Talk in 16th-Century Switzerland
Also: The problem of color, Robert Browning’s prosody, and more.
In the London Review of Books, John Gallagher reviews a fascinating new book on talk in early modern Europe. Carla Roth’s The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland provides a detailed examination of a journal that a linen trader named Johannes Rütiner kept of people’s everyday conversations in the Swiss town of St. Gall, starting in 1529:
He diligently, perhaps obsessively, recorded what Carla Roth calls ‘the debris of talk in a 16th-century town’. Rütiner’s manuscripts, known as the Commentationes – a term meaning ‘studies’ or ‘treatise’ – were long dismissed by historians as a gossipy record that had none of the gravitas of the more publicly oriented chronicles of urban life kept by his more scholarly and respected peers. The early 20th-century German historian Theodor von Liebenau described the Commentationes as containing just a few ‘golden nuggets’ of fact, buried beneath ‘an enormous amount of worthless slag’. But for Roth, Rütiner’s notebooks present a unique opportunity to reconstruct an oral world, and to improve our understanding of the way verbal communication and information worked in a century thought of as an age of print.
The other chroniclers at work in St Gall – for more high-minded purposes – included Johannes Kessler, who wrote the Sabbata, a chronicle of the Reformation in the town, partly inspired by conversations with his friend Rütiner. ‘In our wondrous time,’ Kessler wrote, ‘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 of the same.’ This was a public account. Rütiner’s Commentationes, by contrast, were private. His notebooks show him and his friends gossiping about the great Swiss reformers Heinrich Bullinger and Huldrych Zwingli. None of their conclusions (Bullinger was rich, Zwingli was belligerent and aggressive towards St Gall) made it into the Sabbata, even though Kessler was part of these conversations. The number of records being kept and accounts written caused consternation among the town’s authorities, and in 1556, its Small Council began calling in local writers to answer questions. Rütiner’s name doesn’t appear in these investigations, though his notebook with its earthy interests and slanderous stories would have appalled the council. The only possible conclusion is that no one, not even the friends whose confidences he so carefully recorded, knew that Rütiner was writing it all up.
What sort of “talk” do Rütiner’s Commentationes contain? There are jokes, of course:
While they can be read for their insights into the political and religious changes of a tumultuous time, the Commentationes are one of the best-preserved sources we have for the early modern joke. Rütiner’s note-taking extended to the intimate details of the gags shared between his friends and acquaintances, and his pages are rich in shagging priests, horny nuns and shit in places where shit should not be. Being a ‘homo ioci plenus’ – a man full of wit – meant something in Rütiner’s friendship group, and knowing how to bring the house down was one way to display one’s communicative capital. Early modern jokes can be bewildering. It’s been argued that finding a joke you don’t understand in the sources can be the first step to unlocking the ways in which a society is different to ours, though that’s also the kind of thing you might say after reading one too many jestbooks and wondering what the punchlines mean. Rütiner and his friends seem to have been setting the table on a roar with witticisms that were long, convoluted and largely impenetrable to the modern reader.
What’s interesting, Gallagher notes, is that while one might expect women in this supposedly “misogynistic age” to be the most frequent butt of jokes, that’s not the case in Rütiner’s journal:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prufrock to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.