Women of the Teutonic Nations Part 11

She was the daughter of a barber and surgeon of Augsburg, where prince Albert, son of Duke Ernst, learned to know and to love her because of her almost unearthly beauty and charm. He made her in due form his lawful wife; but the old duke would not recognize the marriage. In the absence of her husband, Agnes was seized in the castle of Straubing, dragged upon the bridge of the Danube, and hurled into the stream. She drifted toward the bank, where one of the hangmen seized her with his hooked pole by her gold-colored hair, plunged her into deep water, and held her beneath its surface until she was drowned.

But let us return to Klara Hatzlerin, the nun, who so frequently chooses scenes from the most licentious poets. _The Song of the Seven Greatest Pleasures_ is original, but extremely coa.r.s.e. Eating, drinking, minne play of the most b.e.s.t.i.a.l kind, the natural functions of stomach and kidneys, sleeping, bathing (as described by Poggio), are the ideals of fifteenth century materialism.

The most loathsome poem, however, in the collection so foul with obscene pictures, is the one in which a mother teaches her daughter in undisguised terms the arduous, though lucrative, art of prost.i.tution. It is scarcely possible that any other literature should contain a poem so degraded.

Again, a poem by Hans Rosenpliit is given entirely in the manner of Boccaccio. The servant of a rich man seeks the favor of his mistress and finds acceptance. She takes him to her chamber and hides him under the bed. When the husband retires to his couch, she tells him that the servant sought her love and that she had invited him for the night to the garden to have him chastised. She advises her husband to put on her clothing, to go into the garden, and to chastise the scoundrel with a heavy club. The husband does as he is bidden. Meanwhile, the wife bestows her favors upon the man-servant. Thereupon she gives him a stick with which he belabors his master unmercifully, saying he only wished to test the fidelity of his mistress toward his beloved master. The latter barely escapes from the heavy volley of blows, tells his wife the adventure, and finally thanks G.o.d for such a faithful servant. The poet, Hans Rosenpliit, composed many carnival plays which are filled with obscene jests, and deal mostly with the lowest peasant elements.

In the same collection, Klara Hatzlerin presents rather barren encomiums on Saint Mary, all of which were composed by Muscatblut. Feebly, the Maria-cult arose once more with a narrow and superst.i.tious treatment, painfully different from the beautiful conceptions of the older periods.

Here everything is Philistine. The statutes of the Rosenkrantz order and the brotherhood of Saint Ursula decree eleven thousand prayers in honor of the eleven thousand virgins who are still adored as saints, with their seat at Cologne. Spiritual songs exalt Saint Mary as equal in strength to Christ, nay, in the estimation of the lowly ma.s.ses, superior to Him. There is a bombastic praise of all her material and spiritual perfections. The songs are scholastic in their exaggeration, artificial in form, and barbarous in language; in pompous terms church controversies are treated there: the Trinity, original sin, the last judgment, and other orthodox and mystic broodings, similes, allegories, etc. A type of the treatment is the description Muscatblut gives of the Blessed Virgin when he calls her "a chest in which G.o.d himself dwells, the rod of Aaron, a well illuminated torch, a chaste Arc of Noah, a deep pond, a cask of myrrh, a reed of grace in G.o.d's field, her body a coffin or a castle the decadence is marked everywhere. We look back with longing eyes to the pure, the beautiful, the lofty, all-merciful Mother of G.o.d of the rich, uncontaminated past, the Holy Virgin who has enriched, enn.o.bled, purified the German nation, German literature, German music, and, above all, the German arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture."

Next to those bombastic, pseudo-pious songs we find hideous drinking songs, poems of gluttony and licentiousness, all of which are, nevertheless, highly valuable to the historian of culture. There are authentic doc.u.ments revealing the tremendous downfall of national ideals from the pedestal of the glorious past, and the immense recuperative power of the nation in struggling upward again after two centuries and a half to the Second Period of Bloom, crowned by Lessing, Schiller, Goethe!

A poem in the compilation of Klara Hatzlerin, _On the Nature of the Child_, is intensely interesting, first, as regards the popular physiological knowledge of the time on the mystery of gestation; secondly, as a cultural doc.u.ment on the character of Klara, the nun's, occupation during her leisure hours. She appeals first to her patroness: "Virgin Mary, I call to thee at all times for thy grace. May thy help point out to me thy way that I may walk on thy path, and may also begin anon to consider how the nature of man's strength mingles in the female womb," etc., and then by an extraordinary medley of truth, error, and fiction she describes the entire process of gestation.

There are stories of shrews and of scolding, nagging women, concluding with: "Whoever has a nagging wife, shall rid himself of her as soon as possible, buy a good rope, hang her on a bough, take three big wolves and hang them beside her. Whoever saw gallows with worse skins? There the song has an end, G.o.d evil women to Hades send!"

We cheerfully leave the foul atmosphere of a poetry which could not have sunk lower in form and spirit, and which, nevertheless, could not have existed but for its direct connection with the social sphere of which it treated and in which its roots were imbedded. And indeed we know also from incontestable historical evidence that while the privileges of the other three estates grew, a heavy slavery lay upon the fourth, the peasantry. When oppression lays its leaden hand too heavily upon a race or a cla.s.s, it crushes out, gradually but surely, the divine instincts of the human soul. Munster, in his _Kosmography_, which appeared in 1545, speaks of "the low and wretched life of the peasants." Their houses are miserable hovels of dirt and wood, placed directly on the ground, and thatched with straw. Their food is black rye bread, oats or boiled lentils and peas. A coa.r.s.e upper coat, two wooden shoes, and a cheap felt hat are their only clothing. These people have never peace or rest. Their masters they must serve through the whole year; there is nothing that the poor people must not do. The picture is completed by another author, who says: "The toilsome people of the peasantry are everybody's footrag, heavily laden and burdened with tasks of slavery, hard labor, interests, taxes, duties, etc." We will not unroll here the endless lists of personal and property dues which were imposed upon the unfortunate peasants of that period. The saddest aspect of that physical oppression is that the unfortunate people were not even conscious of their frightful moral subjugation. We have already mentioned that even the marriage of the serfs of both s.e.xes depended upon the consent of their masters, the landed proprietor or, in most cases, of his steward, that the marital tax (_maritagium_) had to be paid for this consent, and that the body of the unfortunate peasant girl belonged to her oppressor, at least for the first night (_jus primce noctis_). The existence of this infamous right has been contested by German historians, but as proofs Scherr adduces two authentic doc.u.ments of the years 1538 and 1543. All these facts are sufficient proof that the above literary remnants do not greatly exaggerate the moral and intellectual condition of that cla.s.s, which is the basic element of every civilization.

We now proceed with more satisfaction to an estimate of the bourgeoisie.

They became more and more cultured, and took upon themselves the task of raising the standards of education and morality, of upholding the sacred flame of German spiritual and intellectual life. They began to spin again the thread of poetry that had broken in the brutalized hands of a degraded n.o.bility. This thread was now the "_Mastersong_." Mastersong, though of a prosaic, mechanical style, was nevertheless an enn.o.bling, purifying element of culture in the frivolous and impure life of late mediaeval German cities. Mastersong formed the bridge between the world of everyday realism and the world of ideals. Mastersong alone prevented an entire break of the continuity of German civilization between the two great periods of bloom, the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. As the bourgeoisie acquired a social position and a personal worth of their own, as the German peasantry, in the extreme North at the mouth of the Elbe between marshes and sea, the Ditmarschen and Stedingers, and again in the South between the Alpine pa.s.ses, the Swiss, heroically defended their manhood and liberties, there began among those lowly born, but high-minded, vigorous, and comparatively pure cla.s.ses an intellectual and a moral life of a higher order. The folk song of love, of warlike honor, of victory over the brutal squirearchy, of invigorating patriotism, of a national union embracing all cla.s.ses, begins to ring through the German "poetic forest," as Uhland calls it. The loving maid speaks of the falcen, and means the lover; the rose garden signifies love's favor; flowers are maidens, like the rose on the heath that is plucked by the boy in spite of its thorns; the forget-me-not designates modesty, humility, chast.i.ty. There are little love songs describing the sorrow of parting, the joy of the dance, the dream of love under the tree from which a rain of blossoms bedews the sleeping beauty.

Emperor Maximilian (1493-1519), "the last knight," the best-beloved son of the house of Habsburg, reigns now in Germany. It is a time of transition, of universal change. The world has doubled its size by the discovery of America, and the horizon has been enlarged accordingly. The printing press has revolutionized the arts. Yet poetry is dry, allegorical, wooden. Maximilian, aided by his secretaries, relates in a rimed allegorical romance, Teuerdank, his wooing of Mary of Burgundy, or, as he calls her in his poem, the beautiful and ill.u.s.trious virgin Ehrenreich, only daughter of the powerful king "Glorious" (_Ruhmreich_).

He recounts the mighty deeds which he must accomplish before he can possess her.

The barrenness of the time, in spite of a great and varied literary activity which, however, bears the stamp of mediocrity, appears also in the translations made by several highborn ladies: Elizabeth of Lorraine, and Eleanor of Scotland, consort of Duke Sigmund of Austria. Princess Mathilda, of the ill.u.s.trious Wittelsbach-Palatine house, the "Lady of Austria," as she is called in the folk song, fostered the first advent of humanism into Suabia and Bavaria, and entertained sympathetic relations with all those who worked in the direction of humanism and literary reform. Niclas von Wyle, an early Humanist, had already in 1474, in opposition to the popular farces which contained offensive, coa.r.s.e, and frequently obscene treatment of woman, composed an encomium or eulogy in her honor, in which he enumerated the manifold blessings which woman had brought to the world. Yet the ribald farces still abound, and are even stimulated by the incipient religious reform.

_Joseph in Egypt_ is the typical subject for poems expressing the criminal and pa.s.sionate love of woman; the monologue of Potiphar's wife expressing her sinful feelings for Joseph is nothing less than edifying.

The play of _Fair Susanna_ presented wicked pa.s.sion in aged men, and innocence persecuted, but finally saved; _Judith and Holofernes_ characterized the clash between conflicting religions.

In South Germany, Nurnberg, Luther's "eye and ear of Germany," is the centre of the culture of the transition period, and is the mirror in which the life of the time is reflected. The aesthetic culture and the lack of it, the status of woman in society, appear nowhere more plainly than in the plays of Hans Sachs, the greatest exponent of the life of his time. He is not stimulated by the pa.s.sions of a Hutten, of a Luther, or of the latter's bitter foe, Thomas Murner. His soul overflows with peace and equanimity even where he censures and chides. His censure is always amiable and gentle. He even describes pa.s.sions meekly. He touchingly represents the driving from Paradise of Adam and Eve, who become more closely attached to each other in misfortune; he delicately depicts Eve's naive anxiety concerning G.o.d, whose visit she apparently fears. He writes decorously of the priest and his fair housekeeper who has not yet attained the canonic age of safety: of the old hag who acts as a procuress and panderer, who is quarrelsome and hideous, and of whom even the devil is afraid; the faithless, cunning, amorous wife who makes sport of her deceived, foolish husband; the jealous and the credulous husband, etc.

In formulating a theory of love, Hans Sachs, who, in his own long life, had felt love's grief and unrest, decided to employ the examples which he gathered from his own experience as well as from history and poetry, especially the Italians Petrarca, Boccaccio, and others. In his carnival plays, however, he avoids, from the very first, the coa.r.s.eness and obscenity of Rosenplut and Hans Folz; but though he no doubt considered that he had excluded all indecency from his works, they still are, here and there, grievous to our modern ears.

In his carnival play Vom Venusberg, the G.o.ddess speaks: "I am Venus, protectress of love, many a realm was destroyed through me; I have great power on earth over rich, poor, young, and old; whom I wound with the arrow mine, he must forever my servant be. I now draw my bow; he who will flee shall flee at once." Too late: the knight is struck, so are all the others, maids and gentlewomen.

In 1518 Sachs wrote the _Complaint of the Exiled Lady Chast.i.ty_, a very bold allegory: Virgin Chast.i.ty, daughter of Lady Honor, dwelt with many virgins in the realm of Virginitas. In the neighborhood lived the frivolous Queen Venus, who frequently invaded the former's kingdom and tried to conquer it. In the repeated wars, Queen Venus succeeded in capturing almost all the virgins, and took them over to the kingdom of Lady Shame. Only Chast.i.ty herself, with her royal retinue, the allegorized twelve womanly virtues, had been saved from capture; they fled and wandered long from one country to the other without finding a hospitable reception. At last they arrived at a distant wilderness, where Chast.i.ty was again suddenly attacked by Queen Venus and her allied princesses: Pride, Frivolity, Intemperance, Idleness, Faithlessness, etc. The poet then warns maidens of the dangers threatening them on the part of Venus and her suite. After explaining the twelve virtues which aid Chast.i.ty, he concludes: "Beware of love, be steady, spare your love until you come to marriage." Sachs himself had at an early age married, in 1519, Kunigunde Kreuzer, an orphan of good family.

The biographer of Hans Sachs described the marriage of Dr. Christoph Scheuerl, a famous jurist of Nurnberg, "the oracle of the Republic." The description of this marriage is interesting as a picture of the life of the high patrician families and their ceremonies and festivities. All the families (Geschlechter) of the city were present. The festivities lasted a whole week, and the ceremonies were elaborate and splendid.

Marriage feasts of the city aristocracy took place either in the house of the parents of the bridal couple, or in the city hall, or even in the cloister. This last practice was, however, forbidden in Nurnberg in 1485, "because the carousals and dances had become unbefitting the holy place." The patrician bridegroom gave the bride a ring with precious stones, the latter presented the bridegroom with an embroidered silken kerchief. There was a great display of precious garments and silk damask. The servants wore the colors of the family to which they belonged. The headgear of the patrician lady was a high diadem, while the bridegroom wore a silver wreath adorned with artificial flowers. The bride's maids and the table maidens wore the same kind of wreath and their hair was arranged in loose waves. The first marriage day was followed by an "early morning dance at the city-hall, a night-dance, and a wedding-a.s.sembly only for the ladies."

The artisan marriages are recorded to have been similar in character, only the jests of the official "speaker" (_Sprucksprecher_) were probably somewhat rude, and the display was not so elaborate as that used in patrician weddings.

Hans Sachs's married life was very happy. His manifold jests regarding quarrelsome women and their qualities, and regarding the hardships of married life were merely products of his humor. "My wife is my Paradise dear, and also my daily h.e.l.lfire sheer;" and the climax:

"She is my virtue, and my vice; She is my wound, and yet my balm.

She is my heart's constant abode, Yet makes me gray and makes me old."

While happily married himself, he knew enough of bad wives. Albrecht Durer's unhappy married life could furnish him sufficient material for his _Ninefold Skin of a Scold_, and _The Twelve Properties of a Bad Woman_, against which all the arts employed in the "_taming of the shrew_" came to naught.

In 1560 his beloved wife died, and one year later he married Barbara Harscher, a charming girl of seventeen years, whose beauty he sang in his _Artistic Woman's Praise_, and with whom he lived happily till 1576.

He was buried in Saint John's Cemetery at Nurnberg. The grateful city erected in 1874 a beautiful monument in his honor. But the highest monument, "more abiding than steel," the prince of poets, Goethe, erected to him in his _Hans Sachs's Poetic Mission:_

"An oak wreath hovers yonder in the clouds, With ever green fair foliage adorned; With this the grateful nation crowns his brow."

Hans Sachs is the typical, the universal, the n.o.blest, and the purest Mastersinger; but he is only the first among hundreds of others who helped to preserve in Germany the sacred fire of poetry.

The bourgeoisie womanhood of the school of humanism, of the circle where virtue was the ideal of life, ably seconded the efforts of men like Sachs. But no one lofty specimen of superior womanhood arose from the atmosphere of feud, brigandage, and drunken intemperance among the so-called higher cla.s.ses. Banqueting, hunting, fighting, gambling, carousing, and s.e.xual excesses are recorded in plenty. _The diary of the Silesian knight Hans Von Schweinichen_ introduces us, in the middle of the sixteenth century, into a "n.o.ble" society full of poverty, brutality, and ignorance. He relates the slight acquirements of his education, interrupted by the occupation of tending the geese, his service as a page at the court of the Duke of Liegnitz, his early interest in women, his presence at weddings, "where he ate and drank his fill for day and night just as they wanted to have it." Of his friendly expedition with the Duke of Liegnitz to Mecklenburg, he says: "I have made for myself a great reputation with drinking, as I could never get enough to drink myself full." Anna of Saxony, daughter of Elector Moritz, wife of William of Orange, who died of _delirium tremens_, proves, by the way, that drunkenness was by no means uncommon with princely ladies. Scherr also adduces many other such princely examples.

A festival at the Mecklenburg court is thus described in nave fashion by Schweinichen in his diary: "The native squires as well as the n.o.ble young ladies lost themselves little by little, until finally there remained with me but two ladies and one knight, who began a dance. I followed with the other lady. It did not last long; my good friend slipped with his dancer to the next chamber; I followed him. As we came to the chamber, two squires and ladies rested in a bed; the one who danced before me fell also with his lady in one bed. I asked my lady what we should do. She said in her Mecklenburg language: I should lie by her. I did not have her ask me a long time, but lay down with mantle and garments, so did the lady, and thus we chatted till the dawn of morning; however, in all honor. This they call there 'to lie by a maiden on truth and faith,' but I do not trust such a 'lying by' for such truth and faith might easily become roguish." Evidently, so far as the n.o.bility were concerned, delicacy and propriety were quite unknown in sixteenth century society.

CHAPTER VII

WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION

Woman, it has been said, always needs a background. She has one in early sixteenth century Germany a splendid background of material prosperity.

The great free cities were at the zenith of their power. Organized labor had triumphed. The guilds and the merchant corporations had done their work well. From the st.u.r.dy, self-respecting German handworker, modestly offering his own wares for sale, had been evolved the governing patrician. Prince, pope, emperor, even foreign potentates, bowed before the German patrician, for he held the purse strings of the world. Not a sovereign in all Europe dared enter into a campaign without permission of the Fuggers, the great merchant-bankers of Augsburg.

In their magnificent free cities the patricians of Germany lived in far more than royal splendor. The chronicler, Wimpheling, writes: "It was not an uncommon thing to eat from gold and silver plates at merchants'

tables as I, myself, did in company with eleven other guests at Cologne."

aeneas Sylvius exclaims to Martin Mayer, Chancellor of Mainz: "How is it that even in your inns you always serve drinks in silver vessels? What shall I say of the knights and of the bits of their horses which are of pure gold, of their rings, girdles, and helmets blazing in gold, of the spears and sheaths studded thickly with diamonds? What riches are displayed in your altar decorations! How beautiful are the reliquaries set in pearls and gold! How magnificent your priests' vestments! What riches in your sacristies!"

Dress received much attention. Women revelled in embroideries of gold and silver, plaited skirts with expensive galloon borders, mantles of ermine, sable and marten; crowns of gold and precious stones; pearl embroidered smocks and the daintiest, finest linen ever woven. Even the burghers' wives and daughters braided gold and silver into their back hair and curls and wore gems of rare value.

At frequent intervals, sumptuary laws designed to lessen feminine extravagance were pa.s.sed, but, like all such laws since the days of Eve's figleaf, they failed. The women invariably got the better of the city fathers. In Mainz one of the most beautiful young dames of the town, acting as the representative of a large number of society women, appealed, personally, to Prince Albert, Archbishop of Brandenburg, against a decree of the Council concerning feminine attire. That handsome, Lothario-priest, Prince Albert, was not the man to resist the pleading of a pretty woman. Dismissing his fair pet.i.tioner with a kiss and the gift of a beautiful jewelled bracelet, he at once ordered the repeal of the hateful law.

But the great sociological preacher, Geiler von Kaisersberg, was no debonair voluptuary. The fairest woman's face could never persuade him to look leniently upon feminine vanity. He shouts:

"The authorities ought to forbid the abominably short skirts that are worn! Look at the belts which encircle their waists, sometimes they are of silk, sometimes of gold, sometimes so costly that the jeweller charges from forty to fifty florins for making them. They drag long trains through the dirt without thinking of the nakedness of Christ among his poor. Some have so many dresses that, during the week, they have two dresses for each day, morning and afternoon. They have many others for dancing, and they would rather see them eaten by moths than give their cost to the poor. We see women letting their hair hang down their backs in cues like men, and wearing c.o.c.k's feathers in the astoundingly ugly bonnets on their heads. What a shame and a sin! Do you not see there is no one without donkey ears on her head? It is a shame that women wear hats with ears. Some paint themselves many times a day and have false teeth and hair. O Woman! are you not fearful, with the hair of strangers on your heads? It may be the hair of some dead woman to the injury of your souls!"

The Renaissance was a period of transition a liberation of mental force which, from Italy, spread itself, invigoratingly, over the rest of Europe. The modern world was rolling into light. With a gun in his hands, the peasant soldier was the equal, physically at least, of his former master. The art of printing and the invention of cheap paper had given wings to thought and knowledge. Trade had penetrated strange lands. Every returning sailor and adventurer brought back tales more fascinating than fairy lore of mysterious golden islands newly discovered in the west. Wonder and imagination were awakened. Money was plentiful. In the German cities a leisure cla.s.s existed. Conditions were ripe for culture, and Humanism came.

The "New Learning," as Humanism was generally called, rapidly overwhelmed the old, barren scholasticism and ecclesiasticism. Every monastery and university became a battleground where Humanism fought Scholasticism to the death.

Under the quickening influence of the "New Learning," free Latin schools for boys were established over all Germany. The poorest boy might attend any or all of the schools. Thus arose the specifically German educational system of "wandering students," with its good and evil influences.

At first little was done, educationally, for the girls. There were a very few small, poorly equipped public schools where daughters of artisans and laborers received religious teaching and slight rudimentary instruction in reading, spelling, and writing. Girls belonging to n.o.ble and patrician families were usually taught in convents. Music, dancing, embroidery, deportment, and, above all, the supervision of a large household were the studies upon which wealthy parents insisted for their daughters. But the brighter girls soon became curious about the "New Learning" of which their fathers and brothers spoke so frequently.

Sastrow, in his biography, writes:

"One of my five younger sisters, Catherine, was an excellent, amiable, lovely, pious maiden. When my brother, Johannes, came home from Wittenberg, where he was a student, she bade him tell her how one could say in Latin, 'This is, truly, a beautiful maiden.' He replied, 'Profecto formosa puella.' She asked farther how one could say, 'Rather so.' He replied, 'Sic satis.' Some time after, three students, sons of gentlemen, came from Wittenberg to see our town. They had been recommended to the hospitality of the burgomaster, Herr Nicholas Smiterlow, who was desirous to entertain them well and have good society for them. As he had three grown-up daughters, my sister Catherine was invited among other guests. The students exchanged all kinds of jokes with the maidens, and as young fellows are wont to do also said things to one another in Latin that it would not have been seemly to say before maidens in German. At last one said to the other, 'Profecto formosa puella,' whereupon, my sister answered, 'Sic satis,' Then the students were much afraid, fancying she had also understood their former amatory talk."

Enthusiasm for the "New Learning" quickly spread among German women of the higher cla.s.s. Among the princesses, Matilda of the Palatinate was especially famed for her love of learning. She was a generous patron of the fine arts, and, a rarer trait among humanistic scholars, she was also an admirer of the literature of her fatherland. She made a collection of ninety-four works on the old court poetry, and delighted in the national folk songs orally preserved. Matilda encouraged the poets of her court to write poetry after the ancient methods. She ordered many valuable works translated into German. Through her influence the university of Tubingen, in Wurtemberg was established.

The "New Learning" stole into the convents and made many proselytes among the nuns. Aleydis Raiskop, of Goch, to whom Butzbach dedicated a book, was renowned for her cla.s.sical scholarship. She composed seven homilies on Saint Paul and translated a work on the ma.s.s from Latin into German. In the same convent with Aleydis lived an artist nun, Gertrude von Buchel, to whom Butzbach also dedicated a book, Celebrated Painters.

Richmondis von der Horst, abbess of the convent of Seebach, corresponded in Latin with Trithemius who highly praises her various writings. Of the nun Ursula Canton, one of her admirers exclaims: "Her equal in knowledge of theological matters, of the fine arts and in eloquence and belles lettres, has not been seen for centuries."