The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland by Carla Roth

Abstract

Internet social-media algorithms deluge today’s users with unreliable and sometimes contradictory information. This small but dense book offers some unusual perspectives about similarly unreliable and contradictory oral information five centuries ago in the small, prosperous, and autonomous Swiss city of St. Gallen, home of one of Latin Christendom’s most famous abbeys. Roth’s source, the “Commentaries” of linen maker Johannes Rüdinger (1501–1556), contains about 2,000 miscellaneous entries, more than 70 percent of them from 349 local informants during the decade after the city adopted the Reformation in 1529 (37). The existence of this private miscellany—alongside several local chroniclers and diarists, some Catholic and others now unknown—remained hidden for two centuries (26–34).Rüdinger’s collection is extremely unusual in two important ways. First, he anticipated Foucault’s “disappearance of the author” by four centuries, saying almost nothing about his household, his business, and his rare and short travels, and treating his growing political career with great modesty.1 As Roth summarizes, he wrote “about almost anything except himself” (18–19). Second, he translated all his material into an abridged Latin that he maintained after leaving the University of Basel in the mid-1520s to enter his family’s (and his city’s) principal business. This second peculiarity had equally peculiar social consequences: As Roth’s admirable set of Venn diagrams demonstrates, Rütinger’s principal informants came from two mutually exclusive groups—his fellow businessmen, neighbors, and relatives and the city’s literary and intellectual elite (46).A quarter-century ago, a multinational European program about “Cultural Exchange in Europe 1400–1700” tried to investigate both the oral and written transmission of information during this era, but it lacked adequate raw materials. On this score, Roth exploits the third way that her source was exceptional: Rütinger, an active businessman with a humanist education, lived in a city that lacked both printing presses and a reliable postal service. Hence, he took less than 5 percent of his information from written or printed sources (59).Roth’s most exciting achievements interweave Rüdinger’s oral information with such written local sources as the legal records about a 1532 execution (97–100). Although his account “does not explicitly contradict any of the facts given in the trial,” it “nevertheless profoundly changes this initial interpretation of the case.” The salacious gossip that Rütiner recorded makes his account of Johannes Vogler, a mainstay of the Reformation in the Rhine Valley and an “eager lover of evangelical truth,” seemingly “drip with irony” (91). Another impressive achievement is the assessment that he offered about his various informants regarding the mysterious “Devil of Schiltach,” the woman reputed to have set fire to that town in 1533 and later tried as a witch (121–127).Rütinger listened to women as well as to men. His most important female source by far was not his wife or kin but an old midwife who regaled him with stories about the private life of various prominent local citizens after helping with the birth of two of his children (80–86). He also collected obscene jokes, some from the old midwife, men being the usual targets; his nastiest one is profoundly anti-Catholic (58, 67–69, 71).In Roth’s words, “Rüdinger’s views on religion were … fairly conventional for Protestant St. Gall” (22). His “Commentaries” reflect the city’s declining optimism during a decade that began as a “wondrous time” but soured two years later when its Abbot returned after the defeat of the city’s Zurich allies at the battle of Kappel. By the time Rüdinger abruptly stopped recording, St. Gall’s future seemed ominous. In his seven accounts of this battle during the next seven years, the number of Zurich’s pastors killed alongside Ulrich Zwingli on the battlefield increased every time that he mentioned it (156). Chapeau!