegeren, as Rütiner called her, Bösch would have spent a lot of time in Rütiner’s house in the critical weeks after a birth, taking care of the new-born and the mother in childbed.²⁴ Bösch’s employment in the Rütiner household would explain her regular appearance as an informant in 1536 and 1538, yet it does not give us any clue as to why Rütiner gave so much weight to her stories. Despite being sceptical of gossipers, and regardless of the close association between (old) women and unreliable talk, Rütiner recorded Bösch’s stories in as much detail as the dinner conversations in Vadianus’ circle or the tales told by his fellow guildsmen, and even complimented her on her remarkably good memory.²⁵ What, then, could Bösch provide that his other, seemingly more prominent informants could not? Due to her profession, Bösch was an inexhaustible source of information about people and their relationships. When describing the wedding of one of her employers, she could tell Rütiner that Mertzin, the bride, had been raised well by her father’s maid, Anna of Muolen, who for a long time served in the castle of Hagenwil, whom Jakob Mertz married afterwards, with whom he fathered Jakob the goldsmith, who in his youth had learned to weave from Jakob Oderboltz . . . ²⁶

²² For information on Bösch, see Comm. II.376 and StadtASG, AA, 281, ‘Steuerbuch 1533’, fol. 41r. ²³ Rütiner’s son Johannes was born in August 1536, just around the time when Bösch makes her first appearance as an informant. Another child, Barbara, was born on 17 November 1538, and indeed Bösch reappears in the notebooks that very month. See Comm. I.948g and II.376. ²⁴ On early modern childbirth, see e.g. Ulinka Rublack, ‘Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany’, Past & Present, 150 (1996), 84–110, here esp. 98–9. ²⁵ Comm. II.376. ²⁶ ‘bene educata ab/ancilla patris Anna de Muola quae longo tempore/ancillata est in arce Hagenwila [ ] Quam Iacobus/Mertz postea duxit ex qua Iacobum illum auri/fabrum sustulit qui in adolescentia texere di/dicit a Iacobo Oderboltz’. Comm. II.377c.

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Bösch’s stories wove individuals into their familial structures and into the town’s wider social fabric, making visible the various bonds and alliances which structured St Gall society. In the context of a small face-to-face-community, such knowledge held great value because it helped individuals navigate their social world. Not only did Rütiner gather similar family histories from a variety of sources²⁷—though they could rarely compete with the detail of Bösch’s accounts—but there is also evidence that he used such knowledge in his capacity as an Elfer. Bösch’s stories about the respectable, hard-working Schurpf family, for instance, came in handy when one of its descendants, Christoph Schurpf, sought St Gall citizenship in December 1538.²⁸ Rütiner repeats the information given by Bösch in an entry on Schurpf ’s petition, and notes that the Great Council did indeed decide to grant Schurpf ’s request.²⁹ It is impossible to tell what impact Bösch’s story had on Rütiner’s vote in the matter, of course. It did, however, provide him with important background information about a person whom he had to judge worthy or unworthy of becoming a St Gall citizen. Even more importantly, perhaps, Bösch was able to provide Rütiner with personal information about his own friends, fellow guildsmen, and neighbours. She complained about Rütiner’s informants Melchior Touber and Bartholomäus Steck—a linen merchant and Vadianus’ brother-in-law—who had not paid for services received many years earlier.³⁰ She revealed that Kessler’s wife, Anna, had only agreed to marry him to end a rumour accusing her of having an affair with her own uncle.³¹ She also alerted Rütiner to the criminal behaviour and cruelty of his fellow Elfer Heinrich Locher, carefully detailing the abuse Locher’s wife had suffered at the hands of her husband. According to Bösch, Locher first took her virginity, then refused to marry her, and immediately turned violent after being pressured into marriage after all. He beat his wife even while she was pregnant and threatened to chase ‘cow and calf ’³² out of his house if she did not procure a considerable amount of money from her father—money which, Bösch’s account suggests, Locher may have needed to cover for textiles which he had previously embezzled. Neither a contract in which Locher promised never to beat his wife again nor childbed stopped the abuse. Convinced that his wife, who could not produce any milk, was deliberately refusing to feed the newborn, Locher squeezed her breasts so violently that his wife screamed: ‘Heinrich, Heinrich, you have given me enough [abuse]!’³³ Soon afterwards, she passed away. ²⁷ For a small selection, see e.g. Comm. I.591a (Neff family); Comm. I.724d (Krum and Grübel families); Comm. II.7 (Schlumpf family); Comm. II.31 (Rütiner family); Comm. II.67 (Miles family). On the role of women in remembering and passing on genealogies, see e.g. Katherine Hodgkin, ‘Women, Memory and Family History in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller et al. (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), 297–313. ²⁸ Comm. II.380c. ²⁹ Comm. II.382a. ³⁰ Comm. II.409o. ³¹ Comm. II.403. ³² ‘vaccam/et vitulam’. Comm. II.409g. ³³ ‘Hanriche hanrice [ ] sa/tis mihi dedisti’. Comm. II.384a.

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According to the rules of gossip described by Gluckman, sharing such stories would have been a relatively risky undertaking: as an outsider to Rütiner’s social circle, Bösch lacked the right to gossip about some of his closest friends and associates in his presence.³⁴ And yet, Rütiner’s notes contain not the slightest indication that he thought her behaviour improper, and no sign that he deemed it problematic to record such gossip about his friends and fellow guildsmen. Gossip, it seems, was all the more valuable when it concerned people with whom Rütiner interacted on a regular basis. Bösch’s stories singled out tardy payers, oathbreakers, unreliable business partners, and violent husbands among Rütiner’s friends and informants, and were therefore able to prevent him from intensifying his relationships with them. And perhaps it was precisely the fact that she was not part of Rütiner’s regular social circle which made her such an important informant: she was able to offer information that none of his other informants could provide. Indeed, Bösch’s stories opened the doors to some of St Gall’s most prominent households. The list of her former employers, which Rütiner records in full in one entry, included wealthy linen merchants, a former mayor, and two masters of the local hospital.³⁵ Thanks to her occupation, which often involved lodging with her employers, Bösch could claim insight into these families’ most private affairs. According to Bösch, Stephan Grübel, one of St Gall’s richest merchants, was so stingy that he attacked his wife with a dagger when she dared suggest sending a fish from their pond to his brother.³⁶ Another of Bösch’s employers, in contrast, was all too generous: Meinrad Weninger, master of the hospital, regularly served up decadent meals of capons and chickens at the hospital’s expense, until numerous complaints forced him to give up these extravagant dinners.³⁷ Two decades of service with the wealthy Lingenhager family had resulted in both a deep respect for the humble, hard-working Lucas Lingenhager the Elder and a strong dislike of his selfish children, Fides and Lucas the Younger. In several entries, Bösch gives detailed testimony of how Fides mistreated everyone in her household, and even suggests that Lucas the Younger’s thoughtlessness was to blame for his father’s sudden death: bitter over the fact that he had not been invited to his own son’s wedding, Lucas the Elder allegedly died that same night.³⁸ In some cases, Bösch merely offered an insider’s account of something that was already an open secret. St Gallers were well aware, for instance, that Bullentretterin had been involved with several different men before she got married. On two occasions, close male friends of Rütiner also mention her lovers ³⁴ On the right to gossip as a sign of membership of a social group, see Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, 313–14. ³⁵ Comm. II.385d. ³⁶ Comm. II.405l. ³⁷ Comm. II.409h. Weninger was master of the hospital from 1530 to 1537: StadtASG, AA, 919a, Scherer and Huber, ‘Ämterbuch’, p. 143. ³⁸ Comm. II.377c, II.399b.

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and illegitimate children.³⁹ Bösch, however, was not only able to provide additional detail; as Bullentretterin’s wet nurse she could, moreover, tell the story from the woman’s own perspective. She carefully related how Bullentretterin gave birth to a stillborn because the stingy merchant Zollikofer had kept her in an unheated house; how another lover, Strub, sometimes locked her up for several days with nothing to eat; how she was offered money for sex but refused to take it; and how she finally managed to restore her honour by marrying Peter Bullentretter.⁴⁰ Bösch’s claim to insider knowledge thus gave her the authority to intervene in, and challenge, well-established gossip narratives in St Gall: in her account, Bullentretterin appears not as the promiscuous, loose woman as which she was otherwise depicted, but as the victim of male cruelty. Judging from Rütiner’s notes, Bösch not only had a wealth of knowledge to share, but also knew how to boost the value of her stories. Among other things, she did so by stressing that she was trading in the valuable currency of secrets. ‘Don’t you tell anyone,’ Locher’s wife warned Bösch after boasting about her husband’s booming business—a warning which Bösch not only blatantly ignored, but apparently repeated, when she shared the gossip with Rütiner.⁴¹ After all, the Lochers’ attempt to hide their wealth only made the story more exciting. Bösch seems to have been aware that it was her access to insider knowledge which gave her a certain degree of authority over domestic gossip. As a consequence, she constantly emphasized and explained her own involvement in the events she described.⁴² She could list the riches of a certain Lemennin because she had been in charge of preparing food and lodgings for the waggoners who had brought them to St Gall; she personally witnessed Fides Lingenhager’s indifference in the face of her father’s passing; and when she returned early from church one day, she found Locher’s wife in tears and learned that she had been beaten.⁴³ Yet Bösch was often more than a passive bystander in her own narratives. She portrayed herself as an adviser and confidante, as someone who helped the poor and vulnerable and who intervened in domestic disputes.⁴⁴ A disagreement over her duties as a maid, she claimed, for instance, lay at the core of a violent conflict between Fides Lingenhager and her husband Johannes Vonwiller. When Lingenhager returned from the bathhouse one day and found that Bösch had not yet fed her son, she immediately launched on an angry tirade. Her husband, however, took Bösch’s side: [Vonwiller said:] ‘Be quiet, the maid was very busy giving out wine.’ [Lingenhager] turned from the maid to her husband. ‘You beggar,’ she said, ³⁹ Comm. II.224a and II.366d. ⁴⁰ Comm. II.400d. ⁴¹ ‘ne cuiquam autem dicas’. Comm. II.384c. ⁴² ‘Boeschin . . . omnia vidit’ (‘Bösch . . . saw everything’), Rütiner writes in Comm. II.403, for instance. For more examples, see also Comm. II.376; II.377c; II.384a; II.384c; II.395; II.399c; II.400c; II.403; II.405i; II.409g; II.419. ⁴³ Comm. II.395; II.377c; II.409g. ⁴⁴ Comm. II.393; II.399c; II.400d; II.405i; II.409g.

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‘you tell me to be quiet? You had nothing, everything you have [you got] from me. Aren’t all of your family recorded in the Schelmenbuch [i.e. the criminal records]?’ The man however became so exasperated that he got up [and] wanted to attack her with his fist. When the maid intervened, the wife said, ‘Let him! I shall see whether he dares to attack me!’ The good man became so exasperated that he fainted, and was attacked by gout, so that the neighbours who were called expected [his] soul [i.e. they expected him to die].⁴⁵

The story of this dispute could be read as a testament to the destructive power of female talk: a woman’s sharp words could apparently threaten a man’s life in more than just a metaphorical sense. On a more subtle level, however, the entry also points to the power of telling stories: according to her own account, Bösch was not only the subject of the fight, but also played an active role by preventing it from escalating further. On this and many other occasions, she thus wrote herself into the stories she shared with Rütiner, stressing her role not only as an insider and eyewitness, but also as an independent actor.⁴⁶ I have previously argued that St Gallers used jokes to distinguish themselves among their friends, and that their ability to entertain rendered them popular companions. In other words, their communicative capital—a stock of funny stories and a skill in telling them—was a factor in the social esteem they enjoyed. The same is true for gossip. Gossip allowed people like Anna Bösch to present themselves as bearers of local knowledge, knowledge that was essential for life in a close-knit community like sixteenth-century St Gall—and not only when it concerned the people in one’s immediate surroundings. Many of the protagonists of Bösch’s stories were dead by the time Rütiner learned of their frailties, but their memory was still very much alive. As we shall see in the next section, male St Gallers may have condemned loose-tongued women, but when they met in the guildhall or had dinner together, they, too, enjoyed sharing gossip about the scandalous behaviour of the city’s past and present elite. Bösch’s stories gave Rütiner something to contribute to these conversations and may thus have strengthened his position in a circle of men who were otherwise superior to him in terms of knowledge, wealth, and political influence. In short, gossip gave Bösch, and by extension Rütiner, communicative capital. The case of Anna Bösch illustrates the limitations of reconstructing communicative authority on the basis of criteria such as gender, wealth, or profession alone.

⁴⁵ ‘Tace inquit maxime occupata ancilla/vino dando fuit [ ] Ipsa ab ancilla in vir/um vertit [ ] Mendice inquit tacendum imperas?/ nihil habuisti [ ] omnia ex me habes [ ] Tui/omnes im schelmen buoch obsignati? [ ] Vir autem/admodum exasperatus vt conscenderit pugno illam/petiturus [ ] interveniente ancilla vxor ait/dimitte illum [ ] videbo num me petere velit/adeo exasperauit bonum virum vt in an vnmacht/venit accessitque podagra vt vicini advo/cati animam expectarunt.’ Comm. II.399b. ⁴⁶ In addition to the example above, see e.g. Comm. II.393; II.400d.

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Bösch may have been a woman on the lower end of St Gall’s social ladder, but she possessed a wealth of information and knew how to ‘sell’ her stories to an audience. Perhaps—and here we enter the realm of speculation—she hoped that by presenting herself as a bearer of such knowledge, she could win Rütiner’s esteem, and potential further employment. If nothing else, her stories and communicative skills certainly gained her Rütiner’s ear and trust. It is telling, after all, that the sceptical Rütiner, despiser of gossipers, never applied the stereotype of the unreliable, chatty old woman to the one informant in his network whom it would have fitted best.

Male gossipers While early modern historians agree that both men and women gossip, in practice it has proved more difficult to overcome the centuries-old association between female talk and gossip.⁴⁷ The latter continues to frame our perception of gossip, and it is both reflected in and perpetuated by the many studies which focus on women’s gossip.⁴⁸ Despite all efforts to the contrary, the link between gossip and female talk thus often re-enters through the back door—not least because gossip is often associated with transgressions that take place in the domestic sphere.⁴⁹ Talk about cases of sexual misconduct, for instance, has been a common focus of research on early modern gossip, and it is not surprising that women played a central role in the circulation of this kind of information in particular. As we have seen in the case of Anna Bösch, women (and many individuals at the lower end of the social ladder) sometimes had freer access to what we would consider the most intimate social spheres. In spite of the negative stereotypes which discredited female talk, Rütiner’s male informants regularly acknowledged women’s expertise in this area and referenced female sources of gossip when it suited them.⁵⁰ They did so, tellingly, to underline, not undermine, the value of their stories. Kessler, for instance, knew that Lukas Falck was so jealous that he spied on his wife and followed her disguised as a beggar; the irony of the story was that Falck ‘was ⁴⁷ See Horodowich, Language and Statecraft, 153–4; Cowan, ‘Gossip and Street Culture’, 315 and 322–9; Rublack, Crimes of Women, 26; Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance’, 11. Some historians maintain that women were more involved in the practice; see e.g. Lipscomb, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, 410. ⁴⁸ E.g. Lipscomb, ‘Crossing Boundaries’; Capp, When Gossips Meet; Tebbutt, Women’s Talk. Lyndal Roper has rightly warned that by studying male and female communication networks separately, we risk underestimating both their shared cultural framework and the unequal distribution of power between them; see Lyndal Roper, ‘Gendered Exchanges: Women and Communication in SixteenthCentury Germany’, in Herwig Wolfram and Helmut Hundsbichler (eds), Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Vienna, 1992), 199–217. ⁴⁹ See similarly Holenstein and Schindler, ‘Geschwätzgeschichte(n)’, 56. ⁵⁰ The same is true for many of the other marginalized groups traditionally described as less reliable, such as servants or the poor. On these groups and their perceived unreliability, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), 86–95.

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himself a fornicator, [whereas] he had a good wife’. Kessler had heard this from his ‘aunt, who works there’.⁵¹ Again, it was a female insider who was able to provide the most reliable information. The same, however, was true for anyone who could credibly claim privileged access to information, as the example of Margaretha Schuhmacher, also known as Guggin, illustrates. In 1537, Guggin entrusted her maid with a urine sample and sent her to have it inspected first by Vadianus, then by another physician. Both concluded that she was pregnant. Guggin then sent her maid to an apothecary, who later complained to Vadianus that he had been asked for ‘such suspicious things’.⁵² Rütiner does not specify what ‘suspicious things’ Guggin sought to buy, but the sources imply that she was trying to hide, if not indeed end, her pregnancy. Finally, Vadianus confronted Guggin on the market square, warning her not to deceive [and that] otherwise the council would not rest, as if he suspected her of being pregnant. Joseph Friederich heard such things from the cloth vendors, some also from Caspar Vonwiller’s wife; he told me [all this] secretly. Because Margaretha did not have her period for some time. Now she has recovered again.⁵³

This could have been the end of the gossip. Yet that same year, after Guggin had left St Gall, even more disturbing accusations started to circulate. Over drinks, Johannes Weniger told Rütiner that Caspar Guggi, Margaretha’s brother, had ‘had an affair with his sister for 3 years’.⁵⁴ Then, on the second-to-last of June . . . a messenger arrived: Margaretha Guggin had given birth to a boy and named him [after] her brother Caspar. When Jakob Cuntz told me this—because he bought linen from me that day—[he said]: ‘I would not take those 250 pieces of cloth which [Caspar] bought in Appenzell for having that happen to me with my sister [i.e. he would rather pass on wealth than commit incest].’⁵⁵

⁵¹ ‘Erat autem ipse scortator/probam vxorem habens / Ioh keßler a matertera/quae ibidem laborans’. Comm. I.573. ⁵² ‘tam suspicio/sa’. Comm. I.860. ⁵³ ‘ne fall/at [ ] alias senatus non obdormiet [ ] quasi illam/in suspicione de impraegnatione haberet [ ] Talia/Ioseph Friderich a Redemptoribus panno/rum quaedam eciam ab Vxore Caspari Vonwillers/ audiuit [ ] mihi clanculum dixit [ ] Quia Mar/garetha aliquo tempore non habuit menstruum/iam iterum revaluit.’ Comm. I.860. ⁵⁴ ‘3 annis rem cum sorore hab/uisse’. Comm. II.171d. ⁵⁵ ‘Penultima Iunij . . . ad/venit nuncius [ ] Margratham Guggin genuisse filium/et Fratri Casparo Baptisasse [ ] Recitando mihi/Iacobus Cuntz quia eo die pannos a me emit/non ego illos pannos quos ab Abbatiscellanis/emit 250 [ ] vt mihi cum sorore accidisset’. Comm. II.228. Jacob Cuntz’s reference to the wealth Caspar Guggi had ammassed by trading with Appenzell linen moreover hints at the possibility that there was also a political dimension to the gossip about Guggi and his sister: much to the displeasure of St Gallers, the wealthy Caspar Guggi had previously given up his St Gall citizenship

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The boy’s birth finally convinced the remaining sceptics. One Schurpfin, for instance, had personally witnessed Caspar’s jealousy when his sister was courted by another man, yet as she told Rütiner, ‘she never believed [the rumours], until [Margaretha] gave birth’.⁵⁶ As the gossip about Guggin suggests, both men and women of all social levels closely monitored and discussed their fellow citizens’ sexual conduct. Premarital sex, illegitimate pregnancies, and adultery were among the most common subjects of malicious gossip in St Gall, and at the more extreme end of the scale they turned into accusations of sodomy and incest.⁵⁷ Yet the gossip about Guggin also raises a variety of issues beyond the informal policing and enforcement of sexual norms. In particular, it indicates that St Gallers often talked about themselves when they gossiped about others. Schurpfin emphasized her connection to Guggin and her brother, but simultaneously stressed that she did not share their blame: she, too, had been deceived. Jospeh Friederich had heard the gossip from the wife of the former mayor and from cloth vendors, who would have witnessed the exchange between Vadianus and Guggin on the market square. They in turn cited men with direct access to the physical evidence: the two doctors who had examined Guggin’s urine, and an apothecary who had been asked for ‘suspicious things’. The ultimate proof of the gossip, however, was a boy named after his uncle; a messenger brought this piece of gossip from the town where Guggin had taken refuge. The gossipers’ gender was secondary in these exchanges; what mattered more was that each one of them played up their own role, showed off their contacts, and claimed access to first-hand information or even physical evidence. In an article on gossip in early modern Venice, Alexander Cowan has argued that female and male gossip ‘each had their habitual spaces’: while ‘men exchanged gossip outside the house in the open, largely because many of their social interactions took place there, . . . women exchanged gossip within the house because they met indoors’.⁵⁸ While the Commentationes do not suggest a clear spatial separation between male and female gossip(ers), they indicate that their somewhat separate social spheres translated into different areas of expertise. While women were often cited as informants on cases of sexual transgression, male St Gallers, who also displayed a vivid interest in such stories, often had easier access to other kinds of gossip. When Melchior Stadler voted for Gallus Berli, who was known to be an Anabaptist, during the mayoral election, for instance, male gossips soon carried the story beyond the doors of the town hall: the guildmaster and moved to Appenzell to further the production of linen there, making Appenzell a competitor of St Gall. See Gottfried Bodemer, Der Bannerhandel zwischen Appenzell und St. Gallen 1535–1539: Ein Beitrag zur schweizer. Kulturgeschichte des XVI. Jahrhunderts (St Gall, 1905), here 117–19. ⁵⁶ ‘numquam/credidit donec peperit’. Comm. II.361aa. ⁵⁷ These were such common topics of discussion that the following represents just a small selection: Comm. I.440; I.482; I.491; I.496 and I.591b; I.860; II.137c; II.137l; II.331c; II.171d. For a more extensive list, see the cases listed under ‘Liebschaften’ in the subject index in Kommentarband, 208. ⁵⁸ Cowan, ‘Gossip and Street Culture’, 329.

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Conrad ‘Scheiwiler related one part, the rest, namely who it was, [Rütiner heard from] Caspar Huseli’.⁵⁹ The case offers us both a glimpse into political gossip and into the politics of gossip: Scheiwiler apparently withheld a central piece of information, ‘namely who it was’. Rütiner’s gossip network, however, quickly filled the gap. While it was certainly crucial to know if a councillor sympathized with known Anabaptists, gossip about local office-holders often revolved around much more mundane matters. ‘Caspar Brisig and Johann Raitter have foul breath,’ Rütiner learned in Vadianus’ circle.⁶⁰ The mayor Heinrich Hochrütiner ‘was rotten on the inside’ and suffered from syphilis before he died, a certain Leonhard told Rütiner.⁶¹ More than a decade after the former mayor Caspar Vonwiller had been suspended from office, St Gallers still discussed the causes of his downfall, and some weavers continued to tell an anecdote that exemplified Vonwiller’s arrogance: after he had been elected guild master, Vonwiller changed from a simple garment into a silk jacket before presenting himself to the public.⁶² Some of these gossip snippets displayed the character of the people discussed, but more often they revealed something about those who discussed them: much like the case of Anna Bösch, they allowed gossipers to show off their intimate insights into the town’s political elite. A conversation about Paracelsus, who spent a few months in St Gall in 1531 treating the mayor Christian Studer, illustrates how gossip evolved as various people shared their expertise.⁶³ Master Simon, a surgeon, knew that Paracelsus wrote day and night and hardly ever slept—and when he did, he went to bed with his shoes on. He had moreover heard that Paracelsus had lived as ‘a gypsy for 5 years so that he could learn their sciences, too’.⁶⁴ To Sebastian Cuntz, Paracelsus had bragged about his beautiful library and suggested that he owned another one in Munich, ‘but Barthol[ome Schobinger] says [these] are mere trifles. [Paracelsus] is a very vain man.’⁶⁵ It was also Schobinger who had caught Paracelsus using ‘chiromantic signs to call a demon’ while he was treating the mayor Studer, Schobinger’s father-in-law.⁶⁶ Each of these learned men was eager to contribute to the conversation, and their contributions quickly moved from a description of quirky personal habits to something verging on an accusation of sorcery. Rütiner’s male informants were similarly keen to show their intimate familiarity with those who fought at the forefront of Protestant reform. Ironically, this

⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ ⁶¹ ⁶³ ⁶⁴ ⁶⁵ ⁶⁶

‘Schaia/willer partem retulit [ ] ceterum scilicet quis sit/Caspar Hußeli’. Comm. I.973. ‘Caspar Brißig Ioh Raitter habent foeditium ex/halatum’. Comm. I.564. ‘intus putridus fuit’. Comm. II.125. ⁶² Comm. I.973; I.930. On Paracelsus’ time in St Gall, see also Meier, Paracelsus, 33–70. ‘5 annis zeginer fuit quo eciam eorum scientias/comprehenderet’. Comm. I.390. ‘sed Bartol ait meras esse nu/gas [ ] homo vanissimus est’. Comm. I.391. ‘cyromanticis charcteribus invocantem demonem’. Comm. I.391.

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meant that gossip in St Gall regularly brought to light unflattering personal details on the Swiss Reformation’s leading figures. The Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, Rütiner was told, for instance, is rich, [he has] a lot from his wife. For preaching the Word [he receives] 70 fl. annually and a canon’s benefice . . . [He is] not very hospitable. Leo Jud, in contrast, [is] more generous, he never saves anything, like our Wolfgang Jufly⁶⁷ . . . Recently, the council paid his debtors [sic, more likely: creditors] first 100 fl., then 6 fl. He has the worst wife.⁶⁸

Even Zwingli was far from untouchable. After his death in the Battle of Kappel am Albis, many Protestant St Gallers openly criticized his belligerent character, and numerous anecdotes were cited to support this image.⁶⁹ Conrad Scheiwiler bemoaned that too much power in the hands of a few had led to the execution of Jakob Grebel, an early supporter of Zwingli who had been found guilty of accepting foreign military pensions in 1526. Hinting at Zwingli’s testimony during the trial, Scheiwiler claimed that Grebel had been ‘destroyed by Zwingli’s mouth’.⁷⁰ Andreas Müller recalled that when the reformed troops and the Catholic five inner states had first faced each other at Kappel in 1529, Zwingli had pushed for an attack. In light of the fact that this first conflict had ultimately been resolved without bloodshed, Zwingli’s eagerness to go to war seemed reckless and misguided. The guild master Johannes Studer’s memory of Zwingli was also ambivalent. He remembered Zwingli’s sermon at the St Galler Synode of 1530 as confrontational and deeply disconcerting: ‘There was one sermon [by Zwingli] I heard here after which I would not even have gone out to the Linsibühl [i.e. area just outside of the town walls]. He repeated often that we were a small community, that we were obstinate and talkative.’⁷¹ Other people present at the sermon also remembered Zwingli’s bellicose rhetoric: ‘Paulus Schlumpf says [he spoke] often of bombardments and war; likewise Joseph Friederich.’⁷² ⁶⁷ I.e. the St Gall pastor Wolfgang Wetter, also known as Jufly (d. 1536). ⁶⁸ ‘diues ab vxore plurima [ ] ob/verbi praedicationem annatim 70 fl et Beneficium/canonicum . . . / non admodum hospitalis/Econtra Leo Iudae liberalior nihil reseruat semper/quemadmodum Vulffgangus noster Iunffly . . . senatus breui suis debitoribus semel/100 fl aliquando 6 fl numerarunt [ ] Pessimam/mulierem habens’. Comm. I.809. ⁶⁹ In addition to the examples below, see e.g. Comm. II.106b. Zwingli’s firm grip on the Zurich city council was also blamed for the deafeat at Kappel and cited as a cautionary tale in an anonymous letter sent to the council of St Gall in 1537; Ernst G. Rüsch, ‘Politische Opposition in St. Gallen zur Zeit Vadians’, Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des Bodensees und seiner Umgebung, 104 (1986), 67–113, here 80 and 84. On the anonymous letter, see also Ch. 6. ⁷⁰ ‘Zwinglij ore perditus’. Comm. II.21. For Zwingli’s testimony in the case, which revolved around French pensions accepted by Grebel, see Huldrych Zwingli, Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, 10 vols (Berlin, 1905–91), here v, 406–15, no. 99. ⁷¹ ‘Vnam autem hic/audiui contionem vt deinde ne ad Lisibuchel exissem/subinde repetens paruam nos esse communem [ ] contuma/ces et loquaces esse’. Comm. I.591g. ⁷² ‘Paulus Schl [ ] ait subinde de bombar/dis et praelio [ ] similiter Ioseph Fridrich’. Comm. I.591g.

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The gossip preserved in Rütiner’s notes reveals a multitude of petty quarrels and small rifts within the Swiss Reformation movement which contemporary chronicles tend to gloss over. A comparison between Rütiner’s Commentationes and Kessler’s Sabbata is particularly revealing. In a conversation with Rütiner, Kessler remarked that Pelagius zum Stein ‘preaches in the most learned fashion’, but unfortunately had ‘bad manners, not unlike [Christoph] Schappeler’.⁷³ In his chronicle, of course, Kessler made no mention of these preachers’ ‘bad manners’, but presented them as learned men who made important contributions to the Reformation.⁷⁴ A particularly bad example was set by a mainstay of the Reformation in the Rhine Valley, Johannes Vogler. Gossip in St Gall had it that he slept with his maid, denied the charges from the pulpit, swore on the Gospel that he was innocent, and finally, after the truth was revealed, blamed his maid for seducing him.⁷⁵ To those who knew the gossip, Kessler’s description of Vogler as an ‘eager lover of evangelical truth’ in the Sabbata must have appeared to be dripping with irony.⁷⁶ There was apparently no contradiction in supporting the Reformation and simultaneously gossiping about the men who fought at the forefront of reform. Indeed, where a minister or reformer was concerned, no piece of information was too insignificant, no character flaw too minor, to be pointed out and discussed. Granted, in the Catholic states of the Confederacy gossip about Protestant reformers was often much more malicious; among other things, Swiss Catholics decried Zwingli as a sodomist.⁷⁷ Yet, contrary to what Reformation chronicles such as the Sabbata might suggest, Rütiner and his friends did not idealize Protestant ministers and reformers. Instead, they took a close and rather sober look at these men: at the same time as they praised their qualities, they also mercilessly brought to light their minor and major flaws. The ministers and reformers they discussed clearly did not quite live by the moral principles they were supposed to teach.⁷⁸ It seems, however, that there was a difference between what one could say about these men and what one could write down in a representative chronicle. While Kessler, too, shared such gossip in conversations with Rütiner, only airbrushed images of the reformers made it into the Sabbata, and it is not surprising that it passed the council’s scrutiny in 1556. The Sabbata ⁷³ ‘doctissime concionatur nisi quod/malos mores habet [ ] non dissimiles a Schapelle/ro’. Comm. I.932a. ⁷⁴ On zum Stein, see e.g. Kessler, Sabbata, 292 (= fos. 315b–316a); on Schappeler, see 36 (= fol. 29b) and 107 (= fol. 125a). ⁷⁵ Comm. II.137h. ⁷⁶ ‘ain yferiger liebhaber evangelischer warhait’. Kessler, Sabbata, 292 (= fos. 315b–316a). ⁷⁷ Comm. II.267c. See also Holenstein and Schindler, ‘Geschwätzgeschichte(n)’, 63–4. ⁷⁸ On efforts to professionalize and discipline Protestant pastors, which seem to have become more successful at the turn from the 16th to the 17th century, see e.g. Ulrich Pfister, ‘Pastors and Priests in the Early Modern Grisons: Organized Profession or Side Activity’, Central European History, 33/1 (2000), 41–65; or Luise Schorn-Schütte, ‘Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe’, Central European History, 33/1 (2000), 1–39.

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was intended for future generations, to which Schappeller’s and zum Stein’s bad manners would have mattered less than their contribution to the Reformation. It is important to bear in mind, however, that those among Kessler’s contemporaries who were aware of the gossip might have read the Sabbata rather differently. The differences between Rütiner’s notes and Kessler’s chronicle once again raise a fundamental methodological question: how might our own reading of early modern sources change if we had access to the oral spheres within which they were embedded and which framed their reception? This question applies not only to representative chronicles, but also to the kind of sources on which most studies of early modern gossip rely, namely court records. Based on such records alone, it is easy to overstate the social divisiveness of early modern gossip. The vast majority of gossip in St Gall never entered a courtroom. Instead, gossip from the courtroom regularly entered people’s conversations.

On trial In the second half of the sixteenth century, an anonymous poet wrote the following verses on the first page of the St Gall town council’s protocol: Oh man, think long before talk escapes your mouth. Speak thoughtfully, without anger and hatred, thus you will succeed all the better. Listening quickly and answering slowly, considering things carefully, that is how wise men live. Through talk many have been overcome, in silence few have been found dishonourable. There is no better protection from dishonour than being the master of your tongue.⁷⁹

The poem’s prominent place next to the words of the Urfehde (oath of truce) is significant. A warning against committing crimes of the tongue such as swearing and libel, the poem was perhaps intended as a timely reminder for those who had to swear not to take revenge on the town in deeds or words. Yet it also reflected much broader concerns with uncontrolled talk and with the threat it posed to the ⁷⁹ ‘O Mensch, thu dich bedenkhen lang/Ehe dir die Red auß dem Mund gang./Red besinnlich ohne Zorn vnd haß/So bestehestu so vil desto baß./Schnell hören vnd träg antwort geben/wol betrachten ist der weisen läben./Im Reden sind vil vberwunden/Mit Stillschweigen wenig in schand funden./Vor schanden ist kain besser list/Dann wer seiner Zungen Meister ist.’ Quoted after Moser-Nef, Reichsstadt und Republik St. Gallen, i, 217–18. The poem seems to echo Proverbs 10:19: ‘In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.’

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reputation of individuals and the authorities of St Gall. Aware of the fragility of its authority, especially after the abbot’s return, the town council was extremely sensitive to any form of criticism, and strictly forbade its members from sharing with outsiders what was discussed on the council.⁸⁰ Such provisions did not prevent sensitive information from spilling out of the town hall and onto the streets of St Gall, however. Quite the contrary: despite the town council’s warning, St Gallers regularly and critically discussed crimes, trials, and judgments passed by the town’s various courts when they met at the market, in the bathhouse, or in private homes, and many of these conversations made it into the Commentationes. A comparison between these discussions and the court records allows us to see what kind of information moved between the community and the courtroom, highlights the ways in which talk about crime could harm both the accused’s reputation and threaten the authority of the court, and sheds new light on the court records themselves. Rütiner was well informed about the trials that took place in St Gall. He usually not only knew who was convicted and why, but could also specify the date, time, and circumstances of their arrest.⁸¹ With remarkable accuracy, he recorded any details he considered noteworthy, including, for instance, the number of years someone had been involved in criminal activities, or the number of times a victim had been stabbed.⁸² In one particularly remarkable case, Rütiner’s notes even reflect a later alteration in the court records. In November 1537, numerous citizens were fined after two groups violently clashed in the streets of St Gall over a defamatory song. Rütiner accurately listed the fine each of them had to pay, but later struck Othmar Spengler from the list, adding instead, ‘Spengler nothing’. Spengler’s fine had indeed been waived: just like Rütiner, the St Gall town scribe had crossed out ‘Spengler 30 s.’ in the council’s minutes.⁸³ Rütiner’s knowledge of court cases often went far beyond the brief summaries read out at public shamings and executions, and he was well informed on civil cases, too. How, then, did Rütiner obtain such information? As an Elfer, and thus a member of the Great Council, Rütiner would have been involved in the trials of the Malefizgericht, the court in charge of capital offences, from 1534 onwards.⁸⁴ This court was only called upon for the most serious offences, and such trials were thus rare. More often, Rütiner relied on other St Gallers to pass on what had been discussed in the town’s various courts. It was Hulrich Schaffhuser, a witness in the case against Othmar Spengler and the other men involved in the brawl, for

⁸⁰ Moser-Nef, Reichsstadt und Republik St. Gallen, i, 107. ⁸¹ E.g. Comm. I.270; I.440; I.471; I.473; I.482; II.51; II.415. ⁸² E.g. Comm. I.253, I.440, I.471. ⁸³ ‘Spengler nihil’. Comm. II.259 and StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 25. August 1533–26. September 1541’, p. 222, 9 November 1537. ⁸⁴ Otto Scheitlin, ‘Das st. gallische Zunftwesen von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts’ (PhD thesis, University of Basle, 1937), 71–4.

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instance, who told Rütiner about the verdict.⁸⁵ Many of the town’s judges rank among Rütiner’s regular informants; they include, among others, three Stadtrichter (town judges) and four out of the five men who presided over the St Gall marriage court from 1531 to 1540.⁸⁶ The weavers’ guild master Conrad Scheiwiler was also involved in criminal proceedings from time to time, and at one point he gave a detailed account of the events that had transpired in the court room during a trial.⁸⁷ Even the families of the accused sometimes facilitated the flow of information between the courts and the wider town. When Erasmus Schlumpf appeared before the marriage court, admitted that he had deflowered Verena Ochenmennin, and agreed to pay 30 gulden in compensation, it was Schlumpf ’s sister Anna who informed Rütiner about their illicit relationship and the agreement they had reached.⁸⁸ Having passed through the porous walls of the town’s court rooms, the details of crimes and trials quickly became the subject of intense discussions in St Gall. The example of Bartolomaeus Huser, also known as Strapler, who tried to stab his mother and threatened to kill her legal guardian, illustrates how stories about the condemned circulated in the town in the aftermath of an execution: When Bartolomaeus Strapler was weaving alongside Othmar Rott, [Strapler] said: ‘Help me, I am going to kill everyone up there.’ Laughing [Rott] agreed, deeming it to be a joke. [Strapler] often repeated the same thing. Once, when they were eating breakfast, he said: ‘Now we will do it.’ Othmar told Gabriel Billwiler, who told Paulus Schlumpf, who [whispered it] into my ear after [Strapler] had been beheaded.⁸⁹

Here, a chain of gossip is traced all the way back to its origin—or at least so Rütiner has us believe. Although the story was shared widely, it remained shrouded in an air of secrecy. This seems to have been a common rhetorical move among gossipers, even when supposedly secret information had clearly ⁸⁵ Comm. II.259. ⁸⁶ The Stadtgericht dealt with civil cases such as disputes over financial matters; see Scheitlin, Das st. gallische Zunftwesen, 73–4. Johannes Brendly, David von Watt, and Joseph Friederich were all Stadtrichter; see StadtASG, AA, 916, ‘Regimentsbuch der Stadt St. Gallen’, p. 241. Joachim Vadianus, Wolfgang Wetter, Dominik Zili, and Franziskus Studer were judges on the marriage court: StadtASG, AA, 919a, Scherer and Huber, ‘Ämterbuch’, pp. 109–10. ⁸⁷ Comm. II.296o. On Scheiwiler’s involvement in criminal proceedings, see e.g. StadtASG, AA, 912, ‘Malefizbuch 1489–1565’, pp. 56, 66, 74. See also Elisabeth Eggimann, ‘Die Verwaltung der Todesurteile: Gerichtspraxis, Kriminalität und städtische Schriftlichkeit in St. Gallen 1500–1550’ (Lizentiat thesis, University of Zurich, 1996), 80. ⁸⁸ Comm. I.602, and StadtASG, AA, 804a, ‘Protokoll des Ehegerichts 1530–1539’, fol. 154v, 25 June 1536. ⁸⁹ ‘Bartolomaeus Strapler texens vna cum Oth/maro Rott dixit Adiuua me omnes super/ius interficiam [ ] ridendo annuit [ ] iocatum put/auit [ ] sepe retulit idem [ ] aliquando matutimum cib/um sumentes iam inquit hoc faciamus/Othmarus Gabrielo Billwiller retulit ille/Paulo schlumpff ille mihi in aurem postquam de/collatus’. Comm. I.952.

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already spilled out into a public forum.⁹⁰ Sharing gossip in low whispers gave conversations an air of intimacy; suggested that what was shared was highly sensitive, and therefore valuable information; and allowed people to share gossip but deny any accountability for its further circulation. Ulinka Rublack has argued that early modern courts relied heavily on denunciations to pursue their ‘widening programme of moral policing’—a strategy which did not sufficiently take into account people’s reluctance to share gossip with the authorities.⁹¹ Similar evidence can also be found in the Commentationes: despite the numerous gossip networks criss-crossing St Gall, it seems that information moved more easily from the court to the wider town than from the town into the courtroom, even where serious offences were concerned. In 1533, Conrad Mülibach was burned at the stake because he had engaged in mutual masturbation with at least nine different young men over a period of fourteen years. It seems that this was a poorly kept secret: as Mülibach told the court, one boy approached him and became his sexual partner after hearing about his homosexual tendencies. Another boy, with whom he did not have any relationship, assaulted him, saying that Mülibach was ‘not a man like another man and as good as him’.⁹² A man from Rotmonten, Rütiner tells us, stopped hosting Mülibach after learning that Mülibach had molested his son during a previous stay. Nevertheless, Mülibach only caught the court’s attention when he became involved in a case of theft and blackmail.⁹³ On the one hand, St Gallers could be reluctant to share their knowledge of crimes with the authorities, but on the other they were quick to complain when the courts acted too leniently. When Debes Schugger was arrested in 1539, for instance, Rütiner remarked that the authorities should have taken action much earlier; after all, Schugger had been involved in fraudulent activities for years.⁹⁴ In a different case, Rütiner’s fellow Elfer Heinrich Locher vented his anger at a mild judgment in the weavers’ guildhall: ‘If the council won’t punish—if only the peace was lifted, I would take revenge with my own hand. Trivial things they investigate diligently, if it pleases [them something] is easily found.’⁹⁵ Locher’s

⁹⁰ See also Comm. I.868; I.482. ⁹¹ Rublack, Crimes of Women, 16 and 27. ⁹² ‘er sig nit ain man als ain annder man unnd als gut als er’. StadtASG, AA, 912, ‘Malefizbuch’, p. 75, 8 October 1533. ⁹³ Comm. I.440. For a discussion of the Mülibach case in the context of other early modern sodomy trials, see Puff, Sodomy in Reformation, p. 78. ⁹⁴ Comm. II.415. See also StadtASG, AA, 912, ‘Malefizbuch’, p. 29, 23 January 1539. ⁹⁵ ‘Si magistratus non multabit [ ] Vtinam pax illa/sublata [ ] ego mea manu vlciscar [ ] Triuialio/ra diligenter quaerunt [ ] si iuuat facile reperiuntur’. Comm. II.259. See also StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 25. August 1533–26. September 1541’, pp. 121–2, 9 November 1537. On ‘peace bidding’ and the legal consequences of breaking the peace in early modern Swiss towns, see e.g. Susanne Pohl, ‘Uneasy Peace: The Practice of the Stallung Ritual in Zürich, 1400–1525’, Journal of Early Modern History, 7/1–2 (2003), 28–54.

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rant was prompted by the council’s decision not to punish the authors of a defamatory letter which targeted several members of Locher’s family.⁹⁶ Apparently, it was not unusual to voice such discontent with the courts in a semi-public forum such as the guildhall, or, as the following example shows, in a tavern: Studer filched two measures of spelt because of his poverty, because [he had] a lot of children. He was beheaded. At the table in Bernhardzell they spoke diversely about him [and discussed] whether one should be killed for [a crime like] that. Finally, magister Hermann [Miles] replied: ‘Probity cannot be destroyed by poverty—improbity cannot be tamed by wealth.’⁹⁷

Although this final ‘verdict’ seems to support the court’s decision, the example shows not only that a broader public engaged in debates about crimes and adequate punishment, but that they also felt they could openly criticize the courts’ decisions despite the council’s warnings.⁹⁸ Indeed, gossip about criminal cases often went hand in hand with criticism of the town’s authorities, which were regularly accused of nepotism and arbitrary judgments. When the town council launched an investigation into the shoemakers’ guild after an anonymous letter had been left at the door of the town hall—a letter which accused the Small Council of arbitrary rule and nepotism— one of Rütiner’s informants suggested that this investigation was itself arbitrary: ‘[The shoemakers] were chosen by lot,’ he said to Rütiner.⁹⁹ Or, when the mintmaster Paulus Zacharias was accused of a crime, he managed to escape with his riches because the majority of the Small Council refused to confiscate them—a decision which seemed all the more dubious in light of the fact that Zacharias had previously wined and dined said councillors twice a week.¹⁰⁰ The case of Andreas Küfferly, who had repeatedly insulted the mayor Vadianus, provides a particularly interesting example of how long-lived some of these accusations could be. When a certain Birchifelder got into an argument with the mayor Ambrosius Schlumpf five years after Küfferly’s conviction, he was reported to have said: ‘Lord Mayor, I want to climb the ladder, I do not want to fall like Küfferly.’¹⁰¹ Rütiner’s notes show not only that Küfferly’s case was still remembered years later, but also how it was remembered, namely as a warning not to pick a fight with a mayor. ⁹⁶ Comm. II.259. ⁹⁷ ‘Studer ob pauperiem 2 mod/ios farri suffuratus quia plures pueros/decollatus [ ] In mensa Bernatzell de eo/loquentes varie num possit eo interfici/Tandem M Herman respondit [ ] Probitas non/potest expelli pauperie [ ] Improbitas neque potest con/tineri diuitijs’. Comm. I.204. ⁹⁸ See also Comm. I.441 for discussions about two further judicial errors, and Comm. II.242, in which representatives of the weavers’ guild accuse the St Gall courts of judging the poor more harshly than the rich. ⁹⁹ ‘Sors in illos ce/cidit’. Comm. II.325. ¹⁰⁰ Comm. II.296e. ¹⁰¹ ‘Domine consul [ ] Ibo per scalas nolo praecipitari tamquam/Kufferly’. Comm. II.296n.

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It is important to bear in mind that St Gall’s councillors and judges were themselves part of the town’s social structure and often knew the people whose fate they were called to decide.¹⁰² Or, as the guild master Conrad Scheiwiler put it, ‘among 14 [councillors] there is undoubtedly someone who knows the person concerned, so that nothing will be done rashly.’¹⁰³ According to Scheiwiler, the intimacy between the judges and the accused could offer protection from unjust decisions. Conversely, however, it meant that those who found themselves in a troubled personal relationship with St Gall’s authorities were more likely to be judged harshly. One final example, namely the trial of Friedrich Schuhmacher, also known as Guggi, illustrates how gossip provided important background information on court cases and rendered visible the net of relationships which determined a criminal’s place within the social world of St Gall—including, in this case, Guggi’s fraught relationship with several members of the town’s political elite. According to the trial records, in June 1532 Friedrich Guggi—the father of the Margaretha and Caspar Guggi whose alleged incestuous relationship became the subject of gossip in St Gall some years later—attempted to kill his pregnant wife and her unborn baby, accusing her of adultery. He was also found guilty of stealing spices, clothes, and household items from friends and family on numerous occasions. Confronted with the ample evidence against Guggi, the Malefizgericht condemned him to be beheaded.¹⁰⁴ Apart from a hint that Guggi may have been a resident but not a full citizen of St Gall, no further information on the case and its protagonists can be found in the books of the Malefizgericht. Through the lens of these records, the case of Guggi therefore appears to revolve around attempted murder and petty theft. Rütiner’s account does not explicitly contradict any of the facts given in the trial records, but the information he provides on Guggi and his family nevertheless profoundly changes this initial interpretation of the case. Rütiner describes the events of 1532 as follows: On 27 June, Fridly Schuhmacher, known as Guggi, was summoned by the council with his relatives and those of his wife, [and] urged to live cautiously in the future and to look after his kin. The next day, seized by rage, he grabbed his ¹⁰² During Rütiner’s time as a judge on the marriage court, for instance, he was repeatedly confronted with cases that involved his friends or their families. See StadtASG, AA, 804b, ‘Protokolle des Ehegerichts 1540–1550’, e.g. p. 10, 7 June 1540 (Rosa Locherin vs. Jacob Schuhmacher, called Guggi), where Rütiner’s close friend and brother-in-law Paulus Schlumpf represents his relative Schuhmacher; pp. 25–42, 20 October 1540 (Katharina Negelin vs. Albrecht Schlumpf the Younger) where three of Rütiner’s informants and fellow guildsmen appear as witnesses; or p. 59, 27 July 1542 (Cleophe Schlumpf vs. Othmar Cuntz), where Paulus and Ambrosius Schlumpf testify for their relative Cleophe Schlumpf. ¹⁰³ ‘ex 14 vtique aliquis est qui no/uit hominem de quo agitur ne temere quicquam fiet’. Comm. II.21. ¹⁰⁴ StadtASG, AA, 912, ‘Malefizbuch’, pp. 68–70, 5 July 1532.

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     wife, [who was] already close to giving birth, and tried to kill her along with the child. Accusing her of having been with another [man], he threw her to the floor [and] attacked her with an axe. When the neighbours rushed [to her aid], he said in a daze that he had done it driven by jealousy. When they asked, ‘Of whom?’, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ The next day the wife delivered a boy, dead, black, with a broken skull . . . On Friday [Guggi] was condemned and beheaded. Only a few members of the council presided [over his case], because of the threefold kinship [between the] Schlumpf, Ransperg, [and] Vonwiller [families] etc.¹⁰⁵

In contrast to the court records, Rütiner’s account clarifies that this was neither a case of petty theft nor one of attempted murder: in light of the baby’s death, Guggi’s crime had to be interpreted as an infanticide. This vital piece of information is missing from the trial records, perhaps because it was assumed—and rightly so, it seems—that it was common knowledge. The talk of the town also forces us to reassess Guggi’s social position. Although he may not have been a full citizen, he was certainly not a marginal figure: his ties to the Schlumpfs, Ranspergs, and Vonwillers—three of St Gall’s most powerful families¹⁰⁶—prevented a large part of the council from judging his case. As evidence from the Commentationes and the St Gall town archives shows, Guggi was tied to these families by marriage. His first wife had been a daughter of the late mayor Caspar Schlumpf.¹⁰⁷ After the wife’s death, Elisabeth Ransperg had become Guggi’s lover. According to Rütiner, Vadianus personally ensured that Ransperg and Guggi got married, and he did so behind the back of the councillor Albrecht Schlumpf, Guggi’s brother-in-law from his previous marriage: ‘In Aberli’s absence, Vadianus called [them] before the marriage [court] judges [and] married them. He did not want them to come before the council.’¹⁰⁸ In the year of Guggi’s execution, relatives of his first and second wives filled numerous important public

¹⁰⁵ ‘27 Iunij [ ] Fridly schuomacher dictus guggi/a senatu vocatus cum amicitia et eciam vxoris mo/nitus vt postea caute viuat et amicitia pro/videat [ ] Sequenti die concitatus ira vxorem/iam vicina partui comprehendens vna cum puero/interficere tentans insimulans eam cum altero/congressam esse, projiciens in terram axe eam petens/irruentibus vicinis atonitus ait zelotipia motum/hac fecisse, interrogantibus cuius? nescio ait/Mulier sequenti die peperit puerum mortuum nigrum/cerebri tegmine fracto . . . Die veneris damnatus/decollatur, paucis senatoribus iudicantibus, prop/ter triplicem amicitiam Schlumpffen Ransperg/Vonwiller etc.’ Comm. I.473. ¹⁰⁶ Rütiner’s aunt Ursula, for instance, recalled a time when nobody could climb the social ladder without being related to the Vonwillers: Comm. II.109b. ¹⁰⁷ Comm. I.28; see also Comm. I.514. ¹⁰⁸ ‘Vadianus absente Aberli advocans ad/matrimonij iudices coniunxit noluit/vt ad senatum veniant.’ Comm. I.132e. The case was indeed discussed before the marriage court, yet Vadianus’ involvement is not mentioned there; StadtASG, AA, 803, ‘Protokolle des Ehegerichts 1528–1530’, fol. 11v, 8 February 1529. The marriage was formally registered in the marriage records that same month: StadtASG, AA, 513a, ‘Ehebuch’, p. 6. It seems that Vadianus did not want the case to be discussed by the Small Council because Albrecht Schlumpf was a councillor at the time; StadtASG, AA, 919a, ‘Malefizbuch’, p. 6.

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offices, including those of deputy mayor and mayor.¹⁰⁹ Through the lens of Rütiner’s notes, Guggi’s place within St Gall’s social structure thus becomes clearer: though not a full citizen himself, Guggi was a well-connected man with close ties to the town’s economic and political elite. Rütiner also offers an alternative interpretation of Guggi’s motives. He implies that the conflict between Guggi and his wife was sparked off by an incident not mentioned in the trial records, namely their being summoned by the town council the day before. Although the council protocols for that day do not mention Guggi himself, they do deal with a legal dispute between Guggi’s sister, her husband, Conrad Scheiwiler, and Jakob Ransperg.¹¹⁰ It revolved around a considerable amount of debt which Ransperg allegedly owed Guggi’s sister. Guggi may well have been present in court that day, but contrary to Rütiner’s story, he seems not to have been the centre of attention. In order to understand this discrepancy, we have to look at other gossip about Guggi. A fascinating narrative emerges from the many stories Rütiner heard about Guggi over the years: born into a poor family from Waldkirch, Guggi had made an astonishing career in St Gall’s linen trade. He spent several years travelling between St Gall, Lyon, and Spain, where he sold linen for the Zollikofer family.¹¹¹ Rütiner and the council records agree that this nearly cost him his life in 1514, when, in the midst of a conflict between the French king and the Swiss Confederacy, he stopped in Berne on his usual route to Lyon and offered his services to a French dignitary kept hostage there.¹¹² Guggi was suspected of treason, arrested, and tortured, but ultimately saved by his first wife’s powerful relatives and his brothers-in-law, who intervened on his behalf.¹¹³ After being released from prison, Guggi continued to climb the social and economic ladder, yet his ascent was met with much envy by St Gall’s less successful merchants.¹¹⁴ His relationship with the Schlumpf family also deteriorated. Instead of showing his gratitude to the people who had likely saved his life, Guggi tricked his brother-in-law, Joachim Schlumpf, and Antoninus Vonwiller, another relative of his wife, into selling him fabric far below value. According to the Commentationes, Guggi’s first wife resented her husband for treating her family so poorly while sparing his own relatives. ‘You

¹⁰⁹ Hans Ransperg was elected mayor in 1531, and Ambrosius Schlumpf became deputy mayor in 1532. StadtASG, AA, 916, ‘Malefizbuch’, p. 3. ¹¹⁰ StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratspotokolle 28. Juli 1528–22. August 1533’, p. 245, 27 June 1532. The case continues on pp. 246–7, 3 July 1532. ¹¹¹ Comm. I.64; II.409v. ¹¹² Comm. II.173c and StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 29. April 1512–21. Juni 1518’, pp. 121–4, 2–14 June 1514. According to the council protocols, on his journey to Lyon Guggi had also broken St Gall law by carrying with him textiles produced by St Gall’s competitors in Isny and Kempten. ¹¹³ For a list of members of the Schlumpf family who vouched for Guggi in 1514, see StadtASG, AA, ‘Ratsprotokolle 29. April 1512–21. Juni 1518’, p. 124, 14 June 1514. ¹¹⁴ Comm. II.173c.

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tricked my blood relatives, but your Spichermann escaped,’ Guggi’s brother-in-law Jakob Spichermann reports her words.¹¹⁵ Rütiner’s account of Guggi’s trial has to be viewed within this context. Given Guggi’s reputation as a troublemaker who did not even stop short of betraying his first wife’s family, the rumour that he had been summoned by the council and ‘urged to live more cautiously and to look after his kin’ the day before he attacked his second wife was not difficult to believe. Although St Gall’s gossipers seem to have misinterpreted Guggi’s appearance before the court, the legal dispute between Conrad Scheiwiler and his wife on the one hand and Jakob Ransperg on the other was by extension a conflict between Guggi’s relatives and those of his new wife. To make matters worse, the case was heard before the Small Council, to which, as we have seen, numerous members of the Schlumpf and Ransperg families belonged. Despite the fact that this legal dispute did not concern Guggi himself, it is not implausible that it did indeed fuel the conflict between him and his wife. While the trial records portrayed Guggi’s case as a marital conflict sparked off by a husband’s jealousy, the gossip in St Gall suggests that the roots of the conflict ran much deeper: that the attack was related to an ongoing struggle between Guggi and the powerful families he had married into—a struggle which he eventually paid for with his life. It was through the lens of this gossip that St Gallers viewed, and made sense of, Guggi’s case, not through the brief summary of his most recent offences read out at his execution. Guggi’s case thus highlights the need for information on the social networks of those judged by, and presiding over, early modern courts—a need which was just as pressing for Rütiner and his contemporaries as it is for historians working with early modern court records today. *

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In theory, Rütiner and his friends were sceptical of gossipers, and female ones in particular. In practice, however, they constantly relied upon, and took part in, the very talk they deemed immoral and untrustworthy. Rütiner may have condemned people’s loose tongues, but he nevertheless eagerly wrote down what they shared with him. The fact that he devoted so much time, ink, and paper to this kind of talk shows that to him it was anything but idle. In a small town like St Gall, and in the context of a close-knit community so focused on reputation, knowing who one was dealing with was of the essence, and being well informed was not limited to politically and economically relevant information. Gossip helped St Gallers understand and navigate their social world. It mapped the complex web of familial ties, friendship networks, dependencies, and factions, highlighting the most promising ¹¹⁵ ‘meos con/sanguineos illudum [ ] Spicherman autem tuus eff/ugit’. Comm. I.514. Spichermann was married to Guggi’s sister. Perhaps this incident also explains why Caspar Schlumpf openly warned St Gall’s weavers never to trust a merchant, and named his son-in-law as an example; Comm. II.171c.

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routes through it and marking out potentially problematic ones. It added context to, and explanations for, what was happening in the town’s courts, a place where both the reputation of the accused and the authority of the court itself was at stake. Gossip was also central for anyone who sought to do business in St Gall, to climb the political ladder, to get married, or even just to socialize—and not only because it provided St Gallers with information about one another. Along with their stories, St Gall’s gossipers also communicated an image of themselves as sources of privileged insider information. In contrast to the gossip which we find in court records, therefore, in an everyday context it was not best to keep gossip anonymous, as has sometimes been suggested.¹¹⁶ Quite the contrary: St Gall’s gossips typically exaggerated their own role because so doing allowed them to present themselves as eyewitnesses or to demonstrate how well-informed and connected they were. The next chapter will explore the effects of this type of ‘self-fashioning’ on the reception of rumour and news.

¹¹⁶ Rublack, Crimes of Women, 19; Cowan, ‘Gossip and Street Culture’, 132–3.

5 Rumour, news, and trust On the evening of Saturday, 14 October 1531, an unsettling rumour reached St Gall and was discussed on the market square: Zurich had been defeated and Zwingli killed at Kappel am Albis. For some St Gallers, Zurich’s defeat did not come as a surprise. Hulrich Scheiwiler, for one, had predicted the outcome of the war. Even ‘a child . . . would understand that it does not befit confederates to fight like this, but the plague is upon us,’ he had told Rütiner shortly before the battle.¹ Now he saw his worst fears realized. ‘Did I not say it?’ he asked Rütiner when they discussed the rumour at the market that day.² The terrible news had arrived in the form of unconfirmed hearsay and at a time of war and chaos, and yet Scheiwiler knew immediately that it was true. After all, the rumour confirmed what he had predicted: God was going to punish those who broke their oath and turned against their own confederates. As we have already seen, oral communication remained central to the provision of news in sixteenth-century Europe, and historians have rightly emphasized its role in spreading information locally and to the illiterate. Less clear is the level of trust such news would have enjoyed compared to other sources of information, and printed news in particular. Due to its fleeting nature, information circulating orally was certainly prone to ‘information loss, distortion, exaggeration [and] a change of emphasis due to the narrator’s necessarily selective and therefore interpretive handling of the news’.³ This would have been particularly problematic in the case of news from far away, which might have passed through several narrators’ mouths along the way, each potentially with an agenda—or a faulty memory—of their own. In comparison to the spoken word, writing, and even more so print, was more resistant to accidental or deliberate alterations. Indeed, as Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in her seminal work on the printing revolution, one of the main advantages of print was that it could multiply and circulate knowledge with a high degree of standardization and reliability, providing readers far apart with identical texts.⁴ Its fixity alone, however, would not necessarily have made print more authoritative than other media in the eyes of Rütiner and his contemporaries. Indeed, Eisenstein’s argument relies on a familiarity with print and a level of trust in its ¹ ‘puer . . . intelligeret non/decere ita contendere confederatos [ ] sed plaga ad/est’. Comm. II.52. ² ‘non dixi’. Comm. II.52. ³ Mauer, Gemain Geschrey, 60–1. ⁴ On the fixity of the printed text, see e.g. Eisenstein, Printing Press, esp. 80ff. and 113–26.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0006

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producers that an early generation of consumers and those outside of the large printing centres may not yet have possessed. As Adrien Johns has convincingly argued, the trust Western societies have invested in the printed word is not the consequence of its inherent reliability, but the result of a long cultural process— and one that was still in its infancy in the sixteenth century.⁵ An essentialist view of print also tends to hide significant differences in the reception of printed texts. While Eisenstein’s argument may hold for print editions of the Bible and the learned books at the core of her monumental study, new and more ephemeral print genres may not have enjoyed the same level of trust. As Rosa Salzberg writes in her study of ephemeral print, it ‘remains frustratingly difficult to document the moments in which consumers encountered and engaged with these texts’.⁶ The most fruitful route towards a history of reception of ephemeral print has been through the detailed study of particularly prolific early modern writers and collectors and their sources.⁷ Such studies have consistently shown how carefully contemporaries weighed different sources of news against one another. Some of these studies have, moreover, proposed detailed hierarchies among early modern sources of news, distinguishing, for instance, between the trust placed in written newsletters, illustrated broadsheets, and political pamphlets.⁸ A ‘hierarchy of trust’ based on genre alone, however, not only echoes the hierarchies between oral, written, and printed sources discussed above; it also threatens to conceal other, potentially more significant factors that framed the reception of news. Indeed, Kessler’s reflections on the reliability of different sources at the beginning of the Sabbata allow us a glimpse of an alternative ‘hierarchy of trust’. Although Kessler was a great admirer of the new technology of print, and credited it with enabling the Reformation to spread, it is not explicitly discussed as a source for the Sabbata.⁹ Instead, Kessler claims to be recording events which he had either ‘seen [him]self ’ or on which he had been

⁵ Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book. Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998). ⁶ Salzberg, Ephemeral City, 9. ⁷ E.g. Tom Hamilton, Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion (Oxford, 2017), esp. ch. 5; Franz Mauelshagen, Wunderkammer auf Papier: Die ‘Wickiana’ zwischen Reformation und Volksglaube (Epfendorf, 2011); Lundin, Paper Memory, esp. 239–45; Mauer, Gemain Geschrey, esp. 3–69; Silvia Serena Tschopp, ‘Wie aus Nachrichten Geschichte wird: Die Bedeutung publizistischer Quellen für die Augsburger Chronik des Georg Kölderer’, Daphnis, 37 (2008), 33–78; Van Nierop, ‘ “And Ye Shall Hear” ’; Alexandra Schäfer, ‘The Acquisition and Handling of News on the French Wars of Religion: The Case of Hermann Weinsberg’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxton (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016), 695–715. On the potential of chronicles as a source for the study of early modern media reception, see also Judith Pollmann, ‘Archiving the Present and Chronicling for the Future in Early Modern Europe’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2016), 231–52, here esp. 250–1. ⁸ See e.g. Gemain Geschrey, 68, or Van Nierop, ‘ “And Ye Shall Hear” ’, 70–1, 75. ⁹ Kessler, Sabbata, 8 (= fos. 5a–b).

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able to obtain ‘trustworthy information’.¹⁰ He then goes on to explain why he did not exclude information based on hearsay: And even if the stories picked up from hearsay may be less trustworthy because talk on the streets [gaßenschrai] (from which I abstain) often removes things from, or adds things to, what [really] happened; if, as a consequence, one did not believe anyone anything at all, how could the whole world work? For it is as impossible to see everything as it is for a person to be everywhere at once. In particular, one should remember in this context what the old Germans used to say: one must still trust, even if a murder happens every day; thus [it is] here: one must still believe, even though lies are told every day.¹¹

Kessler was not gullible enough to believe everything he heard, but he recognized his dependence on the spoken word and emphasized the necessity of trusting others. More importantly, his notes suggest that the line between trust and distrust may have run along a different divide than that between the printed and the spoken word. After all, it was personal eyewitnessing, not printed or written accounts, which Kessler considered preferable to hearsay. This chapter focuses on rumour—a form of communication which is typically associated with orality and placed at the lower end of the ‘hierarchy of trust’—and its relationship to news in order to show that we need to challenge our modern conceptions of reliability when we study the early modern period. Trust was invested in specific sources of information, not a specific medium of transmission. Since it was ‘impossible to see everything’ and to personally verify most news, Rütiner, Kessler, and their contemporaries relied on an elaborate system of ‘source criticism’ to tell them whom they should or should not believe—a system which, as we shall see, often led to a perception of oral informants, and even fama, as being more reliable than printed news. In order to understand the role of orality and rumour in the context of sixteenth-century news-mongering, however, we must first take a look at the full range of news sources available in Rütiner’s St Gall. ¹⁰ ‘so ich selbst gesehen, zum tail durch globwirdigen unterricht wahrhaft empfangen hab.’ Kessler, Sabbata, 4 (= fol. 1b). ¹¹ ‘Und wievol villicht die historien, so uß hörsagen ufgmerkt, weniger globens tragen möchtend, von wegen das durch gaßenschrai (deren ich mich entschlagen) geschechnen dingen oftmals von oder zuogesetzt wirt: sölte man aber darumb niemat gar nichts globen, wie welte die ganze welt beston? Dann alles sechen ist so glich onmüglich, als ainem menschen uf ain mal allenthalben zuo sin; sunder och hierinnen gedenken, wie die alten Tütschen gesprochen haben: man muoß dannocht truwen, und wenn alltag ain mord gescheche; also hie: man muoß dannocht globen, ob alltag gelogen wirt.’ Kessler, Sabbata, 4 (= fol. 1b). A remarkably similar argument is made by the Augsburg chronicler Georg Kölderer, referred to in Mauer, Gemain Geschrey, 40–1, and by the author of a 17th-century print, quoted in Allyson F. Creasman, ‘ “Lies as Truth”: Policing Print and Oral Culture in the Early Modern City’, in Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Robin B. Barnes (eds), Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H.C. Erik Midelfort (Farnham, 2009), 255–70, here 261.

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Circulation of news in print and manuscript In spite of St Gall’s economic success and its involvement in long-distance trade, two of the early modern communication revolution’s central pillars—the printing press and a regular postal service—had not yet reached the town in the 1530s. The town would only get its own press in 1578, and all printed material thus had to be brought to St Gall from larger cities such as Zurich, Basle, Nuremberg, and Augsburg.¹² At the same time, the imperial post, introduced around the turn of the century and providing a regular, public service from the 1530s onwards, bypassed the Swiss Confederacy as it followed the main trade routes from Italy via Innsbruck and Augsburg to Antwerp.¹³ It was only in the second half of the sixteenth century that St Gall’s merchants created their own regular postal service to Nuremberg, connecting them to the larger imperial post.¹⁴ This did not mean that St Gall was cut off from communication across Europe, of course. The town council regularly exchanged letters with neighbouring towns and cities;¹⁵ Vadianus’ surviving correspondence alone comprises more than 2,000 letters which he exchanged with humanists and reformers from all over Europe;¹⁶ and St Gall’s long-distance merchants communicated regularly with their agents in Nuremberg and Augsburg, two of the cities which lay at the heart of the new communication infrastructure. Since the fifteenth century, private citizens had been able to hire the town’s official messengers when the latter were not travelling on council business, provided that they covered the messenger’s salary and all expenses incurred.¹⁷ Lacking a relay system, however, these messengers travelled much more slowly than those of the imperial post. Moreover, the ¹² Ehrenzeller, Geschichte der Stadt St. Gallen, 218. On the first printing press in St Gall, see Hermann Strehler, Die Buchdruckkunst im alten St. Gallen: Die Geschichte der Offizin Zollikofer: Vom ‘Wochenblatt’ zum ‘St. Galler Tagblatt’ (St Gall, 1967). ¹³ Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 70–8. ¹⁴ According to Fritz Glauser, the Taxis family which ran the imperial post tended to avoid crossing Swiss territory wherever possible: Fritz Glauser, ‘Kommunikation und Innovation im 16. Jahrhundert: Zu den Anfängen der Post in der Schweiz’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 53/1 (2003), 1–33, here 28–9. On the messenger service between St Gall and Nuremberg, see Alfred Schelling, Die Kaufmännische Botenanstalt St. Gallen-Nürnberg: Ein Beitrag zur Schweizerisch-Süddeutschen Verkehrsgeschichte (St Gall, 1919). ¹⁵ An online edition of these letters is currently in progress; see Stefan Sonderegger, ‘Austausch über den Bodensee im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit. Perspektiven einer Edition von Missiven der ehemaligen Reichsstadt St. Gallen’, in Harald Derschka, Jürgen Klöckler, and Thomas Zotz (eds), Konstanz und der Südwesten des Reiches im hohen und späten Mittelalter: Festschrift für Helmut Maurer zum 80. Geburtstag (Ostfildern, 2017), 171–87. ¹⁶ See Rezia Krauer, ‘Briefsammlung’, in Rudolf Gamper, Joachim Vadian, 1483/84–1551: Humanist, Arzt, Reformator, Politiker. Mit Beiträgen von Rezia Krauer und Clemens Müller (Zurich, 2017), 350–5. Most but not all of the letters pertaining to Vadianus’ correspondence have been published in Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung. ¹⁷ Volker A. Simon, Der Wechsel als Träger des internationalen Zahlungsverkehrs in den Finanzzentren Südwestdeutschlands und der Schweiz: Historisch-dogmatische Untersuchung der Entwicklung des Wechsels bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Verhältnisse in St. Gallen (Stuttgart, 1974), 43. See also p. 226, n. 162.

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majority of St Gall citizens could not afford this service, and even Vadianus often relied on merchants or other travelling citizens to transport his personal letters.¹⁸ This could be problematic for a number of reasons. Letters to and from St Gall regularly failed to reach their destination, thus interrupting the vital flow of information between Protestant reformers or between merchants and their faraway agents. In the case of one St Gall trading company, this had disastrous consequences: a letter containing instructions for the immediate sale of wax, whose value was about to drop by a third, was lost along the way, resulting in a loss of over 600 gulden. The fate of the company was sealed when an unwise business decision coincided with the loss of a second letter, leaving the company with a huge supply of unsellable stock and bankruptcy.¹⁹ Yet even when letters did arrive, the senders sometimes paid dearly for saving the costs of a professional messenger, as Rütiner tells us. While on his way to Lyon in 1537, Othmar Zollikofer wrote a letter to his sister-in-law Lingenhagerin. In Rickenbach he entrusted it to the innkeeper Christoph Ruty, who carelessly ‘gave it to my [i.e. Rütiner’s] brother Christian, who [gave it] to Jakob Laderer, who in turn [gave it] to Jakob Zollikofer. He opened it. They received it with much laughter.’²⁰ The exact content of the letter is unknown, but it seems to have fed rumours about an affair between the recently widowed Zollikofer and his sisterin-law. What is significant here, however, is that even on the relatively short distance between Rickenbach and St Gall—a distance of less than thirty kilometres—Zollikofer’s letter passed through four different pairs of hands. Moreover, it was unrightfully opened and its content exposed to public ridicule. Given these risks, St Gallers had a strong desire for a fast and reliable postal service—a desire which was reflected in many tales about particularly fast messengers. According to Rütiner, Clam, the town’s official messenger, bragged that he did not need more than a day to reach Baden, situated around 90 kilometres from St Gall.²¹ A man from Altstätten was rumoured to be able to walk the 60 kilometres to Constance and back in a single day.²² In a particularly extreme case, the abbot’s messenger Hensilin was even said to have used black magic to travel to Rome and back in just three days, thus giving the St Gall abbot a distinct advantage over the town in a legal dispute.²³ In reality, of course, travelling was much slower.²⁴ What these fantasies suggest, however, is that speed was of the ¹⁸ Conradin Bonorand, Vadian und Graubünden: Aspekte der Personen- und Kommunikationsgeschichte im Zeitalter des Humanismus und der Reformation (Chur, 1991), 47–56. According to Wolfgang Behringer, most humanists relied on foot messengers or travellers for delivering letters: Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 101 ¹⁹ Comm. I.376. ²⁰ ‘Christano/fratri meo dedit [ ] ipse Iacobo Laderer [ ] ille/vicissim Iacobo Zolikoufer [ ] aperuit [ ] maximo/risu exceperunt’. Comm. II.372l. ²¹ Comm. I.647. ²² Comm. I.646. ²³ Comm. I.24 and I.534. ²⁴ As Rütiner notes elsewhere, under normal circumstances the journey to Baden took at least a day and a half (Comm. I.61), and when the St Gall messenger was sent to Zurich before the first war at Kappel in 1529, he allegedly needed 15 hours to travel the 70 km (Comm. I.946).

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essence.²⁵ While the imperial post had managed to respond to the need for fast communication by dividing space into manageable portions and introducing a relay system on the most important routes, St Gallers remained dependent on a combination of expensive private messengers and travelling individuals, who were often slow and unreliable.²⁶ In Rütiner’s St Gall, sustaining a network of correspondents thus required considerably more time, money, and effort than elsewhere. In a town without a printing press, this affected both personal correspondence and the circulation of other media. Granted, itinerant booksellers such as David of Wil regularly passed through St Gall with a variety of books and other small wares—including medical instruments—on offer, and it is likely that they also traded in the cheaper kinds of print such as news pamphlets.²⁷ More often, however, printed matter travelled to St Gall alongside personal correspondence, either in original form or in a manuscript copy, so that the circulation of letters and print was intimately intertwined.²⁸ This meant that St Gallers depended heavily on their personal networks to provide them with news, and may go some way towards explaining why printed and written sources of information played only a minor, and mostly indirect, role as a source for Rütiner’s Commentationes: if only the town’s elite had the contacts and funds required to sustain a large network of regular correspondents to supply them with written and printed news, the majority of St Gallers— including educated men like Rütiner—had to rely on such news being passed on along the arteries of their local networks, being read out in the town council or guild meetings, or being summarized in conversations.²⁹ But let us set the question of dissemination aside for a moment to look at the various types of written and printed media which were able to bring news to St Gall. From the late Middle Ages, missives played an important role in formal ²⁵ This is true for both the dissemination of letters and responses to them. St Gall’s mayor Komerer, for instance, was criticized heavily because he used to postpone reading incoming letters instead of immediately calling a council meeting upon the arrival of the town messenger: Comm. II.299i. ²⁶ This system was still very similar to the one used by merchants a century earlier. For an example of how information was spread through merchants’ letters in the late Middle Ages, see Margot Lindemann, Nachrichtenübermittlung durch Kaufmannsbriefe: Brief-„Zeitungen” in der Korrespondenz Hildebrand Veckinchusens (1398–1428) (Munich, 1978), 18, 33–35, 43; see also Teuscher, Bernische Privatbriefe, 369. ²⁷ On itinerant booksellers, see esp. Comm. I.129 and II.391d. It was not unusual for pedlars to sell cheap print alongside a variety of small wares; see e.g. Margaret Spufford, ‘The Pedlar, the Historian and the Folklorist: Seventeenth-Century Communications’, Folklore, 106 (1994), 13–24, here 15; or Rosa Salzberg, ‘ “Selling Stories and Many Other Things In and Through the City”: Peddling Print in Renaissance Florence and Venice’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 42/3 (2011), 737–59, here esp. 743. ²⁸ See numerous letters to Vadianus, e.g. Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, iv, 207–8, no. 599: Marcus Bersius to Vadianus, 29 Mar. 1530; or iv, 220, no. 610: Georg Binder to Vadianus, 20 Aug. 1530. ²⁹ This also means that in many cases print did not yet live up to its potential to communicate information ‘free of interaction’, as Michael Giesecke has argued; see ‘Podiumsdiskussion und Gegenrede: Begann die Neuzeit mit dem Buchdruck? Ist die Ära der Typographie im Zeitalter der digitalen Medien endgültig vorbei?’, in Johannes Burkhardt and Christine Werkstetter (eds), Kommunikation und Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2005), 11–38, here 18.

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communications between St Gall and other political and religious entities, as well as between the town and its envoys. Most of these highly formalized letters were concerned with petitions or legal disputes involving the town or its citizens.³⁰ Even though the dissemination of news was not their priority, missives could serve as a source of news. Reformed allies, for instance, used these formal channels to forward tidings they considered pertinent to their common interests, such as updates on joint military campaigns.³¹ Yet since missives were only sent when and where there was official business to discuss, they did not provide a steady flow of information, and their geographical reach was limited.³² Personal correspondence and business letters had long served the dissemination of news, and they continued to do so in the age of print. In contrast to missives, the circulation of news seems to have been more than an occasional byproduct of epistolary exchanges. Besides containing the latest tidings, letters to Vadianus regularly included explicit requests that news be sent in return, or apologies when there was nothing new to report.³³ Those who could afford to sustain a network of regular correspondents clearly expected to be kept up to date. The constant demand for news, however, encouraged the circulation of information that had yet to be confirmed, thus often contributing to, rather than eliminating, the uncertainties that characterized most early modern news-mongering. Letters have often been described as a written substitute for conversations.³⁴ Yet as long as letters were transported by a single messenger rather than a series of relay couriers, correspondents did not have to rely on the written word alone.³⁵ Both letters and missives sent to St Gall regularly referred their readers to the messenger for further information.³⁶ When the commander of St Gall’s troops, ³⁰ Thomas Bruggmann, ‘Unser frundtlich willig dienst zuo vor. Spätmittelalterliche Nachrichtenübermittlung über den Bodensee’, Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des Bodensees und seiner Umgebung, 132 (2014), 41–56, here 47. ³¹ In 1531, for example, Zurich forwarded several missives about the progress of the War of Musso to St Gall (StadtASG, AA, Tr.Q.1b, Missiven, 20 Apr., 5 and 12 May 1531). Both towns had sent troops in support of the Three Leagues of the Grisons. ³² Of the 130 missives dating from the 1530s which survive in St Gall archives, for instance, only a fifth were sent from outside the Swiss Confederacy; see StadtASG, AA, Verz. 3,I, 2, ‘Missiven-Register’. A considerable number of missives were lost, however: Nicole Stadelmann, ‘Austausch übers Wasser. Wirtschaftliche Beziehungen und Arbeitsalltag zwischen dem Nord- und Südufer des Bodensees’, in Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, Christian Rohr, and Michael Stolz (eds), Wasser in der mittelalterlichen Kultur: Gebrauch—Wahrnehmung—Symbolik/Water in Medieval Culture: Uses, Perceptions, and Symbolism (Berlin, 2017), 206–20, here 207. ³³ See e.g. Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, i, 48–9, no. 676: Gabriel Billwiler to Vadianus, 9 Apr. 1532; 57, no. 684: Christian Fridbolt to Vadianus, 15 May 1532; 64–6, no. 69: Christian Fridbolt to Vadianus, 23 May 1532. ³⁴ E.g. Peter Bürgel, ‘Der Privatbrief: Entwurf eines heuristischen Modells’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 50/1 (1976), 281–97. ³⁵ See similarly Michael Jucker, Gesandte, Schreiber, Akten: Politische Kommunikation auf eidgenössischen Tagsatzungen im Spätmittelalter (Zurich, 2004), 200, and Teuscher, ‘Bernische Privatbriefe’, 372–3. ³⁶ Sonderegger, ‘Austausch über den Bodensee’, 174. For examples, see Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, iv, 226, no. 615: Wolfgang Wiener to Vadianus, 8 Sept. 1530; i, 141–3, no. 751: Ambrosius Blaurer to Vadianus, 16 Dec. 1533.

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Christian Fridbolt, sent a hurried letter to Vadianus about the Battle of Kappel, for instance, he added: ‘Zöger can relate it all; he was at the camp.’³⁷ In another letter sent from the battlefield a few days later, Fridbolt admitted that his letter might be hard to understand because it was written ‘in haste’; any gaps in the written narrative, however, could be filled by the messenger.³⁸ In these cases, letters were a substitute for only part of the conversation. Even at the most crucial moments in St Gall’s political history, then, messengers were trusted to add to, or explain, written news orally. So far, we have looked at media that had been in use in St Gall since the Middle Ages. With the rise of printing in Europe, however, new types of media such as single-sheet broadsides and pamphlets started to enter the marketplace of information. Yet they did not necessarily make it easier to obtain accurate current news. Protestant pamphlets played an important role in the early Reformation, and indeed Rütiner owned quite a few from that time (which—tellingly—coincided with the years in which he studied in Basle, an important printing centre).³⁹ Such prints, however, typically focused on theological debates, and thus on the stable truth of the gospel, rather than on the ever-shifting and unreliable news of the world. When they did discuss news, the primary aim was to convince and incite their readers to take a particular theological position, not to inform them about current events.⁴⁰ Printed broadsides and non-periodical news pamphlets, often called Neue Zeitungen (new tidings), promised to fill this gap by supplying their readers with news of important events.⁴¹ However, they were usually

³⁷ ‘Zöger kann es üch als berichten; ist in dem leger gesin.’ Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, i, 22, no. 649: Christian Fridbolt to Vadianus, 13 Oct. 1531. ³⁸ ‘Wellen also mein schryben baß verston, dann es in yl beschechen ist; kann üch zöger wol sagen.’ Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, i, 23, no. 650: Christian Fridbolt to Vadianus, 17 Oct. 1531. On the letters sent between Fridbolt and Vadianus during the Second Battle of Kappel, see also Rezia Krauer, ‘ “Haben die Züricher verlorn den Zwingli”: Kommunikation im Zweiten Kappelerkrieg’, in Ortsbürgergemeinde St. Gallen (ed.), Reformation findet Stadt (St Gall, 2017), 72–3. ³⁹ ZBZ, A. Drucke Rara III.B.94; and ZBZ, A. Drucke Rara 18.423. The latter contains, among others, Martin Luther’s Sermo de digna praeparatione cordis pro suscipiendo Sacramento Eucharistiae (1518), Adversus execrabilem antichristi bvllam (1520) and Assertio omnium artoculorum M. Lutheri, per Bullam Leonis X. novossimam damnatorum (1521); Huldrych Zwingli’s De Canone Missae Huldrychi Zvinglii Epichiresis (1523) and Ad Ioannis Bugenhagii Pomerani epistolam responsio Huldrychi Zvinglij (1525); and Andreas Karlstadt’s Do. Andreae Carolostadij & Archidiaconi Wittenburgen. CCCLXX & Apologeticae conclusiones pro sacris literis & Wittenburgen. compositae (1519). On the relationship between printed pamphlets and the Reformation, see e.g. Scribner, Simple Folk; or Richard G. Cole, ‘The Reformation Pamphlet and Communication Processes’, in HansJoachim Köhler (ed.), Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit: Beiträge zum Tübinger Symposion 1980 (Stuttgart, 1981), 139–61. ⁴⁰ Arnold Snyder has suggested that in the case of St Gall, such pamphlets did not even play a significant role in promoting the Protestant cause; see Snyder, ‘Communication and the People’. ⁴¹ For an overview, see Paul Roth, Die neuen Zeitungen in Deutschland im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1914).

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published anonymously and sometimes long after the event.⁴² Reporting on violent battles, gruesome crimes, and natural disasters, they often aimed to shock and entertain as well as to inform, and above all they were meant to sell. As we shall see, in the eyes of many of Rütiner’s contemporaries, their news value and reliability therefore remained questionable.⁴³ Moreover, such pamphlets were one-off publications typically focusing on a single event.⁴⁴ In contrast to periodical manuscript newsletters, which came into fashion north of the Alps in the second half of the sixteenth century, or to the periodical newspapers of the seventeenth century, these early news pamphlets did not provide the steady stream of information St Gallers needed to conduct their business and to stay abreast of current developments.⁴⁵ A brief glance at two contemporary St Gall collections of prints supports this picture. The first, owned by Kessler, contains 36 prints dating from the 1520s, the vast majority of which are Protestant pamphlets.⁴⁶ Only a handful of news pamphlets—concerning the peace treaty between Charles V and Francis I and the Peasants’ War—were included in the collection. The second, owned by Vadianus, contains 20 prints in total, of which 8 date from the 1530s.⁴⁷ These include three prints about the wars against the Ottomans, and one each on the Battle of Kappel, the Münster Anabaptists, and the wars between Charles V and Francis I. Granted, these collections represent only a small selection of the news pamphlets available in St Gall at the time, and indeed, in his chronicle Kessler used snippets from a considerable number of news prints which have not survived in St Gall.⁴⁸ What such collections do suggest, however, is that prints offered only a ⁴² Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven, CT, 2014), 72. Paul Roth, for instance, found that out of a sample of 327 German pamphlets printed between 1500 and 1550, only 11% named a printer, and 13% named the city where the pamphlet had been printed. See Roth, Die neuen Zeitungen, 53, n. 1. ⁴³ See e.g. Lundin, Paper Memory, 239–45; Tschopp, ‘Wie aus Nachrichten Geschichte wird’, 39. ⁴⁴ For a few exceptions, see Roth, Die neuen Zeitungen, 26–8. ⁴⁵ On handwritten newsletters, see Oswald Bauer, Die Zeitungen vor der Zeitung: Die Fuggerzeitungen (1568–1605) und das frühmoderne Nachrichtensystem (Berlin, 2011), 36–9. ⁴⁶ VadSlg, GA 1812 (K1–K36) [collection of prints owned by Johannes Kessler]. ⁴⁷ VadSlg, GA 920 (K1–K20) [collection of prints owned by Joachim Vadianus]. ⁴⁸ For a particularly striking example, see Kessler’s account of the Münster Anabaptists (Kessler, Sabbata, 424–8 (= fos. 444b–448b)), which is patched together from numerous sources, including several different pamphlets. Large parts are directly taken from Dietrich von Hamburg, Von der Münsterischenn Auffrur verstockung vn yamer Glaublich anzeyg Dietterichs von Hamburgk. Dabey wie vnd wen solich ubel anfenglich erregt vn entspringen ein warhaffte Histori (s.l., 1535, VD16 D 1530), as well as Der gantze handel vnd geschicht von der stat Münster in Westphalen gelegen wie es ergangen ist in einer kurtzen Summa begriffen ([Nuremberg:] Hans Guldenmund, [1535], VD16 G 376) and Historia der belegerung vnd eroberung der Statt Muenster Anno 1535 ([Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius], 1535, VD16 H 3916), which survives as part of Vadianus’ print collection: VadSlg GA 920 (K9). Smaller snippets are taken from Dje Ordnung der Widertauffer zuo Münster. Jtem was sich daselbs nebenzuo verlauffen hat von der zeyt an als die Statt belegert ist worden ([Strasbourg: Johann Prüss d. J.], 1535, VD16ZV 29788) and Newe zeyttung Wie die Statt Münster eroberet vnnd gewunnen worden ist am Freytag nach Sant Johannes des Teüffers tag den fünff vnd zwayntzigsten Junij des tausent fünff hundert vnd fünff vnd dreissigsten jar ([Augsburg: Heinrich Steiner, 1535], VD16 N 1047). On Kessler’s use of printed sources, see Carla Roth, ‘Speaking of Print: Competition and Intermediality on the Marketplace of News’, Media History (forthcoming).

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patchy perspective on current events, and in some cases they may not even have been considered ‘news’ by the time they reached St Gall. The pamphlet on the Battle of Kappel, for instance, was only published in 1532, many months after the news had reached St Gall by other means. The same was true for news from further away. Vadianus owned a pamphlet on the end of the Münster Anabaptists’ rule that was published shortly after the event but would nevertheless have been old news when it arrived in St Gall: even if it was sent there straight away, it would have arrived later than two separate letters on the matter, and at a time when the news was already being discussed across town.⁴⁹ Obtaining reliable current news in 1530s St Gall was no simple task. In these circumstances, delays and uncertainties were the norm rather than the exception, and even educated St Gallers and town officials relied heavily on their personal networks and oral sources of news. This led to a perception of oral information, and even rumour, that differed considerably from today’s. They were not simply a poor alternative to ‘official’ sources of information, or the ‘black market’ of news.⁵⁰ Fama, in the sense of uncertain information, was often the only, or at least the first, source of news available.⁵¹

Fama: rumour, reputation, news Modern rumour has a bad reputation. To some extent, this is a consequence of the origins of rumour research: some of the most influential studies on rumour were conducted in the context of the Second World War II, in a political climate that condemned rumours for their power to undermine official sources and threaten national security.⁵² Although these early works were later heavily criticized, they simultaneously succeeded in defining the young field’s central areas of study.⁵³ While the exact nature of rumour is still a matter of debate—rumours have variously been described as ‘propositions for belief ’ for which hard evidence is

⁴⁹ Historia der belegerung, which survives in VadSlg, GA 920 (K9), was published on 17 July 1535, whereas the first letter to arrive in St Gall is dated 12 July: Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, v, 231, no. 826: Jakob Grübel to Vadianus, 12 July 1535. Another letter brought the news to St Gall at the end of July; see Comm. I.615. ⁵⁰ This is how rumours are typically described in modern rumour studies; see e.g. Donovan, ‘How Idle Is Idle Talk?’, 60–1; Jean-Noël Kapferer, Gerücht: Das älteste Massenmedium der Welt, trans. Ulrich Kunzmann (Leipzig, 1996), 19 and 25–6; Gary Alan Fine, ‘Rumour, Trust and Civil Society: Collective Memory and Cultures of Judgment’, Diogenes, 54 (2007), 5–18, here 7 and 12. ⁵¹ See similarly Penny Roberts, ‘Arson, Conspiracy and Rumour in Early Modern Europe’, Continuity and Change, 12/1 (1997), 9–29, here 10–11. ⁵² Robert H. Knapp, ‘A Psychology of Rumour’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 8/1 (1944), 22–37; Gordon W. Allport and Leo J. Postman, The Psychology of Rumour (New York, 1947). ⁵³ For criticism of Allport and Postman’s seminal Psychology of Rumour, see esp. Ralph L. Rosnow, ‘Psychology of Rumour Reconsidered’, Psychological Bulletin, 87/3 (1980), 578–91; and more recently Donovan, ‘How Idle Is Idle Talk?’, 63–4.

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lacking,⁵⁴ as a means of reshaping reality to fit a group’s prejudiced beliefs,⁵⁵ or as ‘improvised news’ which helps people cope with a lack of information at a time of great uncertainty⁵⁶—the field continues to revolve around two main research interests. First, it studies how rumours evolve as they are being circulated, and second, it is interested in the ways in which rumours reflect common stereotypes and anxieties. As a consequence, rumours which turned out to be true are rarely discussed. According to all definitions, rumour ceases to be rumour and becomes information, news, or fact the moment it is confirmed.⁵⁷ Thus, while all rumour theories agree that rumours do not necessarily have to be false, in practice they tend to contribute to the idea that rumours are inherently unreliable, hostile, and harmful. In the early modern period, however, rumour was seen in a more nuanced light. This was partly a consequence of people’s dependence on rumour for the daily provision of information, but it was also linked to the wider semantic field spanned by the term fama. In Rütiner’s time, fama referred not only to rumour but also to reputation, fame, public opinion, and tidings.⁵⁸ The term was not used primarily to express concern about the factual correctness of a story, but rather described a specific mode of communication: at the most basic level, fama was simply what was commonly said about a person or an event.⁵⁹ This is also reflected in the term’s early modern German equivalents: Sag (rumour or tale, from sagen,

⁵⁴ Knapp, ‘Psychology of Rumour’, 22; Allport and Postman, The Psychology of Rumour, p. ix. ⁵⁵ Terry Ann Knopf, Rumours, Race and Riots (New Brunswick, NJ, 1975), 159. See similarly also Ralph L. Rosnow, ‘Rumor as Communication: A Contextualist Approach’, Journal of Communication, 38/1 (1988), 12–28, here 12, where he describes rumours as ‘public communications that reflect private hypotheses about how the world works.’ ⁵⁶ Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, 1966), and similarly Fine, ‘Rumour, Trust and Civil Society’, 7. Shibutani’s theory has been particularly influential on historical studies of rumour. See e.g. de Vivo, Information and Communication, 193, where he refers to Shibutani’s ‘law of rumour’; or Boris Bove, ‘Deconstructing the Chronicles: Rumours and Extreme Violence during the Siege of Meaux (1421–1422)’, French History, 24/4 (2010), 501–23, here 513, where he describes rumours as a product of a ‘lack of information’ which made people project their anxieties onto any facts available. ⁵⁷ Kapferer, Gerücht, 22. ⁵⁸ Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Introduction’, in Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (eds), Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 1–11, here 2, and Hans-Joachim Neubauer, Fama: Eine Geschichte des Gerüchts (Berlin, 1998), 56. The term rumor is used in a more narrow sense and can be translated either as ‘rumour’ or ‘murmur’. Philippe Depreux argues that in the medieval use, the term rumor (in contrast to fama) usually has a negative connotation: Philippe Depreux, ‘Rumeur, circulation des nouvelles et gouvernement aux temps carolingiens’, in Maité Billoré and Myriam Soria (eds), La Rumeur au Moyen Âge: Du mépris à la manipulation (Ve–XVe siècle) (Rennes, 2011), 133–47, here 145–5. Because Rütiner only rarely uses the term rumor, I shall focus primarily on fama. ⁵⁹ See Gianni Guastella, Word of Mouth: Fama and Its Personifications in Art and Literature from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2017), 57–8. An illustrated print published in the 1530s features this definition prominently in its title: Fama: Was man sagt, ist mein Tittel, Vermeyn ich triff das recht mittel, Alt missbreuch unnd jren mutwillen, Hinzulegen unnd zustillen, Darauff bevor an der Keyser mildt, Bedracht was da sagt dieses Bild (s.l., s.d., VD16 F 592).

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i.e. to say), Geschrei (rumour, gossip, libel, from schreien, i.e. to shout), and Ruf (reputation, from rufen, i.e. to call) all stress the vocal nature of fama.⁶⁰ Although Rütiner did not reflect on the nature of fama in any detail, we can deduce some of its characteristics by taking a closer look at the phrases in which the term commonly appears in his notebooks. Rütiner used the term fama almost 100 times in over 80 different entries, representing all the meanings listed above. Most often it is employed in the phrase ‘fama est’, which can refer to both rumours and tidings and is best translated as ‘rumour has it’ or, more neutrally, ‘it is said that’.⁶¹ Fama is also cited as a source of information on several occasions.⁶² For instance, ‘Vadianus, Johannes Studer, and const[ant] fama’ are named as informants for the story of a conflict between St Gall and its Catholic neighbours.⁶³ Fama could thus describe both content and medium, both a particular type of message and a particular type of messenger.⁶⁴ Rütiner often used the term fama in combination with adjectives that stress its power and public nature. One’s fama (here meaning reputation) could be bad or damaged, but more often fama was public, common or commonly known, constant, and consistent.⁶⁵ These adjectives indicate that fama drew its power from the many voices which carried it forth and repeated it, as well as from the wide publicity it thereby received. Of course, Rütiner and his contemporaries were aware that fama could be made up or exaggerated, but at the same time fama represented a form of public consensus. In fact, popular sayings stressed that ‘a common rumour is rarely made up’.⁶⁶ In the Italian city states, fama was considered so trustworthy that it became a legal category on the basis of which a trial could be initiated and on which the court could draw as evidence.⁶⁷ This was also true for the Holy Roman Empire, where the Carolina specifically mentions the accused’s ‘bad reputation and rumour’ as the first on a list of eight factors indicating guilt.⁶⁸

⁶⁰ ‘Sag’ in Schweizerisches Idiotikon, vii, columns 375–377; ‘G(e)schrei II’, Schweizerisches Idiotikon, ix, columns 1444–1451. The Latin fama is similarly related to the verb fari, i.e. to speak. ⁶¹ See Comm. I.8, I.90, I.122, I.208, I.314, I.372, I.374, I.541, I.560, I.584, I.613, I.802, II.28, II.184c, II.189, II.246c, II.259, II.265k, II.274b, II.292, II.296b, II.330a, II.361u, II.361w, II.367. ⁶² Comm. I.535, I.591b (‘constans fama’), Comm. I.594, I.604, I.608, I.680, II.387c (‘concors fama’). ⁶³ ‘Vadianus Ioh Stud et const fama.’ Comm. I.594. ⁶⁴ See also Neubauer, Fama, 13. ⁶⁵ ‘Fama mala’ (Comm. I.738, II.357, II.361n), ‘laesa’ (Comm. I.755), ‘communis’ (Comm. I.901, II.246c), ‘vulgaris’ (Comm. II.32f), ‘constans’ (Comm. I.591b, I.594), ‘concors’ (Comm. II.387c). ⁶⁶ The Augsburg chronicler Georg Kölderer writes: ‘Man sagt im gemainen Sprüchwortt ein gemain Geruch sey sellten erlogen.’ Quoted after Mauer, Gemain Geschray, 51. ⁶⁷ Antonella Bettoni, ‘Voci malevole: Fama, notizia del crimine e azione del giudice nel processo criminale (secc. XVI–XVII)’, Quaderni Storici, 41/1 (2006), 13–38, here 18–20; Thomas Kuehn, ‘Fama as a Legal Status in Renaissance Florence’, in Thelma S. Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (eds), Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 27–46, here 35. ⁶⁸ Karl V, Des allerdurchleuchtigsten großmechtigsten vnüberwindtlichsten Keyser Karls des fünfften: vnnd des heyligen Römischen Reichs peinlich gerichts ordnung/auff den Reichsztägen zuo Augspurgk vnd Regenspurgk/inn jaren dreissig/vnd zwey vnd dreisssig gehalten/auffgericht vnd beschlossen (Mainz, 1533), vi, art. xxv.

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The verbs used in conjunction with fama are equally revealing. Most of them reflect fama’s close relationship with speech and movement. Fama relates, narrates, and accuses, but more often it flies, arrives, appears, grows, spreads, and falls upon people.⁶⁹ Rütiner also stressed the speed at which fama travelled. A rumour spread citissime (very fast) about Georg Guldy, undermining his unjustified claim to have conquered the enemy’s standard in the Battle of Peschiera.⁷⁰ Only two hours after Hulrich Bader’s parents drowned while crossing Lake Constance, fama brought the sad news to St Gall.⁷¹ It was also fama which announced in the middle of the night that Emperor Maximilian I’s troops were marching towards Schwaderloh and prompted St Gall’s soldiers to prepare for battle.⁷² Fama, it seems, was talk in motion, and since it moved extremely fast, it held great importance for the circulation of information. Although fama has a plural form, Rütiner and his contemporaries only used it in the singular.⁷³ This suggests that they had a very specific image in mind when they wrote about fama, one which drew on ancient authors and contemporary depictions in which fama was usually personified as a woman. Virgil had most famously described fama as a monster-like winged creature, covered all over in ears, eyes, and mouths.⁷⁴ Rütiner, who read the Aeneid during his studies in Basle, knew Virgil’s unflattering description of fama, and perhaps he was also familiar with her monstrous appearance in Sebastian Brant’s illustrated edition of Virgil’s works, published in 1502 (Fig. 5.1).⁷⁵ In accordance with Virgil, this well-known woodcut depicts fama as a winged woman with several pairs of ears and eyes. Winged hooves and fire-breathing tongues growing from fama’s palms complete the picture, evoking close associations with depictions of demons and devils. Yet Rütiner may also have had in mind a more positive—and more common— pictorial tradition, one which depicted fama as a beautiful winged woman blowing or carrying one or two trumpets (Figs. 5.2–4).⁷⁶ Like the Commentationes, this iconic tradition called attention to fama’s principal activities: movement (wings) and speech (trumpets).⁷⁷

⁶⁹ ‘Fama referebat’ (Comm. I.503, I.535, II.32f), ‘narrabat’ (I.511), ‘deferebat’ (I.531, II.361n), ‘(per/ ad)volat’ (I.75, I.578, I.624, I.832, II.73, II.44, II.191, II.265e, II.295, II.296n, II.296o, II.316a, II.330e, II.352, II.364e, II.398), ‘(ad)venit’ (II.200, II.266c, II.308b, II.408), ‘emersit’ (II.405c), ‘orta est’ (II.372c), ‘increbuit’ (II.32e, II.173d, II.313, II.325), ‘accidit’ (II.357). ⁷⁰ Comm. II.44. ⁷¹ Comm. II.191. ⁷² Comm. II.408. ⁷³ According to Guastella, the plural of fama is very rarely used; Word of Mouth, 58. ⁷⁴ Virgil, Aeneid, 4.173–97. ⁷⁵ Publius Virgilius Maro, Publij Virgilij Maronis Opera, ed. Sebastian Brant (Strasbourg: Johann Grüninger, 1502), fol. 215v. Evidence that Rütiner was familiar with the Aeneis can be found in Comm. I.575. ⁷⁶ The two trumpets represent good and bad reputation; Neubauer, Fama, 80. ⁷⁷ Fama ‘flies’ through Rütiner’s notebooks on a great number of occasions; see e.g. Comm. I.75, I.578, I.624, I.832, II.73, II.44, II.191, II.265e, II.295, II.296n, II.296o, II.316a, II.330e, II.352, II.364e, II.398.

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Fig. 5.1. Fama, woodcut published in Publij Virgilij Maronis Opera, ed. Sebastian Brant (Strasbourg: Johann Grüninger, 1502, VD16 V 1332). University of Heidelberg, Cod. Heid. 370,319, fol. 215v.

Such visual references and the close connection between fama, reputation, and tidings continued well beyond Rütiner’s time and into the age of the periodical press. The metaphorical ties between fama and talk tend to imply that early modern fama was an exclusively oral phenomenon, thus obscuring the fact that letters and print also disseminated, drew upon, and contributed to the ‘common consensus’ fama represented. Indeed, personified fama seems to have been particularly popular among those who dealt in the new medium of print. In the second half of the sixteenth century, for instance, the famous German printer Sigmund Feyerabend used a whole series of different depictions of fama as his printer’s mark, including many whose dresses, covered all over in eyes, still matched Virgil’s description (Fig. 5.3).⁷⁸ In the age of the periodical press, ⁷⁸ Paul Heitz, Frankfurter und Mainzer Drucker- und Verlegerzeichen bis in das 17. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg, 1896), plates xxxiii–lxi, nos. 26–92. Feyerabend was not the only Frankfurter printer to use fama in his printer’s mark: see ibid., plate lxxxi, no. 172–4, for fama in the early 17th-century printer’s marks of the brothers Ruland and Nicolaus Roth.

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Fig. 5.2. Virgil Solis, Fama, mid-sixteenth-century intaglio print. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 740-6.

Fig. 5.3. Domini Sigismvndi Feyrabendij, Typographi & ciuis Francofordiensis Symbolum (The printer’s symbol of Sigmund Feyerabend), here taken from Hartmann Schopper, Panoplia omnium illiberalium mechanicarum aut sedentariarum artium . . . (Frankfurt a.M.: Sigmund Feyerabend and Georg Rab, 1568, VD16 S 3897). Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, Signatur: R 16 Schop 1, fol. 148r.

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numerous newspapers invoked fama in their titles, and the winged, trumpetblowing figure which often adorns these newspapers’ front pages sometimes still echoes Virgil’s fama.⁷⁹ Early modern printers and newspaper producers clearly expected their readers to be familiar with the iconography of fama: in the case of the newspaper Die europäische [Fama] (The European [Fama]), a depiction of fama even replaces the term in the title (Fig. 5.4). More significantly, however, they assumed that an association with fama would help them sell their products. In this context, fama was clearly not associated with unreliable oral information. Quite the contrary: her many faces allowed fama to become an allegory for news and its rapid dissemination, and at the same time to vouch for the quality of the information provided.⁸⁰ In short, she represented both tidings and reputation, and there was no clear distinction between her roles as a bearer of news and as the guarantor for its trustworthiness. Rütiner and his contemporaries were aware of fama’s many forms and the close relationship between the concepts she embodied. They were, moreover, unable to reduce her to a single one of those concepts. When Hans Sachs published a pamphlet on the nature of fama based on her description in the Aeneid in 1534, for instance, he translated fama not in one word, but in three: ‘leumund, ghrüch oder newe mär’ (repute, rumour, or new tidings).⁸¹ As a consequence, Sachs’s depiction of fama is more ambiguous than Virgil’s, and so is the woodcut accompanying a later edition of the poem (Fig. 5.5). In addition to providing a translation of the Latin original, Sachs reminds his readers that they are responsible for their own fama and should therefore behave honourably. Here, fama’s role is both to spread rumours and to publicize people’s misdeeds: ‘Nothing is so secret, as is commonly said,/in due course everything will come to light.’⁸² The conceptual and metaphorical links between rumour, reputation, and tidings have to be taken seriously if we aim to understand how fama was perceived by Rütiner and his contemporaries. Not only was there no neat separation between these concepts, but at their core, they all relied on similar modes of dissemination.⁸³ If we assumed that rumour was generally considered unreliable because it spread primarily through hearsay, we would therefore also have to question contemporaries’ trust in reputation, which circulated in the very same manner. Instead, however, I would argue that contemporary views of fama were more ⁷⁹ On fama and its association with early modern newspapers, see e.g. Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 645–6, and Hedwig Pompe, Famas Medium: Zur Theorie der Zeitung in Deutschland zwischen dem 17. und dem mittleren 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2012), 4. Andreas Würgler has identified around 20 18th-century journals which carried the term fama in their titles; Andreas Würgler, ‘Fama und Rumor: Gerücht, Aufruhr und Presse im Ancien Régime’, WerkstattGeschichte, 15 (1996), 20–32, here 27–8. ⁸⁰ Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 645–6; Pompe, Famas Medium, 127. ⁸¹ Hans Sachs, Werke, ed. Adelbert von Keller, 26 vols. (Stuttgart 1870–1908), here iv, 161. ⁸² ‘Nichts ist so haymlich, wie man spricht/Es kumbt zu seyner zeyt ans liecht.’ Ibid. iv, 163. Rütiner was familiar with some of Hans Sachs’s works (see e.g. Comm. I.889), but it is unclear whether he knew his translation of Virgil. ⁸³ See similarly Guastella, Word of Mouth, 59.

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Fig. 5.4. Title page of Die europäische [Fama], Altona/Hamburg, 21 May 1694. Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, Digitale Sammlungen: Zeitungen des 17. Jahrhunderts, https://brema.suub.uni-bremen.de/zeitungen17/periodical/pageview/ 1329773 (accessed 7 January 2021). © Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen.

Fig. 5.5. Woodcut illustration to Hans Sachs, Fama. Das gerücht mit seiner wunderlichen Eygenschafft/nach beschreibung Virgilij des Poeten (Nuremberg: Hans Weigel d. Ä.), c.1546. Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha, Inv. 37,25. © Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha, Aus den Sammlungen der Herzog von Sachsen Coburg und Gotha’schen Stiftung für Kunst und Wissenschaft.

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nuanced than is usually suggested. This is not, of course, to say that fama was generally considered reliable, but neither was she perceived as naturally unreliable: even Virgil’s fama, however monstrous she may have appeared, spoke the truth.⁸⁴ Early modern fama was not the antagonist of ‘official’ printed news in the way that rumour is perceived today, but rather one of the ways in which news was circulated. Granted, it was not trusted blindly, but neither were other sources of news. Rather, trust in a piece of news depended on factors which were only indirectly determined by the medium through which a story was disseminated.⁸⁵ In fact, as we shall see in the next section, fama not only played an important role in the circulation of news, but also in its validation: whether fama (tidings) was believed depended to a large degree on the fama (reputation) of the messenger.⁸⁶ A close study of oral, written, and printed news about the Devil of Schiltach (1533) will illustrate how this process worked in practice.

From ‘uncertain story’ to ‘consistent tale’ On 10 April 1533, Holy Thursday, a small village in the Black Forest called Schiltach burned to the ground. Soon, the culprit was found: a devil had haunted the house of the Schultheiss (head of the municipality) in the days leading up to the fire and kept its inhabitants awake with strange whistling, the beating of invisible drums, and threats to set the house and the whole village on fire. The devil’s mischief only stopped when the Schultheiss’s maid, who was suspected of bringing the devil into the house as her lover, was sent away. Yet the inhabitants of Schiltach were soon to learn that peace and quiet had not been restored. On Holy Thursday, the maid flew back to Schiltach on a poker and poured fire and flames over the village, all with the devil’s help. Shortly after, she was arrested in the neighbouring village of Oberndorf and burnt at the stake on 21 April, after admitting to witchcraft under torture.⁸⁷ This episode sparked off a veritable explosion of rumours which were recorded by numerous chroniclers in southern Germany and the Swiss Confederacy.⁸⁸ At least two longer news pamphlets and an illustrated single-leaf broadsheet circulated widely after the event, both referring and contributing to the stories that ⁸⁴ Arthur L. Keith, ‘Vergil’s Allegory of Fama’, Classical Journal, 16/5 (1921), 298–301, here 300. ⁸⁵ See similarly Schäfer, ‘Acquisition and Handling of News’, 701–2. ⁸⁶ This link also exists in medieval German literature; see Horst Wenzel, ‘Boten und Briefe: Zum Verhältnis körperlicher und nichtkörperlicher Nachrichtenträger’, in Horst Wenzel (ed.), Gespräche— Boten—Briefe: Körpergedächtnis und Schriftgedächtnis im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1997), 86–105. ⁸⁷ For a full account of the event and an edition of most important contemporary sources, see Hans Harter, Der Teufel von Schiltach. Ereignisse—Deutungen—Wirkungen: Mit einer Quellendokumentation (Schiltach, 2005). ⁸⁸ Ibid. 120–25, where Harter mentions Nicolaus Thoman’s Weissenhorner Historie, Heinrich Hug’s Villinger Chronik, and the Zimmersche Chronik. As will be discussed below, the case was moreover recorded in the chronicles written by Sebastian Franck, Kessler, and Vadianus.

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were spread by word of mouth.⁸⁹ Erasmus of Rotterdam even received a letter from the Portuguese diplomat Damião de Góis enquiring whether the rumours were true, and his response was published one year later.⁹⁰ In a study of rumours during the Dutch Revolt, Henk van Nierop has suggested that ‘the best way of verifying a rumour’ was to ‘check it against a letter or a similar, trustworthy written piece of evidence’.⁹¹ Yet in the case of the Devil of Schiltach, the available written sources seem to have done little to confirm the rumour. If anything, they cast even more doubt on its validity. The three news pamphlets disagreed on many central details, including the sequence of events and the number of witches involved. In an extended edition of his Chronica, published in 1536, Sebastian Franck made it very clear that neither the rumours nor the printed news about the Devil of Schiltach had convinced him: ‘As many say and as has been published in print, [Schiltach] was set on fire by the devil, which, however, I cannot believe, for he is a spirit.’⁹² As a consequence, Franck placed his account under the revealing heading ‘Schiltach was burnt down, and other uncertain stories’.⁹³ Although Erasmus was not quite as sceptical as Franck, he, too, did not dare confirm ‘whether all that is commonly said about this is true’, thus keeping his correspondent in suspense.⁹⁴ The cleric Nicolaus Thoman was left in a similar state of uncertainty: ‘Afterwards there was a rumour that it was just a tale and not true; I have left it at that,’ he wrote in his Weissenhorner Historie.⁹⁵ Faced with two contradictory rumours, neither of which he could verify, Thoman refused to decide between the two.

⁸⁹ Ein erschrocklich Warhafftige History wie es yetz auff den Gründonnerstag im Kintzgertal zuo Schiltach im dreyunddreissigsten jar/der listog Teufel die frumen leut dasebst/mit falschen worten/ pfeiffen/allerley gesang/etc. betrogen/zu lest die Statt gar verderbt/und verbrent hat/wie er wider antwort geben/findestu gründtlich in dism buechlin getruckt ston. M.D.XXXiii (s.l., 1533, VD16 E 3856); Ein wunderbarlich erschrockenlich handelunge/So sich auff den Grün Dornstag dis iars/ynn dem Stedlein Schiltach/mit einer brunst durch den b[oe]sen geist gestifft/begeben hat/ym M.D.xxxiij. ([Leipzig: Michael Blum], 1533, VD16 W 4588); Ein erschröcklich geschicht Vom Tewfel und einer unhulden/ beschehen zu Schilta bey Rotweil in der Karwochen. M.D.XXXiii Jar. ([Nuremberg:] Stefan Hamer, 1533). On these pamphlets, see also Harter, Teufel von Schiltach, 105–18, and Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Witchcraft and the Media’, in Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Robin B. Barnes (eds), Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H. C. Erik Midelfort (Farnham, 2009), 217–36, here esp. 220–2. ⁹⁰ For Erasmus’ reply to de Góis, see Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami, ed. Percy S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1906–1958), here x, 275, no. 2846, or alternatively Harter, Teufel von Schiltach, 119. ⁹¹ Van Nierop, ‘ “And Ye Shall Hear” ’, 70–1, 75. ⁹² ‘als etlich sagen und im truck außgangen lassen vom teüffel anzündt, welchs ich aber nit glauben kan, weil er ein geist ist’. Sebastian Franck, Chronica, Zeitbuch vnnd Geschichtbibell von anbegyn bisz in diss gegenwertig M.D.xxxvi. jar verlengt [ . . . ] (Ulm: Johannes Varnier, 1536), fol. 295v. ⁹³ ‘Schiltach verprunnen und ander ungewiß histori’. Ibid. ⁹⁴ ‘an omnia vera sint quae vulgo iactantur, non ausim affirmare’. Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, x, 275, no. 2846. ⁹⁵ ‘Darnach wart die sag, eß were ayn fabel, were nit war, dabey hab ichs bleiben lassen.’ Nicolaus Thoman, Weißenhorner Historie: Quellen zur Geschichte des Bauernkriegs in Oberschwaben, ed. Franz Ludwig Baumann (Stuttgart, 1968), 190.

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We do not know whether one (or indeed several) of the prints about the Devil of Schiltach reached St Gall. If they did, they would not necessarily have qualified as trustworthy sources—and even less so if they were contrasted with Erasmus’ letter, published in 1534, or Franck’s extended Chronica, a copy of which has survived in St Gall.⁹⁶ Nor were Rütiner and his learned friends generally inclined to believe in tales of demons and witchcraft. In most cases, they dismissed such stories as the product of common people’s superstitions.⁹⁷ When a house in St Gall was rumoured to be haunted, for instance—by a ghost, a demon, and a basilisk, no less—a very profane explanation for the strange noises coming from the house was soon found, and one that sat comfortably with Protestant views: according to Rütiner, the Catholic priests who lodged there were visited by prostitutes at night and failed to keep things quiet.⁹⁸ Yet in the case of the Devil of Schiltach, St Gall’s learned men came to a different conclusion.⁹⁹ Kessler’s immediate response to a version of the story that reached St Gall in 1537 is especially enlightening. ‘In all respects, it is similar to a fable,’ Rütiner reports Kessler’s words, and if it had not happened in such close proximity I would only be convinced with difficulty . . . God warns us [by example of] a small town; a larger one is therefore not immune [to such dangers] and equally prone to them.¹⁰⁰

According to Rütiner, in spite of his initial doubts Kessler was convinced by the story because it happened in ‘such close proximity’. And although Kessler still called the story of the Devil of Schiltach a sag (rumour, tale) in the Sabbata, it had by then become ‘a common and consistent sag also among trustworthy people’.¹⁰¹

⁹⁶ Rütiner cites Franck’s chronicle in Comm. II.244c; however, it is not clear which edition he read. Both the 1531 and the extended 1536 editions of Franck’s chronicle survive in the Vadianische Sammlung (VadSlg, GA 200 and VadSlg, GA 201). The illustrated pamphlet Ein erschröcklich geschicht Vom Tewfel later became part of the Wickiana, a famous 16th-century collection of pamphlets and news put together by Johann Jakob Wick (1522–88) in Zurich: ZBZ, GSM PAS II 12/18; the same print is also included in Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling (eds), Die Sammlung der Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Teil 1: Die Wickiana I (1500–1569) (Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts VI, Tübingen, 2005), here 26–7, no. VI.13. Given the close ties between St Gall and Zurich, it is quite possible that it also reached St Gall. ⁹⁷ As Alexandra Walsham has argued, Protestant discourse associated such superstitions with Catholicism: Alexandra Walsham, ‘Reformed Folklore? Cautionary Tales and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850 (Manchester, 2002), 173–95, here esp. 175–9. ⁹⁸ Comm. II.372c. That Rütiner generally took a rather critical stance on rumours about the supernatural can also be seen in a series of examples of popular superstition and some St Gallers’ laughable attempts at sorcery just before he writes down Brendly’s story: Comm. II.28. ⁹⁹ For Vadianus’ brief account, see e.g. von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, 523, no. 579. ¹⁰⁰ ‘per omnia similis fabulae et si non in tanta vi/cinitate facta esset [ ] difficulter persuader/er . . . in paruulo oppido monuit nos deus ma/ius propterea non exemptum aeque promptum est’. Comm. II.32f. ¹⁰¹ ‘Ist ain gemaine und iberainstimmende sag och by den globwirdigen personen’. Kessler, Sabbata, 400 (= fol. 422b).

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How, then, had the story of the Devil of Schiltach become believable? In order to answer that question, we need to take a closer look at the conversation which apparently changed Kessler’s mind. In February 1537, almost four years after the fire in Schiltach, the St Galler Johannes Brendly had travelled to Rottweil in the Black Forrest because of a legal matter. Upon his return, he met with Rütiner, Kessler, and perhaps a few others over drinks and told them extensively about his journey.¹⁰² While travelling from Rottweil to Strasbourg, Brendly had been accompanied by an advocate from Rottweil who had been a most skilful teacher of the fine arts some time ago . . . Among other things they mentioned Vadianus. [The advocate] elevated this man over everyone else. Among other things he said that he had no greater desire in this life than to see [Vadianus] and to engage him in some conversation.¹⁰³

As they passed through the village of Schiltach on their journey, Brendly seized the opportunity to ask the advocate about the rumours regarding the Devil of Schiltach. In the four years since the fire, St Gallers had still not reached a final verdict on their validity. Now, however, the advocate offered Brendly the perfect source: an eyewitness. ‘I will not tell you anything’, [the advocate] said, ‘but we shall visit the inn in our town. [There we will find] an old citizen who once moved here, exiled from [Schiltach] for breaking a contract. From him we will find out how it happened, for his house was next door to the house of the Schultheiss where the fire started, [he is] a man who speaks the truth; you can trust whatever he says, because he is not someone who speaks idly.’¹⁰⁴

The advocate thus took great pains to assure Brendly of the reliability of the eyewitness, the innkeeper. And so did the witness himself. As he told Brendly about the fire of 1533, he continuously stressed his involvement in the events that had transpired. Alongside eleven other men, the innkeeper claimed, he had personally witnessed the demon’s nightly mischief in the Schultheiss’s home. During the fire, he told Brendly ‘in tears’,¹⁰⁵ he had saved fifteen people from

¹⁰² Comm. II.32e/f. ¹⁰³ ‘ante aliquot tempora ibidem Ludi/magister bonarum artium peritissimus . . . inter alia Vadiani memores adeo/extulit illum virum vt nihil supra [ ] inter alia/dixit nihil in vita magis exoptare quam illius/conspectu et conversatione aliqua frui’. Comm. II.32e. ¹⁰⁴ ‘Nihil/inquit tibi dicam [ ] Diuertemus autem in hospicium/in nostrae vrbis antiquus ciuis qui olim inde/coactus ob foedifragium illuc migrauit ex/illo omnia quemadmodum gesta experiemus quia conti/gua illius domus est domus Praefecti vnde/ignis inicium sumpsit, homo veridicus quiquid/ narrauerit huic fidem tribuito quia non/vanidicus est.’ Comm. II.32e. ¹⁰⁵ ‘flendo’. Comm. II.32e.

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the flames, and as if to rule out any remaining doubt he ‘showed [Brendly] the scars and burn marks on his body’.¹⁰⁶ This elaborate frame narrative, which Rütiner recorded in great detail, served a single purpose: to render the story credible, to turn fama into fact. By tying Brendly’s account all the way back to an eyewitness, it created the ‘close proximity’ which Kessler had found so convincing. Moreover, Brendly made every effort to present his sources as reliable. The innkeeper’s intimate knowledge of the events that had transpired in 1533, his tears, and the burn marks and scars on his body all ‘proved’ that he spoke the truth.¹⁰⁷ Brendly’s efforts to present his sources as reliable even extended to the intermediary who led him to the eyewitness in the first place and who vouched for the innkeeper’s reliability. By describing the Rottweil advocate as an educated man and ardent admirer of Vadianus, his judgement, too, appeared reliable—in particular to Brendly’s audience, which included Kessler and Rütiner, two great admirers of St Gall’s brightest humanist star, and perhaps even Vadianus himself. The fact that Brendly himself seemed convinced by the story may have given it additional weight, for Brendly was not just any St Galler. As Rütiner’s second-most-frequent informant and godfather to two of his children, he enjoyed Rütiner’s friendship and trust. Moreover, he was a respected citizen who held several public offices and whose house was often used for the social gatherings of St Gall’s educated elite.¹⁰⁸ Perhaps, then, it was Brendly whom Kessler had in mind when he declared that the tale about the Devil of Schiltach had been confirmed by ‘trustworthy people’. It was the trustworthiness of his sources and their proximity to the events they described that distinguished Brendly’s story from the rumours and printed pamphlets in circulation. This is not to say that Brendly (or his sources) did not draw on written or printed material, however. In fact, Brendly’s version of the Devil of Schiltach, at least as it was recorded by Rütiner, reads like a puzzle pieced together from all three surviving pamphlets, with some original elements filling the gaps. With the first pamphlet it shares the description of the devil’s voice as human and the claim that the devil screamed ‘ia’—although that sound is taken out of context in the Commentationes and only makes sense in the pamphlet,

¹⁰⁶ ‘cicatri/ces ostendidit in corpore suo vsturae et stig/gmata’. Comm. II.32e. ¹⁰⁷ In a later entry, Comm. II.53, Brendly adds another eyewitness to the story, namely a priest who was injured when he tried to exorcize the demon. Again, physical marks ‘proved’ that the witness was reliable: four years later, so Brendly claims, the priest’s wounds still had not healed. ¹⁰⁸ On Brendly as a godparent, see StadtASG, AA, 510, ‘Taufbuch’, pp. 51 and 108. For evidence of Brendly’s links to St Gall’s elite, see e.g. Comm. I.788. According to StadtASG, Scherrer and Huber, ‘Stemmatalogia Sangallensis’, Brendly held several public offices, including city court judge (1530), blacksmiths’ Elfer (1535), and deputy mayor (1544). It is likely that Brendly worked as a barbersurgeon; see Comm. II.173a and Gertraud Gamper and Rudolf Gamper, Katalog der Inkunabeln in der Kantonsbibliothek St. Gallen: Vadianische Sammlung der Ortsbürgergemeinde und Eigenbestand (Zurich, 2010), 160.

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where ‘ia’ (yes) is the devil’s answer to a question.¹⁰⁹ In accordance with the second pamphlet, Brendly’s account specifies that it was the Schultheiss’s house that was haunted, and that the devil’s mischief stopped briefly when the maid was sent away.¹¹⁰ Like the illustrated third pamphlet, Brendly’s account provides the number of years the maid had intercourse with the devil, and the figures given only differ by a year.¹¹¹ Despite all this apparent ‘plagiarism’, Brendly’s account also contradicts and ignores a large number of details in the printed accounts. Among other things, it does not mention the devil’s outing of a secret Lutheran whom he had seen eating meat in Basle during Lent, or the claim that some houses were spared from the fire because they were inhabited by the poor.¹¹² Moreover, it contradicts the one detail that all other sources agree upon, namely that the fire started on the morning of Holy Thursday. In Brendly’s version of the story, in contrast, the fire is moved to Good Friday and occurs during the night.¹¹³ Although Brendly’s account partially overlaps with the printed pamphlets, it is thus not an exact copy of any of them. Either some of the shared elements were also circulated orally, or what Rütiner recorded was a pick-and-mix compilation of those elements in the pamphlets which seemed most interesting or most convincing. Indeed, some of the original elements in the version presented by Brendly seem almost custom-made for his St Gall audience. According to Brendly, the Schultheiss of Schiltach had initially shrugged off the strange sounds his daughters had heard coming from the maid’s room as young girls’ fantasies. Yet shortly after, Brendly’s account continues, even the Schultheiss could not help but notice the strange whistling and shouting.¹¹⁴ By offering an example of how a sceptical eyewitness had overcome his doubts when he was confronted with sufficient evidence, Brendly’s account thus anticipated and addressed the doubts his own audience might have had. Tellingly, his account is also the only one that traces the whole series of disastrous events back to a mercenary going off to war, leaving his desperate lover, the Schultheiss’s maid, vulnerable to the seduction of the devil. This idea sat well with attitudes towards mercenary service in the Protestant states of the Swiss Confederacy, where it was seen as a source of great evil.¹¹⁵ All this suggests that there may have been a weak link in the allegedly solid chain of information presented by Brendly. Whether the innkeeper made a business out of telling the story his guests wanted to hear, whether Brendly had ¹⁰⁹ Comm. II.32e and Ein erschrocklich Warhafftige History. See alternatively Harter, Teufel von Schiltach, 105 and 108. ¹¹⁰ Comm. II.32e and Ein wunderbarlich erschrockenlich handlunge, 2 and 5. See alternatively Harter, Teufel von Schiltach, 111 and 115. ¹¹¹ 18 and 17 years respectively, compared to the 14 years mentioned by Erasmus. See Comm. II.32e and Ein erschröcklich geschicht Vom Tewfel. See alternatively Harter, Teufel von Schiltach, 118 and 120. ¹¹² Ibid. 114 and 118. ¹¹³ Comm. II.32e. ¹¹⁴ Comm. II.32e. ¹¹⁵ Zwingli, for instance, compared the mercenary recruiters in Swiss villages to the Devil seducing Eve. See Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), 52.

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not actually found a reliable eyewitness but wanted to distinguish himself among his friends by offering a ‘factual’ account of the events of 1533, or whether Rütiner misremembered or embellished the story when he wrote it down, is impossible to determine. Yet the interesting question is not who lied or who got it wrong, but rather how Brendly’s version of the story managed to convince the sceptics Rütiner and Kessler. The case of the Devil of Schiltach reveals a set of four criteria for trustworthiness applied to all information, independently of whether it reached St Gall in oral, manuscript, or print form: 1. Volume: a multitude of voices repeating similar accounts of the same story.¹¹⁶ In Rütiner’s world, consensus was central to finding truth. The Bible taught that ‘in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established’,¹¹⁷ and Rütiner and his contemporaries took this quite literally. If several people witnessed an event,¹¹⁸ if independent sources brought the same news,¹¹⁹ even if a crowd gave its (tacit) approval to a story told in its presence, they amplified and gave weight to the information shared.¹²⁰ In the case of the Devil of Schiltach, a large number of contradictory voices initially cast some doubt on the veracity of the story. By the time Kessler recorded the story in his Sabbata, however, these voices had become ‘common and consistent’ enough to warrant an entry in his chronicle. 2. Proximity: a chain of information tracing a story as closely back to an eyewitness as possible.¹²¹ Sixteenth-century humanists and reformers taught that truth should be sought at the source, and in the case of news their call ad fontes translated into a call ad testes: the most reliable account was an eyewitness account. As a result, Rütiner’s informants made every effort to present themselves ¹¹⁶ Comparing information from several sources was also central to Hermann von Weinsberg’s ‘source criticism’; Lundin, Paper Memory, 242. ¹¹⁷ 2 Cor. 13:1. ¹¹⁸ Even when Rütiner personally witnessed an event, he sought confirmation from others. When a French beggar tricked people into giving her money on the St Gall market square, for instance, he noted: ‘I saw it, and several others’ (‘Vidi et plures alij’; Comm. I.611). ¹¹⁹ As Rütiner carefully noted, for instance, both St Gall’s traders and Gabriel Billwiler related that Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria had insulted Ulrich of Württemberg and called Philipp of Hessen Ulrich’s fool. Moreover, Billwiler himself was able to draw on several informants, too, including Georg von Hewen, Ulrich of Württemberg’s commander-in-chief (Comm. I.836). Similarly, a story about a legal dispute between two men from Appenzell was related ‘unanimously by Brendly, David [von Watt] and Johannes Weninger’ (‘Brendly [ ] Dauid et Ioh Weniger/vnanimes retulerunt’; Comm. II.57). In May of 1537, David von Watt shared the news of the defeat of Ferdinand I’s troops by the Ottomans at Klis, stressing the fact that he was drawing on letters sent to him independently by merchants in Linz and Nuremberg (Comm. II.159). ¹²⁰ Conrad Scheiwiler, for instance, shared several stories ‘in the presence of all [Elfer], and everybody nodded’ (‘praesentibus omnibus retulit et omnes annuer/unt’; Comm. I.846b). It is telling that Rütiner often records the names of those who were present when a story was shared: by listening to a story without challenging it, a crowd suggested that it approved of what was being said; see e.g. Comm. I.788; I.807; II.259; II.267c; II.278; II.347; II.366bb; II.387d. ¹²¹ See similarly Mauer, Gemain Geschray, 51; Lundin, Paper Memory, 242; Fine, ‘Rumour, Trust and Civil Society’, 9–11.

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or their sources as eyewitnesses.¹²² If they could not plausibly do so, they created proximity by claiming that they (or their sources) had been physically close to the place where an event had occurred. 3. Reliability: ‘proof ’ that all links in the chain of information are reliable.¹²³ When an informant was part of the St Gall community, a simple name usually sufficed to decide whether or not they could be trusted. In the case of unnamed or indirect informants, however, their own fama, or reputation, often became part of the story.¹²⁴ A reliable informant was probus (upright, honourable),¹²⁵ fidelis (trustworthy),¹²⁶ or veridicus (truthful, literally: speaking the truth),¹²⁷ neither a flatterer nor someone who talked too much.¹²⁸ In the case of the Devil of Schiltach, physical evidence (scars) and the witness’s emotional response (tears) also played a part in ‘proving’ the reliability of the person telling the story. 4. Plausibility: a story compatible with the audience’s frame of reference. As Steven Shapin has convincingly argued in A Social History of Truth, whether we find a story plausible depends both on our trust in the source of the story and on the extent to which the story is compatible with our personal frame of reference.¹²⁹ Rütiner and his contemporaries, diligent though they were when assessing the reliability of their sources, nevertheless more readily believed in stories which were compatible with their view of the world. It made sense that Zurich’s troops were defeated in a war against their confederates, that Catholic priests were caught in the company of prostitutes, and that a mercenary had set off the series of events that led to the destruction of Schiltach, for all of these stories confirmed Rütiner’s assumptions about the world in which he lived. What does all this tell us about the ‘hierarchy of trust’ and the relationship between printed and oral news? Let us turn to the case of the Devil of Schiltach ¹²² On 92 occasions Rütiner explicitly states that his informant was an eyewitness (e.g. Comm. I.511; II.278; II.306a; II.316a). His informants sometimes dedicated a considerable part of their stories to reassuring him of their status as eyewitnesses. Othmar Cuntzly, for instance, claimed that he was able to describe the death of a commander during the Battle of Bicocca (1522) in extraordinary detail because the commander had been ‘thrown down next to’ him (‘iuxta Othmarum Cuntzli prostratur’). He was also able to deliver a detailed account of a supposedly private commanders’ meeting before the battle, and as he told Rütiner about it he reassured him that he ‘was also at the assembly because it is custom that each commander is accompanied for protection by the four or five men whom they trust the most’ (‘In senatu eciam illo Othmarus/fuit quia mos est vt singuli capitanei 4/vel 5 secum quibus maxime fidunt commitantur/in protectionem’, Comm. II.306a). Rütiner’s informants also provided him with a list of their own sources on 208 occasions, and often these ‘information chains’ lead all the way back to an eyewitness (e.g. Comm. I.952; II.165; II.194; II.256b). ¹²³ See similarly Mauer, Gemain Geschray, 51 and 68; Horst Wenzel, Mediengeschichte vor und nach Gutenberg (Darmstadt, 2008), 51, and van Nierop, ‘ “And Ye Shall Hear” ’, 72, where trust in the informant is mentioned as one of the main criteria for regarding a piece of news as reliable. ¹²⁴ See e.g. Comm. I.493; I.615; I.737; I.770; I.828; I.837; II.26; II.89c. ¹²⁵ Comm. II.207e. ¹²⁶ Comm. I.615; I.737; I.770; I.837. ¹²⁷ Comm. II.26; II.89c. Occasionally, these reassurances even take the form of a circular argument, such as in the case of an indirect informant who ‘speaks the truth . . . as he truthfully says of himself ’ (‘veridicus retulit . . . vt vere de se praedicat’; Comm. I.493). ¹²⁸ See e.g. Comm. I.828; II.254a; II.370. ¹²⁹ Shapin, Social History of Truth, 4 and 21–2. See similarly Fine, ‘Rumour, Trust and Civil Society’, 8–9.

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once more. While the printed pamphlets helped circulate the story, in contrast to Brendly’s account they did not fulfil most of the criteria above. With the exception of the first pamphlet, which claimed to have been written on the spot in Schiltach, they did not mention where they got their information from, and so their distance from or proximity to the events of 1533 remained unknown.¹³⁰ Two of the prints were published anonymously, while the third had been produced by a little-known illuminator from Nuremberg, and so their fama could not be established with any certainty: there was no guarantee that the prints’ producers and their stories could be trusted.¹³¹ And finally, the prints reached every reader in the exact same form, regardless of their social, educational, cultural, and confessional background.¹³² In the case of news, and in particular news concerning miraculous events, a certain degree of flexibility could be an advantage.¹³³ Print’s ability to produce identical copies of the same text may well have increased people’s trust in print editions of the Bible or learned books. Yet for a story such as that of the Devil of Schiltach to be successful, it had to make its audience believe in the unbelievable. This was achieved more easily by oral communication than by print precisely because the former could not be fixed to the same extent as the latter. It was this lack of consistency which allowed the story of the Devil of Schiltach to adapt and develop until it had reached a form that Rütiner and his learned friends found plausible. Of course, matters were rarely as clear as they seemed in the case of the Devil of Schiltach, where only Brendly’s account fulfilled all of the criteria listed above. How, then, did Rütiner and his contemporaries deal with those instances in which several reliable sources contradicted one another?

Competition in the marketplace of news On 18 November 1538, the Augsburg citizen Leonhard Beck sent a letter to Thomas Fechter, son of the St Gall town scribe Augustin Fechter.¹³⁴ It contained ¹³⁰ The pamphlet which claimed to have been written in Schiltach is Ein erschrocklich Warhafftige History. See alternatively Harter, Teufel von Schiltach, 110. ¹³¹ The illustrated broadsheet entitled Ein erschröcklich geschicht Vom Tewfel was produced by a certain ‘Steffan Hamer Briefmaler’ (‘Stefan Hamer, illuminator’), who was active in Nuremberg from the 1530s onwards. In 1534, the Nuremberg city council questioned the reliability of Hamer’s sources for a news print he had produced—a print which is probably identical with Ein erschröcklich geschicht Vom Tewfel; see Franz Mauelshagen, ‘Verbreitung von Wundernachrichten als christliche Pflicht: Das Weltbild legitimiert das Medium’, in Franz Mauelshagen and Benedikt Mauer (eds), Medien und Weltbilder im Wandel der Frühen Neuzeit (Augsburg, 2000), 133–54, here 143. ¹³² Michael Giesecke has similarly argued that the new medium forced writers and producers to conceptualize a new type of recipient: a reader stripped of biographical details and specificity; Giesecke, Buchdruck in der Frühen Neuzeit, 404–5. ¹³³ Filippo de Vivo has made a similar argument with regards to diplomatic negotiations; see Filippo de Vivo, ‘Archives of Speech: Recording Diplomatic Negotiation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’, European History Quarterly, 56/3 (2016), 519–44, here esp. 539. ¹³⁴ Beck was heir to the richest woman in St Gall, Regina Schittli, and Fechter was put in charge of executing her will. See Bonorand, ‘Hieronymus Sailer aus St. Gallen’, 116–18.

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news of a volcanic eruption in Naples, a list of cities recently conquered by the Ottomans, and an account of a case of adultery and attempted rape by an Augsburg citizen. On account of this last story, and perhaps because of Fechter’s familial ties to the town scribe, the whole letter was read out at the public marriage court, and its content then passed on orally from Brendly to Rütiner.¹³⁵ Here, however, we shall focus on the former two pieces of news, both of which were intensely discussed in St Gall at the time. The first one, concerning news about a natural disaster in southern Italy, provides an example of how St Gall’s merchants asserted their authority as bearers of news by discrediting competitors in the marketplace of information. The second one, regarding rumours about the advance of the Ottomans and their impending alliance with several Catholic powers, takes us back to the beginning of this book. Here, it will allow us to illustrate how an overflow of contradictory information exposed the limits of Rütiner’s ‘source criticism’. Starting on 28 September 1538, a week-long volcanic eruption accompanied by ash rain, earthquakes, and the formation of Monte Nuovo (New Mountain), destroyed Pozzuoli, a small village west of Naples.¹³⁶ Beck’s letter was the first medium to bring the news to St Gall. It was not unusual for news from the south to reach St Gall from the north. By the 1530s, the imperial postal system facilitated the flow of information between the Italian lands and Augsburg, turning the latter into an important centre not just of trade but also of news.¹³⁷ As an Augsburg citizen, Beck was therefore in a prime position for gathering and redistributing foreign news. Yet Beck’s account of the volcanic eruption was soon challenged by one which, according to Rütiner’s criteria, seemed even more reliable: 17 September [sic]. In Naples, as the sea was moving back and forth, everything was burnt and reduced to ashes. The wind which followed pushed [the ashes] into a pile and formed an exceptional mountain. Dominicus Hochrütiner related it when he returned. And he saw: it did not burn as long as it was said.¹³⁸

The entry contains little news in the literal sense of the term. Beck had already informed St Gallers about the receding sea which had exposed fire-breathing crevices

¹³⁵ Comm. II.373–5. ¹³⁶ For a volcanological account of the eruption which draws on contemporary sources, see Mauro Di Vito, Lucio Lirer, Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo et al., ‘The 1538 Monte Nuovo Eruption (Campi Flegrei, Italy)’, Bulletin of Volcanology, 49 (1987), 608–15. The eruption is also briefly mentioned in Carlos H. Caracciolo, ‘Natural Disasters and the European Printed News Network’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxton (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016), 756–78, here 760. ¹³⁷ Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 76–6 and 324. ¹³⁸ ‘17 Septemb [ ] Neapoli mari reciprocato comb/usta omnia et in cinerem redacta [ ] vehe/menti vento subsecuto in cumulum contrusit/montemque formauit eximium [ ] Dominicus Hoch/rutiner rediens retulit [ ] Viditque non/diu vt dictum fuit vssit’. Comm. II.406.

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at the bottom of the Mediterranean.¹³⁹ Yet Hochrütiner was nevertheless able to make a contribution: from his own observation, he claimed, he knew that earlier reports had been exaggerated.¹⁴⁰ At the same time, Hochrütiner’s account, too, was highly exaggerated—at least as it was recorded by Rütiner. It is true that Naples lay in ashes after the eruption, but not because it had been destroyed by fire: rather, it was simply covered in volcanic ash which had fallen down on it like snow.¹⁴¹ Early in 1539 a third informant—and another self-proclaimed eyewitness— added to the story: ‘When [Jakob Schlappritzi] returned from the autumn markets in Campania, he observed the earthquake and that conflagration near Naples.’¹⁴² In contrast to Hochrütiner’s account, Schlappritzi’s version is both more detailed and more compatible with other extant sources, and one in particular: a letter written by the Neapolitan Francesco Marchesino on 5 October 1538, which was published in print that same year.¹⁴³ In fact, the close parallels between Marchesino’s letter and Schlappritzi’s account seem somewhat suspicious. Both mention a thermal bath near Pozzuoli, a detail which never made it into the German prints published soon after the event.¹⁴⁴ Schlappritzi’s description of how he investigated the sulphurous fires on a mountain between Florence and Piacenza also seems to faintly echo Marchesino’s observations during his first walk on the newly formed Monte Nuovo.¹⁴⁵ It is therefore possible that what was presented by Schlappritzi as an eyewitness account was in fact partly based on a print of Marchesino’s letter.¹⁴⁶ Like Hochrütiner, not only was Schlappritzi asked to share his own observations, but his expertise was also sought to verify earlier accounts: ¹³⁹ Comm. II.374. ¹⁴⁰ It is unclear whether Hochrütiner was referring to Beck’s letter or one of the contemporary printed accounts which indeed claimed that the fires were still burning (‘print noch ymer dar’). See Wunderbarliche vund erschrockliche newe zeitung, so sich neulich auff den 28 tag Septembris im 1538 jar, in Welschland, nit fern von Neapolis zugetragen haben ([Nürnberg:] [Johannes Petreius], [1538], VD16 W 4605), fol. 2v. ¹⁴¹ This is how one contemporary Neapolitan described the scene; Francesco Marchesino, Copia de Una lettera di Napoli che contiene li stupendi, & gran prodigij apparsi sopra à Pozzolo (s.l., 1538), 2. ¹⁴² ‘Ex Campania rediens autumnalibus nund/inis et percepto terremotu et conflagratione/illa circa Neapolim’. Comm. II.421. ¹⁴³ Marchesino, Copia de Una lettera. ¹⁴⁴ Ibid. 2 and Comm. II.421. In addition to Wunderbarliche vund erschrockliche newe zeitung, the German pamphlets on the eruption include Erschrockenliche vnd grusame zeychen erschinen/ouch groß erdbyden beschehen nach by der statt Nappoli/an einem ort genant Puzolo/an S. Michels abend/mitt schwebel raegnen/donneren vnd blitzgen/ouch mit vffbrechung der bergen/vnd grossen fhür flammen . . . (s.l., 1538, VD16 ZV 29549), and Wunderbarliche Newe Zeytnng [sic], So sye newlich auff den XXVIII. tag Septembris jm MDXXXVIII. Jar Jm Welsch lande, nit ferr von Neapolis sich zu tragen hat, bey Bykelo anderhalb meyl on Neapolis, Des erschrockenlichen prinnens viii. Welscher Meyl. Anzaigung Der straff Gotes künfftig. MD XXXIX (Augsburg: Melchior Ramminger, 1539, VD 16 W4607). ¹⁴⁵ Marchesino, Copia de Una lettera, 4, and Comm. II.421. ¹⁴⁶ In fact the Schlappritzi family, originally from Italy, seems to have been involved in the circulation of books between Bologna and the Swiss Confederacy; see Alfred Schmid, ‘Die Schlapprizi: Geschichte einer St. Galler Burgerfamilie, 1526–1949’, Der Schweizer Familienforscher, 23/1–2 (1956), 1–16, here 6.

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When asked whether it happened as it was told in a little tract [tractatulo]: ‘Perhaps’, he said, ‘they have added a few things. In substance, however, some things did happen. The wind pressed the ashes down into the form of a mountain’. Jakob Schlappritzi Dominicus Hochrütiner also reported it similarly . . . ¹⁴⁷

The tractatulum mentioned here is likely identical with the pamphlet entitled Erschrockenliche vnd grusame zeychen, which survives in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich and large parts of which Kessler quotes verbatim in the Sabbata.¹⁴⁸ Yet, as the example shows, it was merchants such as Schlappritzi and Hochrütiner who were considered the authoritative source for events which happened where they had travelled for business.¹⁴⁹ Their accounts—and indeed those of travelling St Gallers in general—carried particular weight because such informants were both part of the local St Gall community and could plausibly claim to have been present at, or physically close to, events which took place far away. In short, they combined reliability and proximity. Both Hochrütiner and Schlappritzi gave a demonstration of their insider knowledge by partially discrediting other accounts, including at least one printed tract. Their authority as a source of news derived precisely from the fact that they did not have to rely on printed accounts or letters (or so they had their audience believe, at least) but could draw on their own observations instead. While these oral informants called into question earlier written and printed accounts, Rütiner did not record any contradictions between Hochrütiner’s and Schlappritzi’s testimony. In fact, Schlappritzi even confirmed what Hochrütiner had reported about the formation of Monte Nuovo. But what if several equally trusted informants contradicted one another? To answer that question, let us take a closer look at that moment at the beginning of 1537 with which this book began, a moment when St Gall was swamped with news about a possible alliance between Suleiman the Magnificent ¹⁴⁷ ‘intero/gando num se habuerit quemadmodum trac/tatulo narratum [ ] Forsan inquit nonnihil/ adiecerunt [ ] in re tamen facta [ ] quaedam in/montis formam ventus cinus detrusit/Iacob Schlaparitzy/Similiter et Dominicus Hoch/rutiner retulit’. Comm. II.421. ¹⁴⁸ Erschrockenliche vnd grusame zeychen. In fact, Kessler even entitled his own account ‘Erschrockenliche und grusame zaichen’: Kessler, Sabbata, 478 (= fol. 502b). The editors of the Sabbata appear not to have been aware of this print and therefore wrongly assumed that Kessler relied on the Wunderbarliche vund erschrockliche newe Zeitung instead; see their commentary in Kessler, Sabbata, 593–4. Erschrockenliche vnd grusame zeychen was in turn translated from an Italian pamphlet: I gran segni et terremoti trarri appresso alla Citta di Napoli a un luoco chiamato Puzolo la uigilia di San Michele, con piouere di solfore, & folgorar de troni, & aperture di montagne, & grandissime fiamme di fuoco, Et seccarosi oiu di tre miglia die mare, & alre cose horribile per setto, o otto giorni continui apparse, & anchora seguitano (s.l., s.d.). ¹⁴⁹ See similarly Bonorand, Vadian und Graubünden, 138. For more examples of merchants returning with foreign news from the markets in Lyon, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and many other cities, see e.g. Comm. I.747; I.762; I.916; II.18; II.25; II.28; II.97c; II.159; II.161; II.194; II.211; II.247; II.265g; II.306d; II.408.

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and several Catholic rulers. Preserved in the Commentationes, the talk of the town regarding such news bears witness to St Gallers’ rigorous approach to sources, but it also reveals a growing sense of urgency and confusion now that this approach no longer seemed to bring clarity. It is therefore worth quoting in full: Erasmus Schlumpf, Hulrich’s [son], heard from Albrecht Miles and Jakob Zili when they returned from Lyon in February that there were 800 Turks in Marseille who had been given two of the city’s quarters as lodgings. A great and noble ambassador of the Turk was said to have departed via Lyon in the direction of the king in Paris; it is unknown what is to be discussed. When [Bartholome] Schobinger heard Erasmus tell me this, he immediately replied: ‘What I said about this treaty was meaningless and random. It came from the Lyon merchants, now they too are telling [stories] like that.’ [Schobinger] added that before the war, when the emperor was still in Rome, the Duke of Ferrara captured a messenger from the Turk to the king and brought him before him. The emperor said: ‘Release him, I know very well what both are planning.’ While he related this, C[aspar] Huseli was present. On the previous Monday he had heard in Wil from the trustworthy man of the Vogt . . . that a messenger from Nuremberg, dressed in the city’s colours and coat of arms, had passed through Winterthur. This man said that he had just seen the Turk, the king of France and the Pope in Marseille, from where he was returning. He did not know what they were planning, and when he spread this in the Thurgau, the Landvogt of Frauenfeld, now [a man] from Uri,¹⁵⁰ almost had him arrested. On the Sunday before Sebastian Cuntz died [4 February 1537], Gebentinger said that he had heard something similar from the mayor Ransperg, because [the latter] read those letters in St. Laurenzen in the assembly after the service, namely that those three had convened in Venice to confirm the treaty. Yet the Venetians have not yet agreed . . . . He also added that the Turk had a citizen who resisted beheaded there.¹⁵¹

¹⁵⁰ The Landvogt was an official in charge of administrating one of the Swiss Confederacy’s condominiums (Gemeine Herrschaften) such as, in this case, the Thurgau. The governing states took turns appointing the Landvogt, and so the position was sometimes held by a Protestant, and sometimes by Catholic—as in this case, a man from the Catholic state of Uri. For a study of how the shared rule of condominiums affected communication and confessionalisation in the Swiss Confederacy, see e.g. Daniela Hacke, Konfession und Kommunikation: Religiöse Koexistenz und Politik in der Alten Eidgenossenschaft (Die Grafschaft Baden 1531–1712) (Cologne, 2017). ¹⁵¹ ‘Erasmus Schlumpff Hulr audiuit ab A[l]brechto Mi/liti et Iacobo Zily redeuntes Lugduno Feb/ ruario [ ] 800 Turcas in Massilia esse quibus/2 regiones vrbis inhabitandum traditae./ Magnus et praecipuus Turcae legatus per Lug/dunum Lutetias versus ad regem proficisci/quid agendum nescire [ ] Audiens illa cum mihi re/ferebat Erasmus [ ] Schowinger respondit subinde/vana et euentita erant quae de foedere hoc dice/bam [ ] Lugdunensibus mercatoribus fuit iam/ipsi talia referunt/Addidit idem dum Caesar adhuc Romae degit/antequam bellum illud inceptum. Dux Ferrariae/legatum quondam Turcae

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In 1537, it seems, the Ottomans were everywhere: in Marseille, in Venice, and on everybody’s lips. Information about their plans was available in abundance, and it all seemed to come from reliable sources. Schlumpf had heard his version of the story from two St Gall merchants who had just returned from the market in Lyon, one of the towns the Turkish ambassador had allegedly passed through on his way to Paris. A ‘trustworthy man’ told Huseli what he had learned from an eyewitness, a Nuremberg messenger whose authority was in turn confirmed by the clothes he wore.¹⁵² The messengers’ testimony seemed all the more significant in light of the Landvogt’s intervention: the fact that a Catholic official had attempted to bury news of a Catholic–Ottoman alliance only made the latter seem more plausible. Finally, Gebentinger learned about the meeting in Venice from a letter the St Gall mayor read out after the service. The stories which reached St Gall in February 1537, however, were also clearly incompatible with one other. The only thing they agreed upon was that the Ottoman sultan and Francis I were planning an alliance—which was, of course, not far from the truth.¹⁵³ The rumours which circulated in St Gall in 1537 were both a reaction to the military campaign of Suleiman the Magnificent and an expression of growing concerns regarding the future of Protestantism.¹⁵⁴ As I argued at the beginning of this book, a far greater threat than that posed by the Ottomans was starting to take shape in both the talk of St Gall and in letters sent to Vadianus around the same time. Between 1537 and 1539, Vadianus’ correspondence was bursting with unconfirmed rumours about several possible Catholic alliances: between Charles V and Francis I;¹⁵⁵ between Charles V, Francis I, and the Pope;¹⁵⁶ between Charles V, Francis I, and the Venetians;¹⁵⁷ or between the Venetians, several Italian

ad Regem, captum, ad se/adductum. Respondit Caesar. dimitte illum no/ui optime quid vtrinque moliantur./ Astitit referendo C Huseli praecedenti Lu/nae Vuyll audiuit a praefecti Dominus Tobel veri/dico quod Vitoduri praeterijt Nuncius Nurenbergensis/colore et insigni vrbis indutus [ ] Ille dixit se/iam Massiliae vnde redeat [ ] Vidisse [ ] Turcam/Regem Franciae et Papam [ ] quid moliantur nesciat/et talia per Turgauiam seminando parum ab/fuit quin a praefecto Frowenfeld captus fuisset/de Vry iam/Illa dominica qua postea Sebastianus Cuntz mo/ritur simile quiddam retulit Gebentinger se au/diuisse a Consule Ransperg quia in templo Laur/entij illas literas legisse senaculo post con/tiones [ ] videlicet illos 3 convenisse Venetijs/pro foedere confirmando. [ ] Tamen Venetianos/nondum consentisse . . . Ad/didit eciam [ ] Turcam ibidem Ciuem obluctantem/decollasse’. Comm. II.25. ¹⁵² On the clothes of messengers as a means of establishing trust, see also Michael Jucker, ‘Vertrauen, Symbolik, Reziprozität. Das Korrespondenzwesen eidgenössischer Städte im Spätmittelalter als kommunikative Praxis’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 34 (2007), 189–213, here 210. ¹⁵³ On the 1536 treaty between Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent and its political and economic consequences, see Jensen, ‘Ottoman Turks’. ¹⁵⁴ On contemporary St Gallers’ reactions to the Ottoman threat, see Ernst Gerhard Rüsch, ‘Die türkische Bedrohung des Abendlandes zur Zeit Vadians im Spiegel der st. gallischen Quellen’, Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des Bodensees und seiner Umgebung, 110 (1992), 169–83. ¹⁵⁵ Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, v.ii, 403, no. 939: Simon Grynaeus to Vadianus, 7 Jan. 1537. ¹⁵⁶ Ibid. v.ii, 517, no. 1031: Heinrich Bullinger to Vadianus, 1 Jan. 1539. ¹⁵⁷ Ibid. v.ii, 477, no. 999: Martin Frecht to Vadianus, 17 Feb. 1538.

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princes, and the Pope.¹⁵⁸ Sent by numerous eminent Protestants including Martin Frecht, Simon Grynaeus, and Heinrich Bullinger, such rumours about a Catholic union were quite alarming—and even more so in light of the divisions between the Zwinglians and Lutherans which the Wittenberg Concord of 1536 had just exposed once again. In 1537, concerns about the advance of the Ottoman army, about an imminent Catholic alliance, and about the irreconcilable divide between Zwinglians and Lutherans thus seem to have merged with rumours about the treaty between Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent. In St Gall, these rumours fell on fertile soil. For a Protestant town surrounded by Catholic territory and largely dependent on the export of linen, an alliance of the kind reported by some of the rumours— namely one between the Ottomans, Francis I, Charles V, the Venetians, and the Pope—was the ultimate threat to both its economy and its confessional independence. However unlikely such an alliance may have seemed, the rumours did not fail to have an effect. Although Rütiner quickly realized that his sources contradicted one another, he did not dismiss them altogether: ‘See what diverse, dissimilar [things] are spread at one and the same time, so that it has not become a saying in vain: Mars is approaching when lies are told.’¹⁵⁹ In this particular case, Rütiner’s system of ‘source criticism’ had failed. Yet to him, this failure was itself evidence that the rumours were true in their essence, and that a war was looming. The threat of war was to hang over St Gall for several years.¹⁶⁰ Indeed, when the pope sought to broker a peace between Charles V and Francis I in 1538, St Gallers saw some of their worst fears confirmed.¹⁶¹ That same year, Rütiner writes in an entry concerning the St Gall abbot and other Catholic authorities: Everywhere they act more tyrannically than hitherto, I do not know [by what] they are animated. It is to be feared that a great persecution will follow shortly, perhaps from the concord between the king and the emperor or something else. Yet while we despair, God will give a good end to all this.¹⁶²

¹⁵⁸ Ibid. v.ii, 456, no. 981: Freiherr Georg von Hewen to Vadianus, 12 Dec. 1537. See also ibid. v.ii, 454–5, no. 979: Freiherr Georg von Hewen to Vadianus, 7 Dec. 1537; 472–3, no. 994: Johannes Comander to Vadianus, 3 Feb. 1538. ¹⁵⁹ ‘Vide quam varia illo et vno tempore/disparguntur dissimilia vt non frustra in pro/verbium abijt [ ] Martium appropinquare/quum de mendatijs loquitur.’ Comm. II.25. ¹⁶⁰ See similarly Bernhard Stettler, Überleben in schwieriger Zeit: Die 1530er und 1540er Jahre im Spiegel von Vadians Korrespondenz (Zurich, 2014), and Traugott Schiess, ‘Bullingers Briefwechsel mit Vadian’, Jahrbuch für schweizerische Geschichte, 31(1906), 23–68, here esp. 38–50, whose studies of Vadianus’ correspondence show that the Swiss Protestants feared an imminent attack by the German emperor throughout most of the 1540s. ¹⁶¹ On the peace negotiations of 1538, see Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars, 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2012), 236–8. ¹⁶² ‘Vndique magis tyrannice ag/unt quam hactenus nescio animati [ ] Timendum/breui magnam persecutionem secuturam/forsan ex concordia Regis et Caesaris vel/alterius rei [ ] Sed deus his omnibus felicem ex/itum dabit nobis desperantibus’. Comm. II.356.

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Swiss Protestants were still holding their breath early in 1539, and the tone of their letters became increasingly desperate. In a letter to Vadianus dating from 1 January 1539, Bullinger reports another set of rumours and hints at a gloomy future lying before them: Rumour . . . has it that Ferdinand, the Pole and the voivode of Hungary are to convene in Vienna, elsewhere the emperor, the Gaul [i.e. Francis I] and the Pope, so that they can earnestly discuss the Lutherans, who are to be suppressed . . . See, my Vadianus, under what sign this year begins. You can imagine what will happen . . . To die is not the worst . . . ¹⁶³

Bullinger’s letter illustrates the lasting effect uncertain and contradictory news could have, especially when it grew out of, confirmed, and fed pre-existing fears. Such rumours were not dismissed lightly, and they persisted over several years precisely because they could neither be verified nor disproved. Perhaps their fear of war, fuelled by constant rumours from a variety of sources, may go some way towards explaining why Rütiner’s notes, in contrast to Kessler’s, became more and more detailed in the last years of the 1530s. In those years, ‘God’s miraculous deeds’ were increasingly hard to come by, and so there was less for Kessler to record. Yet the need for a record of the innumerable rumours flying through the town, and for a system, however limited, for determining which ones to trust, was greater than ever. *

*

*

As we have seen, Rütiner’s trust in a piece of information depended not so much on whether it was circulated in oral, manuscript, or printed form, and rather more on the people involved in its circulation: it was by considering the fama of those who spread news and vouched for its validity that it could be evaluated. Deciding whether or not to trust a piece of information was thus a task that required considerable social knowledge. It is in this context that the purpose of the ‘references’ that Rütiner recorded for most entries becomes clearer: they allowed him to establish whether a piece of news was trustworthy and to weigh contradictory accounts against one another. If Rütiner intended to use any of the information he recorded in future conversations, his careful notes would, moreover, have allowed him to present his sources as reliable, too. While Rütiner may have been exceptional in his meticulous and systematic recording of sources, his ‘references’ point us to a much more general ¹⁶³ ‘Rumor deinde est, Ferdinandum, Polonum et Vaywodam Ung(ariae) conventurus Viennae, alibi Caesarem, Gallum et papam, ut serio tractent de opprimendis Lutheranis . . . Vide, mi Vadian, quibus auspiciis hic annus ingrediatur. Quid futurum sit, coniicere potes . . . Mori non est miserum’. Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, v.ii, 517, no. 1031: Heinrich Bullinger to Vadianus, 1 Jan. 1539. According to Rütiner, Vadianus shared Bullinger’s concern; see e.g. Comm. II.248.

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phenomenon. Most of Rütiner’s informants—from the maid Anna Bösch to the educated Johannes Brendly—understood what it took for their stories to become believable and willingly disclosed their sources. Similar ‘references’ were also required from witnesses in courts. In the protocols of the St Gall Siebnergericht (Court of the Seven), the court scribe routinely recorded long chains of information: ‘Ulr[ich] Ransperg says Thias Schiegg told him the messenger of Zug told him a certain Mantzer said that God cannot be eaten or shat.’¹⁶⁴ Like these oral accounts, letters sent to St Gall were full of reassurances that their authors were drawing on reliable informants. ‘If you hear anything different,’ wrote one of Vadianus’ correspondents, for instance, ‘you should not believe it: for this I have personally heard in Kassel from the people who were present . . . ’¹⁶⁵ In their attempt to establish their credibility, authors of early news pamphlets similarly insisted that what they reported had ‘truly’ happened, and sometimes they backed this up by including lists of eyewitnesses as supporting evidence.¹⁶⁶ The argument that the primacy of the eye (and thus of the eyewitness) is a distinctive characteristic of the age of print, with its focus on visual rather than aural experience, does not square with such evidence.¹⁶⁷ Nor can it be said that ‘ideals of face-to-face communication’ were ‘devalued’ with the advent of print.¹⁶⁸ Rather, early print relied on mechanisms of verification which had been well established in both oral and epistolary forms of communication.¹⁶⁹ Indeed, evidence from the Commentationes suggests that in St Gall, these mechanisms worked in favour of oral informants. It has often been argued that Europe ‘shrank’ with the introduction of the printing press and the imperial postal system—just as it is often claimed that the world ‘shrank’ with the introduction of the Internet—for they allowed efficient and fast communication over long distances, thus bringing people closer together.¹⁷⁰ At the same time, however, the sources of news became more elusive as the physical distance between an author and their audience grew. In a system where trust in a piece of news was ¹⁶⁴ ‘Ulr[ich] Rainsperg sait Thias Schiegg hab im gsait, der bot von Zug hab im gesait ain mantzer hab geredt got lass sich nit essen noch schissen.’ StadtASG, AA, 797, ‘Protokoll des Siebnergerichts 1519–1527’, p. 78, 1 Mar. 1527. On the St Gall Siebnergericht, see also Moser-Nef, Reichsstadt und Republik St. Gallen, i, 378–80. ¹⁶⁵ ‘Ob ir annders hortten, sonnd ir eß nitt globenn; den diß hab ich selber Kaßell gehortt vonn dennen bersonen, die dorby gweßenn . . . ’ Arbenz and Wartmann, Vadianische Briefsammlung, v.1, 231, no. 826: Jakob Grübel to Vadianus, 12 July 1535. For a similar example, see also ibid.,v.2, 278, no. 865: Niklaus Guldin to Vadianus, 12 Jan. 1536. On the numerous ways in which contemporaries tried to establish trust in written correspondence, see also Jucker, ‘Vertrauen, Symbolik, Reziprozität’. ¹⁶⁶ See e.g. Harms and Schilling. Sammlung der Zentralbibliothek Zürich, 90–1, no. VI.44; 128–9, no. VI.63; 228–9, no. VI.114. This last pamphlet, for instance, names several ‘wahrhafftige Personen’ (truthful people) as witnesses and even includes the places where they lived. ¹⁶⁷ Giesecke, Buchdruck in der Frühen Neuzeit, esp. 568–90. ¹⁶⁸ Ibid. 392. ¹⁶⁹ See similarly Franz Mauelshagen, ‘Was ist glaubwürdig? Fallstudie zum Zusammenspiel von Text und Bild bei der Beglaubigung aussergewöhnlicher Nachrichten im illustrierten Flugblatt’, in Wolfgang Harms and Alfred Messerli (eds), Wahrnehmungsgeschichte und Wissensdiskurs im illustrierten Flugblatt der Frühen Neuzeit (1450–1700) (Basle, 2002), 309–38, here esp. 337. ¹⁷⁰ Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 104.

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inseparably linked to one’s trust in the source, this caused much uncertainty. As Cohen and Twomey argue, in ‘an oral world where men and women often knew one another, the written word seemed disembodied’.¹⁷¹ This was particularly true for information spread in print, whose dissemination was not tied to pre-existing social networks to the same extent that oral accounts and letters were. Eventually, regularly published newspapers with a fixed title would develop their own fama on the basis of which readers could decide whether or not to trust them.¹⁷² In Rütiner’s time, however, printed news typically came in the form of individual, anonymous pamphlets, making it difficult to establish the kind of familiarity required to build trust. Even when a printer was mentioned in such pamphlets, the names of small printing shops in faraway cities would not normally have meant much to people in St Gall. When they had the choice, it therefore seemed safer to consult a familiar oral informant. It was their flexibility and social embeddedness, moreover, which gave oral narratives an advantage over other media.¹⁷³ Oral informants who created the illusion that news stories from far away had only passed through a few reliable hands before reaching their destination made the space in between ‘shrink’ as well, and more successfully so than anonymous prints.¹⁷⁴ Indeed, as in the case of jokes, oral informants sometimes actively obscured the fact that they drew on printed material. They were also more successful in catering to their audience’s expectations. Early modern prints are often studied as a mirror of contemporary attitudes and ideas: because their main objective was to sell, it was in their producers’ interest to give their audiences what they wanted.¹⁷⁵ Yet while it is certainly true that pamphlets were written with a particular readership in mind, their authors had no control over who actually read their work and no means of addressing all possible audiences at once.¹⁷⁶ Those who spread

¹⁷¹ Cohen and Twomey, ‘Introduction’, 18. ¹⁷² To some extent, this may have already been the case for Neue Zeitungen when they were at the peak of their production in the second half of the 16th century. As Schilling has argued, even learned collectors of such prints often received them rather uncritically: Schilling, Bildpublizistik der Frühen Neuzeit, 115–25. ¹⁷³ André Belo has made a similar argument with regard to handwritten news, whose ‘added value’ compared to printed news derived, among other things, from the possibility of including last-minute additions and personalized content: André Belo, ‘News Exchange and Social Distinction’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxton (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016), 375–93, here esp. 378. ¹⁷⁴ See however Giesecke, Buchdruck in der Frühen Neuzeit, 499, who argues that reports were only considered informative if they ‘relied on visual perception’, and that oral communication was devalued as a consequence. His argument, however, is based on an understanding of oral communication as limited in geographical scope and unable to plausibly claim access to eyewitness reports, which was clearly not the case in 16th-century St Gall. ¹⁷⁵ E.g. Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, 145; Scribner, Simple Folk, 8–9. A similar argument regarding early newspapers is made by Paul Arblaster, From Ghent to Aix: How They Brought the News in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1550–1700 (Leiden, 2014), 8–9. ¹⁷⁶ See similarly Schlögl, ‘Kommunikation und Vergesellschaftung’, esp. 171 and 207–8, and Ong, Orality and Literacy, esp. 99–100.

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a story orally, in contrast, had a better sense of who they were talking to. Talented storytellers could use such knowledge to adapt their stories for different audiences, to respond to their reactions, and to anticipate and disperse any doubts they might have. This was not only true for those who circulated current news, but also for those who shared stories of days long gone by. The next chapter will explore how conversations in the present shaped St Gallers’ visions of the past.

6 Tales of the past A ‘sense for change’, writes Daniel Woolf, ‘has always been taken as a precondition of the ability to think historically.’¹ To Rütiner and his contemporaries, it seemed that change was all around. As we have seen, they experienced the Reformation as a radical departure from their Catholic past. Less than a decade after the Reformation had taken root in St Gall, they described Catholic rituals as though they had never participated in them, and marvelled at the beliefs they had held in the past.² It was this experience of change which inspired Kessler and many of the other chroniclers to write about their time. Yet the confessional divide was not the only gap which had opened up between Rütiner’s own age and the generation of his parents and grandparents. In fact, Rütiner noticed dramatic shifts in almost every aspect of St Gall life, and the origins of those shifts often lay much further in the past than the Reformation. Several entries on the evolution of fashion— from the extravagant hats, slashed trousers, and pointed shoes of the fifteenth century to the more modest post-Reformation style of dressing—reveal St Gallers’ awareness of, and curiosity about, the differences between past and present.³ Other trends were more disconcerting. Some citizens bemoaned the loss of the St Gall they had known in their youth, a town which they claimed had known neither poverty nor luxury, and in which mercenaries had been a rare sight.⁴ Senior guild members complained that Rütiner’s generation of linen merchants no longer led the frugal and modest lives of their forefathers—the kind of lives which had turned St Gall into a flourishing textile centre in the first place.⁵ Along with old customs and long-standing traditions, whole families had disappeared. Caspar Schlumpf, for instance, ‘remembered fifty very rich lineages, of which not one remains. Reclining on the oven, he counted them.’⁶ Ernst Ehrenzeller has argued that Rütiner’s Commentationes bear witness to ‘a true sense of history’ radiating from Vadianus’ circle, and has cited as evidence their conversations about antiquity, their obsession with old coins and castles, and their awareness of social change.⁷ Yet as we have seen, the Commentationes hold a

¹ Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past. English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), 19. ² E.g. Comm. I.541; II.296c. See also Ch. 1. ³ See e.g. Comm. I.340; I.462. ⁴ Comm. II.81f. ⁵ Comm. II.157 and II.361b. ⁶ ‘C Schlumpff vltra 50 prosapiarum ditissimarum/meminit quarum ne vnus restat/super fornacem cubans numerando’. Comm. II.86. ⁷ Ehrenzeller, Geschichte der Stadt St. Gallen, 131.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0007

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somewhat exceptional position among the writings which emerged from this circle. Rütiner’s notes were guided more by the needs of the present than by an ambition to write for posterity, and he made no attempt to turn his informants’ fragmented and contradictory oral testimonies into a chronological—let alone coherent—account of the past. Moreover, his notes show that interest in the past and an awareness of historical change were not limited to St Gall’s educated elite. In fact, while Rütiner shared his learned friends’ interest in the remote past, his preference for eyewitnesses often led him to rely on senior guildsmen and older family members where his hometown’s more recent past was concerned.⁸ Chronicles and ego-documents can tell us a great deal about how early modern people experienced historical ruptures, and historians have productively used them to trace shifts in historical consciousness.⁹ The vast majority of people in early modern Europe, however, did not write history, but tell it. They would not have encountered the past in the form of a well-ordered chronicle, but as a set of haphazard, fragmented, and contradictory stories which changed considerably over time. Many stories of this kind are preserved in the Commentationes. They allow us to look beyond the written works of the elite and explore how oral (hi)stories evolved over many conversations. The first section of this chapter looks at how objects and places—or imagines and loci—were used to preserve and structure stories about the past. The second section traces changes in the way past events were remembered and retold. I argue that these changes are not simply evidence of the frailties of human memory, and nor do they occur at random. Rather than presenting us with reliable accounts of the past, the evolution of such stories offers important insights into their tellers’ present.

Remains and reminders In 1524, the Basle canon Jodocus von Rinach was accused of having abducted and sexually abused a young girl.¹⁰ His arrest caused such a stir that Rütiner—a student at Basle University at the time of the scandal—still remembered it when news of a similar crime reached him from Basle over a decade later. Writing about the events of 1524 in turn triggered a whole series of memories linked to Rütiner’s time in Basle:

⁸ E.g. on the St. Galler Auflauf of 1491, Comm. I.777; on social change, Comm. II.81f and II.361b. ⁹ For a brief introduction, see Brecht Deseure and Judith Pollmann, ‘The Experiences of Rupture and the History of Memory’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller et al. (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), 315–29. ¹⁰ For the controversy around von Rinach’s arrest, see Emil Dürr and Paul Roth (eds), Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Basler Reformation in den Jahren 1519 bis Anfang 1534, 6 vols. (Basle, 1921–1950), here i, 147–151, no. 276.

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[Jodocus von Rinach’s] court [aula]¹¹ was where one comes to the plain from the Sprung, close to the cloth house; [then] follows [the court] of Master von Andlau,¹² a most handsome man; then Gundelfinger’s,¹³ a man of small stature; [then] follows [the court] of the vicar; then upon descending the court of the scholar whose whore was an Edelmennin; to the left [follows the court] of the custos Hallwiller,¹⁴ facing the church; [and] Olpe’s [court].¹⁵ Then [follows] a different Rinacher the Elder’s [court],¹⁶ in which we played the Eunuchus. When [one reaches] the road to St Alban, next to the fountain, [there is] the provost’s [court], which Cratander¹⁷ bought and has now sold to Westheimer¹⁸ etc.¹⁹

Rütiner’s memory of the scandal around Jodocus von Rinach was thus embedded within a strikingly accurate mental map of Basle. It became the starting point for a walk down memory lane which led Rütiner from the steep alley called the Rheinsprung, where the University of Basle was located, to the cathedral square, past the prestigious houses of Basle’s cathedral canons, and then onwards to the Dompropstei, the residence of the cathedral provost situated where the Rittergasse turned onto the St.-Alban-Graben. On this mental walk from the university towards the suburbs, Rütiner was in turn reminded of a whole series of characters and events from his Basle years: of the handsome cantor Jakob von Andlau, whom he would have seen in church; of a scholar rumoured to have had an affair; and of

¹¹ Rütiner uses the term aula (court, palace) to distinguish the grand private houses of Basle’s elite families, lined up around the Münsterplatz (cathedral square), from the common houses that could be found in the rest of the city. ¹² Probably Philipp Jakob von Andlau, canon and cantor at the Basle Cathedral, who owned the Andlauerhof on the Münsterplatz in the first quarter of the 16th century. See Eugen A. Meier, Verträumtes Basel (Basle, 1974), 87. ¹³ Rütiner may here be referring to von Gundelsheim, the owner of the Gundoldsheimerhof which was adjacent to the Andlauerhof on the Münsterplatz, rather than to Gundolfinger. See Meier, Verträumtes Basel, 87. ¹⁴ Johann Rudolf von Hallwyl (after 1460–1527), custos of the Basle Cathedral from 1510 onwards. See Catherine Bosshard-Pfluger, ‘Hallwyl, Johann Rudolf von’, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, , accessed 21 Jan. 2021. ¹⁵ Likely Johann Bergmann von Olpe (c.1455–1532), priest and publisher in Basle. See Veronika Feller-Vest, ‘Bergmann von Olpe, Johann’, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, , accessed 21 Jan. 2021. ¹⁶ Perhaps Rütiner is referring here to the Reinacherhof on the Münsterplatz. See Meier, Verträumtes Basel, 87. ¹⁷ Andreas Cratander (b. around 1490, d. before 1540), printer in Basle. See Frank Hieronymus, ‘Cratander, Andreas’, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, , accessed 21 Jan. 2021. ¹⁸ Bartholomäus Westheimer (1499–1567/8), printer in Basle. It has been suggested that Westheimer took over Thomas Wolff ’s printing shop in 1536, yet Cratander also stopped printing in 1536. Perhaps Rütiner was right in suggesting that it was Cratander’s shop that Westheimer bought. ¹⁹ ‘Aula illius fuit quando ventum in planiciem vom Sprung/proxima am tuochhuß [ ] sequens domini de Andlo/w formosissimi viri [ ] deinde Gundelfingers/parui viri staturae [ ] sequens Vicarij [ ] Deinde de/scendendo aula cuius scortum fuit Edelmennin scho/larici [ ] In sinistro latere Hallwillers custodis [ ] ver/sus templum [ ] Olpen. [ ] alius deinde Senioris Rinachers/in qua Eunuchum lusimus. [ ] Quando iter gen S Alban/iuxta fontem [ ] Prepositi quam Cratander emit et/nunc Vvestheymero vendidit etc’. Comm. II.207c.

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the play by Terence which Rütiner performed in one of these grand houses during his student years.²⁰ The passage bears witness to Rütiner’s profound knowledge of Basle years after he had left the city. At the same time, however, it echoes a long-standing philosophical tradition which emphasized the visual nature of memory and described the process of remembering as a mental walk. Treatises on rhetoric by Cicero and Quintilian, as well as the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, contained detailed instructions on how to use the visual nature of memory to one’s advantage. In order to remember a speech, an orator had to visualize it, and this was done by choosing imagines (images) associated with each part of the speech and arranging them along a series of loci (places). By ‘walking’ through these mental places, the orator could then recall an entire speech in the right order.²¹ Medieval writers, and above all Thomas Aquinas, not only recommended the use of loci and imagines as memory aids, but raised the stakes by making memory an indispensable element of prudence—and thus of the cardinal virtues—and by emphasizing the close links between remembrance and piety.²² By the sixteenth century, classical mnemotechnics had passed their prime. The Rhetorica ad Herennium wrongly attributed to Cicero remained immensely popular, but contemporaries of Rütiner such as Erasmus and Melanchthon now discouraged their students from using loci and imagines as memory aids. They did not question their efficacy, however; rather, they deemed these techniques outdated and argued that memorization alone could not replace proper studying.²³ In an academic context, loci and imagines may have lost much of their importance throughout the sixteenth century. The assumptions about the nature and value of human memory on which classical and medieval mnemotechnics were based, however, proved much more long-lived. According to Mary Carruthers, medieval writers had linked memory and morality to such an extent that ‘a person without a memory’ would have been seen as ‘a person without moral character’.²⁴ This idea was still prevalent in Rütiner’s time. Those with a reliable memory were not only admired by Rütiner for the wealth of knowledge which they had at their disposal. When he wrote about how the former St Gall mayor Caspar Vonwiller had defended the town’s interests in a conflict with a neighbouring village, he linked Vonwiller’s efforts for the common good to his

²⁰ For a list of all plays in which Rütiner took part, see also Comm. I.528. ²¹ Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 1–4. ²² Ibid., esp. 70–81. ²³ Jörg Jochen Berns, ‘Umrüstung der Mnemotechnik im Kontext von Reformation und Gutenbergs Erfindung’, in Jochen Jörg Berns and Wolfgang Neuber (eds), Ars memorativa. Zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst 1400–1750 (Tübingen, 1993), 35–72, here esp. 37–9. Erasmus, for instance, confirmed that these techniques were helpful, but argued that study, order, and care were preferable; Yates, Art of Memory, 127. ²⁴ Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 13. Similarly Jacques Le Goff, Geschichte und Gedächtnis, trans. Elisabeth Hartfelder (Frankfurt, 1992, 1st French edn 1977), 102–7.

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good memory: ‘C[aspar] Vonwiller responded [to the accusations] most resolutely from article to article, having kept everything in his memory; not [even] the smallest word [was] unnecessary. He was assisted by the old mayor Caspar Schlumpf, who admired his memory very much.’²⁵ Vonwiller had apparently perfected the art of memory as it was envisioned in classical rhetorical theory: he was able to defend the town’s interests because he had memorized his speech perfectly, and not a single unnecessary word distracted from the matter at hand. On a different occasion, it was Caspar Schlumpf whose memory was praised. According to his son Paulus, Schlumpf and his friend Hugo von Watt once travelled to Constance to consult the famous astronomer Marcus Schinnagel. Among other things, they asked him about the fate of St Gall, and Schinnagel accurately predicted both the war with the Swiss Confederacy (1490) and a conspiracy against the town council (1491), which will be discussed in more detail below. When he noticed that Schlumpf was paying close attention to every word he said, Schinnagel added yet another prophecy: ‘See,’ he said, ‘this one [i.e. Schlumpf] will remember everything in order, but Hugo will forget everything.’ And it happened as he said; for Hugo played no small part in that conspiracy.²⁶

Even outside of religious doctrine and learned debates, memory was thus tied to morality and order. It was Hugo von Watt’s carelessness that caused him to forget Schinnagel’s prophecy and eventually turned him into a conspirator against his own hometown.²⁷ The ability to remember the past was much more than an admirable personal quality, and rather more akin to a civic duty. In this context, the idea that knowledge of the past could be safely stored away in, and reliably retrieved from, visual reminders or imagines held great significance. In contrast to the mental images envisioned by ancient orators, however, early modern imagines often took on a much more concrete form. For the St Gall context, the use of nuts as part of both official and unofficial memory politics provides a particularly striking example. On 13 June 1454, the town became a Zugewandter Ort, an associate member of the Swiss Confederacy. The treaty between St Gall and a number of states in the Confederacy marked an important step towards the town’s emancipation from the powerful abbey in its midst, which had signed a similar treaty three years before. As a contemporary of Rütiner recalled, the town’s treaty ²⁵ ‘respondit C Vonwiller de articulo ad articulum/constantissime [ ] omnia in memoria comprehensa [ ] ne verb/ulum frustraneum [ ] cui astitit Caspar Schlumpff/vetus consul maxime admiratus illius memoriam’. Comm. II.81a. ²⁶ ‘videte inquit ille omnia ex ordi/ne reminiscetur [ ] Hugo autem omnium obliuisce/tur. Contigit autem vt dixerat quia Hugo non mi/nimus fuit in coniuratione illa’. Comm. I.977. ²⁷ Comm. I.777 and I.977.

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with the Swiss Confederacy had been years in the making: ‘Hulrich Kuntzly . . . remembered that our [citizens] had asked for [the town] to be made an Ort four times in forty years. They always declined.’²⁸ When the Swiss Confederacy finally granted the town’s request, ‘nuts were distributed among the children for the sake of memory’.²⁹ The distribution of nuts as reminders was a common practice in St Gall at the time, and one over which the town council did not have a monopoly. When St Gall and Zurich entered a reformed alliance in 1528, the official celebrations consisted of a service in the church of St. Laurenzen, a parade through the city, and festivities in the weavers’ and tailors’ guild halls; yet ‘Stucheler, the jester’ also ‘scattered nuts among the children in memory’ of the alliance.³⁰ In other contexts, nuts were employed to replace old memories with new ones: ‘After [Vogelwaider] had bought Jakob Zollikofer’s house,’ Rütiner writes, ‘he scattered nuts among the children so that the name of the previous owner would be erased.’³¹ In the absence of house numbers, most buildings in St Gall were named after their owners.³² Such names—and in particular those of prominent citizens such as Zollikofer— sometimes stuck to a house long after it had been sold.³³ In order to fully own his new home, Vogelwaider therefore sought to erase Zollikofer’s name from both his house and the neighbourhood’s memory. In a different entry, the mechanisms by which nuts were supposed to change the memory of a neighbourhood are described in more detail: ‘In order to erase the name of the house, he distributed nuts among the children, so that when they came home and [were] asked where they had got the nuts, his name would become known.’³⁴ Here, nuts were simultaneously expected to remind the children of the new house-owner’s name and to spark off a conversation in which that name could be circulated further. While it was not uncommon for St Gall’s youth to receive special treats during public celebrations, these examples suggest that nuts were linked specifically to memorial practices.³⁵ On the surface, handing out ‘memory nuts’ was a clever play on words: the contemporary German term for both memory and remembrance, ²⁸ ‘Hulrichus Cuntzli . . . 4ter meminit/in 40 annis solicitatos nostros vt fiat pagus/semper renuentes’. Comm. II.319. ²⁹ ‘Nuces pueris disper/guntur ob memoriam’. Comm. I.41. Ernst Gerhard Rüsch translates ‘pueris’ as ‘boys’. It is indeed possible that boys were the primary target of this kind of memory politics, yet since Rütiner’s use of ‘pueris’ is ambiguous, I have chosen a more neutral translation. ³⁰ ‘Stucheler morio pu/eris nuces in memoriam spargit’. Comm. I.52. ³¹ ‘Postquam domum emit Iacobi Zoli/kouffers pueris nuces sparsit quo nomen veteris/deleret possessoris’. Comm. II.330c. ³² On the naming of houses in early modern towns, see e.g. Karin Czaja and Gabriela Signori (eds), Häuser—Namen—Identitäten: Beiträge zur spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgeschichte (Constance, 2009). ³³ Jakob Zollikofer, a member of the Small Council from 1529 until his death in 1544, paid the highest taxes of all St Gall citizens in 1533. See StadtASG, AA, 281, ‘Steuerbuch 1533’, fol. 44v. ³⁴ ‘quo nomen domus deleret nu/ces in pueros sparsit quo venientes domum et/quaerentes vbi nuces legerint [ ] illius nomen inno/tesceret’. Comm. II.86. ³⁵ See e.g. Comm. II.33.

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Gedächtnuss, contained the word Nuss (nut).³⁶ Yet the nut was also a fitting symbolic choice: a sweet treasure protected by a hard, durable shell, it embodied the value of memory and people’s efforts to preserve it. Commonly used in figures of speech—in nuce, ‘in a nutshell’—to refer to a wealth of knowledge packed into a tiny vessel, it moreover suggested that the memory of a whole town could rest within a small object—or indeed a single person.³⁷ Handed out by both town officials and private individuals, nuts thus marked important events and reminded their recipients of the need to remember. Neither nuts nor the burden of memory attached to them were distributed randomly, however: they were given to the youngest generation of St Gallers. Children were expected to grow into bearers of the memories that previous generations had marked as significant, and it was their responsibility to preserve them for generations to come. While nuts were distributed in memory of specific events, such as the signing of a treaty or the sale of a house, more complex stories about the past required a more complex set of reminders. The many stories passed down to Rütiner about the St Galler Auflauf (1491) illustrate how closely oral accounts of important political events were tied to places—or loci, to put it in mnemonic terms—as they were passed down to the next generation. Johannes Häne described the attempted coup of 1491 as a response to economic inequalities within St Gall, amplified by the war with the Swiss Confederacy the year before. As resentment against the Small Council grew in the tense months after the siege, a rumour tipped the scales in favour of the conspirators. It claimed that profits from a sale of the town’s salt reserves had ended up in a few councillors’ pockets, that a considerable amount of salt remained unaccounted for, and that the council refused to investigate the matter.³⁸ Citing this rumour and the council’s inaction to legitimize their planned coup, the conspiracy’s leaders succeeded in recruiting a considerable number of supporters.³⁹ Yet before they were able to take action, an anonymous letter exposed the conspiracy to the council. As the matter was discussed in the town hall on 10 February, Fat Thursday, one of the main conspirators, a member of the Great Council named Ambrosius Spengler, fled the scene and called his fellow conspirators to arms. A day of chaos and turmoil followed, at the end of which the council, faced with an armed mob, agreed to appoint an independent committee to investigate the conspirators’ accusations.⁴⁰ Over the next few days, the conspirators met in the shoemakers’ guild hall where they renewed their oath, elected their own shadow government, and drafted 24 articles charging the council with ³⁶ ‘Dachtnis’ in Schweizerisches Idiotikon, xii, cols 369–376. ³⁷ The origins of this idea and of the term in nuce go back to Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, 9 vols. (Cambridge MA, 1938–52), ii, 560–1 (= Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 7.21). ³⁸ Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 30–4. Resentment against the authorities grew as the town council decided to compensate some, but not all, citizens whose houses had been burnt down as part of St Gall’s defence strategy during the siege by the Confederacy troops. See ibid. 49–51. ³⁹ Ibid. 36–8; 45–6. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 56–63.

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various cases of embezzlement and partisanship.⁴¹ In the meantime, however, the town council was able to restore order and regain public support, in particular once it became known that the conspirators had renewed their oath despite the council’s concessions. When the conspirators sensed that their luck was turning, some of them took refuge in the abbey. Yet the council had already called upon the Reichsfiskal, an imperial official who had the authority to suspend the legal protections the abbey walls normally granted. Little more than a week after the uprising, the six main conspirators were arrested, tried, and beheaded on St Gall’s market square.⁴² The generation of Rütiner’s parents perceived the coup of 1491 as one of the most momentous events in the town’s recent past. As Caspar Schlumpf, a councillor at the time of the coup, told his son Paulus, he ‘had seen many tribulations’ in his life, ‘but nothing frightened him more than our civic discord’.⁴³ Following on the heels of the war with the Swiss Confederacy, the riot made painfully clear how brittle St Gall’s social fabric had become and how vulnerable the town was to attacks from within and without.⁴⁴ As a consequence, Schlumpf and his contemporaries were keen to pass their experiences on to the next generation. Over the ten-year period in which Rütiner wrote his notebooks, he heard many different versions of the events of 1491 from a variety of sources.⁴⁵ Rütiner’s close friend Paulus Schlumpf shared with him what his late father, Caspar, had told him about the conspiracy on two occasions.⁴⁶ Both Rütiner’s own mother and Kessler’s mother, Anna, had witnessed the riot in their youth and told Rütiner what they remembered.⁴⁷ So, too, did Sebastian Hagmann, Rütiner’s neighbour and fellow Elfer, who vividly recalled being held up by his father so that he could see the executions.⁴⁸ What, then, did these informants pass on to Rütiner and his friends, most of whom were born a good decade after the St. Galler Auflauf? In his earliest entry on the subject, dating from 1529, Rütiner writes: The cause of our tumult was this: 100 gulden, which the vendors had gained from [the sale of] salt, were lost and withheld without the council’s knowledge. A rumour flew through the city. Some private [citizens] murmured this and that. Then some gathered in the house where Paulus Schlumpf now lives, gossiping this and that about the city council; it was agreed that when 300 of them had come together, they would invade the city hall. From here and there ⁴¹ Ibid. 64–70. ⁴² Ibid. 80–1. ⁴³ ‘plurimas tribulationes vidit/nihil autem magis expauit quam discordiam nostram/ciuilem’. Comm. I.777. ⁴⁴ On the 1490 war with the Confederacy, see Johannes Häne, Der Klosterbruch in Rorschach und der St. Galler Krieg, 1489–90 (St Gall, 1895). ⁴⁵ The coup is discussed in the following entries: Comm. I.75; I.712–3; I.754; I.756; I.777; I.780; I.977; II.153a; II.185a; II.188; II.310b. ⁴⁶ Comm. I.777, I.780. ⁴⁷ Comm. I.777; II.185b/d. ⁴⁸ Comm. I.777.

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one called the other. Some people disclosed some part of this to the town council, so that the matter was discussed during the Carnival season on Ash Wednesday. With his sword drawn, [Ambrosius] Spengler ran into the house where Kantengusser was sitting already [and] where all the armed [conspirators] had gathered. In turmoil they ran to the town hall. With [the help of] the private [citizens] an intercession was reached. Nobody was injured. One [man] climbed onto the granary and restored peace by persuading them to assemble in the church of St. Laurenzen and to ask the council [to reveal] the culprit etc. etc. The Reichsfiskal announced the sentence from the door of Nell’s bed[chamber].⁴⁹

Eight years later, in 1537, Rütiner describes the events of that day again, this time with a slightly different focus: Heinrich Zili was mayor then. From the town hall, he shouted down to the conspirators: ‘If we have culprits among us, point them out. We will keep them in custody until the trial.’ It did not help. He was chased over the market square into St. Laurenzen and around the altar by someone with a drawn sword. Immediately, a loud noise was heard everywhere, the gates were closed, people ran together from all sides. The conspirators gathered and came together in the shoemakers’ guild hall.⁵⁰

In Rütiner’s notes, the events of 1491 are depicted as a series of fast, chaotic movements from private to public space and back again, touching on a variety of places along the way. Rütiner’s informants remained conspicuously vague with regards to the content of the rumours and discussions about ‘this and that’ which lay at the root of the conspiracy. Nor does chronology seem to have been of great concern to their accounts: most of Rütiner’s informants wrongly dated the riots to Ash Wednesday rather than Fat Thursday, and the only time Rütiner recorded the year of the coup, he was off by two years.⁵¹ In some entries, the events of an entire

⁴⁹ ‘Caussa tumultus nostri haec fuit [ ] c gl/perdita ac supressa erant inscio senatu/qui ex sale a redemptoribus soluti er/ant [ ] fama vrbem pervolat [ ] quidam priva/torum haec et alia mussitantes [ ] tandem/quidam conuenientes in domum vbi nunc pa/uli Schlumpff [ ] haec et alia de sen/atu garrientes convenit inter eos vt/si eorum trecenti conciliati fuerint sena/torium invasuri [ ] hinc inde alius alium/ convocat [ ] nonnihil senatui aperitur per quos/dam adeo vt circa carnispriuium die/cinerum de hac re in senatu consulturi/Spengler districto gladio cucurrit/in domum vbi iam kantengusser sedit/ibidem armati convenerant etc [ ] Tumu/ltu accurrunt ante senatorium [ ] Ex priu/atis fit intercessio [ ] nemo leditur/vnus conscendit granarium [ ] fecit concor/diam persuadendo vt templum Laurentij/conveniant [ ] ex senatu reum poscant/et etc [ ] Fiscalis cesareus sen/tentiam per valuam cubilis Nellen dixit’. Comm. I.75. ⁵⁰ ‘Hanrichus Zili Consul fuit [ ] Clamauit/de senatorio ad seditiosos [ ] Si habemus inter nos/ nocentes indicate eos [ ] pro iure contestando seruab/imus [ ] Nihil iuuit [ ] stricto gladio ab aliquo per/ forum vsque in templum Laurentij circum altare Fug/atus [ ] Subito magnus clamor vndique au/ditur, clauduntur portae [ ] concurritur vndique/Seditiosi collecti in domo calceatorum concurrunt’. Comm. II.185b. ⁵¹ In Comm. I.713, Rütiner dates the coup to 1489 rather than 1491, which could suggest that the St. Galler Auflauf had become closely associated with the Rorschacher Klosterbruch of 1489.

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week—from the riot to the conspirators’ flight to the abbey—were packed into a single day.⁵² Rütiner (or his informants) were similarly confused about the story’s main protagonists. The mayor Heinrich Zili who allegedly restored peace, for instance, was not in office that year, nor was he the man who calmed down the angry crowd that had gathered on the market square.⁵³ Yet Rütiner’s notes—and, by extension, the stories passed on to him—were quite specific and surprisingly accurate with regards to the places touched by the conspiracy and the movements between those places.⁵⁴ As one might expect, the story’s key events were firmly positioned around St Gall’s main landmarks: the town hall, the market square, and St. Laurenzen. It also seemed important to locate the less prominent places featuring in the story, however. Rütiner’s informants carefully specified where the conspirators had met (in the house that now belonged to Rütiner’s friend Paulus Schlumpf),⁵⁵ where the conspirator Ambrosius Spengler was sitting when the conspiracy was exposed (‘just right of Caspar Schlumpf ’),⁵⁶ where the conspirators had hidden (‘in the container where the candles for St Blaise’s Day [are kept], behind the altar’),⁵⁷ and how they had witnessed the executions (Sebastian Hagmann’s ‘father was standing on the block of wood in front of the hospital and lifted him up’).⁵⁸ Why did the stories passed on from one generation to the next revolve so strongly around places and movement, while neglecting other, seemingly more important details? One could argue that the story had become a purely cautionary tale and that the names of its protagonists, for instance, were consciously omitted so that the descendants of those involved would not be offended. Such was the stance of Vadianus, who refused to name the conspirators in his account.⁵⁹ Indeed, Rütiner himself writes that after some of the conspirators had proven their loyalty to St Gall during the Swabian War, the council decided to abandon its politics of memory: from 1499 onwards, the conspirators’ names were no longer read out to the public on St Stephen’s Day.⁶⁰ This may have erased the conspirators from public acts of remembrance, but it did not remove them from the public’s memory. The conspirators’ names continued to be passed on in unofficial narratives of the conspiracy, and were thus still familiar to the generation born

⁵² E.g. Comm. I.777 and II.185b. ⁵³ In fact, Walther Kuchimeister was mayor that year, and the former mayor Lienhard Merz is said to have calmed down the crowd. See Comm. II.185b and Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 38 and 61. ⁵⁴ I believe Rütiner’s account deserves more credit than Johannes Häne was willing to give him, for the trial records of 1491 confirm many of the movements described by Rütiner’s informants; Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 57–64. ⁵⁵ Comm. I.75. ⁵⁶ ‘ad dexteram iuxta/Caspar Schlumpffen’. Comm. I.777. ⁵⁷ ‘in illo conditorio/reseruati vbi candelae die S Blasij abscond/diti retro eius altare’. Comm. I.777. ⁵⁸ ‘Super truncum ante hospitale pater eius stans illum/subleuauit’. Comm. I.777. ⁵⁹ von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, ii, 369. ⁶⁰ Comm. I.712; see also Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 87.

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after 1499.⁶¹ Although Rütiner was not always sure about the role individual conspirators had played during the riot,⁶² he knew many of them by name, including one which Vadianus may have been particularly keen on forgetting: Hugo von Watt, the man who had played an active part in the conspiracy in spite of Schinnagel’s warning, was a relative of Vadianus.⁶³ Indeed, it was not the conspirators who had fallen into oblivion by the time Rütiner wrote his notebooks, but the story’s hero, Lienhard Merz, who had prevented bloodshed by calming down the agitated crowd that had gathered in front of the town hall.⁶⁴ The places touched by the St Galler Auflauf, it seems, were more indispensable to the story than precise chronology or its protagonists. Perhaps this was because in the early modern period, popular historical consciousness was shaped more by a sense of space than a sense of chronology, as Alexandra Walsham and others have argued.⁶⁵ Although university students were now discouraged from memorizing information with the help of loci, in practice narratives about the past were still tied to places, albeit in a much more literal sense than ancient rhetoricians had envisioned. Thomas Aquinas had argued that the place in which an event had occurred could be used to access the memory of the event itself.⁶⁶ It was this concrete variety of locus around which the stories passed down to Rütiner were built. In the 1530s, most human protagonists of 1491 were long dead, but the immobile spatial protagonists remained visible all throughout town. The places touched by the conspiracy were woven together and into the present urban space by tales of the past, creating a backdrop for the story that the next generation could still relate and refer to—and one, moreover, designed to aid their memory.⁶⁷ This mental map of events past was not without consequences for Rütiner’s present. In December 1537, an anonymous letter containing a long list of threats and accusations was placed at the door of the town hall. Among other things, it claimed that the Small Council was dominated by a few rich families who protected each other’s interests in all financial, political, and legal matters.⁶⁸ The ⁶¹ For a list of those implicated in the conspiracy, see Comm. I.713; further conspirators are named in Comm. I.777. ⁶² In Comm. II.185c, for instance, Ambrosius Spengler is confused with Ambrosius Schlumpf. ⁶³ On Hugo von Watt, see Comm. I.777 and I.977. As Rütiner points out, Hugo von Watt was saved from prosecution by his powerful family. ⁶⁴ See Comm. II.185b and Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 61. ⁶⁵ Alexandra Walsham, ‘Sacred Topography and Social Memory: Religious Change and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland’, Journal of Religious History, 36/1 (2012), 31–51, here 33. See similarly Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers, ‘Introduction. On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller et al. (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), 1–23, here 10; Woolf, Social Circulation, 310–15 and 350; Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1999), 233–56, here 241–3. ⁶⁶ Thomas Aquinas, In Aristotelis libros De sensu et sensato, De memoria et reminiscentia commentarium, ed. R. M. Spiazzi (Turin, 1949), 107, here paraphrased after Yates, Art of Memory, 72. ⁶⁷ For a similar argument see Woolf, Social Circulation, 350. ⁶⁸ See Rüsch, ‘Politische Opposition’, 79–82.

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letter also drew an explicit comparison to the conspiracy of 1491, which it claimed had been caused by similar divisions among St Gall’s citizens.⁶⁹ Tellingly, the council immediately sought to protect the places that had been taken by the conspirators almost half a century earlier. Three hundred men were ordered to rush to the market square should they hear any noise or bells ringing, and the council launched an investigation into the shoemakers’ guild in whose guild hall the conspirators of 1491 had gathered after the turmoil.⁷⁰ ‘[The shoemakers] were chosen by lot,’ one of Rütiner’s informants remarked, but perhaps the council’s decision was rather based on a mental map of the past on which the shoemakers’ guild hall was still marked as dangerous.⁷¹ Rütiner never explicitly refers to mnemonic theory, but the latter is nevertheless echoed in both memory practices and conversations about the past in St Gall— and not just within the elite group of learned citizens who would have read Cicero and Aquinas. In fact, it seems that the men in Rütiner’s guild and the women in his family and neighbourhood were just as eager to discuss events of the past, and even more precise in locating them. Those with limited access to chronicles and public records, those, moreover, who could not, or would not, put their stories down in writing, sought to preserve their memory of the past in other ways. Consciously or not, they turned objects into reminders and tied their stories to the locations where events had literally taken place, employing techniques which had been developed for the very purpose of speaking in the absence of written memory aids.

Changing the story The use of physical objects as reminders bears witness to the efforts made by Rütiner’s contemporaries to preserve the memory of important events, but of course they could not prevent memory loss altogether. A trail of gaps and internal inconsistencies runs all through the Commentationes, with many of them being the consequence of either Rütiner’s or his informants’ faulty memories. Rütiner was under no illusions about the limits of his own memory. It was usually small details such as numbers, names, and dates which he could not recall with any certainty.⁷² Tellingly, he found it particularly challenging to remember information linked to places with which he was unfamiliar. In an entry on a dinner conversation with the Zurich minister Benedikt Finsler, Rütiner recalls how Finsler took him on a mental walk through Zurich’s territory, listing the high ⁶⁹ Ibid. 79. ⁷⁰ Comm. II.185b; Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 64. ⁷¹ ‘Sors in illos ce/cidit’. Comm. II.325. ⁷² See e.g. Comm. I.759, I.760c, I.785, I.850, I.893c, I.911, I.915, II.4c, II.222. E.g. he was uncertain about how much gold Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg owned at the time of his death (Comm. II.222), or whether a crime had really been committed during Lent (Comm. II.4e).

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tributes each village had to pay to the local monasteries. By the time Rütiner wrote about the dinner, he had already forgotten much of what Finsler had told him: ‘I could not keep it because I am unacquainted with that territory,’ he admits.⁷³ At first glance, Rütiner’s faulty memory may seem to pose a methodological problem. In his well-known book Der Schleier der Erinnerung (The Veil of Memory), Johannes Fried has argued that the human memory is so prone to error that any piece of historical evidence ‘which is based only on memory should principally be considered false’.⁷⁴ According to Fried, this poses a particular challenge to scholars of historical periods for which written evidence is scarce, for they lose the ‘basis of secure factual knowledge’ on which they could previously rely.⁷⁵ If the objective of historical research is to find historical facts, then the indisputable frailties of human memory are indeed problematic. In the context of cultural history, however, faulty memories can be an asset rather than an obstacle.⁷⁶ Changes in the way the past is remembered are not only a consequence of human memory’s shortcomings: they are also the result of an evolutionary communicative process in which some details of a narrative are preserved, while others are altered or abandoned altogether. In this sense, it is precisely those faulty, inconsistent, and impermanent memories which can grant us insights into both this communicative process and a community’s mentality.⁷⁷ Let us turn to the St. Galler Auflauf once more. By the 1530s, the story of the coup had changed in a number of ways. While most of St Gall’s chroniclers continued to date the riot to Fat Thursday of 1491, among the broader citizenship the riot was now more commonly known as ‘our tumult on Ash Wednesday’.⁷⁸ This shift may be explained by the dwindling significance of Fat Thursday, which had traditionally heralded the start of Carnival in the region, after the reformers’ ban on such festivities. Evidence from the Commentationes suggests that along with its religious function, Fat Thursday had lost its role as a marker of time. It was no longer obvious what Fat Thursday was, or when it was celebrated: ‘Fat

⁷³ ‘perquam eleganter totam ditionem/peragrando . . . non potui/continere quia inexpertus agri illius’. Comm. II.389. ⁷⁴ Johannes Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich, 2004), 48. ⁷⁵ Ibid. ⁷⁶ For similar criticism of Fried’s book, see Marcel Moning, ‘Eine Apologie des Historismus’, KULT_online, 6 (2006), , accessed 21 Jan. 2021. ⁷⁷ See e.g. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 2009, 1st edn 1999), 265; Judith Pollmann, ‘Of Living Legends and Authentic Tales: How to Get Remembered in Early Modern Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 23 (2013), 103–25, here 106; Pollmann and Kuijpers, ‘Introduction’, 15. ⁷⁸ ‘Tumultum/nostrum die cinerum’. Comm. I.754. See also Comm. I.713; I.977; I.75; II.185c. This shift did not occur in the St Gall chronicles, however (see von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, ii, 371, and Miles, Chronik, 292).

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Thursday (so it is called), [celebrated] during Carnival,’⁷⁹ writes Rütiner the only time he mentions the feast. In light of this development, it made little sense to date the riots with reference to Fat Thursday. Instead, they became associated with a more memorable feast day of the same period—one which no longer marked the beginning of fasting, but was still part of the liturgical calendar. At the same time as the riots were moved from the beginning of Carnival to the beginning of Lent, the story was significantly condensed. In several accounts recorded by Rütiner, the events of the entire Carnival season, from the riots to the conspirators’ demise, were packed into a single day.⁸⁰ The lengthy tug-of-war between the council and the conspirators, which did not make for a captivating plot, was at the same time boiled down into a highly symbolic anecdote. According to Paulus Schlumpf, on the day of the riots the whole town was up in arms until nightfall, but just when ‘all things [seemed] desperate . . . a simple but upright man’⁸¹ proposed the following solution: ‘Oh councillors’, he said, ‘you see that it has come this far—though I say it in tears—that nothing remains but to resolve this quarrel in this way, namely by dividing ourselves: those who agree with the council should come together, and those remaining should stand with [those who share] their opinion.’ It was done as he had suggested. The smaller part remained with the conspirators. After they had fled, they sought asylum [in the abbey].⁸²

A similar account also reached Rütiner through a different source one year later: Anna Kessler, who told me everything, was present. For a long time, they discussed [the matter] from all sides. Finally, the mayor said: ‘Whoever is on the council’s side should come together.’ [The conspirators’] number was so diminished that they fled and sought asylum [in the abbey].⁸³

It would be too simplistic to dismiss this anecdote on the grounds that it lacks any factual basis. Though it did not render the events of 1491 as they were described in the contemporary records, it nevertheless captured their essence by portraying the ⁷⁹ ‘Insano die Iouis (sic dicitur) in bacchanalibus’. Comm. II.361t. German humanists used the term bacchanalia, meaning an orgy or drunken feast, to refer to (and criticize) contemporary Carnival excesses. ⁸⁰ E.g. Comm. I.777 and II.185b. ⁸¹ ‘omnibus rebus de/speratis . . . simplex quidam sed probus/homo’. Comm. I.777. ⁸² ‘O senatores inquit videtis huc ventum rem,/quamuis lachrymis dico vt nihil supersit quam/vt hac re lis dirimatur Nempe vt segr/egamur consentientes senatui [ ] coeant et/reliqui pedibus in sententiam eant [ ] Factum vt/suasit [ ] minor pars apud Coniuratos man/sit [ ] fuga facta Asylum petiere.’ Comm. I.777. Pedibus in sententiam ire is a fixed expression meaning to agree (and showing one’s agreement by stepping to one side of the senate-house). ⁸³ ‘praesente Anna Keßlerin quae mihi omnia re/tulit [ ] Diu vtrinque collocuti [ ] tandem Consul ait/qui ex parte senatus est coeant [ ] adeo minutus num/erus vt fuga asylum petentes’. Comm. II.185b.

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conspirators’ demise as the result of a shift in public opinion.⁸⁴ Moreover, this version of the 1491 events was apparently disseminated quite successfully—perhaps not least because eyewitnesses such as Anna Kessler gave it authority. By the 1530s, the reversal of the conspirators’ fortune had thus been recast as a single dramatic moment which ultimately legitimized the council’s actions: according to Rütiner’s informants, the community had literally stood by the council. At the same time as the narrative of the conspiracy was simplified, however, a remarkable side-plot emerged. It revolved around the simple-minded Othmar Ortwig who, according to Rütiner, had repeatedly declined the conspirators’ advances and only joined them when they threatened his life.⁸⁵ Yet even after he had sworn them allegiance, the conspirators continued to doubt Ortwig’s loyalty and immediately suspected him of treason when their plot was exposed: ‘Ortwig has revoked, Ortwig has revoked [his oath]!’⁸⁶ they shouted as they fled from the town hall, according to one of Rütiner’s informants. Nevertheless, Ortwig was eventually among those sentenced to death precisely because he had not disclosed the conspiracy to the council. By giving in to the conspirators’ threats, he had become stuck in the middle, and his death sentence left a bitter aftertaste even among those who delivered it. Among the conspirators, writes Rütiner, were ‘Caspar Schlumpf ’s best companions. He was almost driven insane when he had to judge [them], in particular when Ortwig was condemned, whom [the conspirators] themselves had almost stabbed.’⁸⁷ Or, as a different entry puts it: ‘[Ortwig] was pitied by everyone with the greatest compassion, but especially by C[aspar] Schlumpf, who often told [his son] Paulus, sighing.’⁸⁸ The court records disagree with this depiction. Although Ortwig claimed to have been pressured into joining the conspiracy, his credibility was considerably diminished by the fact that he simultaneously confessed to storming the town hall in full arms and threatening the council.⁸⁹ Indeed, the account of Ortwig’s tragic death was much more consistent with the new narratives which had emerged by the 1530s: if the story reached its dramatic climax when everyone was asked to pick a side, the example of Ortwig warned of the dangers of getting caught in the middle, even if one was innocent. Erika Kuijpers has argued that for oral tales to survive they needed a good plot and a clear moral message.⁹⁰ In the case of the St. Galler Auflauf, we can see how

⁸⁴ Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 75. ⁸⁵ Comm. I.777; I.780; II.185c. ⁸⁶ ‘Ortwig retexuit Ortwig retexuit’. Comm. II.185c. ⁸⁷ ‘optimi sodales Caspar Schlumpffen [ ] ferme in/sanus factus iudicando, praecipue dum Ortwig/ iudicabitur, quem ipsi . . . fer/me transfodissent’. Comm. I.780. ⁸⁸ ‘maxima miseratione misertus/ab omnibus praecipue autem C Schlumpff qui sepiuscule/Paulo filio retulit ingemiscens’. Comm. II.185c. ⁸⁹ Häne, Auflauf zu St. Gallen, 59. For a transcript of Ortwig’s confession, see p. 139, no. 4. ⁹⁰ Erika Kuijpers, ‘Between Storytelling and Patriotic Scripture. The Memory Brokers of the Dutch Revolt’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller et al. (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), 183–202, here 200.

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such a plot emerged from the testimonies of numerous St Gallers. In under fifty years, they turned the story of the coup into something resembling a Greek drama: following the fate of a few exemplary characters such as the tragic anti-hero Ortwig, it was now told as a series of dramatic events taking place on the public stage of St Gall over the course of a single day. Stories about past events could also change over a much shorter time span. Rütiner’s notes on the Battle of Kappel—an event to which Rütiner returns on seven different occasions between 1531 and 1538—illustrate how he and his contemporaries remembered a critical event of their own time, and how their views gradually evolved.⁹¹ On 11 October 1531, Zurich suffered an unprecedented defeat against the forces of the Catholic five inner states and lost its most influential public figure, the reformer Huldrych Zwingli. Although not involved in the battle itself, St Gall fought on Zurich’s side during the subsequent war and ultimately shared in its defeat. The triumph of the Catholic states over their Protestant confederates represented a severe setback to the Protestant movement in Switzerland, and one which, given Zwingli’s death on the battlefield, held considerable symbolic power.⁹² For the town of St Gall, the defeat had particularly dramatic consequences: both the abbey and the territory around St Gall had to be returned to the abbot, leaving the town politically isolated and enclosed by Catholic land once again. By comparing Rütiner’s entries on the Battle of Kappel to one another and to a series of contemporary Swiss chronicles, we can trace how the narrative of this momentous event evolved in the years following the battle. Right from the outset, one of the most widely circulated anecdotes from the battlefield revolved around the Zurich standard. According to all the sources, it was lost and heroically regained several times during the battle. A soldier who was severely wounded while saving the standard finally cried out for help: ‘Is there no upright Zurich citizen here who may save our city?’⁹³ At this another soldier grabbed the standard and fled the battlefield, saving it from falling into the enemy’s hands.⁹⁴ Losing a standard on the battlefield was considered a great humiliation, not least because such booty was often publicly displayed by the triumphant party.⁹⁵ The detail with which all authors recorded the heroic efforts to save the Zurich standard thus reflect the symbolic value attributed to this small victory in the face of a disastrous

⁹¹ Rütiner writes about the Battle of Kappel in 1531 (Comm. I.355/6), July 1532 (Comm. I.301), 1535 (Comm. I.641), twice in 1537 (Comm. II.52/II.235) and twice in 1538 (Comm. II.360/II.388). ⁹² On the war and its implications for the Swiss Reformation, see Helmut Meyer, Der zweite Kappeler Krieg: Die Krise der Schweizerischen Reformation (Zurich, 1976). ⁹³ ‘Ist kain frommer Züricher hie, der unser statt errett?’, Kessler, Sabbata, 367 (= fol. 383a). ⁹⁴ With slight variations, this is the story told by Kessler, Sabbata, 367 (= fol. 38a); von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, 302, no. 310; and Johannes Stumpf, Schweizer- und Reformationschronik, ed. Ernst Gagliardi, Hans Müller, and Fritz Büsser, 2 vols. (Basle, 1955), ii, 173. ⁹⁵ Peter M. Mäder, ‘Fahnen’, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, , accessed 21 Jan. 2021.

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defeat. Yet in contrast to the chroniclers, who agree that the standard was saved in a joint effort by two men from Zurich, called Schweitzer and Kambli, in Rütiner’s account a certain ‘Hirt from St Gall’ plays the key role.⁹⁶ Since St Gall’s troops did not arrive in time to fight in the Battle of Kappel, this is a remarkable twist, but one which may have had more to do with Rütiner’s present than with the events of 1531. Rütiner recorded the tale of the standard-bearer at the time of the Bannerhandel, when rumours about a St Gall standard which had allegedly been won by Appenzell in 1403 but secretly returned to St Gall sparked off riots in Appenzell and caused high tensions between the two towns.⁹⁷ Perhaps, then, it was particularly important to encourage identification with the heroic standardbearer of the Battle of Kappel at a time when St Gall was involved in a dispute over a standard of its own. Rütiner’s entries on the Battle of Kappel not only differ from his friends’ historiographical accounts; they also contradict each other. The number of Protestant clergy killed during the battle, for instance, grew every time Rütiner recorded it.⁹⁸ One could argue that this is a detail of little significance, yet the regularity with which conversations about Kappel returned to it suggests otherwise. Nor was this a personal obsession of Rütiner’s: although they all disagreed on the exact figure, Kessler, Vadianus, the chronicler Johannes Stumpf, and the author of an anonymous pamphlet likewise specified the number of casualties among the Zurich clergy.⁹⁹ In order to understand the deeper significance of this number, we must first look at what Rütiner and his contemporaries thought to be the cause of Zurich’s defeat. In the years following the battle, various explanations were proposed. Initially, the defeat was blamed on treason: rumour had it that a man from Zurich had been paid by the commander of the five inner states’ troops to betray his hometown.¹⁰⁰ Then St Gallers argued that Zurich’s troops had been illprepared, disorganized, and simply outnumbered by the enemy’s forces.¹⁰¹ Finally, Rütiner’s informants variously blamed the disloyal peasants of Zurich who had fled the battlefield, and Berne, Thurgau, and Toggenburg for hesitating ⁹⁶ ‘Hirt de sancto/Gallo’. Comm. I.641. ⁹⁷ See e.g. Comm. I.613 and I.624. On the Bannerhandel, see Bodemer, Der Bannerhandel. ⁹⁸ At first, Rütiner mentioned only Zwingli and a few others; then he agreed with Kessler that 15 ministers had died during the battle, but only one year later this number had increased to 25 or 26. Comm. I.356, II.235, and II.360. ⁹⁹ Kessler, Sabbata, 367 (= fol. 383a); von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, 309, no. 320; Stumpf, Schweizer- und Reformationschronik, ii, 177; Merckliche vnnd warhafftige geschichten von den Schweytzern Nemlich wie im Jare Funffzehenhundert eyns vnd dreyßig die fünff Orth der Eydgnoßschafft als Lucern Vri Schweytz Vnderwalden vnd Zuog denen von Zürch sampt jrem anhang schrifftlich abgesagt Vnd als balde darauff mit jnen vnd denen von Bern vnd Basel [et]c. Vier trefflicher Schlachten gethan vnd allzeyt den Syegk wider sie erhalten Vnd darnach beyde partheyen eyn Vertragk vffgericht haben Mit etlichen sonderlichen artickeln sampt eyner declaration so jüngst darüber gmacht (Strasbourg: Johann Konbloch d.J., 1532, VD16 M 4840), 6–7. ¹⁰⁰ Comm. I.356 and II.307. See also Meyer, Der zweite Kappeler Krieg, 157–8. ¹⁰¹ Comm. I.641.

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or refusing to send troops in aid of Zurich.¹⁰² As we have already seen in Chapter 4, Zwingli’s own responsibility was discussed as well. Rütiner and his informants praised the reformer’s courage and determination during the battle, but also described him as an impulsive and confrontational man who ceaselessly attacked those less inclined to violent conflict from his pulpit and accused them of cowardice.¹⁰³ Did the people of Zurich blame Zwingli for their defeat? It was Kessler who raised this question during a dinner with the Zurich minister Benedikt Finsler seven years after the battle. Although Finsler immediately diverted the focus away from Zwingli, claiming that the people of Zurich only blamed themselves and their sins, Kessler’s blunt question shows how much Zwingli’s reputation had suffered in the years after Kappel.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, Finsler’s response points to yet another explanation for the defeat at Kappel which had emerged by the late 1530s, and one which seemed more frightening than all others: had God punished the Protestant members of the Confederacy for straying from the right path? As we have seen in the previous chapter, Hulrich Scheiwiler certainly thought so when he warned that ‘it does not befit confederates to fight like this’, and added that ‘the plague is upon us’.¹⁰⁵ A comet spotted a few months before the battle supported Scheiwiler’s interpretation; it was retrospectively interpreted as a divine warning announcing Zwingli’s impending death.¹⁰⁶ In Rütiner’s own memory, the defeat at Kappel was linked to a whole series of local and personal catastrophes which accumulated in two days of quasi-apocalyptic proportions: On Tuesday, 11 October, at three o’clock our town sent two hundred soldiers in aid of Zurich . . . The previous night at around nine o’clock a massive earthquake shook the town so much that the guards feared its imminent destruction. During the same night, between two and three o’clock, my Isaak [i.e. Rütiner’s son] died. The day before, during the night, the powder magazine burned down.¹⁰⁷

From Rütiner’s perspective, the road to Kappel had been lined with a whole series of warning signs and disasters indicating that the Protestants were on the wrong path. Against this backdrop, it becomes clearer why the number of clergy who had lost their lives in the battle mattered to Rütiner and his contemporaries. The fact

¹⁰² Comm. II.235; II.388. ¹⁰³ Comm. II.235, II.360. ¹⁰⁴ Comm. II.388. For the content and context of the conversation, see also Comm. II.385a; II.387g– II.389. ¹⁰⁵ ‘non/decere ita contendere confederatos [ ] sed plaga ad/est’. Comm. II.52. ¹⁰⁶ Kessler, Sabbata, 359–62 (= fos. 376b–9a); Oswald Myconius, Vom Leben und Sterben Huldrych Zwinglis, ed. Ernst Gerhard Rüsch (St Gall, 1979), 71. ¹⁰⁷ ‘11 Octobr die martis hora 3 vrbs nostra/200 milites in auxilium Turegi missi . . . praecedenti nocte hora nona terraemotus ingens/concussit vrbem adeo vt Vigiles praesentem ru/inam veriti [ ] Eadem nocte hora inter/2 et 3 moritur ISaac [sic] meus/Pridie in nocte conburitur puluerhuß’. Comm. I.353–5.

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that so many ministers had gone to war was controversial enough in itself, but the high number of casualties among them seemed to confirm that they had incurred God’s wrath. Or, as Vadianus put it: with his ‘punishment God has surely indicated that the servants of the Word should not dedicate themselves to, and teach, war, but peace’.¹⁰⁸ As these examples show, changes in the way past events were remembered and retold did not occur at random. They followed a distinct set of patterns which are well known from rumour theory and which we have encountered many times throughout this book: as they circulated orally, narratives were ‘levelled’, that is, reduced and simplified, details considered particularly important or shocking were simultaneously ‘sharpened’, while others were ‘assimilated’ to fit the cognitive framework of the audience in any given case.¹⁰⁹ By tracing a story’s evolution, we can reconstruct parts of that framework. In the case of the St. Galler Auflauf, the narrative increasingly centred on the rift the conspiracy had opened up within the community and the necessity of choosing a side. At a time when a deep confessional divide threatened the cohesion of both the reform movement and the Swiss Confederacy—a divide, moreover, which ran straight through the heart of St Gall—this story resonated strongly with Rütiner and his contemporaries. Similarly, the evolution of the narrative around the Battle of Kappel suggests that Rütiner and his contemporaries did not only see another confrontation between Catholic and Protestant forces looming, but had also started to doubt whether God was still with them.¹¹⁰

¹⁰⁸ ‘an welcher straf Got wol angezaigt hat, daß die diener des wortz nit zuo krieg, sonder zuo friden richten und leren sölind.’ Von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, iii, 309, no. 320. ¹⁰⁹ Kuijpers, ‘Between Storytelling and Patriotic Scripture’, 184–5, and Donovan, ‘How Idle Is Idle Talk?’, 64. ¹¹⁰ See e.g. Comm. II.25 and Ch. 5.

Conclusion It was a ‘wondrous time’ that had prompted Rütiner to take note of the talk of St Gall in 1529, but by the time he stopped writing towards the end of the 1530s, the wonder of the early Reformation years had worn off. Slowly but surely, the consensus that grew out of the town’s many disparate voices seems to have been that dark days lay ahead. St Gallers continued to talk about all sorts of things, of course—about the weather, about petty local quarrels, and about the linen business. Yet a common thread—and a common threat—had started to run through a growing number of the conversations recorded by Rütiner, taking shape in jokes, gossip, rumours, and tales alike. As the town’s long-distance merchants shared news of Ottoman advances and secret meetings between unlikely allies, St Gallers also took note of other unsettling developments closer to home. Rütiner’s informants repeatedly discussed a chilling threat uttered by the St Gall abbot after he had been publicly mocked while passing through the town—a threat which, as Rütiner writes, ‘remains unforgotten’: ‘Someday, I will finish you.’¹ St Gall’s envoy Johannes Studer returned from negotiations with the town of Appenzell reporting that the latter’s representative had casually joked about attacking St Gall: ‘We know well that your town cannot be taken by force; it needs to be occupied secretly in the morning or at dusk.’² Older St Gallers told cautionary tales of the past, warning their fellow citizens of the divisions that had plunged the town into war and chaos several times before. Former soldiers found keen audiences for their dramatic stories of bravery and survival in the guilds and ‘at the crowded linen market’,³ and some of them used this platform to remind their audiences of the hardship of war. Albrecht Schlumpf, who had barely escaped the disastrous Battle of Marignano in 1515, for instance, ended the story of his ordeal with a stark warning: ‘You are still young,’ he told Rütiner, ‘such [things] will happen to you, too. Then you will remember that what I told you was true.’⁴ The future also looked increasingly gloomy to the circle around Kessler and Vadianus. One day, as they discussed the latest news, one of its members produced ‘a very old book’

¹ ‘non oblitum est verbi [ ] Finiam aliquando vobiscum’. Comm. II.88. See also Comm. II.60 for another account of the same incident. ² ‘Bene scimus oppidum vestrum non vi occupandum [ ] opor/tet illud clanculum mane occupare vel sub/crepusculo.’ Comm. II.343. ³ ‘in frequenti foro panorum’. Comm. II.105; see also II.143a. ⁴ ‘Iuuenis adhuc es [ ] talia et tibi continget [ ] Deinde recordabis vera esse quae tibi dixi’. Comm. II.95c.

The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. Carla Roth, Oxford University Press. © Carla Roth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846457.003.0008

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which contained the verses ‘The Turk’s Machument [Muhammad]/puts an end to all things’⁵ as well as a prophecy ‘not unfitting for our times’.⁶ Although Rütiner does not specify the precise content of this prophecy, these were certainly no longer the ‘wondrous times’ that had prompted many St Gallers to write. Rather, as Kessler made clear in several conversations, they now lived in a ‘dangerous time’.⁷ While talk of war and persecution was omnipresent at the end of the 1530s, war would not, in fact, return to St Gall for some time. The voices recorded by Rütiner thus reveal a hidden history of a disaster that never materialized but nevertheless left a noticeable mark on the town. It was through this lens that he and his contemporaries judged the past, perceived their present, and anxiously looked towards an uncertain future. It was also in fearful anticipation of war that Rütiner and his contemporaries sought current news, interpreted incoming information, and weighed diverging accounts against one another with an increasing sense of urgency. Indeed, the Commentationes reflect these growing concerns in both content and form: while Rütiner’s entries exploded in number and length during these years, he also became increasingly systematic in his writing, tracing his informants and their sources further and further back. Yet the talk of the town not only reflected St Gallers’ fears; it also played a part in amplifying them. Rütiner clearly did not record abstract flows of information devoid of human agency.⁸ Rather, the social dynamics which structured exchanges of information in sixteenth-century St Gall gave informants an incentive to respond to, and feed, their audiences’ concerns. As we have seen, Rütiner and his contemporaries relied heavily on their personal networks and on oral exchanges to provide them with both local and foreign news. Within these circles, St Gallers not only gathered and shared information of all kinds, but also profited from telling their stories in a way that would both capture their audiences’ attention and allow them to present themselves in a favourable light. As information was passed on along the arteries of personal networks, consumed in sociable settings, and discussed within a variety of different social circles, it was therefore enriched in numerous ways. It was inserted into elaborate performances, linked to previous conversations, and shared alongside a plethora of information about those who spoke and those who listened. Familiar places, characters, and stereotypes were often introduced into the stories shared in St Gall, so that they would gain credibility or pique the audience’s interest. Over time, complex narratives were boiled down to highly dramatic and impactful scenes that sold well in the ⁵ ‘Des Turcken Machument/Die Ding alle endt’. Comm. II.272. ⁶ ‘non male congruens no/stris temporibus’. Comm. II.272. ⁷ ‘pericoloso tempore’. Comm. II.251. For further examples of Kessler’s growing pessimism regarding St Gall’s future, see also Comm. II.263c, II.274c, and II.286. ⁸ For a critical discussion of the concept of ‘information flows’ with regards to early modern history, see Ghobrial, Whispers of Cities, 11–14.

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marketplace of information. Yet St Gall’s audiences were not only keen to hear what their informants knew; they also expected to be told how they knew it. As a consequence, St Gallers frequently related—and perhaps even more often created—elaborate frame narratives to explain why their stories should be trusted. Indeed, the intense scrutiny information faced upon its arrival in St Gall sometimes prompted informants to hide their reliance on sources of dubious origin—and anonymous prints in particular—and to cite an ‘eyewitness’ instead, thus lending credence to stories which would otherwise not have gained St Gallers’ trust. One could argue, of course, that many of these changes did not enrich, but take away from the core of the information transmitted, sometimes distorting it beyond recognition. Yet as we have seen throughout this book, these changes are more than the inevitable consequence of St Gallers’ reliance on an inherently unreliable medium, namely the spoken word. If we trace the evolution of individual stories over time, over many conversations, and across various media, they can instead become part of a larger history of reception, and offer us a key to early modern mentalities. Indeed, the decisive characteristic of communication in Rütiner’s St Gall was not people’s reliance on oral sources in itself, but rather the close entanglement of information and community. Information disseminated via personal networks and face-to-face exchanges was never entirely anonymous: instead, it was inseparably tied to the person who shared it and vouched for its reliability, even if the original source of a story remained unknown. Moreover, the same networks that spread information of all kinds also circulated a wealth of knowledge about the community. It was the combination of both which enabled Rütiner and his contemporaries to judge the value and validity of a piece of information by considering their informant’s reputation, while at the same time providing talented storytellers with the knowledge they needed to tailor their narratives to their audiences’ expectations. The close ties between information and community in Rütiner’s St Gall may also help us understand other contemporary developments. After all, the appeal of the history of communication lies not only, or indeed primarily, in what it can tell us about the communicative strategies and conventions of past societies, but in its potential to illuminate a much broader range of phenomena, such as the negotiation of social hierarchies, the circulation and reception of ideas, and the formation of popular movements. With regards to the Reformation, for instance—a set of ideas and a movement which brought radical change to Rütiner’s world—the Commentationes prompt us to pay close attention to the role social knowledge and trust played in spreading the new faith.⁹ If the message was only as reliable as the ⁹ On the complex ‘culture of persuasion’ needed to spread the new faith, see also Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005).

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messenger, it was crucial to know those who asked people to question established beliefs, whether they did so in pamphlets or sermons, by reading from the Bible, or in conversations on the gospel. It was Zwingli, not Zwinglianism, which became a matter of debate in Rütiner’s various circles in the aftermath of the Battle of Kappel, and it is telling that the one thing St Gallers remembered from the sermon the great reformer had given in St Gall was its aggressive tone and the fear it had inspired, not its theological content.¹⁰ Through the lens of the talk of the town, we can also get a clearer sense of the role social networks played in spreading the Reformation on the ground, where matters of faith were more frequently, and perhaps more effectively, communicated in the concentrated form of a joke or a piece of gossip rather than as part of a sermon or a complex theological debate. Indeed, the Commentationes call our attention to the social considerations and matters of trust involved when people faced the difficult choice of whom to follow. This is strikingly illustrated in a conversation recalled by one of Rütiner’s informants, the former Anabaptist Jakob Spichermann. ‘Don’t we have perfectly good ministers here? Don’t they tell us sufficiently what [is] needed?’ Spichermann remembered his wife asking him as she urged him not to join the Anabaptists. ‘What do you know on your own? I would do as the others do.’¹¹ If we look beyond Reformation St Gall, we could argue that one of the more important transformations in the history of early modern communication was a growing gap between the dissemination of news and the circulation of social knowledge. In Rütiner’s time, the circulation of news, dependent as it was on personal networks, was still intimately intertwined with the telling of gossip, jokes, and tales, and inseparably linked to the social dynamics described throughout this book. Yet, as professional writers of handwritten newsletters, or avvisi, began offering their services north of the Alps in the second half of the sixteenth century, and with the advent of regular printed news in the seventeenth, news could increasingly be circulated independently of personal networks. In contrast to single, anonymous news pamphlets, periodicals, published under a fixed title, were able to develop their own fama over time, reproducing, to some extent, the sense of familiarity and accountability that had previously been reserved for information disseminated by personal networks. This does not mean that the latter stopped spreading and discussing news, of course. It merely means that those who could afford it now had a range of alternatives to choose from. Meanwhile, jokes, gossip, and tales remained more closely associated with sociability, and this may go some way towards explaining why modern efforts to understand such forms of communication have typically focused on their social, not informational, value. The same development may also have contributed to the

¹⁰ Comm. I.591g. ¹¹ ‘non hic satis/bonos pastores habemus [ ] non sufficienter/dicunt quicquid opus [ ] Quid tu solus sapis vt/alij homines facerem’. Comm. II.106b.

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gradual marginalization of some of the voices preserved in the Commentationes, whose talk, having lost its informational value, now seemed truly idle. In Rütiner’s time, the social knowledge offered by people like Anna Bösch was essential to finding out whom to trust, and thus to uncovering truth. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, this type of knowledge had instead come to be seen as part of the ‘worthless slag’ under which truth was buried.¹² We currently stand at another crossroads in the history of communication, and one which, in many ways, will inevitably lead us even further away from Rütiner’s St Gall. Information from most corners of the world is now circulated in quantities and at a speed clearly unimaginable in the sixteenth century. In dealing with these masses of data, however, we may also be falling back onto strategies that would have been more familiar to Rütiner and his contemporaries. One might have expected that the free flow of information on the Internet would further widen the gap between the social sphere and the realm of news, but in some areas, the opposite seems to be the case. Online social networks have become a significant player on the marketplace of information over the past decade. Information circulated on such platforms typically reaches users through (supposedly) familiar, and therefore seemingly reliable, sources—through family members, friends, and acquaintances, via people with similar interests or public figures. As in Rütiner’s time, social networks thus seem to offer a solution to the issues of trust raised by a new medium swamping the world with contradictory information of unknown, and often untraceable, origin. Social media also accumulate and circulate a wealth of information of all kinds, ranging from their users’ personal data, their preferences for certain films or political parties, to advertisements and news. This means that, like Rütiner’s informants, these platforms are able to tailor information to their users’ individual interests and expectations, targeting them with a precision unachievable in print. Finally, the exchange of information on such platforms is driven and shaped by powerful social dynamics not unlike those described in this book, with users sharing information in exchange for likes and attention. Rütiner’s writing may have been partly driven by similar motivations: as a man acutely aware of his shortcomings, he may have hoped that owning a treasure chest full of past conversations would provide him with plenty of communicative currency to spend on conversations in the present, and win him the appreciation and attention of his fellow St Gallers. What he certainly did not anticipate is that his notebooks might one day earn him the appreciation and attention of historians instead. As a chronicler of the talk of St Gall, Rütiner has left us a unique treasure.

¹² Von Liebenau, ‘Aus einem historischen Notizbuch’, 342. Daniel Woolf has made a similar argument with regards to antiquarianism, whose reliance on oral sources decreased from 1600 onwards. See Daniel Woolf, ‘The “Common Voice”: History, Folklore and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 120 (1988), 26–52, here esp. 38–47.

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Most of the conversations preserved in the Commentationes left no trace in other records, and most other early modern towns did not have a collector of talk of their own. Rütiner’s notes thus allow us to listen to many voices who, due to their social status, usually struggle to be heard, or whose impact, when they are heard, is deemed negligible. It is my hope that by helping us understand some of the mechanisms of early modern communication, these voices may in turn alert us to similar evidence in other, more common sources of the period, such as letters, chronicles, and ego-documents. For only by taking into account the innumerable exchanges in which information was shared, discussed, processed, confirmed, or contradicted can we understand the circulation of ideas in early modern Europe.

List of illustrations 1.1. Melchior Frank, Die loblich Stat Sant Gallen sambt dem Furstlichen Clostr (The praiseworthy city of St Gall including the princely abbey, 1596). Stadtarchiv der Ortsbürgergemeinde St. Gallen, Plan-A., S 2, 1.

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1.2. Rütiner’s taxable assets from his first appearance in the tax records as head of his own household (1526) until his death. Based on data from StadtASG, AA, 275–296d, ‘Steuerbücher 1526–1556’.

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2.1. Johannes Rütiner, page from the Commentationes. Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana St. Gallen, Vadianische Sammlung, Ms 79, fos. 109v–110r.

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2.2. Locations of Rütiner’s informants (left) and some of their former places of residence (right). Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann.

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2.3. Places mentioned in Rütiner’s Commentationes (Swiss Confederacy). Online Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann.

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2.4. Places mentioned in Rütiner’s Commentationes (Europe). Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann.

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2.5. Places mentioned in Rütiner’s Commentationes (World). Basemap: ‘World Terrain Base’ © Esri. Plotted by Tim Heinemann.

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2.6. Rütiner’s most frequent informants, sorted by social group and frequency of appearance as an informant. Illustration by Urs B. Roth.

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2.7. Taxable assets of Rütiner’s most frequent informants. Based on data from StadtASG, 281, ‘Steuerbuch 1533’.

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5.1. Fama, woodcut published in Publij Virgilij Maronis Opera, ed. Sebastian Brant (Strasbourg: Johann Grüninger, 1502, VD16 V 1332). University of Heidelberg, Cod. Heid. 370,319, fol. 215v. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ diglit/vergil1502/0447 (accessed 17 February 2021).

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5.2. Virgil Solis, Fama, mid-sixteenth-century intaglio print. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 740-6.

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5.3. Domini Sigismvndi Feyrabendij, Typographi & ciuis Francofordiensis Symbolum (The printer’s symbol of Sigmund Feyerabend), here taken from Hartmann Schopper, Panoplia omnium illiberalium mechanicarum aut sedentariarum artium . . . (Frankfurt a.M.: Sigmund Feyerabend and Georg Rab, 1568, VD16 S 3897). Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, Signatur: R 16 Schop 1, fol. 148r.

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5.4. Title page of Die europäische [Fama], Altona/Hamburg, 21 May 1694. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, Digitale Sammlungen: Zeitungen des 17. Jahrhunderts, https://brema.suub.uni-bremen.de/zeitungen17/ periodical/pageview/1329773 (accessed 07 January 2021). © Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen.

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5.5. Woodcut illustration to Hans Sachs, Fama. Das gerücht mit seiner wunderlichen Eygenschafft/nach beschreibung Virgilij des Poeten (Nuremberg: Hans Weigel d. Ä.), c.1546. Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha, Inv. 37,25. © Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha, Aus den Sammlungen der Herzog von Sachsen Coburg und Gotha’schen Stiftung für Kunst und Wissenschaft.

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List of tables 1.1. Chroniclers and diarists in 1530s St Gall

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2.1. Male and female informants in the Commentationes

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2.2. Oral and textual sources in the Commentationes

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2.3. The guild master and Elfer of the weavers’ guild in 1534

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Abbreviations and conventions Comm. I.: Johannes Rütiner’s Commentationes, notebook I. Johannes Rütiner, Diarium 1529–1539, ed./trans. Ernst G. Rüsch, vols. i and ii (St Gall, 1996) (= VadSlg, Ms 78: Johannes Rütiner, Diarium 1529–1539, vol. i). Comm. II.: Johannes Rütiner’s Commentationes, notebook II. Johannes Rütiner, Diarium 1529–1539, ed./trans. Ernst G. Rüsch, vols. iii and iv (St Gall, 1996) (= VadSlg, Ms 79: Johannes Rütiner, Diarium 1529–1539, vol. ii). Johannes Rütiner’s notebooks are often referred to (misleadingly) as Diarium, a title which was also reluctantly adopted by the editor of the notebooks, Ernst Gerhard Rüsch. Throughout this book, however, they will be referred to by their original title, Commentationes. Rüsch gave a number to each entry in the Commentationes, and his system has been adopted here to facilitate the identification of individual entries: arabic numerals are used to identify individual entries (e.g. Comm. I.1 = Commentationes, notebook I, entry no. 1), while lower-case letters are added when an entry is divided into several parts (e.g. Comm. II.299a = Commentationes, notebook II, entry no. 299, part a). Kommentarband: Johannes Rütiner, Diarium 1529–1539, ed./trans. Ernst G. Rüsch, vol. v: Kommentarband: Einführung und Register (St Gall, 1996). StadtASG: Stadtarchiv der Ortsbürgergemeinde St. Gallen. VadSlg: Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana St. Gallen, Vadianische Sammlung. ZBZ, A.Drucke Rara: Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Abteilung Alte Drucke und Rara. ZBZ, GSM: Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphische Sammlung.

Translations and quotations from primary sources Quotes from Latin and German primary sources are translated into English in the main body of the text, while the original is provided in the footnotes. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations to English are my own. Rütiner’s Latin is often grammatically incorrect; separate clauses and new sentences are indicated with spaces in the manuscript (represented by a space in square brackets [ ] in Latin quotations in the footnotes) or line breaks (indicated with a solidus / ) rather than with punctuation. I have tried to stay as close to the original wording and sentence structure as possible in order to do justice to the unpolished character of the Commentationes. In the interest of comprehensibility, however, punctuation has been added to translations, and square brackets are used to indicate where it was necessary to provide additional text, for instance to fill in missing auxiliaries. In translations and in the main body of the text, the names of people and families which could be identified with certainty are standardized and modernized in accordance with the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz or, alternatively, the Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Schweiz. All quotations from Scripture are based on the King James Version.