Early Modern German Research Articles

Mechanism and materialism in early modern German philosophy

ABSTRACTThe paper focuses on the gradual separation between materialism and mechanism in early modern German philosophy. In Germany the distinction between the two concepts, originally introduced by Leibniz, was definitively stated by Wolff who was the first to provide a definition of the new philosophical term Materialismus, and of the related philosophical sect. In the first part I describe the initial identification of mechanism and materialism in German philosophy between the last decades of the seventeenth century and 1720. Mechanism is here mostly conceived within a monistic metaphysics of body, which refers mainly to Hobbes and to some (unfaithful) interpretations of Spinoza’s pantheism. This tight connection between a mechanical explanation of nature and the Deus sive natura issue leads to a negative judgement on mechanism and its materialistic implications, both charged with a form of more or less explicit atheism. In the second part I describe the gradual emancipation in Germany of mechanism from materialism according to the distinction between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ materialism. In the third and final part, I sketch the first appearances of the entry ‘materialism’ in the philosophical encyclopaedias of early modern Germany, pointing out the by-then clear distinction between this metaphysical issue and the mechanical claim.

Configuring European Archives: Spaces, Materials and Practices in the Differentiation of Repositories from the Late Middle Ages to 1700

While recordkeeping and record-using were important in Classical societies and early medieval Europe, rapid evolution and change characterized recordkeeping practices from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern period. This paper recasts changes in Western European recordkeeping from the fourteenth to eighteenth century in terms of the differentiation of spaces and practices, thus challenging older literature that sees increasing accumulation around a foundational archivum as the primary mode of expansion. Empirically, the argument concentrates on developments in the German lands that produced highly sophisticated Registratur (practices that tracked and indexed a wide variety of circulating records) across the German sphere after 1400. As first argued by Ernst Pitz, early modern German archivists began differentiating conceptual and physical spaces for recordkeeping in the fifteenth century, thus producing both archives of charters and registries of informational records of many kinds. A close examination of developments in Habsburg Innsbruck confirms that both an ordered archive and a powerful comprehensive system of registry emerged simultaneously in the 1520s in one of the most sophisticated recordkeeping venues of the era. The paper also reconsiders the historiography of archives, emphasizing how the cultural, medial and spatial turns have transformed current research. By contrasting relatively stable medial forms – pen, ink and paper; roll, bundle and codex – with more dynamic and transformative medial configurations which can be studied through the systematic comparison of specific cases, I argue that new research on archival history offers fresh and less culturally bound approaches to the preservation of records in the archives that remain the foundation for historical research into the past.

The Early Modern German Professor at Home – Masculinity, Bachelorhood and Family Concepts (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

The Early Modern German Professor at Home – Masculinity, Bachelorhood and Family Concepts (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

Family and Kinship in Early Modern German Prose Novels

The debate about the relevance of the marriage theme in the late Middle Ages has been ongoing for a long time. We are still collecting data to establish a solid paradigm for future discussions about this topic. The current article examines two highly popular prose novels, Thüring von Ringoltingen's Melusine (1456) and the anonymous Fortunatus (1509) where the married life of the protagonist gains much more traction in the narrative development than in previous courtly romances. Most importantly, both authors place significant emphasis on the role of the family and portray their characters as situated in the network of smaller social units consisting of parents and children only. We can thus recognize the meaningfulness of the new genre of the prose novel (Volksbuch) in the public discourse about family and kinship during the late Middle Ages.

Der Bauernjörg: Feldherr im Bauernkrieg

The German Peasants War (1524–6) is a seminal event that has long attracted scholarly attention. While interpretations have often changed, the interest has remained squarely focused on the peasants rather than the war , despite this being one of the bloodiest conflicts of premodern German history. The only substantial military history of the war remains a short book by Manfred Bensing and Siegfried Hoyer published by the East German Militärverlag in the anniversary year of 1975. Peter Blickle, one of the foremost scholars of the early modern German peasantry, addresses this deficit in his new study of Georg Truchsess von Waldburg (1488–1531), who commanded the army of the Swabian League and played a decisive role in winning the war for the established authorities. Blickle was given access to the extensive private archive of Waldburg’s descendants, which has remained largely unused for this topic since the nineteenth century. These rich sources are supplemented by material from across south-west Germany, as well as the insight gained through a career studying peasants and, above all, the political dimension of the Peasants War, which Blickle terms ‘the Revolution of 1525’.

Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann

and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. x, 260 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). Editors Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann have put together an excellent collection of essays on the history of Germany's connections to the black diaspora their book, and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914. The book's strength lies the fact that it is not centered on the twentieth century. It demands that we tie transnational connections between people of African descent and German-speaking Europe to an earlier time and place. What we have long understood as twentieth-century phenomena (black soldiers on German soil; black entertainers German culture) are nothing of the sort; these encounters--and German responses to them--belong to older historical discourses. The advantage to covering pre-WWI German-speaking Europe for a project such as this is that it encourages specificity. Because the majority of essays this collection concentrate on Germany before it existed as a unified nation-state, the book gives us more nuanced and highly contextualized portraits of black-white encounters on German-speaking lands. In this volume we find regional histories addition to global ones, micro-histories of black musicians at a Baroque court Bayreuth placed side by side with a century-long history of black American travel. For example, her chapter, Ambiguous Duty : Black Servants at German Ancien Regime Courts, Anne Kuhlmann demonstrates the diverse opportunities available to blacks within and outside German courts the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that permitted them to lead different lives. Local cultures at different regional courts made it possible for blacks such as Anton Wilhelm Amo to be potentially upwardly or downwardly mobile. Paradoxically, the other strength of this volume comes from the seven centuries-long timeframe the editors constructed. Because the book spans such a long time period, the reader can zoom in to local stories and also zoom out to see larger shifts over time German perception of blacks. For example, the authors effectively illustrate the evolution of language depicting people of African descent from the thirteenth century to WWI. Whereas the medieval and early modern eras German speakers labeled people of African descent Moors, by the nineteenth century that word had been replaced by the transatlantic term, Negroes. This switch, the editors argue, represents an unfortunate downgrading of the position of people of African descent German life. While connoted brave warriors, Christian saints, and the riches of Africa, the term Negro, they write, alluded instead to a trading commodity; a childish, cheap, and unskilled hand (p. 3). In Part I, called Saints and Slaves, Moors and Hessians, the authors demonstrate how shockingly different and sometimes egalitarian German treatment of blacks were prior to the Enlightenment. In their chapters examining medieval and early modern German artistic representations of blacks, Paul H.D. Kaplan and Kate Lowe encourage us to look beyond the category of exoticism to instead consider how an image of a black saint or a black slave functioned German courtly life. …

'A WONDERFULL MONSTER BORNE IN GERMANY': HAIRY GIRLS IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN GERMAN BOOK, COURT AND PERFORMANCE CULTURE.

Human hirsuteness, or pathological hair growth, can be symptomatic of various conditions, including genetic mutation or inheritance, and some cancers and hormonal disturbances. Modern investigations into hirsuteness were initiated by nineteenth-century German physicians. Most early modern European cases of hypertrichosis (genetically determined all-over body and facial hair) involve German-speaking parentage or patronage, and are documented in German print culture. Through the Wild Man tradition, modern historians routinely link early modern reception of historical hypertrichosis cases to issues of ethnicity without, however, recognising early modern awareness of links between temporary hirsuteness and the pathological nexus of starvation and anorexia. Here, four cases of hirsute females are reconsidered with reference to this medical perspective, and to texts and images uncovered by my current research at the Herzog August Library and German archives. One concerns an Italian girl taken to Prague in 1355 by the Holy Roman Empress, Anna von Schweidnitz. Another focuses on Madeleine and Antonietta Gonzalez, daughters of the ‘Wild Man’ of Tenerife, documented at German courts in the 1580s. The third and fourth cases consider the medieval bearded Sankt Kümmernis (also known as St Wilgefortis or St Uncumber), and the seventeenth-century Bavarian fairground performer Barbara Urslerin.Krankhafter menschlicher Hirsutismus kann aufgrund unterschiedlicher Ursachen auftreten, zu denen u.a. genetische Veränderungen und Vererbung, verschiedene Krebserkrankungen und hormonelle Störungen gehören. Die moderne Hirsutismus-Forschung ist im 19. Jh. von deutschen Forschern initiiert worden. Die meisten europäischen frühneuzeitlichen Erscheinungen von Hypertrichose (dem genetisch bedingten Haarwuchs am gesamten Körper und im Gesicht) gehen auf deutschsprachige Eltern oder Förderer zurück und sind in Deutschland in den Druck gelangt. Bei Untersuchungen des Motivs des Wilden Mannes zieht die aktuelle geschichtswissenschaftliche Forschung in der Regel Verbindungslinien zwischen der frühneuzeitlichen Wahrnehmung von Hypertrichose-Fällen und Fragen der Ethnizität, ohne jedoch zu beachten, dass in der Frühen Neuzeit die Verbindung zwischen temporärem Hirsutismus und der krankhaften Verknüpfung von Unterernährung und Anorexie bekannt war. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden vier Fälle von an Hirsutismus erkrankten Frauen neu analysiert, unter Einbezug dieser medizinischen Perspektive und unter Beachtung von Texten und Abbildungen, die meine jüngsten Forschungen in der Herzog August Bibliothek und an deutschen Archiven ans Licht gefördert haben. Die hier betrachteten Fälle betreffen ein italienisches Mädchen, das 1355 von Anna von Schweidnitz, Kaiserin des Hl. Römischen Reichs, nach Prag gebracht wurde; Madeleine und Antonietta Gonzalez, die Töchter des ‘Wilden Manns’ von Teneriffa, die in den 1580er Jahren an deutschen Höfen bezeugt sind; die bärtige Sankt Kümmernis (Wilgefortis), und die bayerische Jahrmarktkünstlerin Barbara Urslerin.

Ritual, Religion, and German Home Towns

German Home Townsis a very forward-looking book. I say that not because it proved so influential—although it certainly had a profound impact on my generation of historians. My point is more prosaic, namely thatGerman Home Townsoccupies a set point in time and social milieu, the inaugural moment of an attenuated phase of stability for a peculiar type of human community in central Europe. That moment, of course, is 1648; the milieu is that of walled and privileged towns—large and differentiated enough for self-sufficiency in most economic functions, but not so large or so differentiated as to generate the degrees of stratification and anonymity that characterized larger commercial or manufacturing cities. In contrast to metropolitan centers, “home towns” embraced all inhabitants in a web of face-to-face relations, at once integrating, enabling, and controlling all inhabitants through guilds and the political systems built around them. Usually, almost all hometown inhabitants were citizens, too—again in contrast to larger cities, with their substrates of noncitizen residents. From the vantage of 1648, and within the stream of early modern German history,German Home Townspeers into a future of confrontation with “movers and doers”—those vanguards of the “general estate,” as Walker called them, who trampled idiosyncrasy, leveled difference, and, with some help from Napoleon, replaced both local corporatism and the imperial “incubator” with provincial and national systems of general, liberal delegation.

Erudite and Honoured Artisans? Performers of Body Care and Surgery in Early Modern German Towns

This article investigates the interrelation between processes of professional transformation in an artisanal trade and the identity-building of barbers and surgeons in German-speaking parts of Europe. From the late fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century this interrelation included acting in various juridical and political functions, engaging in medical book-writing and, therefore, in knowledge transfer. Such findings are based on a combined analysis of administrative and corporative manuscript sources, and of printed books. Against this background the intention in pictorial representations and the meaning in biographic material become apparent. The individuals and the group defined themselves as medical artisans despite the fact that they assimilated academic standards in their training and lifestyle. Families played a leading part in this adaptation to political, economic, scientific and social change, they even overruled confessional boundaries. For the formation of trade identity during the seventeenth and the first half of eighteenth centuries families were indispensable.

PUPILS’ CHOICES AND SOCIAL MOBILITY AFTER THE THIRTY YEARS WAR: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY

ABSTRACTThis article presents the main findings of the first detailed reconstruction of the pattern of attendance at an early modern German school, based on the exceptionally preserved matriculation records of the Latin (grammar) school of Zwickau/Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century. It investigates pupils’ social background, their geographical mobility, and reconstructs their educational choices. Prevailing top-down perspectives on early modern education obscure the range of choices available to pupils. This article argues that substantial social mobility into learned professions formed the backdrop to the preoccupation with rank and distinction within the Republic of Letters in the Holy Roman Empire.

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington (review)

Reviewed by: The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington B. Ann Tlusty The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century. By Joel F. Harrington. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 283. Cloth $28.00. ISBN 978-0809049929. As Joel Harrington notes in the preface to this intriguing portrait of Frantz Schmidt, executioner in Nuremberg from 1578 to 1618, the story it tells is first that of a man, and second that of the world in which he lived and worked. Both the man and his world evolved in interesting ways during this period, and it is this evolution that frames Harrington’s lively and very readable book. The story is based primarily on Frantz Schmidt’s diary (first published in 1801), a chronicle-like list of entries describing the many hundreds of executions and public punishments he performed from his first hanging in 1573 until he retired in 1618. Harrington provides immediate context with a variety of local records produced during Schmidt’s lifetime in Hof, Bamberg, and Nuremberg, at the same time locating developments in these towns within the more general framework of early modern German social, political, and legal history. As a result he is able to tell the story of a life on the margins from multiple perspectives, the most interesting of which is Schmidt’s own. To this end, Harrington often lets the “faithful executioner” speak for himself, incorporating many direct quotes from Schmidt’s diary into his narrative. Shunned as members of a dishonorable caste but enjoying a relatively high economic status, early modern executioners were in the unusual position of living as privileged outcasts. Schmidt’s lifetime coincided with the high point of the instrumentalization of public executions as dramas of contrition and redemption and as demonstrations of government power. This “golden age of the executioner” (26) provided ample opportunity for Schmidt to ply his trade and to leave a colorful record of its grisly details. Harrington organizes Schmidt’s personal story around the stages of his professional career, beginning with his early life as an apprentice to his father and concluding with his late-life struggle to realize his lifelong dream of redeeming the family name and providing himself and his progeny with honorable status as professional healers. Throughout the book, Harrington attempts to interpret Schmidt’s entries not only as a record of early modern crime and punishment, but also as a chronicle of the executioner’s personal relationship with his job and his condemned victims. This is especially challenging during Schmidt’s early years, when the entries are generally [End Page 419] terse and lack detail. As time passes and the executioner matures, his entries become longer and more thoughtful, providing more to work with in teasing out motives and judgments. What Harrington finds in this process is a man who understood and fulfilled his role as a member of a dishonorable caste, but was not satisfied to accept his fate as permanent. In both his personal life and his professional judgments, Schmidt was careful to distinguish between his own dishonorable status and the kinds of disreputable choices made by those he was charged with punishing. Throughout his life, Schmidt also displayed deeply religious values and avoided any hint of scandalous behavior, even eschewing drink (a rare choice for a man during the sixteenth century). Never far from the surface of Schmidt’s pious judgments and exemplary conduct, Harrington concludes, was his “relentless campaign” (184) to restore his family to honor—a battle that was ultimately won, at least in the legal sense. Recreating a life in all of its details is never easy, and it is in these details that some questions arise, in particular in defining and delineating the different categories of honor and dishonor that characterized life in the early modern German city. While Harrington is convincing in distinguishing Schmidt’s forthright behavior from his legal status as a dishonorable person, these lines are somewhat blurred in describing other actors in Schmidt’s world. It is not clear, for example, why such professions as butchers or tanners are...

The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany. By Mark Häberlein. Studies in Early Modern German History. Translated by Mark Häberlein. Edited by H. C. Erik Midelfort.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+286. $39.50 (cloth); $39.50 (e-book).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany. By Mark Häberlein. Studies in Early Modern German History. Translated by Mark Häberlein. Edited by H. C. Erik Midelfort.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+286. $39.50 (cloth); $39.50 (e-book).Christine R. JohnsonChristine R. JohnsonWashington University in St. Louis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 86, Number 1March 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674282 Views: 34Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Regional History and the Comparative Turn in the Study of Early Modern German Cities

Regional History and the Comparative Turn in the Study of Early Modern German Cities

Full Cups, Full Coffers: Tax Strategies and Consumer Culture in the Early Modern German Cities

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the excise taxes (Ungeld) paid by town residents on the consumption of beer, wine, mead and brandy represented the single most important source of civic revenue for many German cities. In a crisis, these taxes could spike to 70–80% of civic income. This paper examines civic budgets and ‘behind-the-scenes’ deliberations in a sample of towns in southern Germany in order to illuminate how decisions affecting consumer taxes were made. Even during the sobriety movements of the Reformation and post-Reformation period, tax income from drinkers remained attractive to city leaders because the bulk of the excise tax burden could easily be shifted away from privileged members of society and placed on the population at large. At the same time, governments had to maintain a careful balance between what they needed in order to govern and what the consumer market could bear, for high taxes on drinks were also targeted in many popular revolts. This led to nimble politicking by those responsible for tax decisions. Drink taxes were introduced, raised, lowered and otherwise manipulated based not only on shifting fashions and tastes but also on the degree of economic stress faced by the community. Where civic rulers were successful in striking the right balance, the rewards were considerable. The income from drink sales was a major factor in how the cities of the Empire survived the wars and other crises of the early modern period without going into so much debt that they lost their independence.

Stained Glass: Radiant Art by Virginia Chieffo Raguin (review)

Reviewed by: Stained Glass: Radiant Art by Virginia Chieffo Raguin Guita Lamsechi Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Stained Glass: Radiant Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum 2013) 112 pp. Stained Glass: Radiant Art is an excellent introduction to a medium that has been much overlooked. Although often associated with the minor arts, stained glass was prized among the luxury arts of the high Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the most sought after artists—luminaries such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Holbein the younger, as well as glass specialists like Peter Hemmel of Andlau—created designs for windows destined for important religious buildings, palaces, halls, and residences. Stained glass transforms architectural spaces. The expanded fenestration in Gothic architecture allowed light to penetrate the interior of religious buildings, dematerializing the mural surfaces with translucent color. Later, smaller window roundels distinguished the homes of wealthy private citizens. The publication of this book followed the excitement generated by the 2000 exhibition Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein. This exhibition organized by Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix of the Saint Louis Art Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum, respectively, was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue with essays on late medieval and early modern German and Swiss glasswork. The enthusiastic reception of that [End Page 313] project demonstrated public interest in stained glass, prompting the Getty Center’s expansion of their collections in 2003. Works originating in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland were put on display in 2010. The author of Stained Glass: Radiant Art, Virginia Chieffo Raguin, is a member of the International Corpus Vitrearum and a distinguished professor of Humanities. This book provides an engaging pan-European survey of the medium from its manufacture to restoration, featuring works in the Getty collection dating from about 1210 to about 1575. Raguin presents an overview of the art of stained glass in its architectural contexts from the windows of sacred buildings such as the cathedrals of Europe and monastic foundations of the high Middle Ages to the heraldic motifs and secular ornaments of private residences in mercantile towns around the end of the fifteenth century. The concluding pages of the penultimate chapter consider the history of collecting and display of stained glass beginning with its renewed appreciation during the Gothic revival in the eighteenth century. Near the opening of the twentieth century stained glass became valued as an independent art form and a subject for study. This book discusses stained glass in relation to parallel artistic developments in other media including works on paper like drawings and preparatory sketches, as well as prints, panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, glass vessels and sculpture. For example, decorative patterns composed of circles, petals, quatre-foils, or canted squares arranged in medallions to frame scenes in medieval stained glass were also adapted in manuscript illumination. Eventually, geometric medallions gave way to narrative scenes ordered sequentially and represented within illusionistic backgrounds or with schematic allusions to architectural settings. Attention to the details of their production and their social and historical contexts allows non-specialists to more fully appreciate the art of stained glass. In addition to the materials and techniques used and stages of production, the author outlines many themes and situations that stained glass addresses from its architectural functions in both sacred and secular buildings to the artists and patrons. Dr. Raguin explores factors such as the role of images in religious devotion that determined the rise and fall of stained glass. Innovations in printing, the use of paper, and increases in literacy and writing in the vernacular impacted the subject matter and quality of stained glass images, as it did other popular imagery. Conversely, devaluation of images during the iconoclastic movements of religious reform in the sixteenth century resulted in the destruction of stained glass windows. Anecdotal and historical details enliven this narrative on stained glass. Considered a precious object, like jewels, glass has been linked to the splendor of the Heavenly City described in the biblical text of the book of Revelations as the place where Christ welcomes his faithful. The lavish decoration of great cathedrals was justified...

A Goy who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern German. By AyaElyada. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii + 260; plates. $60.00.

A Goy who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern German. By AyaElyada. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii + 260; plates. $60.00.

:The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany. Studies in Early Modern German History

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Handling of Diversity in Early Modern India?

The notion of plurality amongst the Indian population is one of the most prominent features of early modern German discourse on India. This article combines the concepts ‘diversity’ and ‘transculturality’ to analyse how German speaking mercenaries of the Dutch East India Company perceived this plurality. These mercenaries were a specific group of travellers, quite different from the well-known, erudite globetrotter. I analyse the group labels that mercenaries used to describe, understand and categorise India’s diverse population. The categories that the mercenaries used reflected their own understanding and fluidity of the terms nation, religion and social status. In contrast to the assumed relevance of religion and social status for early modern societies, the authors predominantly chose the term ‘nation’ for the different people in India. Moreover, their notion of a ‘nation’ did not imply a social hierarchy, but rather a juxtaposition. Based on this evidence, this article concludes that the organisation of diversity depended crucially on the individual author and his social position.

Globalizing Early Modern German History

Globalizing Early Modern German History

Martin Luther's Use of Rhetorical Masks for Jews, Princes, Clerics, and other Enemies: The Problem of Meaning in a Post Modern Age

In modern times, there is a common widespread and common misunderstanding of Martin Luther's views on Jews, Peasants, Clergy, Women, and Princes. An analysis of Luther's rhetorical use of “masks” as metaphors will help us understand that he was not the father of anti-Semitism, or of political and social elitism. The purpose of this article is to explore and understand Luther's rhetorical intent in the context of early modern German culture. The central thesis of this article is that Martin Luther may have had in his use of rhetorical masks in his public discourse a hidden communicative strategy. Often his masks involved vulgar, crude, and violent words in his attempt to stimulate and persuade public opinion. Does language have consistent long-term meaning regardless of context? Michael Giesecke, a professor of German linguistics, correctly argues that each cultural period develops its own ways of triadic perception that involves thinking, acting, and communicating. New ways of processing information as we now see in the electronic revolution holds true in the cultural shift in the sixteenth century fostered by the printing press. The new medium of printed works forces a new way of thinking in every affected age. Our problem is to understand the “new way.”