In the mid-16th century, the Cologne rentier, Licentiate of Law, and parish church warden Hermann Weinsberg (1518-1597) embarked upon what would become one of the early modern period’s most astonishing and intriguing efforts to deal with the anxieties of that turbulent time. Fearful of fading into oblivion, Weinsberg developed a secret and extraordinarily ambitious plan to provide for himself and his family a refuge from the forces that threatened to wipe them from the face of history: he would entail the Weinsberg estate within the male line in perpetuity. This plan was in direct contravention of the traditional German practice of partible inheritance and violated a Cologne law that limited entails to three generations. Weinsberg thus sought to claim for his middling family the kind of status and enduring corporate identity that could only be found among aristocratic and religious houses. He drew up an elaborate will that laid out his plan (which denied his sisters their rightful inheritance); created a fanciful family history—Das Boich Weinsberg—that included an impressive and largely fictitious genealogy; and authored a Declarationsboich that contained, among other things, a detailed manual for how subsequent Weinsberg house fathers should manage the estate so that it would endure forever. To these writings Weinsberg contributed a three-volume Gedenkbuch (Memory Book) in which he recorded with rare candor and specificity the quotidian details of his life and age, believing that God himself had called him to do so for the good of the Weinsberg posterity. Altogether Weinsberg’s vernacular writings fill some 70,000 manuscript pages (!), an extraordinary effort to “write a middling burgher family into history.”
Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World (Harvard Historical Studies)
Harvard University Press
352 pages
$59.66
In Paper Memory, Matthew Lundin’s first book, the Wheaton College assistant professor of history has provided an elegant, insightful, rigorous, and extremely sensitive treatment of Weinsberg and his project. Other scholars have dealt with portions of the Weinsberg corpus, but no one has attempted to wrestle with the whole of it, certainly not in English. Lundin’s microhistory makes an especially valuable contribution to Reformation/Early Modern Studies, for it furnishes us with rare insight into how one admittedly eccentric townsman dealt with the distinctive insecurities of his life and age, and in so doing anticipated some of the defining characteristics of the modern period.
Why did Weinsberg, the Samuel Pepys of 16th-century Germany, begin to write? Lundin identifies a number of motives. While Weinsberg was not a social revolutionary, he did resent the way the noble/commoner and clerical/lay divides had contributed to the undervaluing of burghers and their contributions to society over the centuries. He especially resented the way official histories and chronicles, which he read voraciously, ignored burghers in their accounts of the past, thus consigning them to oblivion. Weinsberg did not wish to turn the world upside down, yet there is an unmistakably anti-clerical and anti-elitist strain in his writing: he desperately wanted burghers to enjoy the same privileges of influence and perpetual memory that the nobility and the clergy did. He imbibed these concerns from his father, Christian Weinsberg, a middling wine merchant, city councilor, and lay humanist.
Christian was an ardent devotee of Renaissance Humanism, even though he knew little Latin and possessed no advanced education. He passed on this passion for the wisdom of classical antiquity to his son, who studied at the University of Cologne. Weinsberg eagerly adopted Humanism’s emphases on the importance of life in this world and the superiority of a meritocracy of virtue over an aristocracy of privilege. Weinsberg developed his own burgher version of Humanism that informed his effort to champion the middling values of modesty, thrift, and industry, which he praises throughout his writings. The Cologne lawyer was a kind of Erasmian Catholic who had certain sympathies with Protestantism, especially its critique of clerical abuses and its positive valuation of ordinary life. According to Lundin, Weinsberg held to something like the Protestant doctrine of vocation, even though he never seriously contemplated a conversion to the evangelical creed. Weinsberg’s scheme may thus be seen as part of the “rise of the laity” that received much of its impetus from the ideals of Humanism and Protestantism. Weinsberg wrote in order to make an extended case for the legitimacy and importance of the middle class.
Weinsberg also wrote out of a deep sense of disease caused by the cumulative destabilizing effects of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation on life in Cologne and beyond. As he read Humanist histories and Protestant assaults on the Catholic Church, he found much to affirm but also much that worried him. While not given to theological or philosophical reflection, he feared that all would soon be in flux in his age, or perhaps that flux was the only truth of human existence itself. Cologne was a Catholic city and would remain so throughout the early modern era, but two of its archbishops turned Protestant and sought to convert the city to the evangelical cause. Protestant refugees also streamed into the city from religious conflicts that raged outside the city walls—Weinsberg himself kept watch on these walls and was prepared to sound the alarm should invading forces appear on the horizon. According to Weinsberg, many of his fellow burghers were sympathetic to Protestantism, and this caused him great concern, despite his own more restrained (and unacknowledged) sympathies with the evangelical faith. What would happen to the traditional means of securing corporate and familial memory if traditional Catholic institutions and rites were reformed or destroyed? This was a matter of deep consternation to Weinsberg. As Lundin observes, “In his writings we find a Renaissance and Reformation era more transformative that its critics contend, but more complicated than its boosters allege.”
Weinsberg responded to this threat in two ways. First, he retreated from his world and its chaos. The image of a snail adorns several pages in Weinsberg’s writings, with sayings such as the following: “Things are so bad all about / That I will not venture out.” Indeed, Weinsberg led a double life, one in the public eye and one in his private study, where he spent countless hours feverishly trying to save himself and his world from oblivion by recording it on paper—he was amazed by the power of printed words to capture and secure memory. He shared this secret life with no one, save his brother and nephew. His family, friends, and associates knew nothing of his grandiose project during his lifetime.
Weinsberg’s second response was to seek refuge from the flux and chaos of his age in his family or, rather, in the Haus Weinsberg and the permanence he sought to provide for it. In many ways, he looked to this house—to the structure itself—and his posterity as an ersatz for the Body of Christ that was splintering around him. As Lundin explains, “If all went according to plan, the Haus Weinsberg would be a community of prayer and memory—an ‘eternal gathering’—in the midst of a changing, uncertain city [and world].” The Haus Weinsberg would become a miniature corpus christianum that would survive the ravages of time and the age. Again Lundin: ” ‘Hold to this book as an anchor’—thus did Hermann Weinsberg admonish his heirs to weather the tumultuous times. Even if the Catholic Church itself collapsed, the heirs were to find their certainty and purpose in the family tradition he had established. In his fondest dreams, the pages he bequeathed to his heirs would carry them safely to a ‘new world.’ ” Weinsberg writes as a senior house father to future house fathers, whom he addresses collectively as his “eternal son,” seeking to show them the way to find salvation in the Haus Weinsberg.
Even as he sought to defend his station in life and to contend with the larger anxieties of his age, Weinsberg also wrote in order to overcome the insecurities that were unique to his own personal history. His father was a powerful influence in his life. A gifted though relatively uneducated man, Christian had high expectations for his son, expectations that Hermann was never able to fulfill, for he turned out to be a mediocre student and lawyer who was rather timid and shy. He also completely failed to become the paterfamilias that Christian read about in classical literature and commended to his son. Hermann married twice, both times to older widows of means, with whom he had no children. He came to question his virility and was deprived of the fragile and this-worldly immortality that children provide. (Hermann did have an illegitimate daughter from an affair with a maid.) In order to compensate for his many perceived (and real) shortcomings, Hermann invented “a private theater of fame.” Lundin explains: “If he could not fulfill the ideals of the classical paterfamilias in person, he could at least do so in his study.” Thus, there is much self-aggrandizement in the Gedenkbuch, but also much self-reproach and honest confession. Weinsberg readily concedes that he is not an especially devout man and that he fears death inordinately and lusts for permanence and glory. As Lundin asserts, “Hermann’s primary concern [in writing] … was to overcome oblivion.”
As Weinsberg became increasingly possessed by “graphomania,” he inadvertently created “an original commemorative form” that sought to tell the quotidian history of an age from the perspective of a single burgher household. Lundin argues that this form anticipates modern values in a number of ways, especially in its near exclusive focus on mundane matters and concerns. Lundin observes that Weinsberg was not especially worried about the salvation of his soul; he was a man of this world who thought he owed it to his descendents to record the mundane details of his life on paper so that posterity would have an honest account of burgher life and its worth. Unlike other autobiographical sources from the period, Weinsberg’s writings do not present a stylized image of their protagonist as a pious man who is favored by God—they present him as a man with both sacred and secular longings, a man who readily admits that the latter were typically stronger. His life and his account of it are largely secular; he anticipates the development of a “robust secular memory” that is so typical of the modern age, especially of modern historians.
An even more interesting connection between Weinsberg’s project and modern values is the way that Hermann felt both compelled and authorized to rely on his own intellect and resources to interpret his life and world. Lundin puts it this way: “In his own peculiar way, this Catholic lawyer discovered the individual agency that would henceforth be required to order a confusing and fragmented world.” Fearful of the destruction of the Christian sacred canopy, Weinsberg turned more and more to his own wisdom and skill to help him create some meaning and permanence in the midst of the flux of life.
Weinsberg thus anticipated the shape of the modern in a final way: he was a tragic and lonely figure who sought to produce an anchor for his house and soul quite literally with his own hands, because the anchor provided in Christ (Heb. 6:19) no longer seemed secure to him. He sought to escape oblivion through his own ingenuity and efforts, believing he could not rely on the Church to help him do so. Lundin observes, “If medieval men and women trusted that they were inscribed in the Book of Life, modern Europeans would become increasingly preoccupied with survival in human books.” In this sense, Weinsberg was more modern than medieval, or rather, like his age, he was early modern, for he still believed in heaven but was far more interested in life and legacy in this world.
Weinsberg’s plan failed. As he grew older, he feared that it would, both because of the ephemeral nature of his medium and because of his inability to capture all that he thought he must record on paper—he knew that he could not literally write his whole self into history. When his relatives discovered his writings after his death, they were outraged and scandalized by his scheme. His house soon wound up in the hands of the city, which sold it and distributed the proceeds equally to his heirs. His writings were given to the city archive, only to be discovered some 250 years later. Weinsberg could not have imagined a worse fate for his paper memory, although he might have taken some small consolation in the knowledge that he would eventually be resurrected in human memory.
Unlike Weinsberg’s plan, Lundin’s book does not fail. It succeeds wonderfully in the way it analyzes and interprets the incredibly rich and complicated sources that Weinsberg left behind. There are occasional unnecessary repetitions, but on the whole Lundin captures with care and precision the tensions, anxieties, and hopes that characterized both Weinsberg’s life and his age, and which have contributed to the shape of the modern world. Here we have a microhistory that truly illumines history; we also have scholarship that is at once human and humane in its approach to its subject. A very impressive achievement!
Ronald K. Rittgers holds the Erich Markel Chair in German Reformation Studies at Valparaiso University, where he also serves as professor of history and theology. He is the author of two books: The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Harvard Univ. Press); and The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford Univ. Press). He was Lundin’s mentor in Valpo’s Lilly Fellows Program; the two also overlapped a few years in graduate school at Harvard.
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